Marine C SBS

by David Monnery

  Beside him, Marker was remembering a summer with his parents in one of the south coast resorts. Hastings, he thought it was. They had been playing in some murder mystery on the pier, and he had been given a small part himself, comprising a grand total of three lines. The third of these had been the last of the play: ‘Mummy, where are they taking Daddy?’

  He smiled to himself and wondered what they were doing now. Probably sitting at home in Highgate, watching themselves on TV, glasses of wine in hand, puffing away at their cigarettes. And here he was five thousand miles away, loitering among the mangrove roots. The whole family was half insane.

  The minutes dragged by, and the setting of the moon deprived the lake of its silver sheen. Every now and then they heard laughter or good-natured shouting coming from the lodge. A single bird began to sing, and then another, and almost at once, or so it seemed, the rest of bird-kind was joining in. The sky above the lake’s eastern shore began to lighten, bringing the small, dark shape of the submarine gradually into focus.

  The men in the house had seen it too. There was the sound of a door slamming, the clump of feet on wood, and then three of them came into view around the wall of the boat-house. The two Hispanics clambered down the steps where Marker had shot their late comrade, one of them carrying the kerosene lamp, the other some sort of customized cradle. The Indian sat down on the top step and lit a cigarette.

  Where’s the fourth man? Marker wondered. The distant sound of rotor blades turning supplied the answer. He turned and gave the thumbs up to Cafell, who immediately melted away into the vegetation.

  Finn looked enquiringly up at Marker, who shook his head. He wanted to be sure that the sound of the submarine’s passage would drown out the whirr of the camcorder, and it was still a hundred yards away.

  The two men on the walkway were talking to each other in Spanish, a language neither Marker nor Finn understood. Both were wearing open-necked shirts and slacks, and both were carrying handguns, one in a shoulder holster, the other in his belt. The Indian seemed unarmed.

  The noise of the submarine was now loud enough, and Marker gave Finn the signal. The phrase ‘you’re on candid camera’ floated out of some deep recess in his mind.

  By this time Cafell had retrieved the PRC 319 and was wading out into the sawgrass swamp. The message, giving the helicopter’s identification number, had already been keyed in. He sent it in a single burst. In the Poole operations room someone would be noting down the precise time the message was received, and using it as an approximate guide to the helicopter’s time of departure. This, along with the location of the lodge and the helicopter’s number, would then be phoned through to the waiting US Customs Service.

  Back at the lake shore the submarine was being guided into the boat-house. Once it was secure, one of the crewmen clambered out into the yellow glow of the kerosene lamp, and stood there straddling walkway and submarine. His partner began passing out the Belzer-Kountz machines, and he handed them across to the men on the walkway, who placed them side by side in the carrying cradle. There were four of them, and two other containers of a different kind. Once they were all loaded in, the two Hispanics took hold of the rope handles at either end of the cradle and carried it off in the direction of the helicopter. The second crewmen followed the first on to the walkway, and handed a small package across to the now hovering Indian, who stuffed it inside the top of his trousers.

  All three men headed up the steps, the Indian carrying the lamp. As they disappeared from view the distant whine of the rotor blades accelerated, and Marker thought he glimpsed a dark shape climbing up into the rapidly lightening sky. The plastic boxes would be delivered all right, and the waiting patients would get what they had paid for, but if the US Customs people were on the ball then there would be no escape for the people who had banked the cheques.

  ‘Time to go,’ Marker whispered.

  He and Finn extricated themselves from the roots and followed the twine back to its source, where Cafell was already waiting for them. They removed the MP5s from the bag, and replaced them with the radio and camcorder.

  Marker led the way to the edge of the trees, and stopped there for a full minute, watching for movement in the dawn twilight. Then all three men moved off at a loping run, Marker and Finn towards the back of the lodge, Cafell towards the front.

  Marker had assumed that the door at the back would be in use whenever the helipad was, and therefore unlikely to be locked. In fact it was wide open.

