by Nick Carter
“Just fine. Only the skipper doesn’t seem to know what it’s all about.”
Hawk laughed curtly. “He doesn’t. This was a hurry-up job—I had to jump channels and go direct to The Man.”
I started the Chevy. “Where to?”
“Just drive. I’ll tell you.”
I watched the mirror as I pulled out into traffic. A Ford with two men in it pulled out from the curb and followed us. As I approached a stop light a red MG gunned out of a parking lot and cut in front of me.
I glanced at Hawk. “I feel so safe, boss. You’ll spoil me with all this security, you know. I might get used to it.”
He made a sour grimace. “Don’t. You’ll be on your own soon enough. Take that next side street.”
We did a little futzing around while Hawk watched the mirror. Following his directions I drove the Chevy past the Ernest Hemingway museum and across Truman Avenue to skirt Garrison Bight. A lot of the charter boats were in. We circled and cut back past the old turtle kraals and eventually ended up in front of a private house on Greene Street. Hawk told me to pull into the drive. The red MG turned a corner ahead of us and stopped. The Ford stopped half a block behind us.
Hawk was grumbling. “A lot of goddamned nonsense but I have to do it. I don’t think there’s a goon within seven hundred miles of here. Come on, Nick.”
It was a little over seven hundred miles to Haiti.
Just to put the spurs in him a little I said, “That’s what the skipper of the Pueblo thought about the North Koreans.”
He just grunted and didn’t answer me.
Hawk unlocked the door and we went into a big, cool, dusty-smelling livingroom. All the shades were down and the draperies drawn. Hawk took a sheaf of onion skin paper from his inside pocket and tossed it to me. It was closely typed, single space, and there were maybe twenty pages.
“Read it,” he said. “Not now. At your leisure on the way to Haiti. Then destroy it. How is the subject doing?”
I said she was doing okay and gave him a fast and succinct rundown on events since the shoot out at the voodoo church. He kept nodding and gumming his cigar and didn’t interrupt.
When I finished he said: “Watch her every minute. I think she and the HIUS are on the level about wanting this Dr. Valdez out, but on the other hand they may want him in. We know they want him as the next President of Haiti. The mulattos, that is. The elite. They want their land back, their cane and coffee plantations, and to do that they have to kill Papa Doc and replace him with this Valdez. He’s a mulatto too, you know.”
I hadn’t known and said so. Hawk waved a hand.
“No matter. What does it matter that Dr. Valdez is also a physicist. Theoretical, but still a physicist. At least he was at Columbia, before Papa Doc snatched him, and I don’t suppose he has forgotten much in five years. That mean anything to you, Nick?”
It did. “It begins to sound a little familiar and ugly,” I said.
“It is. You remember those Sidewinder rockets that were stolen recently in Bonn? That were supposed to have been shipped to Moscow?”
I said I remembered.
Hawk stuck a new cigar in his mouth. “They never got to Moscow. They were stolen again, enroute, and ended up in Haiti. The CIA lucked into that bit of information. The Coast Guard picked up a Cuban refugee not long ago. He was a member of Cuban Intelligence and he was pretty well shot up when they took him aboard a cutter. Before he died he convinced the CIA boys that Papa Doc has got missiles, modeled after the Sidewinder, and that he is trying to develop atomic warheads for them. Castro knows this and is about to go nuts. You see it?”
I saw it. If Papa Doc had missiles, and if he could arm them with nuclear warheads he was going to dominate the Caribbean. Every little banana republic was going to dance to his tune.
And Dr. Romera Valdez was a physicist. No wonder that Papa Doc refused to ransom him for the million the HIUS had raised. Lyda was right about that.
“Valdez was a Commie when he was at Columbia,” Hawk said. “The FBI and CIA have a file on him from here to there. He was never an activist, only a parlor pink, but he was a Commie. We don’t really want him back in the States.”
I watched him carefully “You really want him dead?”
Hawk shook his head. “Only in extremis, son. That’s what The Man says. You’re not to kill him unless there is absolutely no hope of getting him out.” He frowned and spat a piece of cigar on the floor. “I wouldn’t do it that way but that is the way The Man wants it, and I have to take orders the same as anybody. But we can’t let Papa Doc keep him.”
