The Betrayers (24 page)

The bow of the boat was taken up by a tiny cabin. The rest was cockpit, at the forward end of which, to starboard, were the steering wheel and other controls. To port was a kind of electronic box with switches, buttons, and dials that could have been a navigating device of some kind, but I was reasonably sure it wasn’t. There were seats for six people, two at the forward end of the cockpit facing forward, two back-to-back with these facing aft, and a couple more just in front of the motor compartment, facing forward again.

Mr. Soo and I were placed in these rearmost seats, and
our ankles were lashed to the chair legs—if that’s what they’re called at sea—which were bolted to the cockpit floor. Then, since there was no space for our arms behind us, our wrists were tied in front of us with the same strong, heavy fishing line. It was a little gain. It’s easier to do something about your bonds if you have them where you can look at them. Irina jumped aboard and sat down facing us, gun in hand.

“Later you will be put in the cuddy, forward,” she said. “However, Monk doesn’t want you to spend too much time alone. You might be bored. So for the present you’ll ride out here where I can entertain you.”

Monk was standing on the bank beside the other boat, a somewhat smaller and stubbier craft boasting two huge outboard motors on the transom. At least they looked enormous to me. I guess the one I remembered from boyhood must have been Ole Evinrude’s little pilot model or a very near descendant. Monk was giving instructions to a couple of men. I could hear enough to know that he was arranging a rendezvous, but not enough to have any idea where it would be.

Irina looked annoyed when Monk dropped aboard our craft and immediately used his flashlight to inspect our wrists and ankles.

“I have already checked,” she said sharply. “Can’t you trust me to do anything right?” She caught herself, and mopped her face, and said in the humble voice I’d come to know, “I’m sorry, Monk. I didn’t mean… This damn
kona
weather!”

He grinned. He was in a good mood. “Check and double-check is my motto, kid,” he said, patting her on the shoulder. I couldn’t help wondering what their relations were and how they’d spent the night, but they weren’t lovers now. His touch and voice were casual and preoccupied. “Well, don’t put any more holes in the specimens than you have to. Here we go.”

He went down the aisle between the seats, picking his way past the clumsy-looking water skis stowed there, and paused to take off his damp Boy Scout shirt and throw it into the little cabin. He sat down behind the steering wheel. When he turned the key, things began to rumble and vibrate behind the seats to which Soo and I were tied.

A man on the bank turned us loose. Monk maneuvered us around in the narrow channel, using, I noticed, a husky lever for a throttle and three colored buttons to work the gears: apparently the boat was equipped with an electric or hydraulic shift of some kind. I watched him carefully. I mean, I’m an automobile man at heart. A fine twisty mountain road and a good sports car is my idea of traveling. After my recent experience in the Pailolo Channel, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d probably never be a true sailboat sailor; and I wasn’t really yearning to test my motorboating abilities, but I might have to.

So I watched him closely, by the instrument lights, as he worked the boat back and forth until he had it heading out. Then he shoved the throttle lever smoothly forward. The rumbling and burbling behind me increased in volume. The trees slid past, and some grass and sand. We
slipped through a final opening and Monk gave another shove to the throttle. The boat seemed to rise and level off, planing. He switched off the instrument lights, and we headed out across the glassy dark sea. I didn’t spend much time looking around. If Isobel was becalmed out here somewhere, there was nothing I could do for her and certainly nothing she could do for me.

The trip was, I figured, more than three times as long as the one we’d made from Maui to Molokai, and we made it in less than a third of the time, which shows what the internal combustion engine can do for you. As the dawn broke behind us, Irina, facing into the sunrise, put on a pair of dark glasses from the pocket of the garment she was wearing this morning: a short, sleeveless muumuu that, except for its bright colors, looked like the kind of starched smock they used to put on very little girls.

We came up on Oahu at thirty knots—or miles per hour. From the rear of the cockpit I could read the figure but I couldn’t read just how the nautical speedometer was calibrated. The fact that there was such a thing at all was a surprise to me. It was daylight when we rounded Diamond Head. There were many more boats out than usual, I noticed, including a good many catamarans with bright sails that didn’t seem to be doing very well without wind. I could see the hotel where I was still paying rent on a room and the beach where I’d first seen Irina. Monk threw the engine into neutral, glanced at his watch, and came aft.

