‘I think we get the picture, boss,’ Finn said soberly.
‘Good. I don’t want to find out that pieces of you two are on sale in half a dozen Florida hospitals.’
While waiting for the word from Poole on their request for reinforcements, Marker and Cafell found themselves with plenty of spare time on their hands.
This proved a mixed blessing as far as Marker was concerned. Usually there were few things he enjoyed more than simply messing around on or beside the sea, but on this occasion he found that the lack of a controlling purpose left his mind open for the demons to roam. He had hardly thought about Penny over the past couple of days, but now he seemed trapped once more by memories of his life with her.
One part of him wished he had left the Marine Corps, as she had wanted. They would probably have had a child by now, maybe even two. He would have been helping to bring new life into the world, rather than taking life away. He had no name for the man he had killed, and the only face he had seen had already been half obliterated by the bullet from the Browning.
Penny’s face also seemed harder to visualize with each passing day, and once, when he tried to conjure it up, he found himself staring into the dead eyes of Tamara Arcilla. Maybe time would untangle these knots of grief, but Marker was no longer so sure. One thing he did know was that any future relationship would have to live and breathe in the shadow of both these women. The past, which had always seemed like a springboard to the future, now felt more like a set of emotional chains.
Rob Cafell had never killed anybody, but he too found himself dwelling on the man whose corpse was now rotting on the bed of Lostman’s River. The trip back across Hell’s Lake in the submarine had been like one of those black farces on TV, where a body keeps turning up despite the best efforts of all involved. Cafell had laughed at such programmes in the past, but he doubted if he would laugh at one again. And he wondered whether the authors of such pieces had ever seen death up close. For the first time he began to understand his father’s lifelong reluctance to talk in any detail about his experiences in the war.
Russell was just finishing putting all the medicines back on the pharmacy shelves when Emelisse came into the room. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said.
It was a copy of the New York Times.
‘Where did that come from?’ he asked.
‘Oh, Calderón has the Tuesday edition sent up from Port au Prince every week. He likes to read the “Science Times” section. Keep up with developments.’
‘I expect Dr Frankenstein was a regular subscriber,’ said Russell.
She sighed and tapped the front page. ‘Haitian Junta Faces Ultimatum’ the headline read.
Russell skimmed through the report, which suggested, without offering any evidence in support, that American military intervention in Haiti was a couple of weeks away at most, and perhaps only a matter of days.
‘Maybe it is not worth trying to escape,’ she said softly. ‘If the Americans bring back Aristide then Joutard’s days are numbered.’
He put a hand on each of her shoulders. ‘Emelisse,’ he said, ‘if law and order comes to Haiti it will come first to Port au Prince. And what do you think people like Joutard will do – wait for it to reach out for them?’ He answered his own question. ‘Of course not. They will cover their tracks, bury the evidence. And we are part of that evidence. All those young men and women with scars on their bodies are part of it.’
She took it in, and her eyes closed as in pain.
‘Come with me,’ he urged her.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘It frightens me,’ she said, though as far as he could tell there was not a trace of fear in her eyes. ‘But you are probably right.’
‘You’ll come?’
‘Oh no, you don’t understand. If you are right, then this is one more reason why I must stay.’
The burst transmission from Poole announcing the dispatch of reinforcements arrived at 09.00 hours on Monday morning. Both the decision and the selection were welcomed by the two recipients. Ian Dubery was as good a boat handler as anyone in the SBS, and Stuart Finn was known to be as effective in a crunch as he was insubordinate.
Marker had ‘talked’ to Franklin via the PRC 319 on their return from Hell’s Lake, and now he composed another message, typed it out on the keypad, and sent it. In a way he felt sorry he couldn’t offer the ex-SAS man a more active role, for Franklin had felt like an integral part of the team ever since their arrival in the Turks and Caicos.
Marker and Cafell decided that only one of them was needed to collect the incoming tourists that afternoon, and the younger man drew the short straw. Marker was left to go over the tactical plan once more, take a swim, and watch cartoons on TV. He felt in control again, and told himself that there would be time enough to sort out the meaning of sex, the universe and everything when they had Arcilla behind bars.
Cafell, meanwhile, arrived at Miami International with plenty of time to spare, parked the car, and started circumnavigating the now familiar sights. He bought and started reading a new paperback account of the Battle of Midway, and missed the on-screen announcement of the plane’s arrival.
Hurrying down to the relevant gate, he caught sight of them through an open door, as they waited to be processed through Immigration. Dubery was the taller one, with dark, boyish good looks which reminded Cafell of the Match of the Day pundit who once played for Liverpool. Finn had lighter hair, swept back and heavily dosed with gel. He looked like one of the lads – Cafell’s father would have called him a ‘wide boy’. Standing in the Immigration queue, Finn seemed faintly amused by the whole business. Dubery, by contrast, looked slightly worried, as if conscious of how far he was from the presumed simplicities of life in the Outer Hebrides.