I lit a cigarette. “How much of this, of what we know, do you think Lyda Bonaventure knows?”
The old man shook his head. “I can only guess. In all her dealings with the CIA she played it very close to the vest. They were trying to mulct each other, she and the CIA contacts, and I’m damned if I know who came out ahead. You’ll have to find out from her the best way you can.”
“She’s all for getting Valdez out,” I said. “Or so she tells me. And she must know he’s a physicist and a Commie.”
Hawk nodded. “Yes. She will know that. She also knows just where in Haiti Valdez is being kept prisoner. Don’t let her con you that she doesn’t. She can take you straight to him. You know she is the Black Swan?”
“I know.” I had told him about the arms and the uniforms and how I had a BG on my hands.
“She’s probably got a pretty good underground organization in Haiti,” Hawk said. “She was planning on using the blacks for the rank and file of her invasion Army. She only has a small hardcore of mulattos.”
“Why would the blacks go for that? Once the mulattos are back in power the blacks will be worse off than they are under Duvalier.”
“They don’t know that yet,” Hawk said. “Things are so bad under Papa Doc that the blacks are ready to try anything. By the time they wake up it will be too late. If she can bring off an invasion.”
“She’s not going to bring off any invasion,” I promised [ him. “She’s cute and clever, all right, but she isn’t that good. I’ve got her in control. Forget the invasion.”
Hawk sighed and leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “All right, son. I trust you on that. But you still have to get to Valdez, get him out of Haiti or kill him, and let us know the stage of progress Papa Doc has achieved with his missiles and atomic warheads. The last thing in the world that The Man wants to do is to have to occupy Haiti again. They hate us enough as it is, we’ve still got the stink of the Dominican thing hanging over us, and right now is a poor time for trouble in the Caribbean. Any time is a poor time, but right now it would be murder. We’ve got enough on our plate with the Mid-East and Vietnam. You’ve got to do us a job in there, boy, and you won’t have any help. The CIA is blown to hell and I’ve got one agent left in Port-au-Prince. One man! I would like to keep him. But if things go badly and you’re running for your life, and can get to Port-au-Prince, he might be able to help.”
He told me how to contact the man in Port-au-Prince. He went on to talk for another quarter of an hour, really socking it to me, and I listened and felt worse by the minute. What I really needed was a regiment of Marines—real tough Marines like those who had occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. I didn’t have any Marines. I had only me. As I drove the Chevy back to Duval Street Hawk told me about the New York thing.
“The CIA is plenty teed off about losing Steve Bennett, but they’re covering. The New York cops don’t know what’s going on, but they smell a rat and their Homicide people aren’t trying too hard. That third goon got away clean and the other two are dead.”
“I knew I got one for sure,” I said. “I couldn’t be sure about the other one.”
“DOA,” said Hawk. “He didn’t talk in the ambulance.”
Hawk didn’t go out on the pier with me. We shook hands and he said, “Study the precis carefully, son. There is a lot more to this than I had time for. Be sure you destroy it.”
“Will
do. Goodbye, sir.”
He flipped his gnarled old hand at me. “Goodbye, Nick. Luck. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
As I rowed the dinghy back to Sea Witch I could only hope that his waiting would not be in vain. That he would hear from me.
Chapter 7
I ran through the old Bahama Channel, keeping well clear of Cuban waters. In fact I made so much northing that as I turned south to enter the Windward Passage I could make out the dim smudge of Matthew Town astern.
The Excalibur, like a faithful dog taught to heel, was running to port of me and a couple of miles back. As soon as I got into the Passage she came boiling up to circle in front of me and signal:
Leaving you now—rendezvous per instructions on call— goodbye and good luck—
I had a lonely and chilly feeling in my gut as I watched her churn away. Her officers and men were watching us through glasses and, feeling as alone as I did, I couldn’t help but chuckle. A day out of Key West Lyda had taken to going topless. She wanted sun on her breasts, she said, and to hell with a bunch of peeping Toms.
