The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  Remembering what Lori had told me, I paid no attention. We were grinding to a sluggish halt on the unexpected and uncharted shoal. Before we lost all momentum, I threw the wheel hard over toward the center of the channel where the deep water ought to be—to port, if it matters—and rammed the engine control clear up to the stop. After a couple of dragging bumps and lurches, with her diesel roaring and her big three-bladed propeller leaving a trail of churned-up mud astern, Lorelei III started to pick up speed again. When she was definitely running free, I straightened her out and brought the tach needle back down to cruising RPM.

  Teresa drew a long breath, rubbed her bruised diaphragm, and said, “Well, that’s one way of doing it!”

  I said, “Lori Fancher told me that was the way her daddy did it; and what was good enough for old Truman is good enough for me.”

  “Well, don’t try it if you ever run aground along the Maine coast; you’ll rip your boat wide open on the rocks.” She glanced at me and gave a little half-embarrassed laugh. “Matt.”

  “Yes, Teresa?”

  “I’m a bossy, know-it-all bitch, aren’t I?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve met worse.” I grinned. “I can’t remember exactly when.”

  She said, “You’ve been very patient.”

  Something in her voice made me look at her sharply. She was wearing another pirate jersey, this one striped blue and white, and clean blue jeans that were neither sexily tight nor fashionably faded: just a tidy, durable costume on a tidy, durable lady. It surprised me to realize that we’d been together for over a week, working our way down the ICW from Norfolk, and that it had been an okay week.

  When I first met her, I’d have said that if I was ever condemned to put up with this arrogant dame for any length of time I’d commit suicide or, more probably, murder. Instead, living at the ends of the boat and meeting, in the middle, we’d got along quite well in a very polite, very businesslike manner; the manner of two intelligent, adult people enduring a forced association who know it will work a lot better if minor irritations are suffered in silence and open disagreements are carefully and diplomatically avoided.

  I said, “Patience is part of the training, ma’am.”

  She smiled. “What I’m trying to say is, thank you, Matt. It’s been nice. Of course that’s the trouble. It wasn’t supposed to be nice. There should have been limpet mines on the hull, torpedoes in the water, and machine guns in the night.”

  I said, “Sorry about that, but we’ve still got—”

  She shook her head quickly. “No. It was a desperate move on my part, and let’s face it, it didn’t work. And I was tired enough to let myself waste too much time just relaxing and resting and enjoying the boat ride. Now I’d better go back and face the music. It’ll look better that way than if they have to send for me. We’ll be in Beaufort tonight. It’s a sizeable town, and Morehead City is right next door; I’m sure that between them they have an airport with reasonable service to Washington. I’ll take a plane out in the morning…”

  Several blasts on a boat horn from astern interrupted her.

  Glancing around I saw Gulf Streamer coming up on us fast. Lori was up on the flying bridge.

  The bullhorn spoke with her amplified voice: “Lorelei III, ahoy. Billy just got a call on the cellular phone. Mrs. Bell is wanted in Washington soonest. There will be a plane for her at the Beaufort-Morehead City airport; we’re to run her there with quote all possible dispatch end quote. Give us a call on seven-two when she’s packed and ready, and we’ll come alongside.”

  Teresa waved her arm out the door to signal that the message had been received and understood. Gulf Streamer fell back. The woman in the doorway stood there a little longer, looking away so I couldn’t see her face. It was quite expressionless when she turned at last.

  “Well, it looks as if they beat me to the draw,” she said quietly.

  I wanted to say something helpful and sympathetic; but she wasn’t a lady who encouraged sympathy. I just said, “Yell when your seabag’s ready. It looked pretty heavy; let me wrestle it out of there.”

  She smiled crookedly. “On this ship we carry our own bags, remember?”

  I said, “On this ship, I’m the skipper; I make the rules. And break them… Teresa.”

  “Yes?”

  I cleared my throat. “Anybody you ever need killed, you know where to call.”