  He found himself in a narrow lobby, looking at the spare machines which Colhoun had picked out on the photographic blow-ups. Ahead of him a passageway extended for some ten yards before opening into the wide entrance lobby. In the distance he could see the front door, wide open.

  He could hear voices ahead, and decided they were probably coming from the room in which he had witnessed the card game, and which he presumed must open on to the entrance lobby from the right. With any luck all five men would be in the same room.

  He remembered his conversation with the captain of the Argyll about stun grenades, and allowed himself a bitter smile before advancing stealthily down the passageway to the threshold of the entrance lobby.

  The Indian walked into view, his face turned back towards the room he had just left, as if he was listening to a parting comment.

  At the same moment one of the two Hispanics walked out past him, took one stride across the lobby in ignorance, and then caught sight of the two SBS men. His eyes almost jumped out of their sockets, and his right hand flashed halfway towards his shoulder holster.

  ‘Freeze!’ Marker whispered fiercely, and the man’s hand seemed to shift into slow motion as his brain registered the twin barrels of the two MP5s.

  The Indian’s head had spun around at the sound of Marker’s voice, but either his brain was half asleep or he had somehow acquired - five hundred years of American history notwithstanding – a touching faith in the white man’s reluctance to shoot unarmed red men in cold blood. Either way he made a break for the door, arriving at it just in time to impale his stomach on Cafell’s MP5.

  ‘Qué pasa?’ the other Hispanic asked as he stepped out into the lobby like one more duck in a shooting gallery. He sounded more irritated than anxious.

  By this time Marker had taken several quick steps forward, and there was no chance for the man to miss the menace of the MP5. He raised his hands in the air, and spat a torrent of Spanish in the direction of his fellow-caretaker. Marker yanked the automatic from the man’s belt, and took a cautionary look around the corner of the door to the communal room. As he had hoped, the two submarine crewmen were simply standing there looking lost. This wasn’t an eventuality they had prepared for.

  The SBS men herded the Indian and the two caretakers back into the room to join them.

  ‘OK, boss?’ Cafell asked.

  Marker nodded. ‘And find some rope to tie this lot up with,’ he shouted after his second in command.

  Cafell disappeared through the front door. A few seconds later they heard the rushing sound of the flare being fired, and through the window Marker caught sight of the bright-green flash in the still lightening sky.

  ‘We are taking you with us,’ he told the five men. ‘Because we have questions to ask you. Refuse to answer them or make any kind of trouble and you will end up where your friend did, at the bottom of the lake. That’s right,’ he added, noticing the look of comprehension on a couple of the faces, ‘it wasn’t an accident. This is not our first visit.’

  They looked at each other, and then at the SBS men. The crewmen looked disgusted, the caretakers looked confused, the Indian looked depressed. No one said anything.

  After a few minutes Cafell returned, carrying a coil of rope and the package which had dropped out of the Indian’s belt. ‘Presents,’ he told Marker. ‘Our stuff’s on the jetty. Ian’s on the way. I’ll take one of the canoes and fetch the Kleppers.’

  He disappeared again, and Marker kept the MP5 pointing steadily in the prisoner
s’ direction as Finn went to work tying their wrists together behind their backs. Once all five were securely trussed, he left Finn keeping watch, took out his knife, and sliced open the end of the package. There were three small plastic bags inside, each containing white powder. He cut a slit in one of them, inserted a wet finger, and tasted the powder, just to be sure.

  ‘Icing sugar, boss?’ Finn asked.

  ‘The very best,’ Marker agreed. ‘And just when we thought Comrade Arcilla had abandoned drug running in favour of spare parts.’

  ‘Seems a bit weird,’ Finn said. ‘They could have brought in a hundred times as much.’

  ‘True,’ Marker agreed.

  ‘And why give it to Sitting Bull here? Why not the helicopter?’

  Marker looked at the Seminole. ‘Maybe in payment,’ he said, and a flicker in the man’s eyes told him he had probably hit the mark.

