by Nick Carter
Yes, I thought. It would have been easy. A man walking down busy, crowded upper Broadway on a limpid June night. A car pulling over to the curb and a couple of goons leaping out and grabbing him and shoving him into the car. It would have been smoothly and efficiently done. Once he was in the car it was all over. They had probably taken him straight to some banana tramp at a pier in Brooklyn or Staten Island.
The sun had gone and the short purple twilight of the sub-tropics fell like a gauzy net over Sea Witch. Lyda Bonaventure lay with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, half between sleep and waking, and I knew she was through talking. No matter. I knew the rest of the story. Most of it was in the AXE files and some I had picked up from Steve Bennett, the CIA man who had been killed in the voodoo church.
I picked her up and carried her into the deckhouse and put her on the divan. I patted her cheek. “Catch a little nap, kid Not for long, because we’re taking off as soon as it’s dark.”
I stowed the two extra machine guns in the deckhouse and took the third with me when I went forward to make up our packs. I didn’t want to show a light and I had to hurry. The dusky light seeping in the ports was already clotting into darkness.
I rigged two surplus Army packs, and two musette bags, and prepared two web belts with canteens and mess kits and a couple of Swiss tool-knives and compasses. All this junk was helter-skelter in one big crate and as I sorted it out I picked up the story of Dr. Romera Valdez where Lyda had dropped it.
There had been one hell of a stink about it in the papers. The Times especially, for which Valdez had been doing the articles, had played it big. Both in the news columns and on the editorial page. Net result—a big zero. Papa Doc sat tight and denied everything, or ignored it, and after two or three weeks the story petered out. Nobody came forward. Nobody had seen Valdez abducted. Nobody had seen anything. He had stepped into a manhole and disappeared down a bottomless canyon.
Not quite. The FBI went to work on it—we had their stuff in our files—and found that a small tramp steamer, a vintage rustpot, had left Staten Island the morning after Valdez’ disappearance. She was La Paloma, registered in Panama. The CIA, when they took over, traced her ownership to Haiti and that was where the trail stopped. Ostensibly La Paloma was owned by the Bank of Haiti. Papa Doc.
There wasn’t a damned thing the United States could do about it. Valdez had never become an American citizen. It took the CIA a year to find out that he was being held in the dungeons under the palace. That was all they could find out—that Valdez was alive and apparently well treated. Now, according to AXE files, this P.P. Trevelyn had him somewhere on his estates near Sans Souci. That figured, if Valdez was working on atomic warheads for the missiles Papa Doc was supposed to have. They would need space and privacy, something you couldn’t get in Port-au-Prince.
I filled another musette bag with ammo and carried the lot back to the deckhouse. I had enough ammo for a small war, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. I also had a dozen each of gas, smoke, and fragmentation grenades. I was tempted to take one of the recoilless rifles and a mortar, then I laughed at myself and forgot it. We would be laden enough as it was and we had to travel fast and far.
I wakened Lyda, and we ran out of the cove without lights and turned into the channel between Tortuga and the mainland. She squatted in the cockpit and read the chart by the light of the instrument board. We were into it now, in Haitian waters and past the point of no return, and if one of Papa Doc’s patrols spotted us it was all over.
As we ran past the eastern point of Tortuga Lyda watched the compass. “Another ten miles and we turn south. That will put us about 15 miles off the coast and our rendezvous point.”
I had Sea Witch throttled down, purring along, and I translated miles into knots and when the time came I arced her into a long turn to the south and then cut her speed to a creeping five knots. There was no moon and it was clouding up to rain. The night was cool, even chilly, but I was sweating a little. When Lyda wanted to smoke I forbade it. I had hooded the instrument board.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I said. “You’re sure this old dock isn’t watched? Seems to me that Papa Doc would keep a special guard on a place like that—he isn’t stupid, you know.”
We were headed for a lonely spot on the coast where the U.S. Fruit Company had once maintained a dock and a cluster of buildings. The place was long disused and falling into ruins, and Lyda swore that she had used it several times to enter Haiti and had never encountered trouble.
