“Okay,” Miranda said quietly. She, too, was pale. “Let’s get back on course.”
Looking astern, she saw gallows birds already swinging over the sinking boats.
From his hammock on the lanai, Commodore Millikan watched Curt’s Thunder and two others depart for their Thai run. A few minutes later he saw Billy Torres approach the Sea Witch in a pump boat. The big dog on the cabin roof studied him silently. Pure menace. The commodore watched Billy anchor near the yawl, then shrug into scuba gear and slide over the side. Good. That morning Abdul had come with Billy to the commodore and reported the severed head. The commodore was furious—“You should have told me about it right away!” he raged. “What did you think you were up to?”
“Obeying orders,” Abdul said. His mouth wore a sullen twist, but then it always did. “You say many time, use chain of command, not bother you with stupid businesses.”
“Well, damn it,” the commodore spluttered. “Next time you find something like that, bring it to me or to Mr. Torres.”
“You mean like another American head, or what?” Billy asked. All innocence, of course.
“I mean something important!” the commodore shouted. He saw the houseboys watching him fearfully. One of them, though, was hiding a grin. That was Daoud, the one with the good English. “Get out of here!” he yelled at them. “Go help Rosalinda pluck those chickens.” They departed quickly for the butcher block, where the estimable Rosa was killing the evening meal.
“Mr. Torres,” the commodore said, “you will go with Abdul out to that yawl as soon as Mr. Hughes has departed on his run. The two of you will dive up that head and bring it to me. On the double.”
“So Abdul doesn’t go along with Curt this run?” Torres asked. “Who do you want to replace him? And won’t Curt get to wondering why no Abdul this time?”
The commodore hadn’t thought of that. Get hold of yourself, he thought. He tried to swallow his fury. No, he realized, his goddamn embarrassment.
“You’re right,” he said at last. Calmly. “Abdul goes with Curt. You dive it up alone, Billy. You’re scuba-qualified. Now . . . get to it.”
While Billy dived, the commodore dozed. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Not since the Phantom attack. There’d been fuck-ups before on the Thai end, always were in a business like this. But never before had such sophisticated aircraft been involved. Not that Phantoms were top-line planes anymore, compared with what the real navies and air forces flew. But for Southeast Asia? This was strange. And now a white man’s head. . . . He dozed off into uneasy dreams of carnival sideshows, leering Asian magicians, severed heads floating in dusky air and flickering like old black-and-white movies . . .
He woke to the sound of footsteps on the crushed-shell walkway that led up to the lanai. A timid tap on the screen door. Ah, Billy! But when he swung from the hammock, he saw two Filipinos, a man and a woman, standing at the door in their Sunday best. The man wore a pressed but shiny black suit, white shirt, and black tie; the woman, a lumpy gray dress and a silly straw hat with plastic fruit on it. They were gray-haired, solemn.
“What do you want?” the commodore snapped at them.
“We’re from the gospel, sir,” the man said. He gestured with a black-covered book. “Are you saved, sir?”
Goddamn it! Jehovah’s Witnesses! You couldn’t get away from them—not even out here, in this cannibal isle.
“Yes, I’m saved,” the commodore said. “Now go away and save someone else.”
“But what church are you, sir?” the old man persisted. The woman stared at him, smiling weakly but bravely.
“None of your goddamn business! Now clear out before I call the houseboys to drive you away with whips. As Christ scourged the money changers from the Temple.”
“You are disturbed, sir,” the old man said gravely. “If we could but speak with you awhile, perhaps—”
“No! Can’t you see, I’m busy? Now scram, both of you!”
“We will just leave you a copy of this Good Book, sir, and some brief, simply written pamphlets with consoling words from the Prophets. If you care to keep the book, a small donation—”
But the commodore was advancing on them now with blood in his eye. The old man laid the book on the stoop, then he and the woman fled. Her high heels spiked the lawn, and she almost fell, but the old man caught her arm, and they redoubled their speed.
Billy, holding a heavy canvas parcel at arm’s length, watched them pass.
“What was that about?” he asked the commodore a moment later.
“Religious freaks,” the commodore fumed. “Born-agains. Witnesses. I don’t know. But, Christ, they’re persistent. You got it?”
“Yes, but you’d better put on a gas mask.” Billy laid the parcel on the glass-topped table. Even tightly sealed it smelled disgusting.