The two of them got through Immigration and Customs without any trouble, and Cafell hurried them down to the basement car park.
‘Nice motor,’ Finn commented.
‘Wait till you see the boat,’ Cafell told him.
They drove south out of Miami, setting sun to their right, rush-hour traffic all around them. Dubery gazed out of the window with interest, but Finn, happily spread across the two back seats, had apparently seen it all before.
‘How many square feet of skin do you reckon you have, boss?’
‘What?’ Cafell exclaimed.
Finn repeated the question.
‘He’s been driving me mad all day,’ Dubery lamented. ‘He bought one of those mini-encyclopaedias at Heathrow, and he’s been showing off ever since. When the hostess brought the meal on the plane he asked her when the microwave was invented.’
‘And when was it?’
‘Nineteen forty-seven,’ Finn said from the back. ‘And the average human has twenty square feet of skin.’
‘I’ll be able to sleep at night now,’ Cafell said. The light was rapidly fading now, the lights of the oncoming cars like a river stretching into the distance.
‘So what’s the score, boss?’ Dubery asked.
‘Marker will tell you the plan. You’ve got the camcorder?’
‘State of the art, according to the Illustrators,’ Finn said from the back. ‘The man said it would shoot in just about any light short of pitch-darkness. He said the Yanks use something like it for filming their drug busts.’
‘Sounds ideal.’
‘What are we going to be filming,’ Finn asked, ‘porno flicks with the boss and this Cuban guy’s sister?’
Cafell suppressed a smiled. ‘I wouldn’t suggest that to Captain Marker if I were you,’ he said. ‘In fact I wouldn’t mention the woman at all.’
‘Left a nasty taste in the mouth, did she?’ Finn asked mischievously.
‘Something like that.’
‘Why, was she really ugly or something?’
Cafell grunted. ‘She was a stunner.’
‘Then . . .’
‘Don’t ask me. And don’t ask him either if you don’t want your head bitten off.’
‘
OK, I get the message.’
They drove on, through Homestead and then on to the two-lane Keys section of Highway 1. As they went past Key Largo’s Holiday Inn Cafell asked the other two if they had heard of The African Queen. Finn had, Dubery hadn’t. Finn expressed his doubts as to whether they had flush toilets yet in the Outer Hebrides. These had been invented, he added gratuitously, in 1589, the year after the Spanish Armada.
For the next half hour Cafell treated the two corporals to a lecture on the defeat of the Armada, something he had studied and modelled in some depth.
‘And you thought I was a know-all,’ Finn said to Dubery as they arrived at Buena Vista.
Marker was waiting at the door to shake their hands. Supper was already heating in the microwave.
‘Invented in 1947,’ Cafell said, nodding at it.
‘When else?’ Marker agreed.
After eating, Finn and Dubery were shown over the Slipstream Queen, beers were retrieved from the fridge, and the four men sat in the boat’s lounge as Marker went over his intended plan of action.
‘My first idea was simply to take over the lodge and round up everyone as they arrived – the sub, the chopper, even the Indian in his canoe if he’s part of the set-up. But there’s one big problem with that. Either of you two see what it is?’ he asked the newcomers.
They both thought for a moment. ‘A lapful of kidneys,’ Finn said eventually.
‘Right. We can hardly expect the bad guys to go ahead and deliver them for us – they’d just make a run for it. And there’s no way we could deliver them ourselves. We could just ignore the damn things, but after people have donated them – whether by choice or not – it seems like a terrible fucking waste not to let them go where they’re needed.’
Marker looked from face to face. ‘So this is what we’re going to do instead . . .’
Russell strung the water bottle across his back and checked that he had everything else he needed. The food had been shared out between his pockets, the scalpel he had lifted from the surgery was stuffed in his right boot, inside a sheath made from paperback covers. The length of rope was wrapped around his neck.
It was one o’clock, the time he had decided offered an optimum balance of risks. Later would have been safer as regards escaping the compound, and earlier would have given him more time to get across the island.
Let’s go, he told himself, and picked up the grappling-hook he had fashioned from bedsprings. After opening the front door he waited half a minute, watching the compound for any sign of movement, and then walked briskly through the trees and darkened bungalows to the southern perimeter wall.
The grappling-hook caught on the strands of barbed wire at the first attempt, and he quickly pulled himself up the face with the help of the twisted sheet rope. Once at the top he gathered together the sheet to make a cushion, and used it to roll across the barbs. He landed as well as he could have hoped in the bare dirt on the other side.
It had been too easy, he thought. If getting out of the compound was that easy, then getting off the island was likely to be a real bugger.
He stood up gingerly and took his first look at the outside world. It was not the way he had imagined it.
Away to his right a few tumbledown homes were gathered around the gate, and beyond them a line of tall palms followed what was probably a stream bed around the far side of the compound. But that was the extent of the cover. The forested hills he had expected were covered with low scrub up to about five hundred feet, and bare above that. It looked more like Provo than the Haiti he had imagined.
