The Detonators (30 page)

She’d sensed it before I had; and she was halfway up the companionway ladder before the boat rose to an even keel and the canvas broke into wild flapping overhead. I heard the rattle of the mainsheet blocks and the ratchety clatter of the jibsheet winch as she trimmed the sails to the new breeze, working, by the sound of it, as quickly and expertly as ever.

She was quite a woman, but I couldn’t forget the mad skull face she’d showed me less than an hour earlier, or the shot that should have killed me. And I couldn’t forget a man who’d been eaten—well, half eaten—by a shark; or a terribly damaged lady in a wheelchair, put there by a gent now working for Mrs. Georgina Williston and her friends. I didn’t think I’d better take her hopeful remarks about my future too seriously.

I noted that she hadn’t used any of the synthetic rope on board to tie me with. It’s all nylon and Dacron on shipboard these days, nylon where elasticity is wanted and Dacron where it isn’t. Modern cordage is a lot springier and slicker than old-fashioned sisal and manila. It’s stronger and it lasts longer, but it doesn’t hold knots nearly so well. Houdini could have freed himself from the new stuff in his sleep. But Gina had used sail ties to immobilize me: lengths of soft white one-inch tape of coarsely woven and immensely strong material designed to stay tied around the furled canvas even under hurricane conditions. Smart girl. However, while she knew her ropes and knots, she hadn’t searched me quite thoroughly enough. I had a trick or two left to use, if necessary; but for the moment I had every intention of being a model prisoner.

During the course of the afternoon we went through the awkward feeding routine and the embarrassing peeing routine. Later, I was aware of a change in our course. I wasn’t invited on deck again, but I hoisted myself up to take a peek through the nearest cabin port. The position of the sun indicated that we were now heading southward. There were no islands in sight, but the water around us was not the rich blue I’d seen earlier. Even though it was roughened by the brisk breeze driving us, I could see that it was lighter and kind of mottled, reflecting the colors of a bottom that ranged from the brightness of sand to the darkness of weeds. It seemed frighteningly close under the broken surface, as if we were driving heedlessly across a sea barely deep enough to float us; but it was actually, I guessed, between fifteen and twenty feet down. Anyway, I’d made it at last; I was sailing on the famous Bahama banks.

I made no further effort to keep track of our progress. Even if we did sight land, I knew that one mangrove cay looks very much like another, at least to a landlubber like me. The wind faded toward evening. Eventually we were motoring through a flat calm with the Genoa jib furled and the mainsail sheeted down hard to minimize its flapping.

Half-asleep in my bunk, I was aroused by some rather abrupt course changes. Suddenly there was a grating sound, and
Spindrift
slowed markedly. The motor roared as Gina threw the throttle-gearshift lever to full ahead. I squirmed out of the bunk and hippety-hopped aft, almost thrown to the cabin sole as the boat hesitated again, the keel scraping across something rough and hard. I fumbled my way up the companionway ladder and clung near the top with my bound hands, looking around. Gina was standing on the cockpit seat for a better view, holding on to the boom of the windless mainsail overhead to steady herself. She was steering with one bare brown foot on the tiller, too intent on the channel to give me more than a glance. There was a chart on the seat, folded so I couldn’t identify it, but she wasn’t looking at that, either. Apparently this was strictly a spot for eyeball navigation.

Astern, the wake was cloudy with whitish silt stirred up from the bottom by the propeller wash. On either hand, the calm surface of the ocean was broken by ugly reefs and islets of coral. Ahead, I couldn’t see anything that looked like a passage. Under the bowsprit was nothing but pale shallow water. It shaded off into a beautiful blue a hundred yards farther on; but we weren’t there yet. The keel dragged gratingly once more.

“Come on!” Gina whispered fiercely. “Keep moving, damn you! You can do it… Ah, that’s my girl!”

Suddenly we were clear.
Spindrift
picked up speed again. The bottom dropped away beneath us and the shoals and reefs fell astern. Gina stepped down into the cockpit and slowed the roaring diesel. She looked at me and grinned.

