The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  Lorelei III was still on autopilot and the smart girl, a shadowy figure except for her gleaming white shorts, had her face buried in the hood of the radar.

  She said, “Port quarter, distance three-eighths of a mile, closing fast.”

  At least I was salty enough to know that a cow may have four quarters, but a boat only has two, and they’re both aft. If it’s forward, it’s off the port or starboard bow.

  “Any idea what it is?” I asked.

  “‘Not really. Well, it’s boat-sized, not ship-sized.” She raised her head to look at me. Her face was pale in the darkness, but her voice was steady enough: “Orders, skipper?”

  I said, “Take the wheel and cut the autopilot. I’ll be on deck, aft. Slow her a bit to reduce the motion so I can shoot and maybe even hit something, twelve or thirteen hundred RPM should be about right. Try to give me a clear field of fire. Any shots forward are risky; we don’t want to blow away our own rigging. What I mean is, keep the stern pointed at them as well as you can. That’ll also prevent them from coming alongside. If you need more power, use it, but remember I’ll be trying to shoot, so the steadier you can hold her the better.”

  “Got it. Good luck, Matt.”

  I can never think of any last-minute words of encouragement for the troops; I just said, “Well, here I go.”

  I already had the rifle. I yanked the shotgun out of its bracket. Lorelei III stuck her nose into a wave and gave me a shower bath as I stepped up onto the side deck. Clinging to the teak railing with my right hand and trying to keep the guns more or less dry tucked under my left arm, I made my way aft and crouched at the end of the deckhouse to avoid displaying a recognizable human silhouette.

  Shotgun first, I thought. There would be a searchlight and I’d have to get it; and anybody who can hit an eight- or ten-inch target on one plunging boat from another plunging boat, with a single-bullet weapon, is out of my class; this was scattergun country.

  I’d mounted another set of gun brackets at the end of the deckhouse; I secured the rifle there. It was a Browning, actually a civilian kid brother of the famous old military workhorse, the Browning automatic rifle, known as BAR. Normally, I’m a bolt-action man where rifles are concerned; it’s the most reliable and most accurate type of long gun. However, in considering the conditions I might have to cope with on this operation, I’d decided that trying to manipulate a bolt rapidly while clinging to the gyrating deck of a thirty-eight-foot boat at sea would probably result in both me and the rifle going overboard; and under those shaky conditions just about any gun would have more accuracy than I could use, anyway.

  I’d picked the Browning because, unlike many of its type, it accepts some truly powerful cartridges. The one I’d chosen was the heaviest available for the gun, the .338 Winchester Magnum. With a 250-grain slug, it was guaranteed to shoot through a charging African buffalo lengthwise, so I’d figured it ought to be able to penetrate the exterior hull of a fiberglass boat of moderate size, and might even rearrange the interior slightly. The sight was our modification of one of the new commercial laser jobs, throwing a small, sharply defined, red spot out to well beyond fifty yards. We have one that’ll operate much farther, and I’ve used it, but it’s an experimental sniper apparatus, bulky and fragile and vulnerable to rain and spray. This production instrument was nice and compact, actually smaller than a normal telescopic sight; and it was supposed to be rugged and waterproof…

  The thing came out of the darkness at well over thirty knots. I caught the flash of its bow wave at about a hundred yards; then the dark shape was lunging at us. It was showing no running lights—but suddenly the blinding searchlight I’d been anticipating hit me like a blow in the face. Rising, I braced my hip against the deckhouse, swung the shotgun, and sent one load of buckshot into the glare, and another. The light flamed out. As the other boat rushed at us, aiming to pass us to port, I lowered my aim and used the rest of the magazine to rake the foredeck and windshield with the little round buckshot balls, fifteen balls to the load, each ball just about the size of the bullets Dan’l Boone probably used in his Kentucky squirrel rifle. A couple of insistent fireflies were winking in the cockpit of the oncoming boat; I felt a small shock through my feet as a bullet struck the hull somewhere near me, dispelling any uneasy doubts I might have had: I wasn’t pumping a lot of lead at an innocent vessel that had just happened to come by on a near-collision course.

