Operation Breakthrough
Page 17
“Who’s that?” Erikson wanted to know, staring at Hermione.
“They brought her along to identify me,” I said. “Which she’s especially able to do. I’ll go talk to her.”
I had taken a step forward when a palm was placed against my chest. My forward progress stopped. “I will go talk to her,” Chen Yi said and walked around the rear of the truck.
“Stop her,” Erikson said.
“Wait,” I answered.
The two women met at approximately the halfway point. “What is it you wish to say?” Chen Yi asked. We could hear her clearly.
“Is — is that you, Chen Yi?” Hermione’s voice was a mixture of fear and bravado. “You can’t get away, you know. They — they want the one I saw and the blond man from the jail. They’ll — they’ll let the rest of you go.”
“Like they let Candy go?” Chen Yi asked evenly. Her right arm rose in a sweeping arc. We could hear the thud as her bladed palm sliced into Hermione’s neck. The slighter girl staggered sideways with a choked scream and toppled from the pier. She hit the water with her neck all askew and sank like a stone.
For a count of three there wasn’t a breath of sound.
Then on shore a pistol cracked twice.
Chen Yi went off the pier into the water near the spot where Hermione had disappeared.
ELEVEN
I THOUGHT Chen Yi had been hit, but in a second I saw the Chinese girl swimming powerfully in our direction.
“That will bring the police!” I rapped at Erikson. “Those goons can’t sit there and wait for orders now. You and Hazel board the tug and get it started!”
“But I’m not sure — ”
“They’re pouring out of the sedan, Karl!” McLaren called. He was crouching behind the hood of the panel truck, peering toward the shore end of the dock. He raised his revolver and sighted.
“We’ll all be back on Cartwright Street lined up in adjoining cells,” I needled a strangely irresolute Erikson. McLaren’s gun cracked sharply as I knelt on the dock and leaned over its edge. “Swim to the tug!” I called down to Chen Yi. “To the tug!” I straightened up as she waved a hand in acknowledgment from her position almost directly beneath me. Then she disappeared among the pilings. “Get on the tug and get a line over the side and help her aboard!” I told Hazel.
“They’re fanning out!” McLaren announced. He fired a shot, waited, then fired another. I could see dark figures silhouetted against the refracted light from the shore buildings, running bent over at the end of the pier.
Erikson could see them, too, and that seemed to make up his mind. “Come on,” he said to Hazel. “And let’s hope we remember something about marine diesels.”
I ran to join McLaren, who was hunched down beside the truck’s hood. “They won’t be advancing too fast now,” he said. “Moving out on this pier is like crossing a thousand yards of desert with no cover. D’you have ammunition?” He held out a box to me.
“I do, but I’ll take yours, too.” He slapped the small, solid box into my palm. “They’ll be coming up the oil company wharf in a minute, too, as soon as they think of it,” I continued. “I’ll cover that from the other end of the truck.”
“I say!” a high pitched, indignant voice demanded. “What’s all the shoot — ” There was a thumping sound and the voice died out in a gurgle.
“Karl just took care of the watchman on the tug,” McLaren said. He aimed carefully toward the inner end of the pier and fired again. “I doubt if I’ve hit anyone, but I’m keeping them on their bellies most of the time,” he said, reloading.
I dropped the box of ammunition into a pocket of the windbreaker and moved quickly to the rear of the panel truck. I could hear scrambling, splashing sounds from the next wharf as Hazel helped Chen Yi hoist herself aboard the tug. “You could have been killed!” I heard Hazel’s voice.
“I owed Hermione much more than that,” Chen Yi responded calmly. “What can I do here?”
“Check out the mooring lines to be sure they can be cast off in a hurry. On the barge, too, if we can’t throw off the towline. I’ll see if Karl needs a hand in the wheelhouse.”
I was watching the shore end of the oil company wharf. “There’s not so many here in front of me now!” McLaren declared at the same time I saw moving figures on the next pier.