  It was almost full light outside now, and through the window the Slipstream Queen could be seen approaching the jetty. He looked at his watch. Less than half an hour had passed since Cafell’s transmission – they probably had as much time again before the American authorities could put in an appearance. They would probably be too busy tracking the helicopter’s deliveries, but Marker was keen to avoid a potentially embarrassing argument over whose prisoners these were.

  ‘Time to go, lads,’ he told the five men, and led the way out of the lodge and down to the jetty, with Finn bringing up the rear. Dubery was easing the Slipstream Queen alongside, and Cafell was waiting to lift aboard the two Kleppers. Once this had been done the two men hurried round to the boat-house, where they loosed the submarine from its moorings and eased it carefully out on to the lake, before taking to the water themselves, and manoeuvring it across to the waiting tow-rope.

  ‘All aboard,’ Marker told the captives.

  They filed on to the boat. One crewman and one caretaker were put in one of the two sleeping cabins beneath the stern deck, the remaining three men in the other. There were no locks on the doors, but there was only one narrow exit to the rest of the boat, and Finn was left to cover this with his MP5, just in case anyone had a brainstorm. So far Arcilla’s men had seemed too stunned to offer resistance or attempt an escape, and Marker wasn’t expecting any trouble in the near future. When the shock wore off they would still have nowhere to run.

  As Dubery eased the Slipstream Queen away from the dock and took her back across the lake towards the Lostman’s River egress, Marker and Cafell went through the questions they wanted answered. Once they had the list, one of the two crewman was brought forward to the lounge area. He was a dark-skinned Hispanic, probably in his late twenties. At first he refused to say anything, other than that he didn’t speak English – ‘No hablo inglés,’ he repeated sullenly.

  ‘OK then,’ Marker told Cafell in a resigned voice, ‘we’ll have to do it the hard way. Go and get his partner up here, and then we’ll throw this guy overboard. His partner will talk.’

  Cafell had taken two steps towards the stern when the man rediscovered his flair for languages.

  ‘My name is Miguel,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘What time are you expected back at the Tiburón Blanco?’ Marker asked. ‘We shall be asking your partner the same question,’ he added as an incentive to truth.

  ‘About four o’clock in the morning,’ the man said. ‘We leave from the lodge at nine.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Sí.’

  Marker went on to extract a detailed breakdown of the Tiburón Blanco’s crew, and a sketch map of the boat itself. According to Miguel the two submarine crews greatly enjoyed the treasure-hunting side of their job and hated the long underwater voyages to and from Hell’s Lake. Angel Socarras, the captain and head of the operation, was a complete bastard. Miguel had never heard of anyone called Fidel Arcilla.

  Nor had his partner, another Cuban-American, whose name turned out to be Jorge. He too thought Socarras was the man in charge.

  The two ‘caretakers’ had never heard of Arcilla either, but they took their orders from a man named Hector Chavez, who ran Anhinga Lodge for ‘some corporation in Miami’. Their only job was to look after the place and scare off unwelcome visitors, particularly between Thursday afternoon and Friday evening. They assumed the contraband organs were going to a hospital, but didn’t know which or where. Once they had asked the helicopter pilot, merely out of curiosity, and been told in no uncertain terms to mind their own business.

  The Seminole, who told them his name was Ricky Bowlegs, knew nothing of the wider picture. As Marker had suspected, the small shipment of cocaine was payment for services rendered – he and a few friends formed Anhinga Lodge’s outer defences, watching and listening out for any hint of danger, either from the law, the Everglades Park authorities or their own people. One Seminole man had needed a strong warning, their captive said phlegmatically. And one Park Ranger had seen more than he should, but he had proved more than willing to jump on the bandwagon.

  Marker showed him the photograph he had taken the week before.

  The Seminole sighed. ‘You boys are good,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a gift,’ Marker told him.

  14

  The joint operations undertaken by the US Customs Service and the Florida State Police on that summer Friday did not reach the ears or eyes of the press for several days. The hospital staff concerned were bound by confidentiality, the authorities by the hope that bigger fish would still fall into their net, and the donor recipients by sheer ignorance.

