Jorge felt his knees buckle. “Liar!”
“No, my friend. There is a liar here, but it isn’t me. I killed them myself, and I can prove it.”
Jorge stood paralyzed, wanting to know, not wanting to hear.
“Don Gallardo loaned your father his boat for the weekend. I remember it clearly. It was a thirty-four-foot Owens cruiser with twin engines and a flying bridge. It was called the Estrella Azul, the Blue Star. They were planning a fishing cruise out into the Golfo de Tortugas. I went aboard and hid below in the bilges until it was under way and they were well out into the Gulf Stream.”
Jorge laughed weakly and shook his head. “You’ll have to do better than that. Everyone in Don Gallardo’s organization knew about the boat and where they were when it happened. That doesn’t prove anything-”
“Your mother was quite beautiful for an older woman. Before I cut their throats, I took her while your father watched. Don Gallardo wouldn’t like it if he knew that, by the way. He wanted her for himself, he told me so. She had deep scars across her back. She said it was from a fall from a horse when she was young. The horse threw her, and she fell across a barbed wire fence.” Lopez smiled. “She was willing to tell me anything to delay me, but it didn’t work.”
Bile washed up in Jorge’s throat, constricting it, gagging him. His mother had been known to be one of the great beauties in Cali, a city known for its beautiful women. She had been deeply ashamed of the scars, would never have worn clothing that would expose them. It was something no one outside the family could have known.
“Then I rigged the explosion to make it look like they had tried to start the engines without first running the exhaust blower to expel the fumes. A Zodiac picked me up just minutes before it went up. You should have been there. The explosion was quite spectacular.”
“You filthy scum! I’ll kill you!” Jorge grabbed Lopez by the throat. He felt his fingers sinking into the greasy flab around his neck.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Captain Delgado said, stepping in between them. “We need him. Unless, of course, you’d like to take his place.”
Jorge spit a stream of green bile in Lopez’s face before letting go. He turned and began to vomit as Lopez was led away.
Lopez laughed loudly in the distance. “Oh, my dear fellow, why blame me? I was merely following orders. The orders of your glorious godfather!”
The sound of Lopez’s laughter rang in Jorge’s ears. He stood bent over with his hands on his knees retching, numb with shock and disbelief. Captain Delgado nodded, and two men took Jorge gently by the arms.
“See that he gets to his room and stays there.”
The soldiers led him out the door and down the path to his room. As he walked out the door, Jorge dimly heard Captain Delgado say that he would let him know when Colonel Suarez had released him and the helicopters. The statement had as much significance now as saying he would call him for lunch. His life was over, finished. All that he had loved or cared about in his life was gone. The people, the ideals, the goals, the ambitions. Everything was gone.
The sun was up now but the beautiful morning had been transformed. The sun blazed angrily. The birds in the trees mocked him. Jorge walked along in numb silence, thinking about Don Gallardo, the man he had loved and respected so completely. How could he? How could he?
He entered the door of the bungalow. Nita was still lying in bed. She rose up and looked at him sleepily.
“Back so soon, lover?”
Jorge turned and locked the door. He took off his coat and stared at her without speaking.
“What’s the matter, lover? You look sick.”
“How much did they pay you, you filthy whore?” His voice sounded dead.
“What in the world is the matter with you? I haven’t done anything.”
“You’re all laughing at me, aren’t you?” Jorge reached down and lifted the drape out of the way and unplugged the telephone cord. He stood staring at the flight attendant, slowly wrapping the cord around his hand. When he reached the instrument, he unplugged the other end of the cord and walked slowly toward the bed.
Nita screamed and jumped out of the other side of the bed. She stood there nude, staring at Jorge with terrified eyes, then bolted for the door. She fumbled desperately with the chain as Jorge came up behind her and spun her around.
“I’ve been betrayed by everyone!” Jorge stood staring at her with zombie-like eyes, so numb with pain they couldn’t release tears.
“Please, don’t, lover. We were good together. We can be again. Let me show you.”
She dropped to her knees and unbuckled his pants. Sliding his shorts down, she released him and took him in her mouth. He moaned and let her take him, eager for anything that would dull the pain. Jorge slumped against the door with a dumb look on his face, breathing hard. He dropped the telephone cord and leaned against the door, grateful for even a momentary release from the mind-numbing pain.
“That’s more like it, lover. That’s more like it. You just aren’t feeling well, that’s all. Nita can make it all right.” Picking up each leg, she slid his trousers and shorts off, as though she were undressing a child. She came to her feet and led him over to the table. He followed docilely behind with eyes that were dead.
Lying back on the table, Nita opened herself and guided him in. He entered her slowly, then plunged in with deep strokes, savagely losing himself in her flesh. Her moist inner tissues were like a narcotic, deadening the pain. His hands went from her waist to her shoulders, pulling her toward him. He felt his release coming, put his fingers around her throat and began to squeeze. She let out a gasp and grabbed his forearms, tried to say something. His fingers sank deeply into the thin layer of flesh around her neck. Her eyes bulged, and he felt her tighten around him, deadening the pain. He continued to squeeze until he was drained, then slumped across her limp body and lay there, only vaguely aware that the wailing animal sound he heard in the distance was coming from him.
