The Detonators (19 page)

“Tell me.”

I told him. There was silence after I’d finished. Then Mac started to speak on one line, and Doug started to speak on the other, and they both stopped.

I said, “Well, which one of you is going to stomp me? Make up your cotton-picking minds.”

Doug said in a strangled voice, “You can’t be serious! You’re telling us that you blew the whole operation, deliberately, to a subject known to be collaborating with the opposition!”

I said, “Known? What’s known to you,
amigo
, isn’t necessarily known to me.”

“But—”

“Let me point out that I’ve had a lot more opportunity to study this so-called subject, who happens to be your daughter, than you have. And let me also point out, while we’re on the subject of this so-called subject, that all this crap about your bitch-wife keeping your little girl away from you all these years is just that. Crap. Under the circumstances, no court in the land would have denied you visiting privileges or prevented you from exercising them, if you’d really worked at it. But you discouraged pretty easily, didn’t you?”

“You sonofabitch—”

I said, “Cut it out. You forget that I know what I’m talking about; I’ve been there. We’re not family men, either of us. Marriage seemed like kind of a nice thing, and we gave it our best shot, but our best shot wasn’t very good, was it? And there’s something kind of claustrophobic about domesticity, anyway, isn’t there? So when the lady decided to bail out with the kid or kids, using whatever excuse came handy, we ranted and raved about our empty homes and broken hearts, but we were really kind of relieved, weren’t we? And I kept in touch with my kids a little because my ex-wife made it easy, but you lost contact with your little girl because your ex-wife didn’t. And although you do like to act the martyred papa—don’t we all—you were just as happy not to push it, weren’t you? So don’t tell me what you
know
about a daughter you haven’t even talked to, to amount to anything, since she was eight.”

Doug said harshly, “You always were a sucker for attractive young girls; I should have known better than to trust your judgment with this one.”

“You wrong me,
amigo
,” I said. “I’m a sucker for attractive middle-aged girls, too, and even attractive old girls.”

Mac’s voice came over the line: “This is becoming quite irrelevant. We’re wasting time. Eric has chosen to trust the young lady in question, whether rightly or wrongly remains to be seen. In return for his faith, misguided or otherwise, he has obtained certain information. It remains for us to decide how we should act on it. Eric?”

I said, “Amy believes that Minister will get in touch with her somehow, as he promised, because he can’t live without her or at least doesn’t want to—”

Doug’s voice was scornful: “This is the Preacher you’re talking about, not a lovesick college boy?”

I said, “That’s a very nice girl you begat somehow. Screwy but nice. Pretty, too. We’re all nuts about her, all us sinister characters on both sides of the fence. Got to make up to her somehow for that cold-hearted monster of a daddy who never made a real effort to see her all these years. Maybe it’s true love with Minister, or maybe he simply can’t bear to lose such a delectable morsel after working so hard to teach her his peculiar ways, but Samson had his Delilah, and Dillinger had his lady in red, if I remember correctly. It seems at least possible that Minister has his Amy, and we can’t afford to disregard it. We don’t have any other leads to him at the moment, or have we?” The brief silence that followed was answer enough.

Then Mac said, “Your suggestions?”

“She’s got to be covered every minute of every day. As long as she’s on the boat with me, okay; but I could be taken out, or just fall overboard. Or she could decide she’s mad at me after all and run off. Or she could be snatched out from under our noses, willingly or unwillingly. While I trust her enough to take a chance on her as far as keeping Doug’s suicidal secret is concerned—because I’ve asked, and because he’s still her pop no matter what kind of a suspicious bastard he may be—I don’t trust her not to leave me if Minister whistles. She says she’s afraid of him, but there’s some kind of a domination-submission complex working there that may be stronger than any affection or loyalty she may feel for me. But if she goes to him, somebody’s got to be there to follow, whether it takes a boat, a helicopter, a submarine, a fast automobile, or just a pair of sturdy shoes. Forget about me. I’ll keep plugging along the lines we’ve already laid out, searching for that mystery island of Constantine Grieg’s, and maybe I’ll come up with something and maybe I won’t; but the girl is a definite thread leading directly to Minister and it must not be broken. Concentrate your manpower on her and to hell with me, no matter what happens.”

Mac’s voice said, “Abraham?”

“I suppose it’s all we can do, under the circumstances,” Doug Barnett said grudgingly.

