The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  “In the morning,” said Hemingway, talking to Wolfer and Patchi, “I want you to take the Pilar up toward Megano de Casigua. Keep your eyes peeled for sub activity and keep Saxon’s ears plastered to the ’phones for some sound of the U-boats communicating with the mainland or the Southern Cross. All he heard today were some squirts in German from the wolf packs way up north.”

  “I thought that we might see the yacht on our trip down here,” said Winston Guest. “She was last sighted heading in this direction.”

  “You may see her tomorrow,” said Hemingway. “If you do, feel free to shadow her.”

  “And if Señorita Helga is aboard?” said Ibarlucia, raising the whiskey bottle in toast.

  “Feel free to fuck her for me,” said Hemingway. Then he started like a guilty boy and glanced at Maria, but evidently her English did not include this most basic terminology of her profession.

  “Anyway,” continued the writer, “Lucas and I are going to take Shevlin’s little darling in past Puerto de Nuevitas beyond Cayo Sabinal and investigate some of those rivers and inlets there, charting the area and checking for possible refueling bases.”

  Fuentes rubbed his chin. “I am surprised Señor Shevlin loaned his beautiful craft for this business.”

  “Tom’s in the Hooligan Navy,” said Hemingway. “He wants to do his bit. And for Lorraine to do hers.” He looked at Winston Guest across the dying campfire. “Wolfer, make sure that the boys and Maria have everything they need for some spearfishing and putting around tomorrow.”

  Guest nodded. “I’m leaving the Tin Kid for their fishing,” he said. “The lieutenant’s promised to watch over the boys until we get back tomorrow night.”

  “Lucas and I will bivouac somewhere around Puerto Tarafa,” lied the writer. “And we’ll see you on Friday morning. Don’t leave on patrol until we get back.”

  If we get back, I thought.

  WE LEFT BEFORE SUNRISE. Hemingway looked in on his boys, sleeping in the tent, and then we rowed the Tin Kid out to where the Pilar and the Lorraine bobbed at anchor. The morning was windy and cooler than most had been that summer. Fuentes had fussed about the Pilar the previous evening, rigging one bow anchor and two stern anchors before being assured that she would ride out any morning squall properly, but the Lorraine lunged and dipped at her single anchor line like a dog eager to be off the leash.

  Hemingway slid behind the wheel and took us out. He was wearing the same safari shirt as the day before and had a long-billed cap pulled low. He kept the rpm down, not wanting to wake the boys. As we passed the Pilar, Fuentes stepped out on deck and gave his boss a two-fingered salute. Hemingway saluted back, and then we were out beyond the reef, the engine growling at a higher note as we crashed through the chop.

  The writer checked the compass, set our course at 100 degrees, and rested his wrist on the Duesenberg steering wheel. “Do we have everything?” he said.

  “Yeah.” I had been out on the Lorraine the night before while the others were finishing their meal. The checklist was complete.

  “No, we don’t,” said Hemingway.

  “We don’t?”

  He looked stern, reached into his safari jacket, took out two short, broad corks, and tossed me one. I looked at it and raised an eyebrow.

  “Asshole corks,” he said, and swiveled back to watch the sun rise just to the north of our projected course.

  WE HEADED EAST OF THE Archipelago de Camagüey, staying on the edge of the Gulf Stream just in sight of land. The wind and wave action stayed moderately high, but the sun broke through scattered clouds and the heat of the day returned with a vengeance. Just before we turned southeast toward Bahía Manatí and Point Roma, I took the glasses out of the waterproof case and began studying the northern horizon.

  “What are you looking for, Lucas?”

  “Cayo Cerdo Perdido.”

  Hemingway chuckled. “Your bearings are right, but your timing’s off. It’s just about high tide. Lost Pig Key should be under water by now. That’s a nasty little reef.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I was confirming.”

  Hemingway swung the bow to heading 160, and the following sea pounded against our port and stern sides. With less power, the speedboat would have wallowed sickeningly, but the writer applied just the proper amount of throttle to keep us cutting through the waves without wasting too much fuel.