  Okay, I thought, two with automatic weapons and one at the wheel. And I was not only supposed to keep them from killing us and sinking our boat, I was supposed to secure at least one live specimen and present it to Mrs. Bell for scientific analysis. Ha!

  Then one of the squirt guns stopped firing, and I caught a ghostly glimpse of a man in a white shirt rising in the cockpit over there and swinging his arm in an unmistakable way, but there wasn’t a damn thing to be done about it. They were passing us now, and we were already in a hard right turn as Lori kept the stern toward them. There was no way she could make the heavy motor sailer react fast enough for any other kind of avoiding action, so I didn’t bother to shout any useless orders; but I lived through several very long seconds until, suddenly, the water boiled up white off the port quarter. It was a considerable relief. I hadn’t been looking forward to trying to field the damn grenade falling out of the night sky and toss it back at the enemy, John Wayne fashion.

  They vanished into the darkness. I stepped forward and steadied myself in the deckhouse doorway, reloading the shotgun. If I went overboard, I thought, I’d go down like a rock, since my right pants pocket was full of rifle cartridges and the left one bulged with shotgun shells.

  “You okay?” I asked Lori.

  She looked at me for a moment rather blankly. It had been a rough initiation for a girl who’d presumably been brainwashed, as most of them are these days, to believe in a basically nonviolent world despite all the evidence pointing the other way.

  She licked her lips. “Hell, no, I’m not okay!” she said. “Those were bullets, I heard them! And what was that crazy explosion astern? And when do I get to change my pants?”

  “Good girl,” I said.

  She drew a long breath and the shock went out of her eyes. She spoke deliberately, straight-faced: “While you were making all that racket, why didn’t you get their radar, too? It was right up there beside the searchlight, on that arch over the cockpit.”

  I grinned. “Some people are never satisfied. I thought I was doing pretty well, just knocking out the light. How do you know I didn’t get the radar?”

  “It’s still transmitting; you can see the funny lines flashing across our screen.” She leaned over and put her face against the hood. “They’re out there about half a mile… They’re turning… Now they’re coming back.” She raised her head to look at me. “So what do we do for an encore, skipper?”

  I wanted to hug her. We meet too many of the helpless ones who just wring their hands and squeal like movie ingénues when things get rough. However, I didn’t know the kid well enough yet to maul her, even affectionately; besides, there wasn’t time for displays of sentiment.

  I said, “You’re doing fine. Just keep spinning that wheel and I’ll see what I can think up in the way of discouragement.”

  “Can I help with our searchlight, blind them or something?”

  I said, “No, a lot of light will just foul up the crazy laser sight I’ve got back there; that’s one reason I had to knock out their spot.” I paused, and we both heard the rumble of big engines approaching fast. I said, “Well, here we go again.”

  By the time I got back to my poop-deck post, the flashing bow wave was visible out in the misty night, and Lori was turning us hard away from it. I’d traded the Remington for the Browning and switched on the electronic sighting apparatus, aiming skyward to keep my little surprise a surprise as long as possible. Then I made out the dark shape of the hull; when it came within laser range I put the eerie little red dot on it. The temptation was to shoot at the starboard side of
the windshield and the helmsman’s head that was presumably behind it, but I wasn’t that sure of my marksmanship with the deck reeling and the gun barrel waving like an aspen limb in a mountain gale. I held the spot on the oncoming hull instead, to the best of my ability, figuring my angle the way you calculate how to reach the vital zone of an elk with a bullet when the animal won’t oblige you with a broadside shot. I waited until things steadied down a bit, and added pressure to the trigger gently. The .338 spewed a long tongue of flame and made a fearful crash in the night, for a moment blanking out all other sounds. The recoil almost knocked me off the deck. It was a hell of a weapon.

  The fast-approaching boat swerved violently away from us. I had it pretty well identified by now: one of the big souped-up sports boats that look like forty-foot torpedoes. Overkill. They hadn’t needed an ocean racer like that to catch an eight-knot motor sailer, but they purely love those rakish craft, all the nasty people. I’d had one used against me before when a plain old twenty-knot cabin cruiser would have done just as well. The front half of the sleek hull was for humans. The rear half was all machinery. As it turned, my white-shirted opponent rose and made another throw, but this time I knew he’d overestimated his pitching arm; and I concentrated on holding the laser dot on the flank of the vessel as it raced past, and pumping three massive .338 slugs where I thought the great mechanical heart ought to be—well, two great mechanical hearts, since it was a twin-engine job.

