“If they get you off my hands, yes.” He moved to the ladder but stayed where he could watch the radar. “If those are Agency people, they have several choices. They can come in now, or they can hold off and take a chance you really are sick and may die. If I’m a liar, they’ve done right to lie off; if I’m telling the truth, they’re SOL. If they’re from your side, they’ve got only one choice, and that’s to get here just as fast as they can, because somebody else is bound to pick up that call.”
Repin crossed his hands over his chest. “If it is CIA, I go to prison, da?”
“They’ll probably trade you for some college professor got arrested for drunk driving in Tashkent. What are they going to get you on? You’re in international waters; you haven’t even got a gun. They’d put you up at one of their cushy places in suburban Virginia, then they’d send you home.”
Repin raised his head. “I do not want to be taken by your CIA!”
“Neither do I. They’re as big assholes as your KGB.” He watched the green dot on the screen, brighter now in the gathering darkness. “We’ll find out which they are real soon. They’re coming.”
He jumped down to the deck and bent over Repin, reaching forward to pull up the knit shirt as if he were skinning the old torso; Repin flinched and put his hands up. “I want you to look as if I’ve been going over you. Lie still and close your eyes.” The eyes closed, then opened. Tarp looked into them, seeing only hardness now. “Can you hurt a man from that position?” he said.
“I can kill a man from this position.”
“That won’t be necessary. Or even advisable. Just wait for me to make the move.”
Chapter 4
Tarp bent over the fish box and took out the little .22, which he laid next to the engine hatch with an oily rag over it. When he straightened, the other boat was coming toward them fast.
“Play dead, Repin.”
He knelt over the Russian, who had made himself go limp and who was breathing in shallow gasps that sounded convincingly stricken. Repin had watched many men die, Tarp recalled; too, he had had major surgery the year before. He had probably rehearsed it all in his mind many times, like saying that if he had Telyegin’s cancer he would kill himself. More theatricals.
Tarp thumped him on the chest. He pressed down with both hands. He thumped again. He looked up. The other boat was slowing twenty yards away. Between them the oil slick spread like a gleaming skin on the smooth water, rippled with crimson from the sunset.
“You got an emergency?” a blond young man called from the waist. He looked like a college boy on a summer job. He was big, Tarp noticed, with a neck like the base of a mast. If he’s Agency, they hired him for that California look. Too much television.
“I got an old man down on his back!”
There was a second man at the wheel. He was shorter and older and had wary eyes. He also had a rifle that he held cradled under his right arm while he steered with his left.
“I’ve been working on him but I haven’t done much good!” Tarp shouted. “He’s breathing. I don’t know. Either of you know any medicine?”
The man at the wheel touched a control and the engine gurgled and his boat swung stern-in toward Scipio. He reversed and began to back slowly toward her through the oil. “Whyn’t you take him into Key West?” he said.
“Engine trouble!”
“What a coincidence.” He throttled it way down and the engine noise dropped to a rough purr. “You must be on a roll.” He looked the Scipio over. It was a bigger and faster boat than his own, and its electronic gear was remarkable for a sportfisherman. “We can give you a tow,” he said grudgingly.
“This old man can die!” Tarp bellowed.
The young blond looked at the older man. There was disagreement there. He knew the dilemma they were in: they had been sent out because of a rumor, and now they were confronted with a complication. A wrong judgment would mean newspaper stories, then internal investigations. It was the sort of dilemma that led to short careers.
“Take him on your boat and you take him to Key West,” Tarp said. “You can’t tow my boat at any speed at all. Take him in and I’ll stay with the boat.”
Their craft came very close and then bumped Scipio’s hull.
“I’ll have a look,” the blond one said. He stood on the gunwale, and Tarp saw that he was wearing a diver’s knife and a .38 on a separate belt at his waist. Feeling young and immortal. A sure way to get killed.
He jumped to the Scipio’s gunwale and then to her deck.
Repin’s shallow breathing was inaudible over the other boat’s engine. His tongue stuck out a little between his flabby lips, and somehow he had managed to look pale. The young man bent over him. “Jeez, he’s in lousy physical shape,” he said. “God, it’s a lesson in how you don’t want to let yourself go, am I right?”