  As we came in off the blue of the Gulf, I looked back to the north. Somewhere out there, below periscope depth, scores of men huddled in a long, clammy, dripping tank smelling of sweat and diesel oil and cabbage and dirty socks. They were down there in the darkness and had been for weeks, their bones and skulls throbbing to the constant beat of the engines and pistons that drove their boat, their skin itchy with too many days without bathing or shaving, their ears attuned to the moan and creak of the steel hull under pressure. They spent their days in the cold dark of the depths and rose only at night to recharge their batteries and suck in some fresh air. Only the captain and perhaps his first officer were privileged to look through the periscope as they took their bearings against landmarks on the mainland or closed on their prey; the rest of the men listened and waited in silence for orders—to man battle stations, to fire torpedoes—and then waited some more for the unmistakable sounds of explosions and the hull of a merchant ship breaking up under pressure as it sank. And then waited again for the explosion of the depth charge that might sink them.

  One hell of a life.

  If the intercepted transmission had been real, two of those men sitting out there in the depths right now were preparing to come ashore. Were they nervous on their last day aboard the U-boat—checking their maps and code words and equipment one last time as they got into civilian clothes and oiled and re-oiled their pistols? Of course they were. They were men. But they were probably also eager to get out of the dark stink of the boat and get on with what they were trained for.

  What were they trained for? Teddy Schlegel hadn’t seemed to know their mission. Meeting with the FBI? That was almost beyond belief.

  “There’s the point,” said Hemingway. “Get the niños out.”

  We had agreed that we would reconnoiter the entire area before settling on a vantage point and hiding place. That meant that we were going into Manatí Bay as well as checking out the points and seacoast. If this was a trap, it probably was designed to snap shut on us in the daytime when we arrived. I went back to the hidden storage compartments and brought out two Thompson submachine guns and a canvas bag of extra clips. The metal of the weapons was oily to the touch.

  “Some frags, too,” said Hemingway from the wheel.

  I opened a box of hand grenades. They were gray, heavy, and cool to the touch as I lifted out four and set them in the bag with the extra clips.

  “Keep the niños out of the salt spray,” said Hemingway. He was bringing the Lorraine in quickly from the northeast.

  I laid the submachine guns between the seats, out of the spray under the teak and mahogany and chrome dash, and studied the coastline with the twelve-power glasses. When one has studied charts long enough, it seems as if one has already visited a place when one arrives. But I had never seen these points or this bay before. On our previous trips along the coast here, we had been too far out to sea to make out details. Now reality came into focus. It was much as the charts had suggested.

  The entrance to Bahía Manatí was wider than I had thought—about forty yards from point to point. Point Jesus, on the east, projected farther out to sea than Point Roma, on the west side of the inlet, but I could see why Point Roma had been chosen for the beacon light: the cliffs on the Point Roma side were higher, rising about thirty feet above sea level, as opposed to the ten- or twelve-foot cliffs on the Point Jesus side. I could see the gradual bight of Enseñada Herradura, to the west of Point Roma, a long, gradual curve of inlet disappearing into mangroves and swamps. The rest of the coastline here was sharp, with rocks and reefs along Point Jesus and more shoals and boulders to
the west of Enseñada Herradura. There was little real beach as such, but a nice sandy spit became visible beneath the beacon light on Point Roma.

  I studied the light through the binoculars. The metal was rusted and corroded through here and there, obviously not maintained, but the real problem was that someone had stolen the lenses and the light assembly. It looked as if the beacon had been out of commission for some time. Looking beyond the broken beacon light, I could see untended cane fields on the bluffs above the sea as far as I could pan to the west and the east. This was not real jungle here; I could see a few scrubs and palm trees above the mangrove thickets, but most of the land had been given over to raising cane before it had been allowed to return to a wild state. Besides the broken beacon light, the only sign of civilization visible from the sea was the Manatí smokestack rising above the cane on the west side of the bay.

  “I’ll take us in for a look around the bay,” Hemingway said softly. “Be ready to get out on the bow with a pole if the channels are’t marked. And keep your niño with you.”