  Then a rat-a-tat gun was again winking at me from the cockpit. The exploding grenade sent up its boil of white water well astern; no danger there, but a bullet clanged off the aluminum mizzenmast above my head and whined off into the dark. One man shooting now, I told myself, one steering, and one dead or badly wounded if my first, carefully calculated, shot had plowed through enough of the boat straight enough to reach him. I’d better be careful; I had to save at least one alive to keep Mrs. Bell happy. As they showed me their stern I saw, with a sense of satisfaction, that the starboard mill had gone dead; only one propeller was churning the water into foam back there. They disappeared once more into the murky night.

  I switched magazines on the Browning self-loader— all right, call it a semiautomatic if you insist on employing that much-abused term. With those big, fat rounds, the gun only held four, counting one in the chamber. I jacked in a fresh cartridge, swung the magazine out again, stuffed a loose round from my pocket into the top, and replaced the magazine in the gun, giving me another four, ready to resume the weird sea battle. Lori was still keeping our stern toward where the enemy had last been seen. I remembered that Admiral Nelson had had a similar problem with his old square-riggers, except that his firepower had been concentrated in his broadside guns so he’d had to keep the enemy abeam as for as possible, instead of astern…

  “Matt.” It was Lori’s voice. “Matt, are you all right?”

  I nodded my head to clear it; my ears were still ringing from the rifle blasts and grenade explosions.

  “Coming,” I called. I made my way forward and stepped down into the deckhouse. I said, “Come left a hundred and eighty degrees. Idling speed.”

  She turned to stare at me. “Are you nuts?”

  “Don’t change the subject. We can discuss my sanity later.”

  “You’re going back after them?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what we’re here for. Can you spot them on the magic machine?”

  She sighed. “It’s not enough I’ve got a bitch for a stepmother; I’ve got to have a loony for a skipper, too!” She looked into the radar. “I’ve got them. They seem to be dead in the water.”

  “I put some heavy lead into the works. I think I knocked out one engine. They’re probably trying to make repairs.”

  She was back at the wheel, spinning it counterclockwise. The hydraulic steering took very little effort but required a lot of wheel rotation.

  She asked, “What the hell kind of a cannon was that you were blasting them with?”

  I showed it to her. “Just a li’l ol’ .338, ma’am.”

  “That’s an elephant gun, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it would do the job, but the Africa boys really like them even bigger.” I rubbed my shoulder. “For that amount of recoil, they can keep their damn elephants.”

  “Matt, look!”

  I said, “Hell!”

  Lori had made the U-turn I’d asked of her, and there was a flickering glow in the mist directly off the bowsprit; and I didn’t want that lousy overgrown speedboat to burn, dammit. Mrs. Bell, the lady I’d never met, wanted a warm body, not a fried one…

  “Get range and bearing if you can,” I said, taking the wheel as Lori bent over the radar. “That thing probably carries at least a couple of hundred gallons of high-test; it’ll go up like a—”

  The explosions lit up the night ahead, first a kind of preliminary flash and bang, then a giant burst of light illuminating the whole misty night, accompanied by a shocking wave of sound. I was aware of Lori licking her lips and swallowing hard. She looked back down into the radar.

  “You’re right on course,” she said. “Steady as you go. A quarter of a mile. Better slow her down.” Then she straightened up and drew a long breath. “It’s gone. Something was still there for a few seconds after the blast, but now I’m getting no returns at all.”

  I guess we both had similar mental images of the explosion-shattered hull lying awash briefly before taking the last long dive to the bottom of the Atlantic.

  “Take the wheel again, will you?” I said. “I’ll get out on the bowsprit with the boat hook and see what I can fish up.”

  Even at idling speed, the bowsprit was a lively place to be. I clung to the head stay with one hand and held the boat hook in the other, feeling a little like Gregory Peck about to sink his harpoon into the great white whale called Moby Dick. We started to pass scraps of stuff in the water. I signaled to Lori to cut the power and try the spotlight. The beam picked up more junk ahead as momentum took us forward with the motor out of gear. The sport boat’s interior had been dressed up with gorgeous yellow-gold upholstery, velvet or something similar, judging by a couple of floating settee cushions, scorched and soggy now.

