by Peter Colt
Around four, the clouds darkened the sky, and the coffee in the Thermos was cold. A little while later, I heard the first unmistakable “plip” of a raindrop on my poncho. I listened as the tattoo of the rain on the poncho picked up until it sounded like an Art Blakey drum solo. I was dry and relatively warm; some water came in the hide but not enough to cause concern. Then the squall passed and the rain just turned into a steady drizzle.
Darkness came. I had finished the Spenser novel and most of the nuts. I wasn’t hungry, which was good, because I didn’t want to face another MRE. I slept for a bit and woke up at nine. At ten p.m., I put the sweater back on and stuffed the hat in my cargo pocket. I had one last cigarette while I held the flashlight against the compass. After that was done, I put the red lens back on the light and then started about my housekeeping. I reapplied camouflage paint to my face and hands. I packed the dry bag with my gear and the trash I had made. Then with the dry bag on my shoulder, I took the kayak to the water.
I checked my watch, and at ten thirty, I turned on the marine radio. It was set to a channel that was at the far end of the dial. I pushed the talk button and keyed it three times, then waited three seconds and keyed it three more times. I waited and then the radio keyed twice and two seconds later twice more. Chris acknowledged that I was going out to the ship. He had driven home and then back to make our communication window. He was already driving home from the put-in point when I was getting into the kayak. He would be back in the morning to pick me up.
I took out the compass and opened the lid. I double-checked my bearing and found it to be true. From now until I was at the ship, the compass would ride open on my thigh, the green line glowing and the green arrow of the needle swinging as I moved. When the green needle disappeared under the green line, I was on course. It was the simplest and safest way to navigate at night. I pushed off with one foot in the kayak and one foot against Ryer Island. I paddled out into the bay toward the ship. Suddenly, I was a modern version of Sam Spade chasing riches and dreams.
The wind was, fortunately, at my back. I was wet from the drizzle and the salt spray but warm because wool is a miracle fiber. I paddled hard, but the current wasn’t bad. It was shift change, and I would have to hustle before the next patrol boat came out. I was aware of how small and insignificant I was on the water in the dark. I was tiny and could disappear unnoticed and that would be it. No more Andy Roark. No one to notice except for Chris, and maybe Brenda Watts. I think if she had a concussion, she might be a little sweet on me.
Chapter 20
As I paddled away from Ryer Island and into the bay, the wind was more noticeable. The compass needle started to drift left of the glowing green line. I corrected by pulling harder, digging the paddle deeper, on the left side. The kayak responded, and the needle drifted back under the green line on the compass face. I evened out my stroke and soon I was warm. The wind and the current were strong enough that I didn’t want to pause to take off my sweater.
The night was still, and the noises of the nearby industry were rhythmic, calming, and repetitive. Then there was a soft undertone of highway noises like the bass in jazz. My paddle dipped into the water reminding me of a muted trumpet and the wind tore through like Charlie Parker’s wailing sax. The kayak and I sliced through the darkness across choppy, brown water. I was enjoying the quiet and the loneliness. Being on some sort of mission again was like methadone to the heroin that was my life in Vietnam. Just a poor substitute.
I paddled toward the row of ships. Off in the distance to my left, I could see the lights from the refinery. The row that I wanted was in an area near marshland, and there was little light coming from the shore. I paddled steadily, checking the compass and making small corrections to keep the needle under the green line. My arms and chest began to feel the strain of unfamiliar work. I was wondering if this wasn’t the year to quit smoking.
The drizzle stopped and the sky cleared. As the stars came out, so did the chill. In front of me, shapes started to materialize in the darkness. They formed a row of metal hills, a ridgeline of sorts, in front of me. Then, looming above me, water lapping at its hull, was the Adams. Its gray bulk blending with the sky. I paddled around her until I came to the gangway, which was raised up over a small dock that was tethered to the ship.