I fired twice, deliberately high, in case the watchman had been able to sound a shore alarm and the advancing figures were oil company personnel coming to investigate. Two winking flashes of light and the thud of a bullet crashing into the truck body close to me settled that point in a hurry.
A muffled roaring sound startled me, it was so close, and then I realized that Erikson had started the tug’s diesels. The sound sputtered and died momentarily, then resumed powerfully and steady. Shouts arose from the shore as the opposition began to sense our intention. McLaren and I both fired shoreward twice more to discourage impetuosity, then reloaded hurriedly.
“Karl says get aboard!” Hazel’s voice drifted to us in a brief moment of inactivity. She sounded close enough to touch with her clear voice carrying in the night.
“You first,” McLaren said. “Then give me the word.”
I left the shelter of the truck, leaped the intervening space to the next wharf, and ran to the stern of the tug. The bow in front of the wheelhouse was a jumble of hoisting machinery and bales of rag waste. Chen Yi was standing on the low fantail of the tug, considerably below wharf level, holding up to me a limp body. “Your partner said we should leave the watchman on the pier,” she informed me.
I wrenched my shoulder all over again lifting the dead weight from her upraised hands and depositing the unconscious figure on the planking. I could hear McLaren firing steadily. I jumped down onto the fantail, then ran forward to the upper level of the wheel house so I would have an unobstructed line of fire along both wharves. “Now, Jock!” I shouted.
I heard the quick pad-pad of his approach, but I couldn’t see him, and I realized how much poorer vision was looking in any direction except directly shoreward.
“Welcome aboard, Horseman,” Hazel’s voice said from behind me. “Sorry I forgot my bos’n's pipe.”
There was a grinding noise at the tug’s stern. “What the hell’s that?” I demanded, startled.
“Karl told me to have Chen Yi cast off on the barge, and it’s drifted into us,” Hazel explained. “It’s a steel towline with some kind of complicated locking device we couldn’t free.”
“You mean we’ve got to drag that lumbering — ”
McLaren materialized beside me. Chen Yi was right behind him, wringing sea water from her sodden, long, black hair. “Get under cover,” I said to her. “Let’s get up on the roof of the wheelhouse so we’ll have a better firing angle,” I continued to McLaren. We climbed up on the roof, using rag waste bales and hoisting machinery tubing as stepping stones.
“Hold your fire until we need it,” Jock said. “No point in giving our position away until it’s necessary.”
Hazel had disappeared into the wheelhouse, and the roof beneath us shuddered as the diesel’s propellers bit deeply into the water. A patch of open water appeared between the tug’s gunwale and the wharf. “I don’t like it,” I said to McLaren. “That crowd should have made a better move than that to stop us.”
“You think they have reinforcements on the way?”
“By water, if they have any brains. I’ll be surprised if we don’t end up running a sea-going gauntlet.”
Hazel burst from the wheelhouse and sprinted to the stern. Her red hair had escaped the confining scarf and was flying loosely in the night breeze, which had turned much more humid. She stood in the stern, waving her arms in circles. It was a moment before I caught on to what she was doing.
“She’s semaphoring Karl on slack or no slack in the towline, so he doesn’t pull the stern out of this baby,” McLaren said.
“Yeah, but she’s exposed. Someone’s — ”
A gun cracked on the pier.
The steel hawser connecting tug and barge shrieked mournfully from the strain against the towing bit. The tug’s throbbing increased as Erikson stepped up the rpm. Hazel darted from the stern and returned to the wheelhouse. “Karl says keep an eye out to sea,” she called up to us.
“Evidently the boss shares your premonition,” McLaren said.
I could feel our speed increasing, although speed was a comparative word with the waddling barge behind us. The wharf slipped away completely and became part of the surrounding blackness. I could make out no further activity on the oil company dock or on pier nine. “They can’t have quit that easily,” I grumbled.
“Maybe they’re waiting for a boat to pick them up,” McLaren suggested.