She laughed softly, with a hint of the old mockery. “What’s the matter, darling? You sound like you’re nervous in the service.”
“Being nervous has kept me alive a long time,” I said. This kid was ready to go to war. This slim brown girl who had been crying not long before.
“That’s the beauty of it,” she went on. “The place is so damned obvious that Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute overlook it. It never occurs to them that anybody would dare to use it. So we use it. Clever, yes?”
“Luck. I hope it holds.”
We were running slowly for the coast, rolling a little in the current setting through the gut. I glanced at my watch and said, “Better get your flashlight now and go forward. If everything is okay we should be seeing their signal within half an hour.”
She leaned to kiss me. Her breath was hot and sweet and smelled of booze. She patted my arm. “I’ve got a good feeling about this. Everything is going to be all right, Nick. Just be sure you remember your new name and don’t goof it I sold them a real bill of goods on you and it wasn’t easy. Duppy is as smart as they come, and he is going to be very unhappy that I’ve postponed the invasion again. But I can handle him as long as you don’t cross me up.”
No use telling her how many roles I had played in my years with AXE.
“I won’t cross you up,” I said. “Get forward. Be sure their signal is right. Exactly right!”
She laughed again and went off humming to herself.
My new name was Sam Fletcher. I was using it because I knew the real Sam Fletcher was in Africa fighting for the Biafrans. If he was still alive. Fletcher was one of the last of the old style soldiers of fortune. Though at times he fought for money he was not strictly a mercenary; when he believed in something he would fight gratis and even spend his own money. He did odd jobs for AXE from time to time, which made it easy to keep tabs on him. I didn’t think Sam would mind me using his name.
Lyda had told me a little about this Duppy we were going to meet. In Haitian dialect, in voodoo jargon, duppy means spirit or ghost. A man may die, but sometimes his duppy has the power to come back from the grave. Sometimes the duppy does not even go, but remains on earth and actually ; takes the dead man’s place.
Duppy was a nom de guerre, of course. Lyda would not tell me his right name, even if she knew it. “The blacks call i him Duppy,” she had explained, “because of the way he moves in the jungles and mountains. Like a ghost. They say that you never hear him, or know he’s coming—you just look up and suddenly there he is. They’re all afraid of him, the blacks.”
Then she laughed and added, “That’s odd, in a way. Duppy is one of the blackest blacks I’ve ever seen.”
I throttled down still more until Sea Witch was creeping. I barely had way on her. My bearing was due south and somewhere off in that gloom was the coast of Haiti. I snapped her over on gyro and went to the rail and peered forward. I had put a “box” on the flashlight so it couldn’t be seen from the sides, only from dead ahead, and as I leaned over the rail and strained into the darkness I wondered if Lyda was signaling yet. That was one of the hazards. We had to signal first. Our engines were well muffled and, when throttled down, gave off a bare whisper of sound. We couldn’t count on the shore party hearing us.
There it was. A pin prick of white light from the shore. It flitted brilliant in the night, swift and questioning. . . — . . Question mark. Who?
The light vanished and though I couldn’t see Lyda’s signal
I knew she was sending: . . . .— .- .- SWAN. I hoped she was getting it right. I had made her practice it enough.
She must have because in a couple of seconds the shore light came back with a -.-. K, okay, come in. Then blackness I again.
Lyda came running back from the bow, tense and choked with excitement. “It’s all right, Nick! They’re waiting for us.”
I switched off the gyro and motioned her to the wheel. “I know. I saw. Here, you take the con until I get up on the fly bridge. I can’t take her in to that dock from down here. Just hold her steady for a minute.”
Lyda had given me an exact description of the dock I was making for. It had been built for ocean going vessels, and it rammed a long, now decaying, finger out from a deep scallop of cove. It had the usual piles and stringers, but for some reason it had been covered on the sides, like an old-fashioned covered bridge. Lyda insisted that we could run Sea Witch in under the dock and it would be like hiding in a long wooden tunnel. We could forget camouflage.
I wasn’t so sure. And I was worried about ripping off the fly bridge as we went in.
I called softly down to her. “Okay. I’ve got her. Go forward and con me in. Keep your voice down.”