The dock was made of a wooden rectangular box that was open on the bottom, where empty fifty-five-gallon plastic drums were lashed inside of it for buoyancy. When the crews came over by boat, they would get off the boat and onto the dock and lower the gangway. Lines ran vertically from it to the davits above so that the gangway could be raised or lowered. The gangway could be left up, but the crews would have a place to get on the gangway from. There was some sort of lockbox on a control to lower the gangway.
I took the kayak’s painter and did a graceless half roll out of the kayak onto the dock by pulling myself up with a cleat. I pulled the kayak up onto the dock. I took the kayak’s bow line and looped it through my belt behind my kidneys. The lines that the gangway was running on were actually steel cables. I was able to pull myself up with my hands and lock the cable between my feet. I climbed the ten feet quickly and was on the gangway. It bounced slightly under my weight.
I undid the bow line and pulled the kayak up onto the gangway with me. Then I carried it up the gangway onto the deck. I would have stopped to salute and ask, “Permission to come aboard?” but there was no one to answer. There was no one standing watch. She was just crewed by ghosts from three wars or, more accurately, one war, one conflict, and one police action. Not that the dead knew the difference. I put the kayak around the corner of the superstructure. It wasn’t well hidden, but someone coming up the gangway wouldn’t see it right away. My plan was to head back to Montezuma a couple of hours before first light. I dug my flashlight out of the dry bag and went looking for a way into the ship.
I took the revolver out of my pocket and unwrapped it from the baggie. I stuck it back in my right front pocket. Bill Jordan wouldn’t have approved of my carrying it that way, and he had literally written the book on the subject of using revolvers. I started to check the hatches leading into the ship. I worked my way around the superstructure, finding hatch after hatch that I would need tools to open. It was beginning to look like I had made the trip to the ship in vain. Then I found it.
In the rear of the superstructure was a hatch that wasn’t bolted shut. It was dogged down on well-oiled hinges. The hatch made no noise when I undogged it and was silent the way well-oiled metal is when I pulled it open. I closed it behind me and did just one latch. I was in a narrow corridor or companionway. Off the companionway were compartments. The bridge, the radio room, and the deck-house were up, and the cargo holds were down. The ship smelled musty, and I was sure that she was more rust than anything else at this point.
I started to explore, feeling like a ghost drifting in the deserted rooms of a haunted mansion. Real Scooby-Doo shit. I checked some cabins and what I think was a Wardroom. The officers mess was deserted, but the tables were still there, with chairs that were no longer neatly tucked into the table. Next was the galley. It was stripped bare except for an old, industrial flat-top grill and two steam kettles. It still smelled like fried food and the faintest trace of bleach.
I made my way through the galley to the enlisted mess. That is where I found something. I said to no one in particular, “Andy, my boy, this is what we refer to professionally as a clue.” We private detective types tend to appreciate a good clue now and then.
In this case, it was a large square covered by a tarp. Under the tarp were bricks wrapped in packing tape and plastic, all of it stacked chest high and about eight feet long. I dug the tip of the KA-BAR into one of the bricks. Heroin came out. I was looking for gold and found drugs. It wasn’t the treasure I wanted to find but it was a fortune. I had to know. I had to keep looking.
I started to make my way down to the cargo holds. I made my way to the number five hold in the stern. It was a large, empty cavern made
of metal. If I were to cry out, it would echo. Numbers four, three, and two were empty as well. I was in number two when I heard something, feet moving above me. Noises of metal on metal and people talking, not trying to be subtle or stealthy. They were talking in Vietnamese. I wasn’t aware that I had taken the revolver out of my pocket, but it was suddenly in my hand. I was in the dark hiding, and there were Vietnamese voices around me. The old feeling of being hunted was with me again.
They were coming my way, above me, somewhere in the ship. I could work my way up, go around them. There was only one hatch in or out, but I was betting that I could find a way out if I went higher. The ship was secured to keep kids out or people who wanted to steal old electronics, but it wasn’t a vault. If I split now, there was probably a porthole or a hatch I could slip out of. Except there was one cargo hold left. There could be gold in it. A treasury from a nation that no longer existed.