I said, “If she keeps her mouth shut, we’re in good shape. They’ll all be watching me and expecting no trouble from you, resting in your watery grave. On the other hand, if she does tell them about the little suicide that wasn’t, they’ll guess you’re hanging around with nefarious intent; but what the hell, we’ve all dealt with situations where the enemy was alerted. You’ll just have to tell the people watching her to be more careful, that’s all. Just so they don’t lose her. We can’t afford that.”

Mac’s voice said, “Abraham?”

“Very well.” Doug’s voice was admirably businesslike, dismissing all personal conflicts. “Anything else?”

“Yes, information,” I said. “If I’m going to close in on this hidden drug-smuggling harbor, assuming I can find it, I’d better know something about those two Coast Guard characters who didn’t make meals for any sharks, at least we don’t know that they did. In case they managed to survive after all, and I stumble on them hiding in the mangroves or somewhere.”

Doug said, “I’ll read you the vital statistics… Just a minute. Here. The one who was lost was six one, two twenty, curly red hair, blue eyes. Anchor tattooed on left forearm. Name Michael Brennerman, chief boatswain. Number two: five nine, one fifty, black hair, brown eyes. No distinguishing marks known. Name Ricardo Sanderson, ensign…”

“Sanderson?” I said. “Like in Admiral Sanderson?”

“Precisely. His son.”

I said, “Hell, it’s old home week. Everybody’s got a personal interest in this case. Go on.”

“Number three: five six, one thirty, blond, blue eyes. No distinguishing marks known. Name, Molly Brennerman, yeoman. Wife of number one, if it matters.”

“Yeoman or yeowoman? Yeoperson? Hell, I was told there were three
men
on that boat. Can’t anybody give me the straight dope about anything?”

Mac’s voice said, “I’m afraid the sexless official verbiage of the Coast Guard’s preliminary report led me to make an unwarranted assumption about the gender of that boat’s crew, Eric, which I passed on to you. My apologies.” After a moment, he went on: “We have a little more information for you. The drugs are brought in by ship. Constantine Grieg concentrates on marijuana. Cocaine and heroin, being much more compact, are usually imported by other routes, often involving light planes. Grieg’s marijuana-smuggling vessels are generally small ships, two thousand tons or less. A couple of hundred feet long, not more. Often less. They’ve got to be manageable in fairly confined waters at both ends of the voyage. Draft, fifteen feet or less. Normally, the cargoes would be transferred to smaller boats offshore, often to powerful speedboats of the ocean-racing type, as in the old rum-running days when the whiskey boats were just about the fastest craft afloat.”

I said, “That’s hardly new information, sir. They’ve been working that routine for years. And I thought we were looking for something besides, or in addition to, drugs.”

“Yes. This PNP organization does seem to have become involved with Grieg somehow; but we haven’t yet determined how. Or why. We may have to wait for you to find the answers there. As far as Grieg’s drug operation goes, what I’ve described is the way it used to be done. There seem to have been a couple of interesting variations introduced recently. For instance, the problem with the offshore transshipment of the illicit cargoes has always been that, besides being obvious to passing traffic and to any airplane in the sky, even when the rendezvous is chosen for privacy, the operation is at the mercy of the weather. If it’s blowing too hard, the small boats can’t get to the ship offshore. We think they have therefore found, or constructed, a hidden harbor on this island of Mr. Grieg’s where a small freighter can be concealed while unloading proceeds at leisure. It wouldn’t have to be much of an installation. I’m told that islands with natural saltwater ponds are quite common in the Bahamas.”

I said, “I can think of two offhand, sir. Up in the Abacos, there’s Tilloo Pond on Tilloo Cay and the sheltered little harbor behind New Plymouth on Green Turtle Cay. I don’t know what’s down in the Exumas, never having been there.”

“To be sure. The trouble is, the Bahamas charts are not very reliable, being based on fairly ancient surveys. There could easily be an uncharted, hidden pool of suitable dimensions on one of the many cays down in the remote area we’re considering. If the entrance channel were dredged, and the basin deepened a little, perhaps, a ship the size we’re considering could be brought in at night, tied up against the shore, and fully camouflaged by daylight. After all, the Germans once hid a large battleship in a certain Norwegian fiord.”