  Then I saw the unmistakable orange of a life vest. I pointed, and Lori steered us that way, kicked us forward a bit to reach the floating man—who was wearing a white shirt under the gaudy flotation vest—and backed us to a standstill when I gave her the signal. From my uncertain bowsprit perch, I poked and stabbed with the long boat hook and finally managed to snag a life-belt strap, but when I lifted—actually, Lorelei III did the lifting, throwing her bow high as she rose to a wave—I saw that this one was not a keeper. His head rolled around with utter limpness; he’d apparently broken his neck when he was blown out of the cockpit. The bounce from the spotlight shining past me gave me enough illumination to see his face, and I knew him. At least I’d seen his picture recently, and read his dossier: Jerome Blum, DAMAG008, specialty explosives.

  “There’s another one over to port, hanging onto a cushion or something!” Lori had stepped out of the deckhouse to call to me. “What about this one?”

  “Dead,” I shouted. I freed the boat hook and let a wave sweep DAMAG008 away. Young Mr. Caselius’s weirdo organization was losing manpower fast; I hoped he’d find it annoying. “No sense bringing him aboard. Let’s go see his pal.”

  “Matt, be careful. Just because they’ve got all wet doesn’t mean they’ve turned into nice people.”

  But the man clinging to a soggy yellow-gold cockpit cushion was no immediate threat; he had only one working arm, and he was badly battered and burned.

  “Get down on the swim ladder, aft.” That was Lori, behind me. “I’ll back us up to where you can grab him.”

  “Watch that propeller, we don’t want to chop his legs off,” I said.

  She grinned at me, her teeth flashing whitely in her small tanned face. “You do the shooting, Buster. Let me do the sailing, huh?”

  A weak voice called plaintive
ly: “Hey, come back, don’t leave me here!”

  That was the man in the water; we were being blown away from him. Then Lori, back at the wheel, put the spotlight on him and started maneuvering to bring the boat around, following him with the light. It was wet work in those seas, and once I got the ladder on the stern flipped down and myself onto it I was being totally doused every few seconds as waves smashed against the flat surface of the transom; but suddenly he was there off the quarter only some fifteen yards away.

  Lori had moved to the outside helm and brought along the biggest flashlight on board since there was no topside control for the spot and it couldn’t be trained under the stern, anyway. She backed us skillfully up to the floating man. I spit out half a wave that had just drenched me, reached far out, grabbed the collar of his knit sport shirt, and tested it. It felt reasonably substantial.

  “Got him!” I shouted.

  The deck lights came on; then Lori was at the stern rail, looking down at us. She called: “He’s in no shape to climb that ladder, and I know we can’t lift him aboard. Hang on while I rig the sling so we can hoist him.” Her face vanished.

  “That Staff character, fucking gun-shy bastard calling himself a helmsman!” That was the man I was holding. I had to lean over to hear him over all the splashing. “Fucking Staff crapped his pants when the spot blew out, wouldn’t take us close enough… Fucking dashboard exploded in his face. Jeez, must have been some bullet, served the motherfucker right, scared to bring us in close so that big-shot bang-bang genius we’d hired could throw his fucking eggs right.”

  “Here it comes, Matt.” Lori was back at the stern rail with something yellow that looked a bit like a horse collar; a rescue device that had been on the boat when I bought it. “Loop it around him, and I’ll crank him up with the mizzen halyard winch. You just kind of guide him… Yell when you’re ready.”

  It took me a minute or two to get the sling into place. “Ready!”

  I’d never realized that lifesaving was such hard work; I could see what Lori had meant when she said we couldn’t have lifted him aboard by hand. Now she strained at the handle of the powerful winch and I tried to help from the ladder, keeping our awkward cargo from snagging as it rose from the water, and boosting it upward as well as I could. All the time I was uneasily aware that, as Lori had pointed out, this guy was not a friend of ours. He’d tried his best to kill us, he and his gun-shy boatman and his hired blow-em-up artist, and I hadn’t had a chance to search him, so there was a distinct possibility that he’d be equipped to try again once we got him aboard.