The smart move would be to try to run, but I had to know. I wasn’t the smartest guy in the room, but I was compelled to find out. I had to know. Now that I had embarked on a fool’s errand, I had to see it through. There was no point in escaping if I didn’t know if the gold was on the ship. That was the problem. My compulsion to know the end of the story would probably get me killed, but I didn’t care.
I moved forward to the last cargo hold, number one. I heard the Vietnamese voices behind me, their feet on decking. I heard their laughter in my mind as I was trapped. There was no gold, no nothing but dust. I was looking for someplace to hide in an empty cargo hold. There was nothing to hide behind and nowhere to run to. I had literally run out of ship. I saw a hatch in the deck. It had BALLAST stenciled on it. I had read that Liberty ships were ballasted by lead bars. The ballast was stored next to the hull under the deck of the cargo hold. The ballast area was serviced by a tunnel that ran down the spine of the ship.
I undogged the hatch, and there it was, a long man-sized tunnel running the length of the ship. There was also the unimaginable stench of bilge water that had been sloshing around with fuel and oil and God knows what chemicals for almost fifty years. I could only imagine what else was in there, too.
They had to have found the kayak. They had to know I was on board. They were looking for me. I slid headfirst down into the dark, damp tunnel. There wasn’t much room and I was soaked to my chest in stinking water. I wanted to gag but trying to get away from them seemed a more pressing need.
The ship was made up of metal ribs and bulkheads that formed a sort of triangle. I had to crawl over those every few feet. Every time I did, I disturbed the water and the stench with it. I gagged but held it together. I was crawling through a crude metal honeycomb that was filled with lead bars. I was lucky that I wasn’t claustrophobic, and I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in anymore that the batteries held on my flashlight.
I had made it under cargo hold two. Everything was clearly marked in old stencils from the forties. I passed row after row of honeycombed metal filled with lead bars. I stopped midway down the hull. A few of the honeycombs were empty except for bits of white burlap. The pieces of old burlap had caught on rough bits of welded seams or rough, unfinished metal. The burlap bits were from old flour sacks, the red, white, and blue design with a pale hand shaking another. USAID was written on the material. A hatch opened, and a voice said, “Mau, mau lem. Grenade. Come out, Trung Si Roark, or I frag you.”
I started moving toward the next hatch until it opened. “Come out, Trung Si. . . . ,” was said in a taunting, singsong voice. I made my way to the hatch and hands helped me out. The hands went over my body, relieving me of the KA-BAR and the revolver and the rounds for the revolver. They took my flashlight, and something hard and metal jabbed me above the kidneys. “Mau, mau lem!” The words were Vietnamese and meant, “quickly, quickly go!” The unmistakable commands.
I made my way up ladders and through hatchways. There were two Vietnamese in front of me and two behind me. All four had Madsen Model 50 submachine guns, simple, postwar 9mm weapons made of sheet metal that weighed a hair under seven pounds. They were flat with a side-folding tubular stock that looked like a tired rectangle with one corner a bit farther out than the others. Unfortunately for me, one was being poked in my back with some enthusiasm.
We—the CIA, Army Special Forces—had given Madsen Model 50s to trail watchers in Vietnam. Trail watchers were friendly locals working for us. They would wear civilian clothes and carry a sort of local woven basket/backpack on their shoulders. Inside were a folded Madsen, a brace of thirty-two-round magazines, and a couple of grenades. The CIA had handed them out in Vietnam and in South and Central America, anywhere to anyone who wanted to kill a commie for mommy. The CIA didn’t discriminate who they armed as long as they were fighting the evil empire. They were effective weapons that didn’t scream America when they were found.
These cats were familiar with the Madsen. They were men in their late thirties who seemed comfortable holding and pointing weapons at people. Again, in this case that was me. They had called me sergeant in Vietnamese, so they knew who I was. When we emerged up on deck, we were behind the superstructure. That was the advantage of one way in and one way out—you come out where you went in.