“Okay, get them below while I rig your towline,” he
snapped at the girl. “Hurry it up before somebody comes too close; it looks as if every boat in Honolulu is heading out to welcome the
Lurline.
” He was feeling some strain now, and his voice showed it. “I hope you’ve got your bathing suit ready under that pinafore.”

Irina laughed. “Really, Monk…”

“Don’t really-Monk me. Just get them out of sight and get overboard where you belong. And remember the instructions. I’ll make one pass. Don’t forget to laugh and wave at all the nice boys. We’ll go right down the side of the ship and swing off to port. At a quarter of a mile, I’ll hit the firing button. You let go and fall when it blows, but not before. Make it look natural, as if you were knocked right off your skis by the concussion. I’ll swing around to pick you up. By the time I’ve got you and the rope aboard, there should be so much smoke and confusion nobody’ll be paying any attention to us… That’s it, tie them up good, there.”

Irina, lashing my ankles, gave an extra yank to the cords. She already had Soo hogtied on the other bunk in the tiny, wedge-shaped cabin. She paused in the opening to regard me for a moment; then she smiled slowly and took off her sunglasses and dropped them into the pocket of her smock. Still smiling, she reached back to unfasten the garment and, with the same graceful movement I remembered—which she was obviously remembering too—she slipped it off with her sandals and dropped it into the cabin beside me tauntingly, like a stripper parting with a strategic tassel. She stood there for a moment in her
white bikini, slim and tanned and blonde and beautiful.

Monk said, “For Christ’s sake, Irina, stop posing and get back here! There’s a ship putting out now… Yes, there she is, right on time, the
General Hughes.
Over you go. Get those skis on and give me the word.”

I heard a splash. Through the open cabin door, I saw Monk return to the controls, looking back impatiently. Then the door slammed shut, but I heard Irina’s voice:

“Put her in gear… All right,
hit it
!”

The boat surged ahead and hesitated briefly, fighting the resistance of girl and skis; then it was up on the step and planing, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I’d been waiting for a break and I’d got it. I remembered clearly telling another girl, in a different place:
There are times when a bit of broken glass can come in very handy.

Now if the lenses of Irina’s sunglasses weren’t plastic, and Monk would just stay too busy to look in on me…

It was tricky work. The lenses were glass, all right, but getting one out of the frame intact, and then cracking it just right to get a usable edge, wasn’t easy with my wrists lashed together. The motion of the boat didn’t help, and there was always the possibility that Monk would stick his head in at any moment. He didn’t even have to open the door to do it.

As usual with those small-cabin entrances, there was a sliding hatch above to give light and headroom in the doorway, and to save you from having to crawl in on hands and knees. With the hatch pulled aft to meet the upper edge of the closed door, protection would have been complete, but with the hatch shoved forward as it was, the rear end of the cabin was open to the sky. All Monk had to do was lean over from his helmsman’s chair and look down.

Fortunately, he didn’t, in the time it took me to prepare my cutting implement and look around for a way to hold
it securely. I glanced at Mr. Soo. He’d been watching, of course, and he nodded when I showed him the half-moon of glass. We had to squirm around a bit on our bunks to get into position, but it was a cozy little place and a lot of reach wasn’t needed. Soo took the glass carefully. I saw the question in his eyes. The first man cut free, of course, had all the advantages.

Mr. Soo didn’t say anything. He was a realist. There was an armed man in the cockpit, and dealing with armed men was my specialty, not his. He wasn’t silly enough to try to extract any meaningless promises. He just braced his hands against the edge of the cockpit to steady the improvised knife. The fact that they’d used fishline helped. Cutting through heavy rope would have taken much longer. At that, we shattered two lens-halves and had to go to a third before the strong cord parted.