  She looked at me for a moment. Then she stepped forward and kissed me lightly on the lips and turned and disappeared down the companionway. A few minutes later I watched Gulf Streamer pull ahead, white water boiling out from under her stern as Lori fed the power to the oversize twin diesels. Mrs. Teresa Bell stood in the cockpit beside Barstow. She glanced aft and raised her hand to me. It was not really a farewell wave; it was more a salute like that given by the Roman gladiators marching in to face the lions: Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die, etc.

  I reached Beaufort late that afternoon and found myself back in civilization. The city marina was right in the middle of town, opposite an anchorage area holding a considerable fleet of boats. I inserted Lorelei III into her assigned slip, with the expert assistance of the dock master. He was as good a hand with a rope as I’ve seen, east or west: he could flip the loop of a heavy dock line over a distant piling like a rodeo cowboy lassoing a running calf. With the boat secured, he pointed me toward the nearest pay phone.

  Mac listened to my report and said, “You seem to have lost contact. We may have to approach the Caselius problem from another direction.”

  “Do we have another direction?” I asked.

  Mac didn’t answer my question. He said instead, “If Mrs. Bell is correct, and she is to be replaced upon her return to Washington, I suppose we will soon receive official notification from her successor, and be advised how he, or she, wishes us to proceed. Since any new incumbent, in any office, is likely to make a point of rejecting the policies of a predecessor wherever possible, it may be that the boat will no longer be considered relevant to the terrorist problem with which that organization is concerned.”

  I said, “It’s my boat. I’ve got papers to prove it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that I can do what I damn well please with it,” I said. “Frankly, I think Teresa—Mrs. Bell—and her associates have given up on this approach too soon; and now you seem to want to quit it, too, sir. But with all due respect, I don’t think we’ve lost contact at all. I think those Arab crazies, including Dorothy Fancher, and their hired DAMAG goons, including Roland Caselius, are right out there watching Lorelei III move steadily south toward the critical area. They just don’t have the stomach for any more frontal attacks, by sea or by land; the Battle of Montauk Point and the Battle of Schaefer’s Canal House cost them too many people. But, hell, Mrs. Fancher isn’t going to give up now, not with her beautiful lover dead with his beautiful balls shot off. And Caselius isn’t going to forget his poor dead daddy.”

  “What are you suggesting, Eric?”

  I said, “I don’t think we need another direction, sir. I think the direction we’re heading is perfectly swell. If Mrs. Bell’s outfit decides on a different approach, and still wants our assistance, maybe you can find somebody else to give it to them. I’d like to keep right on sailing—well, motoring— down the ICW. I think young Mr. Caselius and I have a rendezvous not too far ahead. I gather that those secretive folks in Washington do still want him neutralized.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “And they still won’t identify the DAMAG target they’re trying to protect?” I said. Mac didn’t respond to that question, and I continued. “Well, in this case I’ll cheerfully risk my life for the White House doorman, or whoever, since even if I were willing to leave Caselius alive, the chances of his being willing to leave me alive are practically nonexistent. It’s a job I’ll have to do eventually; I might as well get it done.”

  Mac said, “But the question is, is this the best way of doing it?”

  I said, “Hell, wh
erever the sensitive point may be, down south of here, it’s got to be somewhere reasonably near the Waterway, so I can’t miss it by too much if I just follow the channel markers, even if I may not know that I’m there when I get there. But I don’t figure Dorothy Fancher and her fanatics will let me get too close to their secret spot, not as long as there’s even a remote chance that I have Truman Fancher’s logbook lying on the chart table in front of me open to the exact latitude and longitude. There’s no reason for them to risk it, and every reason for them to dispose of the boat and me with the help of their hired DAMAG experts, as soon as they’ve figured out a safer way to do it than they’ve managed so far. The fact that they’ve held off for a few days doesn’t mean they’ve given up; it just means they’re cooking up something very fancy.”

  Mac said dryly, “All of which is just guesswork, of course.”

  I said, “We don’t call it guesswork, we call it instinct, sir.”