  But there was no way of keeping the whole business under wraps indefinitely, and soon after four o’clock that afternoon Hector Chavez, the Cuban-American lawyer who had been acting as coordinator between the Health Trust and Arcilla’s organization, received a phone call from a worried hospital executive. That afternoon the executive had arrived back from lunch to find the parking lot full of police cars. He had driven away again, and eventually gone home, only to find that there was a police car sitting outside his house. A phone call to a friend at the hospital had confirmed his fears that it all had something to do with the transplants, but he had been unable to get hold of any more specific information. What, he asked Chavez, should he do?

  ‘Pray,’ the lawyer told him, and hung up. Chavez then tried to reach his contacts at the other three hospitals in the Trust, but only one proved available, the consultant in St Petersburg, who denied that anything unusual had happened that day.

  ‘Did you have a delivery today?’ Chavez asked.

  ‘No, it was . . .’

  Chavez hung up on him too, and sat in his Miami office wondering whether he should call Arcilla.

  Not yet, he decided. First he needed details. Half an hour and a dozen phone calls later he had set enough investigatory wheels in motion to satisfy a Congressional Committee. Before another hour had passed a picture had begun to emerge, one that was far from comforting. It was possible that the police had been tipped off by someone in the know at the first delivery point, and then followed the delivery boy to the other two hospitals. Possible, but a little too fortuitous, Chavez thought. More likely, and much more seriously, the delivery had been followed all the way from Anhinga Lodge.

  He sat at his desk for a few minutes, building up the nerve to tell Arcilla, and finally picked up the phone. At almost the same moment a police detective pushed past his secretary, prised the receiver none too gently from his hand, and started to recite him his rights.

  Marker was woken by the hand shaking his shoulder. ‘Ten minutes, boss,’ Finn told him.

  ‘OK.’

  He sighed, shifted his legs off the bunk, and sat on the edge rubbing his eyes and yawning. His watch said it was two-twenty in the morning. Mind and body were telling him that four hours’ sleep in twenty-four hours was not enough.

  The eighteen or so hours which had passed since the SBS team’s hurried departure from Anhinga Lodge had been busy. They had conducted five interrogations, taken lessons in hand
ling the Russian submarine and been through several conversations with Poole. They had sailed the Slipstream Queen through the Keys and out across the Straits to its current position some twenty miles south-west of the Muertos Cays. They had rendezvoused with the Argyll, and persuaded her captain to offer their prisoners the hospitality of the frigate’s brig. He in turn had passed on some up-to-the-minute intelligence – American troops would be moving into Haiti within the next few days. Tuesday at dawn was the current best guess.

  Which didn’t bode well for Russell, Marker decided. Arcilla’s man in Haiti would presumably be shutting up shop.

  In fact the whole business was becoming a race against the clock. For all they knew the Tiburón Blanco had already received word that the operation was unravelling, and headed out into the wide blue yonder. Or was waiting, guns at the ready, for a visit from the SBS.

  There was no way of knowing. The US authorities had promised Colhoun they would do their best to keep the lid on for twenty-four hours, but Marker didn’t have the highest opinion of American security. It had also occurred to him, and perhaps the Americans too, that any communication between Arcilla and his captain at this juncture would make it harder for the former to claim ignorance of the Tiburón Blanco’s illicit activities. An American might reckon that was worth a couple of British casualties.

  They would soon know. Marker got to his feet and walked forward to the lounge area, where Finn was sitting in his wetsuit, encyclopaedia in hand.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Marker told him. ‘I can’t cope with any more interesting facts.’

  Finn grinned. ‘Time to go?’ he asked.

  The two of them helped each other on with their diving equipment, double-checked that everything was working, and went out on deck, where Cafell and Dubery were manoeuvring the Russian submarine alongside. They were dressed in the original crew’s clothes, which fitted pretty well.