The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  We stood on the beach in gray light. He had his hands in his pockets and his red beard swung flaglike in the storm wind. It was starting to sprinkle, and you could see the green veil of rain sweeping toward us on the sea.

  “I have to tell the group. I guess I have no choice. My God, Dusky, what’s happening?” He started to walk up the beach to the camp, then stopped. He turned to me. “You’re not thinking about going after them, are you, Dusky?”

  “Yes, Jason, I am.”

  “There’s been too much violence already. I can’t let you. It’s a matter for the police, Dusky. The Coast Guard will be here soon . . . storm held them up . . . too much violence.” He was muttering.

  “Jason, Jason! Listen to me. There’s something I haven’t told you. I’m not really a treasure hunter, Jason. In a way, I am the police. I was sent out here, Jason. And I’m going.”

  He looked at me a moment, then turned and walked up the beach.

  They had a service for Wayne, in the meeting tent. I could see the glow of their Coleman lanterns through the slashing rain and sudden brightness of lightning.

  Jason preached. I could hear his voice sometimes carried to me on the wind. I sat soaking on the beach, watching Sniper and the sleek Superior swing nervously on their anchor lines. It was a black scudding storm sky, the speed of the clouds gauged by a reluctant moon.

  I sat there thinking, wanting to be alone. I heard the group chanting a prayer, saying goodbye in their own way. And I could hear Jason above them all in the occasional silences of storm and wind. He preached as if angry.

  He had every right to be angry.

  Someone came up behind me and sat down on the wet sand. It was Jennifer. She wore a bright-yellow rain slicker. She reached out, and I let her take my hand.

  “He had to go, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Jesus called him. He had to go.”

  She was like a pathetic little girl. I said nothing. Frankly, I get a little tired hearing about God’s mysterious ways. If there is a God, He’s got one hell of a weird sense of humor.

  “He was a good man, Jennifer.”

  “Yes. I wanted to have his babies.”

  I let that one pass and said, “I suppose you all will be heading back tomorrow, huh?”

  “I don’t know, Dusky, I just don’t know.” And then: “Jason would like you to come up to the tent. It would make him feel better. He likes you, Dusky. He likes you a lot.”

  Sure, sure. Good old Dusky MacMorgan. Everybody likes Dusky.

  They even smile when they die in his arms.

  So I went up to the tent. The kids were lighting candles. They stuck one in my hand. Jennifer sat down beside me on the canvas floor. Jason stood before us at a little altar. Some of the kids, guys and girls, sobbed quietly.

  Jason held up two candles, staring at them.

  “One bright white light has left us,” he said. He leaned and blew out one of the flames. “Yet there is still light. In his own way, Wayne Peters was an example to us all. In his own way, Wayne was an inspiration to us all.”

  Jason put his candle on the altar and motioned with his eyes toward one of the kids. The lithe blond went out into the storm and returned with her guitar. She played the same haunting melody as before, and everyone sang along. I started to stand and leave, but Jennifer took my hand again. When I sat back down, she leaned against me, crying.

  They sang other songs. There was the sweet sad kinship among them of the living mourning their recent dead. They sat in a tight circle, I among them. Two violent deaths in one day. I looked at the pretty young faces in the candlelight and thought: This is one hell of a way for them to learn of the brutality. The poor, poor bastards.

  The blond was just starting the chords of a final hymn when Jason suddenly jumped to his feet.

  “Listen!”

  The way he said it made my hair rise. There was only the roar of the storm and the wind in the trees—but then I heard it, too.

  The thin sound of an engine. Someone was in a boat near the island.

  Quickly I went running outside, right behind Jason. It was raining harder now. In the explosion of lightning, you could see the green rage of sea and white waves. And you could see a boat, too. A white skiff battling its way away from the rolling anchorage of Sniper and the Superior.

  “They were messing with our boats!” Jason took off running toward the water. I swam out with him.

  They were on our boats, all right. They had sledged my radio, and my rifle was gone.

  And that’s not the only thing they had taken.

  Wayne’s body was gone.