  I heard a short laugh at the Washington end of the line. “As it happens, I have seldom lost money gambling on an experienced operative’s mission instinct. Very well, Eric. As the U.S. Navy likes to say, carry on. If Mrs. Bell’s people object, I will deal with them.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He said, “However, if they decide to withdraw your escort vessel, there is nothing I can do about that.”

  I said, “Gulf Streamer’s not around at the moment—I don’t know where they took her—and frankly I hope she stays away. I’m just as happy without Mr. William Barstow breathing down my neck; he’s not one of my favorite colleagues. As a matter of fact, it might be a good idea to run a check on him. Apparently he’s been giving the little Fancher girl a hard time, and he’s kind of a schizo personality anyway, a hardheaded pro one minute and an oversexed slob the next. His record should be interesting; I have a hunch it isn’t exactly snow-white.”

  “Very well, Eric. Report in when you can.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After dinner, obtained from a can—Dinty Moore beef stew, if you must know—I opened the big chartbook for the area to see what lay ahead; I hadn’t done my navigational homework beyond Beaufort. In North Carolina, the U.S. coastline turns a fairly sharp corner, called Cape Hatteras, and begins to angle southwest instead of southeast. Proceeding directly from Norfolk to Beaufort, we’d cut the corner; the ICW had brought us straight down its well-marked channels almost fifty miles inside Cape Hatteras and the Outer Banks.

  But now we were back on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean—actually for the first time since Cape May, New Jersey, having spent the intervening time on the inland waters of Delaware and Chesapeake bays—and I saw on the chart that the waterway ahead followed the coast, protected from the open sea by a string of barrier islands broken by occasional inlets that, the guidebook said, were apt to be troublesome because of the strong tidal currents that rushed through them. Those currents, the book warned, if you weren’t careful, could carry you into shoal-water difficulties; particularly since storms often changed the bottom, scouring out new channels and silting in the old ones in an unpredictable manner…

  “Pssst! Lorelei ahoy!”

  I had the deckhouse draperies closed for privacy and the doors open for ventilation. Since there was no wind to flap the curtains tonight, the two purposes did not conflict seriously. The voice had come from the side of the boat away from town; it had been very soft, but I’d recognized it. I released the butt of the .38.

  “Ziggy, what the hell?” I whispered.

  “Oh, damn this lousy hand…! Help me with this dinghy, please, Matt.”

  I debated turning out the deckhouse lights, but that would have told watchers on shore, if any, that something was up, so I just slipped through the curtains and stepped up to the side deck. She was standing right below me in a tiny white plastic boat that didn’t approve of upright passengers; it wanted to slide out from under her and dump her into the harbor. With one hand splinted, she was having trouble holding the little craft in place while she secured the bowline, or painter, to a lifeline stanchion.

  I took the painter from her and tied what I hoped was a seamanlike knot. I opened the boarding gate and got the ladder off the deckhouse and hooked it over the rail. She got herself aboard in a rather stiff-legged fashion.

  “Where’d you get the dink?” I asked.

  “Stole it,” she said. “I didn’t want them to see me coming out here to talk with you.”

  “So let’s get under cover,” I said.

  In the cabin, I turned to face her. She’d thrown back the hood of the buttoned-up foul-weather jacket she was wearing—standard marina costume, rain or shine— but as always the gauze and tape still made her face somewhat anonymous. I noted once more that she had blue Scandinavian eyes—with a name like Kronquist she could hardly help it—a slightly tip-tilted nose, and a soft mouth devoid of lipstick. The visible features were promising; I suppose it was only normally ghoulish to wonder just how badly she’d been spoiled, beneath the dressings, by the sharp blade of a dead man’s knife.

  I said, “First, one question. You said you didn’t want them to see you coming here. So I’m really under surveillance?”

  Ziggy nodded. “Oh, yes, you’ve got some nice shadows ashore; I had a hard time staying clear of them.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “A lot of folks seem to feel that, since I haven’t been shot at recently, there’s nobody following me around.”