I notched her down almost to stop and listened to the soft burble of the engines as she inched along. Ahead of me it was like the inside of a tar barrel. Good in a way, because if I couldn’t see neither could Papa Doc’s coast patrols.
I was wearing the Luger in the belt holster and the stiletto in the sheath on my right forearm. My sweater and jacket covered both. Outside I had the Colt .45 strapped on, and I cozened a machine gun in my lap as I peered and waited for the guide lights.
They flicked into life, dim, sallow, barely seen. One on each side of the open end of the dock. All I had to do was put Sea Witch squarely between them.
It wasn’t easy. I had almost no way on her and the rudder was slow to answer. The current ran fast in so close to shore and the trade breeze, pushing me from the east, didn’t help much. Sea Witch kept falling off to starboard.
Lyda’s voice came whispering back to me. “To the left, Nick. Left. LEFT!”
I had to goose the engines a little to get her back to port. When I throttled down again she was shoving her bow squarely between the lights. They went off. I shoved her into reverse for a second, then cut the engines and ducked and reached up with a hand to feel for clearance, if any. My fingers brushed the splintery underside of the dock boarding. I had six inches of clearance.
A trap door opened in the dock just over my head and a white shaft of light blazed down at me. A deep voice, speaking in Haitian Creole, said, “Bon jou, Blanc.”
Hello, white man.
I shifted the machine gun so he couldn’t miss seeing it, but kept my finger away from the trigger assembly. “Who are you?”
Deep rumble of laughter. He thrust his head into the hole, so the light was masked, and turned the flashlight on his face.
“I’m Duppy, blanc. You the man Swan tell us about? The Sam Fletcher man?”
I nodded. “I’m Fletcher.”
I didn’t give myself away. I’ve had too much practice for that. But the moment I saw that broad, shining black face, that expanse of white gap-toothed smile, I knew who Duppy was. We had his picture in the AXE files. Every AXE man spends a lot of time going through those files and memorizing and I do my homework as well as any.
The picture showed him as a younger man, and with hair—his head was shaven now—but it was the same man.
His real name was Diaz Ortega and he was a Cuban. He had once held a high rank in Cuban Intelligence, when he and Che Guevara had been buddy-buddy. Now Che was dead and Ortega would have been dead too if he hadn’t run for it in time. Castro had found out that Ortega was really KGB, working for the Kremlin, keeping an eye on the Cubans.
The black man extended a massive hand down to me. “Come on, blanc. Fletcher. We got no time to lose, man.”
I ignored the hand and said that I had things to do first. I had to make Sea Witch fast, string fenders so she wouldn’t rub a hole in her planking, and get our gear ashore. I would be along presently.
We were whispering in the dark. “I got men to do all that, Fletcher. We got no time for it.”
“I’ll take time,” I said. “And I’ll do it. I don’t want anybody coming aboard. Swan doesn’t either. She must have told you that?”
“Where Swan?”
“Right here, Duppy! How are you, you big monster?”
Lyda squeezed past me, reaching for my hand and pressing it as she did so. Her lips brushed my ear as she breathed: “Let me handle him.”
I gave her an assist up through the trapdoor in the dock. They whispered and I heard the sound of a kiss. Duppy growled deep in his throat, like an animal, and I caught some of it.
“This Fletcher man . . . boss already . . . who he think . . . I . . .”
Discord already. Not a happy omen. I shook it away and made Sea Witch fast. I hung out the fenders. Then I remembered and cursed myself and went back to rig the lines again because I hadn’t allowed for the fall of the tide. We had come in at high tide, purposely, and I damned near goofed it I told myself to get with it, Carter, and take things as they came. One at a time. Don’t rush matters. Sooner or later I would find out what Diaz Ortega, a Kremlin man, was doing in Haiti trying to promote the Black Swan’s invasion.
Until then I had to keep my mouth shut and play my cards close to my vest and stay alive. I had to get Romera Valdez out or kill him. I had to check on the missiles and atomic warheads Papa Doc was supposed to have. I had to watch Lyda Bonaventure and see that she didn’t stage an invasion. I had to—oh, the hell with it, I thought as I collected all the gear and lugged it up to the fly bridge. One of Hawk’s coarse jokes, when he is overwhelmed with work, is that he is “as busy as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking!”