The guy behind me wasn’t shy with his Madsen. He guided me to an area not far from the stern of the ship with sharp little prods of the barrel. He, not so gently, nudged me toward a trio of men; two were older Vietnamese, and the other was a white guy in his early fifties. His hair was light, and he was dressed in boat shoes, faded jeans, and a navy blue sweater with horizontal white stripes. He had a red bandana tied around his neck like he was James Coburn or something. He looked like he should have been on a yacht instead of a Liberty ship.
Only the Smith & Wesson 76 submachine gun, slung barrel down over his left shoulder, was out of place with his nautical image. The gun was behind him, but I knew that he could sweep it up with his left hand and shoulder it, ready to fire, in a fraction of a second. We had taught a lot of our Montagnards to carry their carbines that way when not in the field. The submachine gun and the two spare magazines sticking out of his back-left pocket were not yacht club accessories. He probably had a grenade hidden somewhere and an F-14 Tomcat on call, just in case.
“Hello, Sergeant Roark. I have heard a great deal about you.” He didn’t extend a hand.
“Nothing bad, I hope? I am afraid you have me at a disadvantage. Have we met?” He was lean, not thin, fit. His eyes never stopped for long on anything. He was always scanning the area. “Let me guess, you’re a Company man.”
“Well, you are astute. My name is Keller.” He said it with a laugh, and his voice had a trace of Virginia in it, not army or navy Virginia but old money Virginia, the Virginia that spoke of horses, boarding schools and cotillions, cocktails that were served on the veranda of a house whose original owners felt that Jefferson Davis was their true president. His accent had been softened by boarding schools in the Northeast and by language schools in parts of Northern Virginia that were owned by the government, but he was old money Virginia. He wasn’t some classless, nouveau riche Company man.
“Well, why are we here?” I was hoping that he would tell me something.
“We, Sergeant? You are trespassing on U.S. government–restricted property. I am here because we were told that you would be coming. Then there was a bit of extra traffic in the area. There aren’t a lot of trucks on the road by Montezuma at five in the morning. Then we watched the ship day and night. We almost missed you. But then you showed up in the Starlight scope on the gangway. It looked like you were exerting yourself, we didn’t want to interrupt you.”
“You were expecting me?”
“Our associates in Boston warned us that you had flown out here. They also said that you are very persistent and that you are stubborn to the point of foolhardiness.”
“Well, that does sound like me. Did they mention my excellent sense of humor?”
“No, they failed to mention that. I think that the colonel grud
gingly respects you in spite of the oppositional nature of your acquaintanceship.” He smiled in spite of himself. It reminded me of a lizard.
“Does he normally show his respect by blowing up people and their cars?” I was unarmed, and there was no way I was going to fight seven men armed with pistols and submachine guns. I would have to try to talk them into submission with my witty banter. The problem was that, as usual, I was the only one who seemed to find me funny. Maybe I could try to bore them to death.
“Well, Sergeant Roark, at least he takes you seriously. You can tell a great deal about a man by the quality of his enemies. You and he are on opposite sides of this one. And you have become a thorn in his side.” Keller spoke as though we were discussing a gentlemen’s rivalry.
“They forgot my romantic nature and love of West Side Story.” The older Vietnamese men were talking among themselves too low for me to hear, but I was pretty sure that they weren’t admiring my witty demeanor in the face of danger.
“You do look like you are a Jet, definitely a Jet, instead of a Shark.... Sergeant Roark, you have stumbled into something that your government wishes you hadn’t.” He sounded like a near perfect imitation of someone who was sincerely disappointed.
“I haven’t stumbled into anything. I am just a guy taking a look at a piece of history.” I didn’t try to feign sincerity since he wasn’t trying either.
“I wish that were the case, but you and I both know you aren’t. The fact that you disturbed the package, poked it with a knife, worries me.”
“I am not interested in whatever you have in there.” Ironically, I wasn’t. I had been chasing a pet theory. Once again trying to prove my brilliance to the world or maybe just myself.