Daniel Blake half tumbled, half slid down the ladder leading into the engine room and stopped on the bottom rung, jolted by the scene before him. Emergency lanterns blazed around a crude patch of shoring, illuminating streams of white water that shot across the machinery space as if they were coming from a high-pressure fire hose. Overheated boilers hissed and crackled under the assault of thousands of gallons of seawater.
Robertson had stripped to the waist and was driving a wedge in at the base of a massive beam with a sledgehammer, while Tobin struggled to hold the makeshift shoring in place. The stream of water splayed out and appeared to slow, but kept on coming. The air was heavy with the foul smell of bilge water rising up through the deck grating, displaced by the flooding sea. To Blake, it was the smell of death.
Something Doc Jones had said surfaced in his mind. It had been a flip, bizarre statement, but he knew now what he had to do. He shouted to Frank Kozlewski and waved him over to the engine-room console.
The chief retrieved a sopping bandanna from his hip pocket and wiped his neck and face. “Ain’t this end a bitch. Losing her now after all we went through.”
“How long’s it been this way?”
“It happened on that last big roll, the one that almost sank us,” Kozlewski said. “You could hear the seams popping, opening up with a tearing sound.” The chief shuddered. “Never heard a sound like that before in my life. Hope I never do again.”
Blake glanced around at the chaotic scene and smiled at the optimism inherent in that statement. In a few hours, they wouldn’t be hearing anything but the sound of water in their ears. He nodded. “It’s a miracle she recovered from that one.”
“She righted herself, God bless her, but she’s going now.” Frank Kozlewski jerked his head toward the stream of water shooting across the engine room. “Knock a man down. There’s no way to stop that.”
“We’ve got to slow it down as much as we can,” Blake said.
“We need more shoring beams. We’ve used all we had. I need to send somebody out
to hunt for more, but I can’t spare anyone.”
Blake heard a loud crash behind him. He swiveled and saw a heavy shoring beam come crashing down the ladder into the engine room, then another and another. He and the chief stood back out of the way and counted a dozen beams tumbling down into the engine room, followed by a dozen mattresses.
When the dust settled, they ran over to the hatch and peered up the shaft that led to the upper deck. “Who in the name of God was that?” the chief said, openmouthed.
“Who do you think?” Blake said, peering up the shaft. “I guess he took my little ass-chewing to heart.”
“Unbelievable.”
“He doesn’t have a real big choice if he wants to keep the ship afloat.”
“How does he know we’re sinking?”
“Probably saw your boys scrambling around looking for packing crates and mattresses.”
“Jesus,” the chief said, looking around. “You think he’s watching us right now?”
“You can bet on it. If we don’t get this flooding under control, he’s as dead as we are.”
“Christ Almighty.”
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” Blake said. “He won’t bother us as long as he needs us.”
“That’s a great theory,” the chief said, glancing around.
“It’s more than a theory,” Blake said, remembering the steellike fingers that had pulled him back from the brink.
The chief gave him a puzzled look.
“Come on,” Blake said. “Let’s get this shoring in place.”
Blake and the chief each grabbed a four-by-four beam and carried it over to the break in the hull, jammed it into place and signaled for Robertson and Tobin to bring another round. When the last timber was in place, Blake stepped off to the side and surveyed the velocity of the seawater still shooting across the engine room.
“Still not good enough,” he said, wiping his face with a wet shirt-sleeve.
“That’s about the best we’re going to do, right there, sir,” the chief said, shaking water out of his eyes. “We’ve slowed it some, but the pumps can’t keep up with it. Eventually, she’ll go.”
“How much time do you think we’ve got?”
“Hard to say.” Kozlewski looked down through the deck plates at the water rising up in the bilges. “If that seam don’t open up any more than it is, and the pumps keep working, ten or twelve hours. If it opens up more, or if we lose a pump, it could go fast.”
“The sea’s calm,” Blake said. “Hopefully that break won’t get any worse.” He glanced at the boilers. “Can we still get up a head of steam?”
“We can, but what’s the point? We got nowhere to go.” The chief looked anxiously at Blake. “That Colombian frigate better get here real soon.”
“You can forget about that frigate.” Blake looked at his watch. “It’d be here by now if it was coming.”
“Then I reckon the only thing left to do is try to build some life rafts with whatever we can find and abandon ship, pull away and let her go, hope to hell somebody picks us up.”
Blake shook his head. “Come on, Chief. What would you build a raft out of? Packing crates? Coming down from the bridge, I spotted a half dozen dorsal fins circling the ship. Big ones. Big enough for me to see without looking. They can sense something’s wrong. But even without sharks, we wouldn’t last long, floating around on a makeshift raft in these waters. It’s storm season. Unless we were picked up right away, our chances of surviving would be slim. And there’s no guarantee we’d ever be picked up. We’re too far out of the shipping lanes.”