The commodore took a deep breath and opened the canvas. Hold on to your lunch, he ordered his stomach. He put on his half-glasses and bent over the thing. Most of the face had been nibbled away by reef fish, but the side that had lain on the bottom still bore large patches of skin. He fetched the magnifying glass that came with his compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and peered closely.
“Beats me,” he said at last. “Round-eye sure enough, but he could be a Russian, a Brit, a Frenchman, even an American for all we know.”
“He is,” Torres said. “American, that is. He’s a fly-boy from MATS in Manila, name of Phillip Chalmers. I did some business with him through the shipping line a while back. He was angling to get in on the heroin traffic, or at least he seemed to be. He’s also the guy who recommended Curt to us.”
The commo mixed himself a stiff drink at the portable mahogany bar—Glenlivet on ice, no twist—and gestured to Billy to help himself. They went out onto the lawn. The lanai would probably stink for a week. He lighted one of the five Manila cigarillos he allowed himself each day and paced the close-grown, dewy grass in the fading dusk.
“CIA?” he asked Torres at last. “Maybe DEA? We’ve got plenty of enemies in Washington.”
“Could be,” Torres said.
“Take that thing down to the photo lab and get some close-ups. Good ones, in strong light. Bracket the bastard. Get me some decent snaps, and we’ll send them to ONI back home, maybe someone knows this guy. Then put the head in the freezer, double-wrapped. We may need it as evidence somewhere down the line.”
“What about Curt?”
“He’s no threat,” the commo said. “There’s no indication he’s anything but a fast-boat bum, a runner. We’ve checked out his background, and he’s okay. Small potatoes. This Chalmers probably fed him to us to improve his own image—if he was a spook, that is. He could just as well have been working for some other heroin conduit aiming to take us over. Keep a close eye on Curt, though. We can eliminate him whenever we feel it’s necessary.”
“Well, sir,” Billy said, “if it comes to that, and I hope it does, I’d like to volunteer for the assignment.”
It was dark by the time Venganza reached her destination—a long, low island enclosed by a coral reef on which the surf pounded in rhythmic, luminous explosions.
“What is this place?” Miranda asked Kasim.
“Isla Perniciosa,” he said. “How you say, Island of Harms’? ‘Of Dangers’? Not much here, just bad culebras, bad snakes, hey? And plenty mosquitoes.” He whined like a million of them, then laughed for joy. “You bring down sails now,” he said.
Kasim piloted the schooner through the reef and motored around to the northwest side of the island. The channel, in starlight, looked sharp-edged in places, as if it had been blasted by dynamite and shaped by capable engineers. A concrete and coral-block mole projected into the lagoon at the end of the zigzagging channel, and Kasim brought the schooner alongside it. Men waited in the dark for their mooring lines. The bollards on the mole looked sturdy, businesslike, not the usual makeshift mangrove stumps seen on other docks in this part of the world. They tied up behind what looked lik
e a floating crane, its arm bent dark against the darkness.
“These men take care of ship,” Kasim said, pointing to the hands at the mooring lines. “We go now, you meet Capitán Katana.”
“Who’d you say he was?” Culdee asked. “Cotinho’s naval adviser? I thought Cotinho was just a simple priest, a missionary kind of guy.”
“Sí,” Kasim said, smiling happily. “Misionario, Padre Cotinho ‘missionary’! Sure enough! Capitán Katana his good friend, his ayudante—‘adjutant,’ right? You meet now, we go.”
“Chinese, he said before,” Culdee whispered to Miranda. “Probably a Chi Com—Red China’s everywhere out here, one way or another. You know him, Freddie?”
“Nope,” Freddie said. He looked off into the night.
Kasim led them inland, along a narrow, winding path of crushed coral toward a low ridge that loomed dark against the stars. Sharp cactus thorns plucked at their clothes in the tighter corners. They were all wobbly-legged, still swaying from the sea. Land crabs scuttled noisily away. Once or twice swifter things slithered off into the cactus, thick and leathery. Snakes? Maybe just lizards. Kasim’s mosquitoes were hungry, all right. Under the brow of the ridge they came to a heavy steel door set in the coral slope. Kasim banged on it twice, paused, banged once, then three times more. A slot opened in the door, and an eye peered out. What’s this, Culdee thought, a pernicious Filipino speakeasy? The door opened.