“That’s right.” Tarp looked covertly at the other man. He was holding the rifle loosely in both hands now. “Hey,” Tarp said to the young one, “let me get rid of some of this grease and I’ll help you with the old guy.”
He knelt beside the rag. He picked it up with his right hand, picked up the gun with the left, still concealed by the oily cloth, and fired. There was a cry of rage and pain from the man in the boat and then there was a flurry of action on Scipio’s deck where Repin was lying. Tarp never took his eyes from the man with the rifle, however, moving quickly to his right and raising the .22 to fire again. He had hit what he had aimed at — the man’s left knee — and the shot had made the man spin to the left and go down, but he was a tough man and he had caught himself, and he was trying to force himself erect again so he could bring the rifle to bear.
“Don’t!” Tarp shouted. “I’ll kill you with the next one.” He stood at Scipio’s rail with the Woodsman pointed at the dark man, who slowly put the rifle down and then sank to a sitting position with his left leg stuck out in front of him.
“Mr. Rubin?” Tarp said.
“Well?” Repin’s voice was deep and mocking.
“You okay?”
“What you think, I am beginner like this boy?”
“Get the rifle.”
The dark man was stoic. Blood soaked his pant leg, but he made no sound. He looked at Tarp and then Repin with open hatred, but he wasted none of his energy in words.
Tarp looked down to Scipio’s deck and saw the blond boy lying on his back. He looked peaceful.
“Get yourself over here,” Tarp said to the older one.
“You’re a real sweetheart.”
“It’s a twenty-two, not a cannon. Come on.”
“It’s big enough.”
He dragged himself to his feet and came down his own boat, supporting himself on the rail. Tarp put a line on the other boat and tied the two together, then he hauled them in tight, stern to port side, as the man put his bleeding leg over and then swung his good leg after and carefully slid to a sitting position on Scipio’s deck.
“They sent me a kid for a partner,” he said glumly.
“He learned a lot.”
The dark man squinted at Repin. “KGB?”
“No, he’s a Polish aristocrat. Don’t ask questions.”
The dark man looked at him with an expression that showed both pain and disgust. “They told me you were a tough nut. I told that kid we should shoot you first and then find out who the old man is. I told him we could always make an accident out of it later, but he said I was cynical.” He laughed. Tarp laughed a little. “Now I’m not just cynical, I’m bleeding. Christ, that hurts!”
“I’ve got morphine.” Tarp reached down into the cabin without taking his eyes from the man and felt in the first-aid box. He tossed him the morphine kit. “Strictly do-it-yourself. You got another gun?”
“On my ankle.”
“Don’t get cute with it.”
Repin had taken the pistol and the knife from the blond one; he put the gun in his own belt and threw the knife overboard, and then, when the older man had finished squeezing the
morphine syringe, he felt over him, staying out of Tarp’s line of fire. He stood up and backed away a step with a little revolver from the ankle holster and the two wallets from the two men. He tossed the wallets to Tarp. There was Agency identification in each one.
“That’s pretty risky,” Tarp said. “Tough if the Cubans caught you.”
“The Cubans wouldn’t catch me.” The man smiled foggily. The morphine was starting to work. “I was going to throw them the kid as a diversion.”
Tarp went aboard the other boat and killed her engine, then looked her over. She had been leased in Key West and was simply a decent sportfisherman with adequate radar and some fancy listening gear that the two men had put aboard. Next to the radar was a black box the size of a toaster, and Tarp knew it was the device that identified them with a friendly signal on properly equipped radars. It was on now, a red light gleaming like a bean-sized eye against the blue-black sky. All the friendlies would know that the boat was sitting here with Scipio.
Tarp went back to his own boat and removed the engine starter and threw it overboard. He took the shotgun and the rifle, then slid open the bulkhead compartment at the rear of the lockers and took out the AR-15 and the clips that were hidden there. He put the weapons on the other boat, then went back into Scipio’s cabin and removed his computer-signal scrambler and dropped it overboard; then he went down again and rummaged under his bunk and found a waterproof packet that looked like an electronic tool kit but wasn’t.