“You’re an exhibitionist,” I told her, “and you are driving a lot of nice clean American boys off their rockers. Onanism is frowned on in the Coast Guard and you are encouraging it. In this case going without a bra is probably treason.”
She couldn’t have cared less and said so. I didn’t give a damn myself and I had to laugh every time I thought of what the officers and men of the cutter must be thinking. Especially the skipper. He knew, without knowing the details, that I was on a serious mission, and it must have shocked his staunch old soul to watch us playboying around on Sea Witch. I wondered if he would put it in the log, or include it in his report to Washington, and what the expression on j Hawk’s face would be like when he read the report.
Lyda came to stand beside me now and we watched the I cutter disappear over the horizon. She stood behind me, her breasts just touching my bare flesh and nuzzling my ear with her moist lips. We had become quite fond of each other by J this time.
The Excalibur was out of sight.
“She’ll run into Guantanamo,” I said. “Give the crew a little leave, take on some supplies, then come back here to cruise on station. I just hope to Christ we see her again.”
“Amen,” said Lyda. She gave me a sharp, excited look of conspiracy and I could almost hear her boiling inside. We were about to get down to the nitty gritty, and she was happy and ready.
In the west the sun was falling fast and lavishing color on the Passage. Lavender and gold and crimson and blue purple. An occasional flying fish skittered in a sparkle of silver. The sea was calm, running in long, shallow, green troughs crested with lace, and the tradewind from Africa was sweeping steadily and moistly cool in our faces. No other craft was in sight and, with night about to come, that suited me fine. From here on it was going to be very tricky.
I smacked her taut behind and told her to go fix dinner. Then I throttled the engines, keeping bare way on her, and snapped on the gyro. I now had a number of problems.
I had read and memorized the precis Hawk gave me, then destroyed it. It was a headache, nothing but more work and more trouble and more danger, but that couldn’t be helped. It also added considerably to the cast of characters— something I could have done without—for this soup already had too many cooks fooling around with it. I had read about Paul Penton Trevelyn, and seen an occasional rare and outdated picture of him, but now I might have to meet this weird character in the flesh. I might even have to kill him.
P.P. Trevelyn, as he was usually called, was an eccentric billionaire who made his permanent home in Haiti. Hawk admitted, in the precis, that AXE didn’t have a hell of a lot on P.P., and what they did have was out of date and not very reliable. P.P. was a mystery man, a recluse and a rabid Fascist, and he and Papa Doc were as thick as the thieves they undoubtedly were. P.P. made Howard Hughes look like a raving extrovert and had more money then Getty. The most recent picture of him was twenty years old.
P.P. was also the head of Papa Doc’s intelligence service, and put up the money for it. It was P.P. who was holding Dr. Romera Valdez on his huge estate near the ruins of Sans Souci palace and not far from The Citadel. It was my guess, and that of the CIA and AXE, that Mr. Trevelyn was calling a lot of Papa Doc’s tunes.
Lyda thought so, too, and she admitted that it was going to be tough to get Valdez out of P.P.’s clutches. The man had a private army! That made two armies I would be up against—Papa Doc’s and P.P’s.
I was still brooding over this when she called me to come and eat. I tossed my cigarette overboard and took a last look around. The sun was gone, and the colors faded, but in the quiet immensity of the sea gloaming there was a quality of peace and serenity that gripped and held me, the more because I knew it might be a long time before I had the feeling again. If ever. This was going to be a rough one and I felt distinctly uneasy.
After dinner I told Lyda to get out all our charts and notes and make them ready for a last council of war. I went topside and cut the engines and put an already rigged sea anchor on Sea Witch. It was fully dark now, with just a sliver of moon in the east. We had this stretch of the Passage to ourselves and I didn’t turn on any running lights. After a last check around I made my way through a clutter of lashed oil and water jerricans and back down to the deckhouse. Lyda had slipped into her halter and a light sweater, against the slight chill, and was poring over the charts and a clipped sheaf of notes.