  I nodded, lifted the weapon, and let the binoculars hang around my neck. The submachine gun on my lap felt a trifle silly; I had been trained in the weapons, of course, both at Quantico and at Camp X, but I had never really liked the so-called tommy guns. They had little range and less accuracy. Essentially they were just pistols with an amazing rate of fire, useful for hosing things down at very close range. Good for blazing away in the movies, but not as useful as a good rifle for long work or a trusted pistol for close-in business.

  Surf broke on the rocks to the east and on the reef to the west as we slowed and grumbled our way into the center channel. Beyond the entrance, various stakes—some just dead branches wedged in the mud of the banks—marked the narrow channel. Some of the stakes were obviously missing and others were tilted so their tops were just under the surface.

  Hemingway slowed Lorraine to just above idle and kept to the center of the channel as I watched the points and cliffs and cane fields on either side for any sign of movement or a glint of sunlight on metal or glass. Nothing is as impenetrable to the eye as a cane field.

  We curved slightly to the left as the inlet wound east a bit before turning south again. We had planned this—to arrive just after high tide, much as it would be at eleven that night—but even so, we could see where the channel had silted up after years of neglect. The way was relatively clear ahead of us so that I did not yet have to crawl out on the bow with a lead rope or pole, but behind us, our passage had roiled the water to a muddy concoction the color of coffee with too much cream.

  “Is she throwing any mud?” said Hemingway, his voice terse.

  “Just from this starboard bank. You might want to hold her hard against that port bank through here.”

  Hemingway tapped the chart laid out on the dash. “This says eight fathoms, six through here, five around the bend of the cut. I bet there aren’t two fathoms through here. And that’s only ten feet wide. It’s all mud bank beyond that.”

  “Yeah.” Doce Apostles became visible on a point to our left. The coastal cliffs were behind us here in Manatí Bay, and the cane fields and mangroves now came right down to the water, but a small hill ran back from the bay where the twelve boulders were visible through the greenery, and below the rocks half a dozen tumbledown shacks were being reclaimed by vines and weeds. A maze of old paths ran along the bank and down to a dock, but the paths showed no recent use and the dock had collapsed into the bay.

  I watched the black windows of the shacks and clicked the safety off on the Thompson.

  “There are the tracks and the stack,” said Hemingway softly.

  The bay was opening up. I could see that the end of it was about a mile to the southwest, with a deep inlet running out of sight southeast of the Doce Apostoles. In the center of the bay, dead ahead, there was a single, tree-covered island. To starboard, where Hemingway was looking, the green tangle of the overgrown cane fields was broken by two openings where rusted tracks ran back into the fields. By the southernmost track, the brick smoke stack rose thirty or forty feet. There were several brick buildings here at what had been Puerto Manatí, and two piers running out into the bay where the track ended, but the glass panes on the buildings had been broken, one of the docks had collapsed and the other ended in water that was now less than a foot deep, and the dirt roads along the bank were overgrown.

  “Shit,” said Hemingway. “Chart says that there should be five fathoms here. We’re drawing less than one. Get out there with the pole.”

  I slung the Thompson over my shoulder and clambered out onto the bow with the long staff. “That was a silt bank,” I said. “It’s almost a full fathom ahead.”

  The engine rumbled and we moved ahead, churning up mud behind us. The little island marked “Cayo Largo” on our chart loomed ahead. Another hill rose above the cane on the shoreline to the right, this one about twice as tall as the Twelve Apostles. Beyond it, more ruins were visible at the southeast edge of the bay.

  “That’s the main Manatí mill,” Hemingway said softly as we moved slowly around the small island. There were a few shacks on the island, but these had been almost completely overgrown by trees and vines. My head was swiveling like a fighter pilot’s as I tried to watch the brick buildings on shore, the area around the stack, the old mill, and the island houses for any sign of movement. Suddenly there was an explosion of sound and color as twenty or thirty flamingoes took flight from a sandbar along an inlet. I admit that I swung the Thompson up in that direction before lowering it sheepishly. The birds flapped noisily along the southwest curve of the bay and landed along another spit of sand in an area marked “Estero San Joaquin” on the chart.