I said, “Well, the
Tirpitz
wasn’t exactly hidden, sir. Her location was soon known; she was just damn hard to get at. But the minisubs did the job in the end.”

“Unfortunately, these waters are too shallow for submarines, even of the miniature variety. We’ll have to trust to a certain sailboat, won’t we?”

I said, “It looks as if I’ll need a couple of torpedo tubes and a rocket launcher, with a few HMGs spotted around the deck for close-in defense. The trouble is, even just a light machine gun with mount and ammo would practically sink the poor little bucket, even if a spot could be found from which you could fire it among all that sailboat rigging. I suppose the theory is that our Coast Guard predecessors were wiped out because they got too close to this Hole in the Wall?”

“What did you call it?”

“A famous old outlaw hangout, sir,” I said. “Out west. You could ride past those cliffs and never spot an opening, but there was a cleft in the rocks, if you looked hard, and a real little robbers roost inside. Like our mysterious hidden harbor.”

“Yes. Very appropriate. We do assume that the Coast Guard’s expedition managed to find your Hole in the Wall and was therefore eliminated.”

Glancing around, I realized that Amy was still missing; but before I could panic I saw her returning to her waiting bench and opening her magazine once more.

I said into the phone, “And I think we must also assume that the body, the part of a body, that was apparently washed up by accident on a deserted beach may actually have been placed there deliberately to mislead us, a long way from the right area. You suggested that there might be another interesting variation from the normal drug-smuggling routine.”

It was Doug who responded. “We have reason to believe that special arrangements are being made to receive a ship that, while she may be carrying the usual cargo, is abnormal in some way.”

“What way?”

“We’re waiting for you to tell us, pal.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but I feel the girl is still our best lead. Your best lead. But okay, as I said, I’ll keep plugging. Before we sign off, let me give you a couple of descriptions and see if they match anything you’ve got in the working file. It may not mean anything, but they were hanging around the pay phone in the International Bazaar when I made some calls this morning—I announced my telephoning intentions fairly loudly to see who might be interested. First, a beefy male, say five ten or eleven, say two twenty. Say forty-five or fifty. Brown hair getting very thin on top. Red face. Bad temper.”

After a moment, Doug said, “There are several overweight business types associated with the PNP, but it rings no bells very loudly.”

“Okay, try this. Female, say five eight or nine, carrying no excess weight, nicely tanned. Dark-brown hair, expensive hairdo, short and trim, ears showing. Strong, straight nose, good mouth and. chin, couldn’t see the eyes for the sunglasses. Say midthirties. Legs very brown, handsome enough to overcome the handicap of low-heeled sandals.”

Doug didn’t hesitate. “Hell, that sounds like Mrs. Georgina Williston, the moneybags behind the PNP. We knew she’d left Cincinnati heading this way.”

“You might have told me,” I said. “I’m getting a little tired of being kept in the dark. And I somehow got the impression from you that Mrs. Williston was a dowager type with five chins and some missing brain cells. The lady I saw didn’t seem to be missing anything important.”

“Oh, my God,” Doug said. “Isn’t one dame at a time enough for you? Next job I manage, I’ll recruit nothing but certified eunuchs.”

Our flight out of Miami was late. Even though the short jump across the water to the Bahamas—well, short by plane; it had taken us thirty hours under sail—barely let the big Lockheed jet get its nose into the sky before it was heading downward again, we didn’t disembark at Freeport until dusk. The formalities were again pleasantly brief.

Afterward, with a handful of the other passengers from the U.S., we squeezed aboard a beat-up taxi, actually a vintage checker with jump seats, and were treated to a tour of the palmy, wedding-cake beach resorts before being deposited at our own hotel-marina complex. Since I was hoping to make an early start in the morning, we tracked down the off-duty dockmaster and paid the bill. When we reached her at last,
Spindrift
was still floating jauntily in her slip.

The tide was down, and it was quite a jump from the dock to the deck. I made it and caught Amy as she scrambled down after me. She was a pleasant, feminine armful, slightly damp and rumpled from all the hot-weather traveling. Vulnerable, like any lady at the end of a late party or a long day, when she can no longer use the defense that you really mustn’t because you might wrinkle the clothes or muss the hair or smudge the makeup since by this time they’re a bit wrinkled and mussed and smudged already; and they’ve done their duty for the day, anyway.