  Jason stood behind me, hands on his hips, breathing deeply. Beneath the salon light, there was a wild look in his eyes. This wasn’t the preacher, the humanitarian. He was someone from far, far away and long ago. He was back in the jungle again.

  “You say you’re going out there tonight, Dusky?”

  “I’m going to make a point of it.”

  “That Cuban-American boat—they were pretty well armed.”

  “Sounds like a job for a SEAL.”

  “Yeah,” said Jason. “A SEAL and one old Green Beret.”

  16

  It was all a mistake.

  A very fatal mistake.

  I should have realized. I should have known. But while your body ages and turns slack and slow, your mind refuses to concede. We could overcome the guards and demand information. We could use strong-arm tactics because Jason was a Green Beret and, dammit, I was an invincible SEAL.

  Was.

  In truth, we were Don Quixote and Sancho. Old fools on mounts of our own imagination. But the Cubans were too well armed, too well trained. They were ready and waiting. And I was the biggest fool of all.

  Oh, we planned our mission. We went over every detail like good soldiers. Jason had gone back to his tent and changed into khaki pants and black sweater. He carried his diving gear and an inflatable raft over one huge shoulder when he boarded Sniper. I handed him the olive-drab tube of face black, and we talked softly in the rage of storm as I fired up the big twin engines.

  “I hate to admit it, Dusky, but I’m looking forward to this. I . . . I missed it so. . . .”

  “I know what you mean, Jason. I know exactly what you mean.”

  We ran in stealth. No lights. The twelve-inch sweep of radar screen threw a soft green light across Jason’s dark face. I told him how the Libertad was situated. I explained all I had been authorized to about my mission. He didn’t seem as surprised as I had expected.

  “Remember, Dusky, I spent some long years in that kind of service. I know how those things work. When you told me you were ‘kind of a policeman’ I started putting two and two together.”

  So we made our plans, went over the options. Jason offered suggestions. He was good. He knew the business. He insisted we not kill anyone unless it was absolutely necessary. I agreed—reluctantly. They might be Castro agents, but they were still American citizens. And their unexplained deaths could lead to some very nasty publicity.

  I ran Sniper well downstorm of where the Libertad would be. Jason was a good mate. He dropped the anchor while I handled the throttle. In a flare of lightning, I could see him clearly on the bow, soaking but ready. It had been a long time since I had worked with someone else of commando quality. Too long. He looked back in at me and gave me a thumbs-up. He felt it, too. It was a good feeling. When the line was snubbed off and I was sure we had a solid hookup, we went over our equipment.

  D. Harold Westervelt, as always, had done a thorough job. Nonlethal weapons, mostly. Jason was happy about that. He selected the Webber 4-B dart pistol with its twenty-six lignum vitae darts loaded with a knockout drug. I told him that the drug could sometimes work too slow for hundred-percent efficency. I knew all too well about that. But he didn’t seem to mind. Hidden aboard Sniper I had three of the steel darts tipped with a special poison developed by Harold D. It was like saxi-toxin, only this poison was from the anal fin of the sco
rpion fish. Shoot a man on the beach, he dies in agony—but seemingly by accident. Oops, didn’t watch where he was putting his feet. Must have stepped on one of those ugly and deadly little fish. More than one Soviet agent around the world had died “accidentally” thanks to Harold D.

  But Jason refused the deadly darts. He said he didn’t trust himself and, besides, if it came down to it, he had his knife.

  And I had my knife, too. My lucky knife: the Randall attack-survival Model 18. It was seven and a half inches of the finest stainless-steel blade with a compartment in the hilt made waterproof by a threaded brass butt cap sealed with an O-ring. It had seen me through plenty of tough times. And had saved my life more than once. Just as a precaution, I unscrewed the cap and slid one of the little poisonous darts into the handle.

  Just in case.

  Rain came down in a slanting blaze of wind and lightning. Seas were a heaving green, waves four to six feet. One hell of a storm. Seas could be worse. But the rain couldn’t.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have left the Whaler behind,” I yelled above the wind.

  “We’ll be okay in this. I thought you SEALs grew up in inflatables!”