And the gibbous moon riding in the eastern sky was bathing the slopes in pale grey light.
Reckoning that the stream bed probably offered the easiest and most inconspicuous route up into the hills, Russell carefully threaded his way through the shacks beneath the watch-tower, keeping one eye on the guard above. Fortunately the man only seemed interested in what was going on inside the walls of the compound.
The stream bed was full of dry pebbles. Russell followed it uphill, slowly until he was sure he was out of earshot, then as fast as the terrain would allow. The moonlight ensured that he had no trouble finding his way, and until the stream bed petered out in an ocean of scrub he made good progress.
The last uphill stretch was a different matter, and it was almost four o’clock when he reached the ridge top, and found himself looking out across several miles of ocean channel at the distant Haitian mainland. Away to the west, he thought he could make out a few pinpricks of light where the town of Port de Paix was supposed to be.
Below and to his left, some two miles distant, a village was stretched along the sides of a small bay.
The downhill leg proved no easier. The southern slopes of the range were not so bare, and this time he had no stream bed to follow through the scrub. More than an hour had passed when he finally emerged into the cultivated fields above the village, and crawled to the crest of the last small rise overlooking the bay.
There were several small boats moored at a ramshackle dock, and one large enough to serve as a public ferry. Russell was strongly tempted to walk straight down, steal a boat, and take his chances out on the water.
But it was gone five o’clock, and the chances of his reaching the far side of the strait before dawn were non-existent. He would have no time to pick and choose which boat to steal. And he would be a sitting duck if they caught him on the water.
On the other hand, he told himself, if he waited until the following night he could be sure of arriving on the mainland during the hours of darkness, and that would vastly increase his chances of finding some sort of sanctuary in Port de Paix before the local thugs found him.
He didn’t much like it, but the smart money was on digging in for the day. He walked back through the cultivated fields, and into the scrub, where he dug out his first hide since the one above Port Stanley twelve years before. This one was blessed with natural cover, and didn’t need to be constructed so professionally, but he was pleased with his work just the same.
Which was all to the good. Only a few minutes after incarcerating himself Russell heard the swelling drone of a helicopter. The search was underway.
13
On Russell’s watch the second hand momentarily merged with the hour and minute hands. With butterflies dancing in his stomach and adrenalin coursing through his veins he started down the slope to the shoreline.
He had left the safety of the hide soon after dark, and surreptitiously worked his way down through the fields to the hilltop observation point he had reached the previous night. From there he had watched the last ferry arrive, the children dragged home to bed, the cooking fires doused, the kerosene glows dimmed one by one. Now only the two armed thugs were left, sitting on the beach end of the dock, their feet hanging just above the sand.
The four-hour wait had given Russell ample opportunity to both study their habits and work out the safest line of approach. The two men were each on their fourth beer, and though neither was showing any obvious signs of drunkenness – Haitian beer, as Russell knew from experience, was not the most potent in the world – the gaps between their visits to the end of the dock were growing noticeably shorter.
Why they should choose to walk all of fifty feet to piss in the sea when there was a perfectly good beach right next to them, only they could know. In Russell’s experience such self-consciousness was refreshingly absent from most ‘undeveloped’ cultures. But maybe an inability to piss with someone watching was as crucial an indicator of development as cellular phones, microwaves and MTV. Not to mention transplant surgery.
Whatever the reason, he was grateful. It put a distance between the two men, and that would give him a chance.
He reached the shoreline about a hundred yards to the west of where they were sitting. They were talking with their backs to him, but every now and then one would turn his head, and Russell had no desire to play Creeping up on Grandma with two men toting Uzis. Instead he inched his way into the water
, wishing the slope of the beach was steeper, but grateful for the noisy swish of the waves. Once the water was deep enough he began to swim, heading in a wide circle for the end of the dock.
The water was warmer than he’d expected, and dirtier too. Reaching his destination, he hauled himself in between the line of pilings and started pulling himself hand over hand towards the land end, where the four dangling feet were silhouetted against the sand. On his way he examined the boats which were tied up on either side, and realized with dismay that the outboard motors had been removed from those boats that normally carried them. He was going to have to row across the strait.
He provisionally picked out a red boat with the name Dolores, and moved on, reaching the point where the waves clawed at the sand about five yards from the four hanging legs. He could hear the two men talking quite clearly now – in Creole, he thought.
Russell lowered himself slowly on to his stomach in the gently breaking waves and began dragging himself slowly up the beach. When he was level with the waving feet he pulled himself up into a crouching position and waited. His breathing sounded far too loud, his heart was hammering like a road drill, and at any moment he expected one of the men to jump down on to the sand and smile at him over the barrel of his Uzi. Or simply blow him away.
But the minutes went by, the men kept talking, and occasionally flexing their feet. Every minute or so Russell would hear the sound of beer glugging out of a bottle and down a throat.
Marine C SBS Page 20