“With us limited to about five knots dragging the barge, don’t even think it.”
The tug’s running lights came on. I stared at the green starboard and red port lights, plus the masthead light, then climbed from the roof down to the wheelhouse deck level, stumbling in the poor light over various items untidily strewn in the passageway. Hazel manned the wheel while Erikson hunched over the chart table. “What’s the matter?” I demanded of Erikson. “Piracy is okay, but your brass-bound Navy soul won’t permit it to be lights-out piracy?”
He straightened up and glared at me. “We’ve already set US-Bahamian relations back fifty years. All we need is to cream one of the hundreds of small craft in these waters, and the two governments — ”
“Cruiser astern!” McLaren sang out from the wheelhouse roof. “Gaining rapidly!”
“How d’you suppose the two governments would recommend handling this happy occasion?” I asked Erikson. I left the wheelhouse to rejoin McLaren on the roof.
He pointed to a spot beyond the dark hulk of the barge wallowing along in the wake of the tug. “Looks to be about a twenty-footer, and she’s flying.”
I grunted acknowledgment when I was able to make out the bone-in-the-teeth white bow wave of the oncoming craft. “If this is what I think it is, I have a hunch we’re going to be deficient in armament in this shoot-out.”
McLaren didn’t say anything. I watched the cruiser rapidly narrow the gap between us. I leaned over the wheelhouse roof while lining up on the cruiser with my .38.
McLaren was doing the same. “You don’t suppose it could be the water arm of the Bahamian police force?” he asked.
“The police would have lights, sirens, and a bull horn going,” I answered. I could make out a figure standing with braced legs on the cruiser’s bow. He had a dark object in his hands, and I knew it wasn’t a violin. “Watch it, Jock!”
The cruiser came flying along the starboard side of the barge. The dark figure on the bow raised the instrument cradled in his arms. Winking red-and-yellow flashes erupted from the muzzle of the machine gun while crashing, tinkling-glass sounds blended with the thudding of bullets into the tug’s bow superstructure and the wheelhouse beneath us.
The tug veered sharply as though Hazel had instinctively released the wheel for an instant. It straightened at once, but the steel towing hawser slackened and dipped beneath the surface as the barge lumbered ahead on its slightly different course. “The only thing saving us is the high bow and all of the crud on deck,” McLaren said. He was watching the cruiser circle in front of us, obviously preparing for a run down the port side. “The machine gunner has a bad angle shooting upward.”
I moved onto the port side of the wheelhouse roof. The cruiser roared toward us, seemingly twice as fast since it was going in the opposite direction. The machine gunner withheld his fire as the cruiser turned on a seeming dime near the tug’s stern and raced between tug and barge above the slackened towing hawser.
I tried to line up on the machine gunner. The vibration of the tug, the plunging of the cruiser, and the distance made it a logarithmic computation to test the seat-of-the-pants adaptability of any wing shot. The winking red-and-yellow flashes burst from the machine gun again as I snapped off four shots as fast as I could pull the trigger.
The flashes stopped. The machine gunner spun, turned sideways, then fell backward, but he held onto his weapon. I watched in disgust while the cruiser veered sharply away out of range, and someone crawled out on the bow and retrieved the machine gun. “If that damn thing had only fallen overboard, we’d have had a chance,” I told McLaren.
“That was a hell of a shot,” he said. “I doubt you get another chance as good. They must have seen where the shots came from. And they can rake us from end to end, firing up over that low stern.” He raised his voice. “Karl, if they cross under the stern again — ”
“I know,” Karl Erikson’s voice said from below us. He was outside the wheelhouse, and I could see that he carried something in his hand. “Let’s see if we can’t fix their little red wagon,” he added. “Hazel, watch the flashlight in my hand.” He walked to the stern of the tug and settled himself down low against the gunwale.
“Let’s hope no bright lad aboard the cruiser gets the notion to pump a few tracer bullets into the barge,” I said.
“Into the barge?” McLaren repeated. “What — ”
“That thing is loaded with oil and lubricants, remember?”