At the end of a low corridor cut into the concrete they came to a second steel door, this one open and secured. Beyond it, a bunker. Sure, this must be the old Jap sub base the Pilot mentioned. The walls were hung with maps and charts—Culdee recognized a large map of Southeast Asia studded with red and blue marking pins, and a detailed chart of the Flyaways similarly marked. In the center of the room was a chart table, lighted by an old-fashioned gooseneck lamp. Moros stood around it, peering down at another chart. A taller man, Asian also, from the shape of his shaved, flat-backed head, stood with a pointer in his hand. He wore starched, military-looking khakis. The Moros looked up as they entered. The tall man turned, dropping his pointer. As it fell, he caught it on the toe of his shoe and flipped it, sending it spinning back up in the air. “Bloody hell!” he exclaimed, snatching the pointer. He faced them now.
“Ah,” he said, a warm smile on his face. “The Yank battlewagon has at last arrived. Welcome, shipmates!” He stepped toward them. “I’m Captain Katana. But you may call me Sôbô.”
Rosalinda came onto the lanai, her arms laden with dishes. She and the boys had cleaned the table thoroughly, and the stink of Lysol had replaced the other one. Dinner was already half an hour late, and she had yet to set the table. She looked around for the duty houseboy. The commodore stood at the far end of the lanai, sipping a cocktail.
“Where’s Daoud, sir?” she asked.
“I sent him out to the trash barrels,” the commodore replied. “Some religious types brought me a bundle of their trash this evening and left it on the stoop. I told Daoud to dump it. And not to stop and read it along the way. That kid’s always got his nose in a book, especially if it’s written in English.”
Not Daoud, she thought. Oh, Mother of God, not Daoud . . .
The explosion shivered the screens and set the lamps swaying. Rosalinda dropped the dishes with a crash that echoed the blast. Bits of shrubbery splattered against the porch as the flash faded to red and yellow flames.
By the time they reached it, the fire was already dying. Daoud lay on his back ten feet from the flames. His hands were gone. His face was black and red meat with a few white teeth stuck in it. His chest had burst open. He was dead.
Shredded paper drifted down from the dark, falling into the flickering light. For a moment the commodore thought it was snowing.
TWENTY-THREE
They stood at the chart table while Captain Sôbô Katana explained the operation. The Moros had gone, and only Kasim remained with them, nodding and smiling gloriously at every stab of the pointer.
“Millikan has two bases here,” Sôbô said. “This boat basin on San Lázaro itself, not far from his house, which also serves as a kind of headquarters. And a larger base on Balbal, right here.” He tapped the chart. “The boat basin doesn’t seem to be protected by an antisubmarine or -swimmer net, and apart from the Tausuq boat crews and Millikan’s mechanics it appears only lightly guarded. There are at least eight, maybe ten, fast boats there. Blue Thunders, American-built, capable of fifty or sixty knots flank speed and armed with M60 machine guns—7.62 millimeter weapons with a rate of fire of six hundred rounds per minute, slow by modern standards—and some sort of antiaircraft missile system, shoulder-held. There are machine shops, barracks, a small armory, and a fuel dump associated with the boat-basin facility.
“We don’t know much about the base at Balbal, though. It can be reached only through a narrow channel leading inland from the shore. Once a week a flying boat comes in from the east—looks like an ancient Mariner, no pun intended, a PBM of elderly aspect. Maybe Philippine Navy? No markings. The drugs Millikan’s fast boats bring in from points west, Thailand mainly, are transshipped on the Mariner, probably to Mindanao. Where they go from there, we don’t know. We do know, however, that the commodore has an old U.S. Navy river gunboat up at the far end of the Balbal channel. She’s not much to worry about, though. That class was built around 1927 in Shanghai for patrol work on the rivers of interior China. USS Panay was one of them. You must remember her, Bosun? Japanese naval aircraft sunk her in the Yangtze, upriver from Nanking, on 12 December 1937. A famous incident at the time, but Washington preferred to look the other way. For that the imperial navy was always grateful. We weren’t ready then. . . . But I digress. These river gunboats are 191 feet long, displace some 450 tons, and are armed with single-barreled three-inch guns fore and aft, complemented by ten .30-caliber machine guns at her waist and topside. They are shoal-draft vessels, potentially capable of eighteen knots. But we are told that Millikan’s gunboat, the Moro Armado, is a bit wheezy in her old age. As aren’t we all?” He smiled at Culdee and swung the pointer between them. “All she can do is an unreliable ten or twelve.”