I rolled back on my bunk to clear my wrists of the multiple loops Irina had used to tie me. I was barely in time. I heard Monk swear out there, and the boat swerved; then the door was flung open and he was standing there with his shiny gun in his left hand—the right was reaching out to one side to hold the steering wheel. His face was pale and furious. At first I thought he had spotted the cut cords; then I realized that his mind was on something altogether different.

“You bastard!” he said. “How did you do it, Eric? How’d you get word to them? She’s turning! The damn ship’s turning, do you understand? She’s been recalled to harbor. How’d you do it?” The gun steadied. “Aren’t you
going to grin triumphantly, you cocky bastard? I’ll give you one last grin, friend. Just one!”

There was no hope of jumping him. I still had yards of twine firmly wound around my wrists, not to mention the stuff on my ankles. I just looked up at him and told myself that Isobel had made it. Somehow, in spite of wounds and weather, the damn woman had made it. She’d got the word through. She was wasting her time on the cocktail circuit; she should have been an agent. She was doing a hell of a lot better than some.

I stared at the stainless steel revolver and watched the finger take up the slack of the trigger; then the muzzle dropped and Monk laughed, a short, harsh bark of sound.

“Okay, Eric. One point for you. It was the woman, wasn’t it? I should have known better than to take Irina’s word for it. These one-shot kids, when will they learn to finish off their cripples? But don’t look so damn smug. Nothing’s changed. We’ll just take the
Hughes
coming in, instead of going out.” He rammed the pistol back under his belt. “Just lie back and listen to the fireworks, friend.”

He slammed the door shut and disappeared from sight. I hurried to clear the stuff off my wrists and got to work on my ankles, but here the fishline was against me: the little knot was tougher to solve than a big one would have been. Irina had set it up good and hard. I was thinking desperately of trying the glass once more, when my fingernails finally found the right purchase and the knot came apart. A few seconds later my legs were free.

I saw Soo looking hopefully my way, and I gave him
a big friendly smile, no more. It was going to be rough enough dealing with the Monk without an unknown quantity at my back. I lay there trying to judge what was going on outside. I had a feeling we had other seagoing traffic around us: there were frequent bounces when we hit what I took to be the wakes of other boats.

Then there was a straight run and a gradual left swing, and suddenly the ship was above us, sliding past at high speed. I could see the gray side through the open hatch, and even faces looking down from the decks above. I thought I could hear masculine hoots and whistles, but the speedboat’s exhaust echoed noisily from the ship’s side, drowning out the other sounds.

I sensed a movement up there, and lay back, and saw Monk reach across to the electronic console to port before I realized what he was about. I’d thought he was just going to check on us in the cabin. I braced myself for noise and concussion, but there was only a click, faintly audible above the sound of the boat’s progress.

Mr. Soo said calmly, “That was the ready switch, Mr. Helm. Circuits are now active. Red light is on. Charges will explode when firing button is depressed.”

“What’s the maximum range of your machine?”

“Approximately one mile as now set. It will operate to ten miles or farther, but the responding circuits would have had to be so sensitive that they might have been activated prematurely by stray electronic transmissions, say from the ship’s own radar.”

The ship was gone. I started counting seconds.
Monk had said he’d fire at a quarter-mile. With the ship going one way and the boat the other, the speed of separation was somewhere around forty miles per hour, depending on the angle. Say a minute and a half, or ninety seconds, for a mile: that was a little over twenty for the quarter. I didn’t dare cut it too close. I went out of there at fifteen.

I was early. He was still in his seat with both hands on the wheel, but my luck was in. For the moment he was looking back at the ship or Irina, I couldn’t tell which. The ship was back there all right, receding fast, and so was the girl: a slim bronzed figure in her scanty white suit, riding her skis gracefully in the speedboat’s wake.

I didn’t take it all in; it was no time to be admiring the view. Monk was turning, but I managed to clip him once and yank him from the seat and, bracing myself against the cabin, kick him aft, away from the firing box at my right elbow, on which a red light now glowed. I didn’t follow him all the way. There were things to be done first, and I gave a twist to the steering wheel with my left hand to send the boat straight out to sea. I glanced at the instrument board on my right. There were too many switches and dials. I knew I didn’t dare monkey with them until we were well out of firing range; I might set up the wrong combination.