  “Cocos,” said Hemingway, killing the engine and letting us float with the mild current.

  I looked toward the hill where he was pointing. A dozen or so of the wood ibis he was talking about fluttered in the lagoon between the abandoned piers near the stack and the hilly point. Closer in, a pair of roseate spoonbills waded delicately across one of the few mud banks still above the waterline at high tide.

  The largest part of the bay lay ahead of us, but most of it was visibly too silted up even for the shallow draft Lorraine. “I bet there’s not ten inches of water in most of that,” said Hemingway, swinging his bruised fingers in an arc that took in the wide expanse of bay.

  “No,” I agreed. “But a rubber raft could make it.”

  “Yeah. And they could come in here tonight and go straight to the pier or to the old road over there, but I still don’t think they will.”

  “Why not? It’s more secluded here.”

  “Yeah,” said Hemingway, “and I think that’s one of the reasons they won’t come all the way into the bay. I think they’ll want to be in sight of the sub—communicate to them by flashlight or somesuch that they’ve landed successfully.”

  I nodded. Hemingway was speaking from intuition, but my experience suggested that he was right.

  “Besides,” continued Hemingway, “they’re scheduled to come in an hour before moonrise, and it would be a pain in the ass to navigate the first part of that channel in the dark, even if their raft draws only six or eight inches.”

  I sat back on the burning hot wood of the bow, cradling the long pole and the submachine gun on my knees. “I agree,” I said. “Point Roma seems to be the spot. Shall we head out and find a place to park Lorraine?” Even though it was just midday and there was a mild breeze, clouds of mosquitoes and sand flies were drifting out toward us.

  “Yeah,” said Hemingway. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  IT TOOK US A LITTLE MORE than an hour to find a place to conceal the Lorraine in the swampy inner curve of the Enseñada Herradura, reconnoiter the area above the Point Roma light, and then haul our gear there. The best hiding place for the boat was in the mangrove lagoon directly west of the point, and naturally that was a mass of mud and swarming mosquitoes. It would have been wiser to drop our gear at the sandy point an
d then hide the boat, but we were both eager to conceal the Lorraine and get on with things, so we ended up making two trips up and down the hill through thickets, bugs, and mud.

  Deciding where to conceal ourselves was serious work. We wanted to see the point, of course, but also get a clear view of the inlet in case the German agents defied our expectations and rafted straight into Bahía Manatí. We also wanted a clear view out to sea and needed to be able to retreat easily in case we had to reposition ourselves or just make a run for the speedboat. Finally, we needed concealment.

  This was a test of Hemingway’s military prowess, and I was impressed by his decision. There was a perfect place near the crest of the hill—just out of the encroaching cane field, sheltered under a low tree, and offering a 270-degree panorama of the beacon light, the inlet, the northern part of Manatí Bay, and even of the enseñada, behind us. There was even an old trail to this high point, running down to the spit to the north and south toward the old mill road, all of which would make it easy to haul our gear up. Hemingway pointed it out immediately and said, “Too obvious. We’ll look lower on the hill.”

  He was right. Part of this deadly game which we could not afford to forget was that it was probable that we were expected to be here. It was hard to understand why either of the German intelligence agencies would want to ambush us, but if it was to be an ambush, there was no reason for us to make it easy for them.

  Hemingway chose a site about a third of the way down the slope to the west of the point. There were no real dunes along this stretch of coast, but erosion had carved innumerable gullies along the face of the low cliffs, and Hemingway chose one of those fissures on the ridge of the slope that ran between the point and the inlet where we had hidden the boat. The gap was narrow and steep on the northern—ocean—side, but wider and filled with trees and then thick undergrowth on the southwestern approach along the edge of the cane field. From the high point in this gully, we could see the beacon light, the trail that ran along the high point of the ridge, the sandy point at the inlet, and a wide stretch of open sea. From the gully we could move under cover to the top of the ridge to check the bay and the old mill road, and if there was movement on the old road or along the old rail tracks behind us, we could beat a retreat either down our gully or into the cane field and from there back down to the speedboat.