I lit cigarettes for both of us and squinted through smoke at the charts. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get on with this. I want to run into Tortuga tonight and hide before it gets light. You got anybody on that island?”
She nodded and frowned down at the chart, wetting her lips with a long pink tongue. “A few people, yes. If nothing has happened.”
“You can get in touch with them without danger to us?"
I watched her closely. We had been together long enough for me to know when she was lying, or even thinking about lying. Now I frowned at her. “You would have heard, wouldn’t you, if anything had happened? You are the Black Swan, the boss lady.”
She nodded, but gave me a tart look. “I mean recently, Nick. In New York I would have heard, yes, but we’ve been a little out of touch the past few days, yes?”
She had a point there. Except for working Excalibur a couple of times I had maintained strict radio silence, and there hadn’t been any broadcasts from Port-au-Prince to indicate trouble. We had been monitoring Radio Haiti constantly. That didn’t mean a damned thing, of course. Papa Doc is a very secretive man.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll have to chance it. Are there many people on Tortuga?” It was an island off the northern coast of Haiti, about 20 miles from Port de Paix on the mainland, and an old private hangout.
“Not many. Some fishermen and a few blacks. There isn’t much there.”
“A place we can hide the boat and camouflage her?”
She nodded. “No trouble there. A lot of coves and inlets. You’re worried about air patrols?”
I was sure as hell worried about air patrols and I said so. Papa Doc didn’t have much of an air force, but I didn’t have any, and it only takes one plane to spot a boat that shouldn’t be there.
Then she brought up an old, and sore, subject. We had argued about it all the way from Key West.
“If you would only let me use the radio, Nick! I could call my people on the mainland and it would be so much easier than doing it the way you want to. I—”
“No, goddamn it!” I slapped the table hard with my palm. Amateurs get on my nerves at times.
“It would make it easier,” I went on. “Easier for Papa Doc and this P.P. Trevelyn. How do I know how many DF sets and monitoring stations they’ve got? Transmitting to the mainland is asking for it, Lyda. They’d get a fix on us and that would be it. End of story. End of us. And don’t bring that up again!”
“Yes, Captain. I won’t.” Her smile had the familiar mock
ery in it.
“We stick to my original plan,” I said. “We lie in Tortuga while you make a contact and send him to your people on the mainland. Verbal only. No notes. Your messenger will set up the rendezvous on the mainland for tonight. That is the way it is going to be.”
“Of course, Nick.”
“Another thing,” I went on, “I don’t want any of your friends coming aboard Sea Witch. If they try it I’ll have to shoot them. Get that straight, Lyda. Because I’ll do it, and if the gunfire starts too soon we’re cooked. We might as well send Papa Doc a telegram.”
She saw the sense in that and agreed, unsmiling. “I know. I don’t especially want the blacks to know what we’ve got aboard—since there is to be no invasion. They—they might get ideas of their own.”
I couldn’t resist sneering a little. During the last few days of sharing boat and bed we had reached that free and easy, comfortable, stage where we did not mind sharp tongues or fear to hurt each other’s feelings.
I said: “The blacks bug you a little, don’t they? You’ve got to use them, because there aren’t enough of you brown people, but you don’t trust them. I see your point—you mulattos make the revolution, then the blacks step in and take over and hang you along with Papa Doc.”
Lyda shrugged. “If I were invading I would worry about that, but since there is to be no invasion it doesn’t signify. Forget the invasion, Nick. You have my promise not to try any tricks.”
I figured that the promise was worth about a half a Haitian gourde. A dime.
She put her finger on the chart, then picked up a pencil and made a mark. “Just here, on the northwest coast of Tortuga, there is an inlet and a little river. Only a creek, really, but it should be deep enough for Sea Witch.”
“No problem. We’ve got a depth finder. We can nose her in slowly, as far as she will go. A little risky, but we’ll have to take that chance.”
I was worried about getting hung up on a bar.
She pushed the pencil into her thick hair and smiled at me. “It should be all right. The last time I was here I was on a boat that draws more than we do, and we didn’t have any trouble. Once we’re into the creek mouth we can lie against the side and the palm trees will hide us.”