“We were a little late with the tide for that particular passage off the banks,” she said. “I figured it was better to drive her through than wait almost twelve hours for the next high water. Now that we’re clear, how about a drink?” She studied me thoughtfully. “Another hour’s parole, Sir Matthew? So I don’t have to pour your booze into you and shovel your dinner into you?”

“Christ, you’d think we were back in the days of tin suits and lances,” I said. “Okay, you’ve got your hour.”

She said, “Maybe I’d better point out that even if you do break your word, and put me out of commission and take over, you don’t know where we are. It would take you days to fumble your way back to Nassau, if you didn’t pile up on the reefs trying. And if you’re thinking of the Loran, don’t. This is the area where it’s totally haywire. You must have heard of that phenomenon. If you were to go by the position you read off it, you’d wind up on the coral for sure.”

I had a hunch she was again playing the old salt intimidating the helpless landlubber, and it wouldn’t be all that tough to reach civilization of some kind. What it amounted to was that my earlier dumb-dumb act was paying off. I had no intention of spoiling it now by showing the slightest glimmer of nautical intelligence. After a friendly drink and a pleasant meal and a couple of aspirins for my subsiding headache, I allowed myself, honorably, to be tied up again.

Darkness fell, and we motored on southward. At least I thought it was southward. It didn’t really matter too much. I couldn’t believe that Gina had taken herself out of the action permanently just to watch over me. She’d put too much time and effort and money and emotion into her mysterious project to leave its completion to others. She was stalling a little sailing around with me out here, she was waiting for something; but I was willing to bet that she’d wind up at the critical place at the critical moment just to make sure her elaborate and expensive plans worked out properly. Whatever they were.

I remembered, for some reason, that the conference in Nassau wasn’t due to open until the middle of the week, although I still had no idea whether the fact was highly significant or totally irrelevant. Hoping that Amy Barnett was leaving a wide trail as she answered the summons of her sadist lover, so that Doug Barnett would be in position to finish the job if I’d miscalculated—hell, it was after all his job—I fell asleep.

Toward morning the motion made me aware that we had some wind again, stirring up a small sea. The mainsail had filled, and the boat was heeling perceptibly; but the big Genoa did not go up, and the motor continued to thump away steadily. It was the first time the lady hadn’t taken full advantage of a sailing breeze. It occurred to me that she couldn’t have had any significant amounts of sleep since I’d first seen her awaiting me on board, in the Lucayan Harbour Marina. Although her racing experience would have hardened her to standing watches night and day on a fully crewed boat, she had to be getting very tired doing it all by herself like this. I dozed off again, then was awakened by the splash of the anchor and the rattle of the chain and rope as it ran out. The motor stopped. I heard the mainsail being lowered and furled. The cabin light came on; and Gina stood looking down at me.

“Are we there?” I asked, yawning. “Wherever there is.”

Gina shook her head. “Waiting. The sun’s coming up; and for obvious reasons we like to make the approach to Ring Cay in the dark. I promised to take you there, remember?”

“That was a lot of promises ago,” I said.

She shrugged minutely. “So we’ll just kill the day right here. Besides…” She hesitated, watching me steadily. “Truce?”

“So you can catch up on your sleep?” Lying comfortably in my bunk, I grinned up at her. “You obviously need it; you look awful. All I have to do is wait until you fall on your face and kick your head in, right?”

“What will it get you? You still don’t know where we are. Will you give me, well, three hours?”

I said, “Hell, think big, honey. Why settle for a lousy three hours? When do you really want to leave here? Wherever here is.”

She licked her lips. “Actually, I don’t want to get under way until this evening. That should put us at Ring Cay a couple of hours before dawn.”

I nodded. “You have my parole, or whatever you call it, until six p.m.; eighteen hundred hours, if we’re being nautical.”

She nodded. “I’ll wake up in time to cook us a good dinner.” She hesitated. There was an odd sadness in her eyes. “Matt, I…”

I said, “I know. It would be nice if things were different, wouldn’t it? We could be having quite a pleasant cruise, instead of playing captor and captee.”

She shook her head ruefully. “All my life I’ve wanted things to be different, my dear. But they never are. Here, let me get those sail ties off you… Good night. Or whatever.”