Inside the pockets of the packet was money in three currencies and a set of identification — passport, driver’s license, credit card, as well as three “details”: a reader’s card for the Bibliothèque National in Paris; a member’s card for the Paris Jockey Club; and a journalist’s pass issued by Agence-Presse Europa, all in the name of Jean-Louis Selous. The Selous identity was a deeply established one that was expensive for him to keep up; it was supported by a listing in the Paris telephone directory and two professional organizations, and by five articles that had appeared over the Selous byline in European magazines, paid for by Tarp and written by some rather high-priced talent. Tarp folded the packet and put it in a rear pocket and buttoned it down, then he looked over the cabin and decided there was nothing more that had to be taken, and he went up to the deck.
“I need your boat,” he said to the blond one, who was sitting up, massaging his neck and shaking his head as if he had learned how to do it from an old movie. “The Coast Guard will pick you up soon.”
The blond one looked helpless. He looked all of nine years old.
“Berth the boat at number thirty-seven at the Boca Chica marina. I’ll hold you personally responsible.”
The young man tried to speak, but whatever Repin had done to him had turned his voice into a gull’s squawk.
“And take care of your partner. There’s a medical kit just inside the hatch, to the right. There’s a book in it if they didn’t teach you what to do. The refrigerator’s full. Help yourself to the booze — after you take care of your partner. I’ll check it when I get back and submit a bill to the Agency.”
The young man tried to squawk again.
“Your partner’s a good man. Learn from him. Don’t be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed next time.” Tarp stepped across the dark man, who was unconscious. “He’s a got a twenty-two slug just above the knee; the kneecap’s okay, but you ought to clean the wound and make sure he doesn’t bleed too much. It’s all in the book.” Tarp swung a leg over and sat with a foot in each boat. “Never trust older men. And never trust an old man at all, even when he looks dead.”
He went aboard the other boat and Repin followed and cast off; Tarp hit the starter and nosed the boat out into the Stream.
Thirty seconds later they were racing for Cuba. On the friendly radars, their signal would show as a strange but not yet dangerous movement. By the time people understood what had happened, it would be too late.
Chapter 5
He had taken the boat in by dead reckoning without radar or sonar and with the radio giving a three-second signal every seven minutes on the frequency Repin had specified. They were off the Cuban coast above Viñales, sitting dead in the water now, with Latin music coming and going on the land breeze like a sound from another decade.
“It seems to be okay,” Tarp said once. Everything was very quiet, except for the music. There should have been a patrol boat and a radar sweep, at least.
“Is all fixed. Is very efficient.”
The ocean seemed endless with no lights. It was as if they were sitting in the sky, space above and below and all around. The air was salty and damp and warm; everything was strange and therefore menacing — the leap of a fish in the void, the random slap of a tiny wave on the hull. Because he had nothing better to do, Tarp slid the .22 into a plastic bag and taped it to the underside of the open hatch cover, then he went around the boat checking weapons: shotgun on the bridge, AR-15 in the scuppers, the Weatherby and the Agency man’s rifle in the cabin.
“When the Cubans come, you talk to them. I’m staying out of sight.”
“Da, is embarrassment for them to see you. To them, you are American paid to bring me back, nothing more.”
“Your Spanish okay?”
“Good enough.”
But not very good, Tarp thought. Repin was like the English in the old days; in Asia, he had spoken the local languages in a guttural pidgin that the locals mocked. His Spanish was probably like that, too, serviceable but not tactful.
The radio crackled and a voice broke in clearly in Spanish. The volume had been set too high and they both jumped and then laughed.
“Large Bear, this is Rum Bottle,” the radio said. “Large Bear, this is Rum Bottle.”
“Talk to him,” Tarp said. “Just press the button on the mike.”
Repin put his mouth very close to the microphone. “Rum Bottle, is the Large Bear over this way.” His Spanish was terrible.
“Identify, Large Bear.”
