The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  “Please,” she said.

  It came out awkwardly; it was a word she clearly hadn’t used for a long time, if ever. Having been brought up to consider “please” and “thanks” and “sorry” as just about the three most important words in the English language, I always wonder how some people get along without them.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She licked her pale lips. “If I wind up in a hospital, they’ll put me on sick leave, those bureaucratic apes in Washington; and by the time I’m pronounced well again, they’ll have me back sorting useless papers in some little office that doesn’t amount to anything.”

  I said, “It isn’t working, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The opposition isn’t reacting to our mad dash south,” I told her. “If they’d been watching at all, hoping to stop us, they’d have made their move when the headstay went adrift and we were helpless to maneuver. We’ve seen nothing, and there’s been nothing suspicious on our radar. We’re playing to an empty house, Mrs. Bell.” She didn’t speak. I said, “Well, it’s your concussion and your subdural hematoma, if any. But you’d better lie down and take it easy for a while; we’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

  She looked at me for a moment longer. “Thank you,” she said at last.

  If she didn’t watch out, she was going to turn practically human.

  21

  We reached the southern end of the Chesapeake around noon next day and sailed past another lighthouse—as Mrs. Bell had said, the damn bay was loaded with them. This one was at the mouth of the James River, into which we had to turn to find the big anchorage of Hampton Roads and the busy port of Norfolk.

  I’d unrolled the mainsail to keep us moving when the wind eased after midnight; now we glided across the flats inside Thimble Shoals Light and found the ship channel just south of it. The depth-sounder was acting up, showing confusing little red flashes all around the dial, but Mrs. Bell—briefly awakened—had told me that was perfectly normal, they all did it occasionally, disregard. However, after the behavior of the loran farther north, it did make me wonder a bit about all this electronic navigation. Maybe those old boys heaving their leads and piloting by their compasses hadn’t been so dumb after all.

  The morning had cleared, and the Chesapeake capes guarding the entrance to the bay, Henry and Charles, were visible on the horizon to port; the Atlantic Ocean lay beyond them. Ahead was the mainland of Virginia. To starboard was Old Point Comfort and Hampton Roads. There were several ships in sight, and I wasn’t about to dodge through that traffic under sail, so I turned Lorelei III into the wind and got everything neatly furled; then I started the motor and headed in.

  Perched comfortably on the helmsman’s stool at the lower steering station, I was feeling pretty good. Mrs. Bell had spelled me from one to three; and any sinister undercover character who can’t get by on two hours of sleep had better turn in his trench coat. And I had a pleasant sense of accomplishment: I had this nautical nonsense licked. Several times before I’d managed to fake my way through a seagoing operation; but this time I felt that I’d really mastered some of the fundamentals, at least enough that, mostly without help, I’d got the old bucket clear down the Bay in the dark, under sail, in moderately breezy conditions, without capsizing her or hitting anything solid…

  The squatty forty-footer with the silly pink stripe took care of my euphoria in a hurry. I’d seen it emerge from the land ahead and recognized the shape of it, similar to that of the sister ship we’d encountered farther north. I let myself hope naively that this one was going to pass us by and go on about its business, but when it was almost abeam it slowed, turned, and headed for us. When I got the heave-to command, I threw the engine into neutral, let Lorelei III coast a short distance, killed her way with reverse, and stepped up onto the side deck as the rubber boat approached.

  The previous boarding party had been commanded by an NCO of some kind—I’m not too strong on the navy and Coast Guard ranks and ratings—but the young fellow in charge here seemed to be an officer. A sailor up forward secured the painter to one of Lorelei III’s lifeline stanchions and then held onto it to keep the boat alongside. There was a small rat-a-tat gun with a straight twenty-round magazine slung over his shoulder, and another handy to the second sailor managing the outboard motor.