  We dropped it over the side, and it surged against Sniper in the waves. One thing forever good about inflatables—once you reach your destination, you can hide it with a couple of slices of the knife. We would paddle it the half mile down to the Libertad, sink it, then swim the rest of the way. I had on my camouflaged BC vest and my dark-blue Navy watch sweater and cap, and I wore my wrist compass. Jason wanted a tank. I didn’t. I already had the Cobra crossbow with the blunted knockout tips strapped to my back.

  And I don’t like to be hampered.

  The first surprise we got was when we neared the Libertad. There wasn’t just one boat, there were three: the Cuban shrimp boat had anchored a few hundred yards away from it, and the white skiff we had seen leaving through the storm had been tied off the stern on a long line.

  “What do you think, Captain?”

  Jason kept paddling on. “We might be in over our heads is what I think.”

  “Wayne was in over his head when they got their hands on him, too. I say you take the shrimp boat and I’ll take the barge. Signal me with your flashlight when you have the area secured.”

  “Aye-aye!”

  Fifty yards from the barge, I slit the raft, letting it sink beneath us. Jason disappeared under the night sea, regulator in his mouth. I battled through the storm breathing through my snorkel, propelling myself along with the good TX-1000 Competition Class fins. When I got to the stern of the barge I held on to the diver’s platform, resting.

  Out of shape. Out of wind. And not very damn smart.

  I should have known then.

  A white flash of lightning brought the name of the barge in pulsing black: Libertad, Miami, Fla.

  And I wondered how Castro had slipped them in on us. Not that hard, really. Send them across the Straits in a ratty boat and let them pretend to be refugees. Finance them, instruct them, let them train on American soil under the guise of being anti-Castro forces.

  Easy enough.

  And only possible in America.

  I pulled the crossbow from off my shoulder. I armed it with a shaft and slid back the automatic cocking device. Some weapon. I had never been without it in Nam. It’s made of light alloy with a draw weight of 150 pounds. The arrows were D. Harold’s invention. If you just wanted to knock out a sentry, you used the blunt blade guards and shot him almost anywhere in the cranium area. If you wanted to kill, you pulled the blunt tips off.

  The crossbow is another of the good things technology has all but left behind. It’s silent. It has a stopping power equivalent to a full-load .45 slug and it’s deadly.

  The first guard was waiting for me. He was hidden behind an oil drum. When I pulled myself up onto the deck, I should have realized. Like in the westerns: It was quiet. Too quiet. Emanuel Ortiz was far too efficient to leave his vessel unguarded—especially after my earlier visit.

  He had a knife. I saw him coming at me in a burst of lightning. Stocky guy in a rain slicker. He held the knife high and jumped at me. From behind. One thing saved me.

  My mask. He tried to stab me in the right eye. I saw it coming and held up my hands in a feeble attempt to stop him. My mask was pushed up on my forehead. The point of the knife caught the bottom part of the mask, busting through the shatterproof glass, then cut across forehead bone, grating.

  In the strange, slow-motion rush of the moment, I thought oddly:

  Great. Another goddamn scar.

  He wanted to play rough. No scare tactics this time. No more make-believe sharks to shoot at.

  And that was fine with me. With one thrust of his knife, the stocky Cuban had outlined a whole new set of rules in my mind. Jason could try to be the gentle conqueror if he wanted. But they had murdered Wayne and probably Gifford, and now they were trying to kill me.

  It was time to take off the gloves.

  My Cobra crossbow clattered to the deck when the knife hit me. I grabbed the Cuban’s elbow, lifted up and twisted, then hit him full-fisted under the armpit, right in the heart. He oomphed loudly and started to sag. I clamped onto the hand which held the knife, pulled it toward me, leveled the blade, then jammed it back into his own right eye, point first. He squirmed in death as I dropped him down on the storm-slick deck.

  “Hold it!”

  A dark figure stood before the wheelhouse cabin, crouching in the rain. He held a weapon I knew well: the Russian AK-47. It might even have been mine.