Going on deck, I found that there was already light enough to see by, although the sun was not yet visible. We seemed to be back on the shallow banks—some banks; there are lots of them in that part of the world—anchored in the lee of a rather bare hump of an island. There were several other islands and islets in sight; and the whole visible expanse of water looked shoal and dangerous. Well, I’d guessed right, I told myself; she’d been unable to stay away from the action. If she expected to leave after dinner and arrive an hour or two before dawn, it meant that the elusive Ring Cay wasn’t much more than ten hours away, say fifty miles at five knots. And I’d better prepare myself for an end to this kind of friendly, unreal captivity…

I therefore, after catching up on my shaving and toothbrushing, exchanged the good pants I was still wearing, pretty baggy and bedraggled by this time, for a pair of tough jeans. I also treated myself to socks and boat shoes, the rubber soles of which could be useful on shore as well. I found a flat little sheath knife that Gina had either missed in her search or left where I’d hidden it. I taped the sheath between my shoulder blades where I could just reach the knife handle and pulled on over it a knitted dark-blue sports shirt suitable for night operations, in case things should work out that way. I left it hanging loose outside my belt. I was just lighting the stove for breakfast when Gina screamed.

“No, no, no, oh, God, no… Ahhhhh!”

She was moving jerkily in her bunk as if fighting somebody or something; I realized that her body thought it was restrained as it had once been. Her face was pale and shiny. Her eyes were tightly shut. They opened abruptly when I touched her. A moment later I was looking into the muzzle of my own little automatic.

“What…” She licked her lips. “What did you have in mind, Matt?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

“Oh. One of those again. I had them all the time in that place… well, I told you.” She stared at the gun as if wondering where it had come from, then tucked it back under her pillow. She licked her lips once more. “Sorry, I misconstrued… I thought you were trying to… Sorry. Thanks. Good night again.”

It was an odd, lost day. I ate, and put away the stuff she’d rinsed out and hung up to dry, and did some other cleanup work around the boat, and ate again, and took a nap although I didn’t really need it, but you never know in this business when your next sleep will be. Gina awoke at last and did a few feminine things to herself and spiced up some canned beef stew for dinner in a fairly palatable way. There were canned pears for dessert. Coffee and a little White Label masquerading as cognac. Afterward I washed, and she dried. Then we went through the formality of tying me up again.

She stood by the bunk looking down at me with a crooked smile. “This is getting pretty ridiculous, isn’t it? I find myself wanting to giggle. Matt…”

“Yes?”

She reached out as if to touch me apologetically on the arm as I lay there. With an abrupt movement, she fired the little hypogun into my biceps.

“What I was going to say was, I’m sorry, my dear. Sleep well…”

When I woke up I was lying at the bottom of a big rusty iron box. A girl I didn’t know was looking down at me worriedly.

The interior of the box was coated with thick gray paint that was flaking away to expose the corroding old metal underneath. Actually, of course, it was a windowless storeroom of some kind, on a ship of some kind. It wasn’t quite rectangular; ships seldom are. One side, opposite the door, had an odd slant and slope to it. Probably that was the side of the ship itself. The chamber was illuminated by a single weak electric bulb, say twenty-five watts, recessed into the wall above the door and protected by a crude, paint-caked grill. A steady vibration in the hull indicated some kind of operating machinery, probably a generator.

The space was small, with floor space enough for a couple of narrow cots and a chemical toilet that was obviously an afterthought; the space had not been designed for plumbing. The gadget stank of excrement and of its own chemistry. There was also an odor of vomit. It all brought back a jail cell I’d once wound up in, in the line of duty, in a country not my own. A ventilator in the ceiling directly above me wasn’t working very hard at improving the situation. Lying on the rusty floor between the cots, I managed to learn this much without sitting up. There was some reason why I didn’t particularly want to sit up until I had to, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

“Take it easy,” said the girl kneeling beside me. “You seem to have been drugged. Give yourself time to snap out of it before you try to get up.”

“What time is it?”

She seemed to consider that a foolish question. I got the impression that she’d been locked up long enough that time had lost its meaning for her. Then she shrugged and glanced at the stainless waterproof watch on her wrist, quite a businesslike timepiece.