  I spoke to the officer: “One of your boats checked us out off Cape May. What kind of contraband do you figure we could have picked up on Delaware Bay or the Chesapeake?” He was a rather handsome boy, if you like boys. He had nice brown eyes in a nicely tanned face and nice brown hair, cut quite short, of course, according to the custom of his service. He also had a nice automatic pistol of some kind in a nice snap-top canvas holster from which he could probably have pried it by next Wednesday, by which time I could have filled him so full of holes with my .38 that, as the old country saying had it, you’d have thought his papa was a sieve and his mama a colander…

  It’s a natural phenomenon, I suppose. Maybe fighting pit bulls hate killer Dobermans. The FBI is reputed to hate the CIA and vice versa; and I’ve heard that any tough street cop hates both indiscriminately. Certainly we who work in the shadows detest the whole arrogant pack of law-enforcement clowns with their snappy uniforms and shiny badges, or three-piece suits and fancy IDs. As I’ve said before, the enemy fuzz is bad enough; God save us from the supposed friendlies.

  The young officer asked suspiciously, “If you came down the Chesapeake, what are you doing way out here?”

  It was clear that, seeing us heading in the ship channel, he’d thought—hoped—that we’d just come off the Atlantic in our husky motor sailer, with a heavy payload of illicit substances (love that jargon!) picked up, say, in Bermuda.

  I said mildly, “I was told it gets sloppy around Old Point Comfort with the wind in this direction, and my crew isn’t feeling too good, so I stayed out a bit to keep her comfortable. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t disturb her. We’re heading for the Tidewater Marina in Norfolk; if you want to inspect the boat, I’ll be glad to have you do it there.”

  He said, “We won’t be heading back to Norfolk; we’re being transferred…” He checked himself; his orders were none of my damned business. He gestured, and said curtly, “Open the gate and let us aboard.”

  Instead, I stepped back inside briefly and lifted the big hinged chart table to take a leather folder from the bin underneath. We have our fancy IDs, too, for use when it’s necessary to impress the peasants. Returning to the deck, I found myself looking into the muzzle of one of the toy squirt guns: the bowman had come aboard with his piece. We’re trained to deal with that situation rapidly and lethally; it took a lot of willpower to check my instinctive reaction.

  “Oh, relax,” I said mildly, instead of sweeping the gun barrel aside and putting three .38s into his guts—no, make that two .38s, leaving one for each of the others and one to spare; you don’t want to shoot your gun empty if you can help it. I extended the ID case to the officer, still in the boat. “The lady below and I are doing special work for the U.S. government,” I said. “I must warn you against searching this boat.”

  He glanced at my ID, unimpressed, and handed it back. “The fact that you’re government employees doesn’t give you any exemption, mister… All right, Zawicki, let’s get on with it.”

  The man already on board opened the gate in the rail and unsnapped the lifeline below it… I switched myself off, as I had on the previous occasion. Everybody makes such a big goddamn fuss if you do shoot the bastards, even when they’re asking for it; hell, Lori Fancher had flipped her little lid because I’d merely thought about it. The alternative was just to go away a small distance and hover there while they played their idiot dope-hunting games on board. Half an hour later they reembarked in their little rubber speedyboat. The young officer threw me a worried look as he departed. He was clearly wondering why I’d made such a fuss about a search when there’d apparently been nothing to find—could he have missed something?
I was aware of Mrs. Bell coming to stand behind me.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  I said softly, “It’s really too bad. A nice-looking young fellow like that committing suicide. I suppose somebody’ll miss him.”

  She said, “Damn you, Helm, I told you I wanted no feuds… What crazy thing did you do? I didn’t see you plant anything on them.”

  I was watching the cutter, if that’s what the Coast Guard still calls its mini-warships, roar away seaward. It would again have made a lovely target for the right weapon; real sporty, like a live-pigeon shoot in spades.

  I said, “Oh, I haven’t done it yet. And it may never happen. But I wanted to know.”

  “Know what?”

  I said, “My chief likes us to be nice and polite to other government departments—as long as they’re nice and polite to us. But you saw how much cooperation and courtesy I got out of those boys, even though I was just as sweet as sugar the whole damn time.”