  I made a motion to hold up my hands, then in one swift belly slide, I dove for the crossbow, hearing a burst of slugs splinter the deck behind me, following me along. As I rolled, I flipped the blunt tip from the shaft and fired. Quick shot, one-handed. I wanted to hit him in the heart. I missed.

  Fffftt-THUD.

  He dropped his weapon, clawing at something. A flare of lightning showed me.

  The arrow had gone through his throat, nailing him against the cabin wall. He hung there grotesquely, pulling at the shaft. I could hear the rasp of air escaping from the hole in his windpipe.

  Lights came on in the cabin. Shouts in wild Spanish. I picked up the assault rifle and retrieved my shaft. He fell onto the hatchway with a hollow thud. Through the cabin window, I could see four or five Cubans getting weapons from an aluminum locker. Ortiz wasn’t among them.

  I wondered how Jason was doing. It was too late for reason. For us to get away safely, we’d have to eliminate or capture them all. If not, those kids would be like sitting ducks on Fullmoon Cay. They had no radio, no idea what in the hell was going on. I reached over with the rifle and tapped on the door. I wanted them outside. One of them, the guy who had shot into the water with his sidearm earlier, looked up and saw me through the window. The automatic in his hands roared, throwing glass and wood all over me. I felt the blood from my knife wound drip hotly down my face, diluted by the rain.

  I crawled along the cabin wall, then pulled myself up onto the roof.

  They came spilling out of the cabin in a burst of fire. They mistook one of their fallen comrades for me, and loaded him up with lead. The body went sliding across the deck like an empty cup at a midnight fairgrounds. I watched from above, flat on my stomach. One of the Cubans moved around the starboard walkway, toward the bow. On the foredeck, he nosed around stacks of barrels and equipment, then stood up, perplexed. I took him cleanly with a shaft through the heart. He tumbled over backward into the water, the splash lost in the noise of the storm.

  “MacMorgan!” one of them yelled in bad English. “Give yourself up. We will not kill you, amigo—honestly!”

  One of them finally got the idea to look on top of the cabin. He came crawling up by himself, head swerving this way and that. I grabbed him by the hair from the side and shoved my knife deep into his brain, through the ear.

  “MacMorgan! It is hopeless!”

  It was hopeless, all right. For them. There were only two left
. They had taken cover on the stern. When I didn’t answer, they opened fire. But their angle was bad. I felt the popping vacuum of slugs passing over me. I slid backward on my belly, past the big chrome searchlight and horn, and dropped down into the foredeck.

  From the side of the cabin I had a clear shot at them. It was assault-rifle time. I didn’t mind drawing the fire of just two weapons. Besides, they wouldn’t have long to shoot back.

  Shooting a human being with a high-caliber automatic is a strange feeling. The way their bodies jolt and jump, it is as if you are connected to them by some high-voltage cord of electricity. I didn’t make them jump long.

  It didn’t take much.

  From the cabin, I heard some anxious voice hailing the Libertad on the VHF. It was in Spanish, and I recognized the voice: Emanuel Ortiz. Probably on the shrimp boat a few hundred yards away. It was bad news, hearing him. It could only mean one thing. They had gotten Jason. The gentle giant. The religion he had loved so well had gotten him killed or captured.

  No, certainly killed. They would take no prisoners after what I had done.

  I listened closely to what Ortiz was saying, and finally realized that he was demanding to know if I had been “taken care of.”

  I picked up the mike, pressed the button, and forced myself to cackle as if a part of some great conspiracy. “Señor MacMorgan es muy enfirmo!” I said it in a loud, raspy voice. When Ortiz began demanding more information, I switched the set off. I was very sick all right. I was damn sick of my friends’ being killed without explanation. Why in the hell had Castro sent them? What were they doing posing as treasure hunters?

  I grabbed a fresh crescent-shaped clip for the AK-47 from the aluminum locker, then threw the rest of the weapons overboard. With the assault rifle over one shoulder and the crossbow over the other, I slid back into the water and headed for the big shrimp boat, Jose Martí.

  The deck was deserted. Wind blew the rain off the rails and blurred the bright cabin windows. But I had seen that kind of emptiness earlier, so I pulled myself up onto the boat very, very carefully.