“I don’t see that we’ve got any other choice.”
“We might have one,” Blake said. Doc Jones’s comment about driving the freighter to New York and running it aground on the first pier they saw had gotten stuck in his mind. His first reaction when he saw the boilers still operating was to head the ship due east. His navigation skills were weak, but with enough time they could simply run at full speed until they hit the coast of South America and run her aground on the nearest sandbar before she went down. With a target that big, even he could hit it. But in the ten or twelve hours the chief had estimated they had left, there was no way to steam 250 miles toward the coast. But they could steam fifty miles in the opposite direction if he could figure out how to get there.
“Chief, there’s an island.”
Kozlewski looked at Blake askance. “An island?”
“It’s just a speck on the charts. I didn’t even see a name. It may not even be a real island, maybe just an atoll, a coral island, but it’s land. Big enough to show up on a chart. If we could make it there, we could beach her, run her aground.”
“Where is it?”
“About fifty miles west from where we were before the storm hit. It may be a little farther now, but it can’t be more than sixty miles. If we can make 6 knots, we could be there in nine, ten hours.”
The chief scratched his head. “How old is the chart?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Coral islands come and go. Might not even be there now.”
“According to the log the ship normally sails in these waters. The charts can’t be that old. It’s got to be there.”
“But what if it ain’t?”
“It’s there,” Blake said. “I can feel it. That’s where all the birds came from.”
Something flashed across Kozlewski’s eyes, a fleeting look of insecurity. “The birds, sir?”
“The birds we saw in the eye of the storm. You weren’t up there, but the deck was covered with them. Land birds as well as seabirds. It’s got to be there.”
The chief looked relieved. “Hell, sir, even if it is, trying to find a speck that small will take some pretty fine navigation.”
“I know. It’s not exactly one of my strong points, but I think I can get us there.”
“How? I thought the navigation equipment was all trashed along with the radio.”
“Maybe I can find a sextant. There must be one up there somewhere. There’s an English-language copy of Dutton in the pilothouse. I think I can-”
Frank Kozlewski’s face fell. “A book? You’re going to learn how to navigate out of a book in the next couple of hours and navigate to a little pin speck in the middle of the ocean with a sextant, if you can find one? And hope to hell we get there before this sucker goes down around our ears?”
“I’m not exactly starting from scratch, Chief. I studied navigation at Kings Point. I just need some brushing up.”
“Have you ever done any navigating before, sir?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean I can’t.”
The chief frowned. “Jesus. Even experienced navigators don’t always hit their target. What kind of a chance would we have?”
“A better chance than we’d have abandoning ship and hoping we get picked up before the next storm hits.”
“How far are we from the coast of South America? If we sail due east, we’re bound to hit it.”
Blake shook his head. “I’ve already thought of that. It’s at least 250 miles, maybe more. We’d never make it in time. The island is only fifty or sixty miles west of here. It’ll be tight, but we can make it.”
The chief scratched his head. “If we go moving around, it’ll make it that much harder for the frigate to find us.”
“Forget the damn frigate. It would have been here by now if it was coming. This chance is the only one we’ve got.”
“Pretty goddamn slim chance,” the chief said, rubbing his chin. “Water gets too deep, these boilers might blow all to hell.”
“I know it’s risky,” Blake said. “But I’m fresh out of ideas unless you’ve got a better one.”
Kozlewski frowned and rubbed his eyes. “No, sir, I can’t say that I do.” He glanced around the engine room and looked at Blake. “I guess maybe you’re right. Sitting out there on a raft waiting for somebody to come don’t appeal to me much either.”
“We’ll run at full speed all th
e way, Chief. Give me everything you can, but don’t stay down here any longer than you think it’s safe. When the water gets too deep, put it on automatic pilot and clear everyone out of the engine room.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” the chief said.
Blake reached the ladder and turned for one last look before heading up. Frank Kozlewski was still standing at the engine room console, staring at him.
The chief pulled his face together in a rubbery attempt at a smile. “Good luck, sir.” He gave Blake the thumbs-up sign and nodded to the others fighting to keep the shoring in place. “We’re all counting on you.”
Blake scrambled back up the ladder, depressed with the near certainty that he had bitten off more than he could chew.
He consoled himself with the knowledge that at least he knew the general direction of the island. He would get under way immediately and head due west. After he had figured out where they were and the probable location of the island, he could correct the course as appropriate. As he crossed the main deck, he glanced out at the gray dorsal fins, smooth and glossy, cruising silently around the ship. There were more of them now. He shuddered at the thought of being out there in a raft.
He walked into the pilothouse and saw a walnut case sitting on the table. He shook his head in wonder. One sextant coming up. He glanced out on the bridge wing. Dana Kelly was looking at something with binoculars. Maria was standing beside her, pointing. The silent one had been here and gone, and they didn’t even know it. Aptly named son of a bitch. He felt a tingling sensation in the pit of his stomach, knowing what they’d be facing after they got the ship beached and were no longer needed. He wondered how he’d feel, trying to kill someone who had saved his life.
Point of Honor Page 31