Repin plodded through a string of numbers.
“Breaking radio contact and approaching,” the radio said. “End communication.”
Tarp waited until he heard the Spanish boat’s engines, then he picked up the AR-15 and boosted himself up to the flying bridge with it in his hand. He squatted there, feeling suddenly how flimsy the spray rail was and how easily he and this rented boat could be blown away. They would never get a better chance.
I’ve gotten very pessimistic about this operation already, he thought. It’s tainted, for sure.
“Large Bear, show your lights.”
He reached up and flipped on the running lights. The engine noise was very loud now, a menacing growl, as if the other boat were stalking around them in the night. Then, almost with his lights, a bright beam shot across the water ahead of the boat and swept quickly over them.
They’re good, he thought, and he ducked as the light came over the flying bridge. Repin was standing on the deck below him, and Tarp saw him in the white glare, legs spread, arms folded, seeming to dare the lights’ brilliance. You’ll never get a better shot, Tarp thought, but no shot came.
The patrol boat swung in close. The searchlight went off and a battery of small lights on her starboard rail shone down into the sportfisherman, which was lower in the water, with the flying bridge two feet below the other’s deck. Tarp saw two sailors at the rail, and then they scuttled away and a man in an officer’s cap leaned over toward his own deck.
“Large Bear?”he said.
“How?” Repin said in his clumsy Spanish.
“Come aboard, please, Citizen.”
There was a ladder down the patrol boat’s side with a platform at the bottom and a light shining on it. Repin stepped over to the platform, grabbed the metal rail of the ladder, and pulled himself across.
“The captain of this American boat?” the officer said.
“He is to be taking it home.”
“Where is he, Citizen?”
“Of what is that the importan
ce?” Repin was at the top of the ladder now. He and the officer were almost nose to nose, their heads silhouetted against the glow of the ship’s lights. “Make you for Havana immediate!”
“Where is the American?”
“This is not of relevance! The arrangement is for me to be gone to Havana.”
“Precisely, respected Citizen. I have orders to deal with this boat, however.”
“This boat was not in the arrangement.”
“Precisely, Citizen.”
He called an order. His voice sound strange and faraway, like one of the sounds from the dark water. Repin wanted to protest, but the officer was drawing him away from the rail.
There was a thump, and Tarp’s boat rocked.
Boarding me, Tarp thought. Some arrangement.
A hand light flashed a beam in his stern and then a second joined it and came swinging forward. Tarp waited for one of them to come up the ladder, but one of the lights disappeared into the hatch and he knew that the man holding it had gone into the cabin under him.
There was a narrow space between the spray rail of the flying bridge and the handrail just above it. He could look up through this gap at the patrol boat. Now, squinting up, he saw a black mass between him and the lights on the boat; it seemed to grow larger and to float above him. His boat rocked hard to that side, and a big hand gripped the rail right above his head. Somebody had jumped from the patrol boat to the flying bridge.
A silhouetted head rose above the rail next to him.
Tarp struck upward with the butt of the shotgun, thrusting up and out, taking the boarder just below the chin. There was a strangled rattle and a gasp, and then the man was pitching backward, the hand sliding off the rail and clawing at the throat as he went back and down into the space between the patrol boat and the sportfisherman. Tarp was on his feet as the man hit the water, and he fired once down into the waist of his own boat where the hand light was, then pumped the gun and twisted, firing again at the lights above him, three quick shots as fast as he could work the mechanism, the twelve-gauge booming into the dead-still night. The lights shattered. Tarp was moving then, twisting, crouching behind the spray bulkhead, and there was a clatter of automatic fire under him as the man down in the cabin fired up through the ceiling at him, firing wildly, firing in confusion, nervous, firing out of bravado and fear and instinct, firing a little off because he knew where the patrol boat was and he knew where his own people were supposed to be; and Tarp felt pain along his left calf (thinking, Serves me right for gunning down the Agency man) and he dove for the blackness of his own deck, dove over and beyond the flashlight that had fallen to the deck there and was stabbing its light toward the open hatch like an arrow.
Under the Freeze Page 4