“That’s still a lot more knots than our schooner can crank out,” Culdee said.
Sôbô raised his eyebrows and smiled again, cryptically.
“In any event,” he continued, “in order to retake Captain Miranda’s vessel, which is anchored here”—he tapped the chart just off Millikan’s house/headquarters on San Lázaro—“we must neutralize both bases. Though we have plenty of pump boats and adequate small arms, we are still outgunned, and we can certainly be outrun by Millikan’s Blue Thunders. To stand any chance of completing this mission, we must make maximum use of the element of surprise.”
“Like at Pearl Harbor,” Culdee said.
“Precisely. And Savo Island, among other places. Yes, surprise—and temerity. With those factors in our favor, we can succeed. And we will begin early tomorrow with my plan, which I shall reveal to you in full later—on a scouting expedition to San Lázaro. I should like Captain Miranda to accompany Kasim here and Mr. Pascal”—he swung the pointer toward Efreddio—“in a pump boat to reconnoiter the boat basin and get an accurate estimate of enemy forces present. Also to study the Sea Witch’s anchorage, from a safe distance, and to see how many persons are aboard her. When we execute the plan, which I have code-named Operation Seamark in honor of the vessel’s true name, the furor over our double attack on the two bases will cover the cutting out and withdrawal of that vessel, our primary target. Now I’m sure you’re all tired from your long and no doubt harrowing voyage. My, my, across the Pacific in just seven weeks! Under sail! I’ve had quarters prepared for you on this station. As you’ve probably guessed, this was an imperial navy submarine repair and replenishment base in the late war. Your quarters are officers’ quarters. I hope you will find them comfortable. Any questions?”
“Yes,” Miranda said. “Just why in the world are you and this Padre Cotinho and all these men�
�Kasim and his crew—going to all this trouble just to get a piddling little sailboat back for an American woman you don’t even know? What’s in it for you?”
“A battle,” Sôbô said, smiling. “A good, rousing sea fight for a just cause. It’s as simple as that, Captain.”
And I’m afraid it’s not, Miranda thought.
“Is all right,” Kasim said, patting Miranda’s shoulder. “Capitán Katana good man. He my friend, I your friend. We all fight together, kill unbelievers, all go to heaven in the end. You see.”
Padre Cotinho sat in a faded canvas lawn chair under a flowering hibiscus tree, looking down on the cathedral and, beyond it, on the whole blue and green sprawl of the Flyaways. He was drinking tuba asesina cut with papaya juice. He knew Padre Fagundes, watching him from the window of the nearby rectory, would be shaking his head sadly, as always. Rum from a priest’s sacred chalice! At seven in the morning! He and Diogo Fagundes had grown up together in the slums of Lisbon, had attended the Jesuit seminary in Spain together, had both been posted to the Philippines, where the Society of Jesus traditionally served in the vanguard of missions to the Moros. But while Cotinho had long ago grown disillusioned with the Church’s role in social reform, turning finally—reluctant at first, then with ever fiercer certainty of its justice—to violent revolution as the answer, Fagundes had remained complacent in the face of Macoy’s atrocities. A capon, Cotinho thought. But at least a loyal one. My capon. He sipped from the chalice.
Bees buzzed loud in the overhead blossoms, angrily almost, but not so furiously as Padre Cotinho. He had disapproved of the book bomb right from the start. Even if it had worked, it would have alerted Torres at least to the fact that something was going on. Now the bomb had merely killed Rosalinda Aguinaldo’s most trusted messenger. Millikan was not even wounded. He would certainly react. He would certainly redouble his watchfulness, alert his men, take radical measures to ascertain who was trying to kill him, and why. But the revolutionary powers in Mindanao had approved the bomb plot. In fact, it was their idea. Better to kill the American commander in one stroke, they caviled, than risk defeat with Katana’s plan. Nonsense. All they knew was bombs and knives in the night. They’d been reluctant to undertake the destruction of the Millikan operation right from the start. Cotinho had been watching it for more than a year now.
Blood Tide Page 17