One thing I decided as I crawled up through the trap door. When, and if, I got back I was sure as hell going to ask for a raise. I don’t mind work, and I don’t mind danger, but of late it had been getting a little much.
I pulled the gear up through the trapdoor and flung it on the deck. I made out the moving shadows of men around me and there was a lot of whispering. No sign of Lyda and Duppy.
One of the shadows spoke to me. “Swan and Duppy go to shore, blanc. Say you come now.”
It had begun to rain, the wind blowing a fine mist into my face. The shadows around me were silent and I heard drums working far inland. One of the shadows was fitting the trap door into place. Two other figures, dimly seen, picked up the packs and musette bags and walked off down the old dock. I for owed them.
Beside me a voice said, “Watch for holes, blanc. Dock very old and rotten. This for sure a break leg place.”
I was lugging Lyda’s machine gun as well as my own. I slogged along, silent, dogged by the shadow. I tried to repress thoughts about Diaz Ortega. In time. First things first.
The man beside me said, low voiced, “Swan say no invasion this time, blanc. How is this come? We ready for invade for long time now, hang Papa Doc to tall tree. How come this, blanc?”
I said that I didn’t know either. I worked for Swan and I took orders the same as anyone else. Ask Swan, not me.
I heard him spit. Then he made a sucking, sighing sound and said, “I think we wait too long. Something big going on now for sure, blanc. Lots of troops and Tonton Macoute around now. They shoot a lot of people, hang some, and burn many huts and villages. I hear tell all people got to get off land for many miles. You know why that, blanc?”
I said I didn’t know. I didn’t either, but I could make an educated guess. If Papa Doc was clearing the land for miles around then he had a good use for that land. He wanted it for something. Something urgent.
Like a missile range?
Chapter 8
The thin drizzle petered out with the dawn and the sun came up huge and red over the Bishop’s Cap, a blunt peak scarred by the ruins of The Citadel. I was p
ropped on my elbows in dense scrub, studying the scene with powerful binoculars. I didn’t waste much time on the Citadel, that massive eyrie built by King H&nri Christophe, the black Napoleon, against the real Napoleon who never came. That was old history. Right now we were sitting in a hotbox where new history was being made.
We were halfway up a mountain on a scrubby ledge. At the foot of the slope, up which we had come so recently with frantic, panting haste, a narrow stone and dirt road skirted the base of the mountains. We had barely made our cover before daylight, and then only because Duppy had set a blistering and merciless pace.
“We get caught in the open,” he said, “we dead men. That bastard P.P. got his own helicopter patrol.”
Now, in conaealment, I watched one of the helicopters fluttering low over a patrol jeep on the narrow road. Talking by radio. The ‘copter was German, one of the new 105s, with five seats and a cargo compartment. As I studied it I thought that maybe P.P. himself was in it. Hawk’s notes had indicated that Trevelyn was a man who trusted no one, and liked to oversee things himself.
There was plenty to oversee. A mile down the road a small village was burning. Except for a French-looking church built of stone, the shacks and huts were all of crude timber and palm thatch, natural tinder, and flames and smoke drifted upward in a thick column to be caught and — twisted westward by the wind.
Tonton Macoute, dressed in civilian clothes and all heavily armed, were escorting a straggling column of people away from the village. They looked like refugees in a war movie, except that they were all blacks and they were not laden with many possessions. The bogymen hadn’t given them much time to get moving.
I swept my glasses back to the village square and adjusted the focus. There was a well in the square and, near it, a single great tree. From one long thick limb of the tree dangled four bodies—three men and a woman. They hung inert, limp, heads twisted cruelly to one side. Objectors. They must have argued with the Tonton Macoute.
I caught the odor and feel of Lyda as she wriggled up beside me. She took the binoculars from me and adjusted them, then stared at the village for a long time. I watched her ripe mouth go taut and lines form on her smooth face as she scowled.