  Ziggy was looking down at the chartbook lying open on the table. “You’re going to have trouble with those damn inlets, Matt. I’ve had some experience with them, so I thought I’d try to persuade you to take me back aboard as a pilot, now that T. Bell seems to have left you.” Ziggy looked around. “She’s gone, isn’t she? I’ve been watching since you came in; she wasn’t on deck to help with the dock lines, and there’s been no sign of her on board.”

  I said, “She was recalled to Washington; she went ahead on Gulf Streamer.”

  “That’s the big sportfisherman we saw in Annapolis with your little girlfriend and Curly Red Barstow on board? Well, I didn’t see them come in, but I wasn’t looking out for them particularly; and those gold-plated power-palaces all look alike to me, I’m a sailboat girl at heart. And of course there are other places besides the city dock here where she could have landed and got a taxi to the airport, over in Morehead City, for instance.”

  I hesitated, watching her, and asked, “Have you run the Waterway recently, Ziggy?”

  “Two years ago. We brought a custom forty-footer up from Palm Beach; actually, we took her clear to Newport, Rhode Island.”

  I said, with a glance at the chart, “Well, it does look as if I could use a pilot, and I certainly need somebody to blame when I run aground. It might as well be you.”

  23

  Ziggy said dryly, “It’s really best not to try to sail where the birds are wading, Matt. Their legs aren’t that long.”

  I’d missed spotting a channel marker that we were supposed to round, and failed to make the indicated turn. Moments later, I’d seen the long-legged white birds standing in the water thirty yards ahead, letting me know I was in the wrong place, but we’d bounced against the bottom a couple of times before I got us out of there and found us the deep channel again—well, four meters deep according to the flasher, call it twelve feet, practically an ocean abyss in that part of the world.

  I said, “Don’t be mean; we can’t all be genius navigators.”

  The previous night we’d just turned the borrowed dinghy loose to drift through the marina with the tide, hoping that it would bump against the boat of an honest citizen who’d secure it and get it back to its owner. In the morning, we’d risen early and motored out of Beaufort’s sizeable harbor and back up the big-ship channel to the ICW, which carried us south past Morehead City and along a dredged channel that ran down a long, shallow sound. A mile or so off to port was the low island that sheltered us from the open sea.

  It was pretty well covered with
beach cottages that looked very vulnerable, perched on that skimpy sandbar on the edge of the wide, potentially violent Atlantic. Well, in California they built their mansions on the San Andreas Fault; here they stuck them on little barrier islands that just asked to be swept clean by any serious hurricane. But who was I, in my line of work, to criticize other folks for living dangerously?

  Now we were back in the coastal marshes. The chart continued to show solid ground of sorts between us and the ocean—more barrier islands, sometimes supporting other beach communities; but most of the structures we saw along the Waterway were either duck blinds or fishermen’s shacks. We passed several inlets; at each one, the piloting got tricky, as promised, with sudden currents and winding channels, but Ziggy seemed to sense where to find the navigable water.

  Which was more than could be said for me; toward the end of the morning, I managed to put us onto the mud in a tricky spot where the channel turned out not to be where the chart said it was. Lori’s ungrounding prescription failed to work. I turned the controls over to Ziggy, which I should have done before things got sticky, and she managed to wiggle us loose by judicious employment of prop and rudder.

  “You’re pretty good at that,” I said when we were clear. “I suppose you can’t leave me sitting in the mud just anywhere; you’ve got a definite place you’re supposed to deliver me.”

  She was perfectly still beside me for a long moment. “I… I don’t understand, Matt.”

  I said, “Don’t try it, Ziggy.”

  There was another lengthy silence. When my companion spoke again, her voice was strained. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I said, “What happened? Did they catch you and go to work on you again?”

  Another long pause. “How did you know?” she whispered at last.

  I said, “Hell, I’m a pro, baby. I suspect everybody. I even suspect a poor bandaged girl you’d think had the most compelling reasons in the world for hating the folks who crippled and scarred her. What was the idea of that elaborate stolen-dinghy drama? Did they figure that if they had you go to such lengths to hide your presence from them I couldn’t possibly suspect you of working for them?”