  She said dryly, “I noticed you didn’t sound at all natural. But I don’t understand—”

  I said, “We may encounter some more of them farther south. I went through that routine because I wanted to know how I stood with them. I told the son of a bitch, in the nicest way possible, that I was a fellow government-employee on a mission. I even told him there was a sick lady on board and let him know that they’d had their freebie—that I’d already put up with their search nonsense once, up around Cape May. Well, he wouldn’t listen. One of his men even held a gun on me. Okay. Great. Terrific, in fact. They’ve had their warning. If we meet down south and they get in the way, I won’t have to worry about being nice to them; I can just go right through them. It’s a big load off my mind.” I drew a long breath and let the anger go out of me. “How are you feeling?”

  She hesitated, wanting to discuss it further, but decided to let it go and said, “My head hurts a bit, but I’m all right, otherwise. I don’t think my brains are seriously scrambled.”

  “Well, you’d better lie down some more; I can bring her in from here.”

  Mrs. Bell gestured shoreward. “Over there, you turn south into the Elizabeth River; it’s well marked. You’ll see the marina to starboard after you’ve passed most of the commercial docks and navy installations; it’s just beyond buoy thirty-six, which is the official Mile Zero of the Intracoastal Waterway. The entrance is pretty narrow, and you have to make a hard turn to port just inside, so don’t take it too fast… Well, you’d better call me when you’ve got it in sight; you’ll need help with the docklines, anyway.”

  Sailing through Norfolk—well, powering—was quite an experience. I mean, even though I was getting used to handling her, Lorelei III still seemed like a lot of boat to me, but the stuff along both sides of the wide channel, lined with docks, gave the poor old girl a serious inferiority complex. This was particularly true when we got past the commercial shipping to the navy installations and had to move aside for a submarine heading out with the help of a couple of tugs. I’d always thought of subs as fairly small, but this thing was enormous, particularly when you realized that most of it was invisible under water. That is, it seemed enormous until we passed an unbelievable aircraft carrier that could have picked up the sub and used it for a dinghy.

  Then we were through the main harbor. Feeling independent when I reached the marina, or maybe perverse, I took Lorelei III through the entrance without calling Mrs. Bell, made my sharp turn to port successfully, and motored up to the fuel dock, figuring that there’d be an attendant to give me a hand with the lines, as there was. I topped up the tanks with diesel and water, careful to stick the right hose into the right hole. My crew came on deck as I was finishing up. I saw that she’d taken time to comb her hair and fix her face. Her pirate jersey showed no signs of her ordeal, and if her white cotton pants were a bit wrinkled, cotton pants are born that way. She was a tough dame, I reflected; nobody looking at her would have guessed that she’d almost had her brains knocked out only a few hours earlier.

  “Have you inquired about a rigger?” she asked me.

  I shook my head. “I thought you’d probably know whom to call for the repairs.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” she said. “I don’t suppose we can get anybody here this evening, but if I call now maybe we’ll see some action in the morning.”

  I said, “Okay, why don’t you go find a phone? I’ll take care of things here.”

  We’d already been assigned a slip. With the help of one of the marina hands, I put Lorelei III into it, alongside a high, fixed finger pier that, since the tide was low, was about six feet above deck level. Fortunately, there was a ladder. Mrs. Bell showed good agility when she came aboard half an hour later to report satisfactory progress; apparently the blow on the head had not affected her coordination.

  In the morning, the sail and rigging doctors she’d summoned held a consultation over the patient and prescribed some minor patches on the Genoa, a whole new head stay and furling gear, and three weeks of bed rest—well, marina rest—while the new stuff was being fabricated. Mrs. Bell wasn’t having any of that, and went off to talk it over with somebody.

  Returning, she said, “I’m having the repaired sail and the new gear shipped to a marina near Savannah, Georgia, when they’re ready. You can have the installation done there.”

  I looked at her. “I can?”