“But it’s a long towline,” he said after digesting my meaning. He was staring at the steel towing hawser, which was still beneath the surface of the water.
“Long towline, hell. If that baby ignites, we’ll be roasted like ants in a picnic campfire by the heat alone. Let’s just hope they still want us alive.”
The pursuing cruiser was momentarily out of sight behind the barge. Then I saw it flying along on our starboard side again, repeating its first run. Erikson stood up in the stern and waved his flashlight in huge circles for an instant, then dropped down behind the gunwale again. An added surge of power from the tug’s engines was evidently Hazel’s response to Erikson’s signal.
It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me the stars were getting paler. I couldn’t see any light in the sky, but there was a feel of dawn in the breeze that seemed warmer all the time. Growing patches of mist swirled around the surface of the water.
I was trying to line up on the machine gunner again when the cruiser turned hard aport to run under our stern for the second time. I never got the shot off. I got a glimpse of the dripping towing hawser rising silently from beneath the surface as the tug’s added power put additional distance between it and the barge. The cruiser’s bow smashed into the hawser, and the cruiser slammed to a halt with a shivering groan of wood and metal.
The stern rose straight up into the air in slow motion as shouts and screams carried across the water and the machine gunner was catapulted off the bow along with his weapon. The cruiser was already on its way over in what would have been a complete flip when the blunt bow of the barge crashed into it. For what seemed like minutes afterward there was the grinding sound of macerated wood and metal beneath the barge’s keel.
McLaren and I dropped down from the wheelhouse roof and ran to join Erikson at the stern. “Keep a lookout,” he said. “I’ll get back to the wheelhouse, and we’ll circle around and make sure there are no survivors.”
It took us ten minutes to complete the lumbering circle and pass alongside the crumpled remains of the cruiser, which looked like wet cardboard.
There were no survivors.
TWELVE
I DON’T know how long it took us to reach Eleuthera.
Erikson and Hazel spelled each other at the wheel while the rest of us slumped on rag waste bales in attempted relaxation. Both Erikson and Hazel steered us into every patch of mist and every fog bank en route. At every movement inside t
he wheelhouse broken glass crunched underfoot.
Reaction had set in, and no one had much to say. Erikson spent his time during the intervals Hazel was at the wheel on the tug’s radio trying to raise the Miami marine operator. It took him quite a while, but he finally succeeded. When I heard him ask for a Washington phone number, I dragged myself from my waste bale and entered the wheelhouse.
“Are you going to be able to put a lid on this?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said confidently.
I pointed at Chen Yi dozing with her back propped against a bale. There were tired lines on her beautiful face. “She and her boy friend can’t go back.”
“Why not?” Erikson wanted to know. “We just made sure there were no survivors to report their involvement.”
“We left two back at the massage parlor,” I explained. “One with a crushed throat, but there’s nothing the matter with the other one’s voice. Even in custody he’ll get to talk to the syndicate’s lawyer.”
Erikson nodded. “I’ll take care of it. Since you obviously couldn’t have managed without them, Uncle Sam will see to it that they don’t suffer from the dislocation.”
“Can you talk openly to Washington like this?”
“It won’t be openly. When I get through to them, I’ll have the duty officer set up a one-way scrambler circuit which will make us half-safe. And if anyone understands what I’m saying from this end, he’ll qualify for solving code ciphers.”
I went back outside.
Almost another hour went by before Erikson called to me. “What was the order number on the crate containing the material that you shipped?” he asked when I went into the wheelhouse again.
I knew it by heart, but I took the slip of paper from my wallet and showed him where I’d written it down. “GSA1234510,” I said.
He transmitted it as letters of the alphabet and not consecutive letters. “Size and descriptive identification?” he asked.
I gave it to him as closely as I could remember. I held up a hand when he seemed to be nearing the end of his conversation. “Chen Yi’s boy friend, Candy Kane, is still in a hospital in Nassau,” I said.