  She said, “It’s close to six hundred miles, not too far from the Florida border, about two weeks at a normal rate of progress for this boat. If anything is going to happen, it’ll happen before then; and in any case it isn’t likely I’ll be with you that long. I’ll either succeed in solving this problem and go back to Washington in triumph, or I’ll fail and be recalled in disgrace. In the meantime, we’ll just carry on like this. The mast isn’t going to fall down, and we won’t have much use for the sails south of here. There isn’t enough open water to worry about. We’ll be under power the whole way. We’ll take off in the morning.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She looked at me for a moment. “You saved my life, didn’t you?” she said. When I shrugged, she went on. “I was completely unconscious; I had no idea… I just met Barstow and the girl on the street. He said you lost control and lucked out. She said it was a fantastic piece of seamanship: you deliberately threw the boat into a crashing jibe and washed me back aboard just as I was about to go over the side. Two prejudiced sources, one against, one for; but I know which one I believe, and I thank you.”

  I said, “Hell, thank old Lorelei; she did all the work.”

  Mrs. Bell smiled. “What I’m really driving at is that you can’t decently continue to address a lady whose life you’ve saved as ‘ma’am,’ even if it does amuse you in some obscure way. Suppose you try Teresa for a change. I… I prefer that to Terry.”

  “I’ll try to respect your preferences, Teresa.”

  She frowned a bit, looking at me. “You do find me amusing in some way, don’t you?”

  I said, “No, I find you a bit intimidating and I’m trying bravely not to show it. You know, like a little boy whistling in the dark? Truly competent ladies always scare me.”

  It occurred to me that I’d said something-similar to another woman who’d served Lorelei III as crew, for totally different reasons. But it was the wrong thing to say here. Mrs. Bell—excuse me, Teresa—made an angry grimace.

  “Competent?” she said. “If I was competent, would I be here? See the high-powered lady administrator playing deckhand on a silly little yacht! If I was truly competent, Matt, I’d have had all this straightened out weeks ago. Now all I can do is take a boat ride and hope people continue to try to sink the boat; but we’ve had no action at all since I came aboard, except that I managed to stupidly get myself hit on the head.” She drew a long, ragged breath. “And the terrible thing is that this truly competent lady can’t think of a single useful thing to do except just keep on going—and hoping.”

  22

  Coming from the d
ry wildernesses of the high Southwest, I found the wet wildernesses of the low Carolinas quite impressive. I hadn’t realized that there was so much desolate, uninhabited land in the super-civilized East, if you want to call that soggy stuff land. The damn marshes went on forever, it seemed, with the ICW marker posts, with their bright little numbered signs, blazing a trail through mazes of swampy lagoons and still, brown creeks and meandering rivers—and great, wide-open sounds that looked like fine sailing water but were barely deep enough to float a canoe except in the dredged channel.

  The swamps and sounds were connected by long, ruler-straight, man-made canals through slightly higher and drier ground that still didn’t seem to attract much habitation beyond an occasional shack or fishing camp.

  I encountered my first lock on the first day out of Norfolk, but it hardly qualified me to tackle the Panama Canal, since the change in water level was less than six inches. It turned out to be the only one along our route—I checked in the guidebook—but bridges we had always with us. The main highways were seldom any trouble since they were usually carried over the ICW on the standard sixty-five-foot-high spans, but the smaller roads crossed on drawbridges that had to open for us, some on demand but many according to schedules that seldom synchronized with Lorelei III’s eight-knot rate of progress: if you hit one right, you’d be too late or early for the next. That meant jockeying around in the channel for up to an hour waiting for the bridge tender to get around to pulling his levers or pushing his buttons. I learned a lot about ship handling in tight quarters.

  We reached Coinjock, North Carolina, the small town just south of which Truman Fancher’s heart had finally given out for good, and started backtracking the old man’s final voyage. In Belhaven, North Carolina, we sat out a one-day gale. Just north of Beaufort, still in North Carolina, I cut a little too close to a channel marker and, although supposedly in deep water according to the chart, hit bottom quite heavily and threw Teresa, who was standing beside me, against the chart table almost hard enough to knock the wind out of her—almost, but not quite; she still had breath enough to snap out some orders.