The Clause

by Brian Wiprud

  People are sometimes floored that the bonefish are all released. Yet golfing is not about eating golf balls. True to their name, bonefish are so bony that the meat has to be completely picked through by hand before being made into cakes, and the taste is mild and unremarkable.

  The tactics of bonefishing involve the angler or his guide spotting the fish and then determining where the fish are, how many there are, and what direction they are traveling. With some experience, the angler can see the fish once they come within casting range, and he can attempt to cast his shrimp-like fly three or four feet ahead of the lead fish.

  I have no doubt that any guide would say the number one mistake anglers make with bonefish is how they hook them. The fish is following the fly, you strip, strip, strip—tug. That little tug should be answered with a long strip to hook the fish. The temptation is to raise the rod to hook the fish, but that doesn’t work for some reason. I’ve had guides explain that it is because of the way the fish’s mouth is angled down. I don’t get that.

  Once the fish is hooked the angler has about two seconds to get ready for the fish to rocket across the flats. At first hooking, the fish runs some tight circles, which is the time when the angler needs to ready his line. Because reels are not used in the retrieve of the fly, there’s a lot of loose fly line on the deck of the boat or on the water. When a fish takes and zooms away, that line jumps into the air and races through the rod’s guides after the quarry. The angler has to manage how fast the line travels and in what direction so that it doesn’t wrap around the reel and halt. When that happens, the fish breaks off. Once the loose line whips through the guides, the angler lowers the rod and lets line peel off the reel. Now the angler is fishing from the reel, which has the capacity to put the brakes on a racing fish by controlling how fast it lets the line roll off the reel.

  Then there are those sharks that will follow and seek out bonefish in ankle-deep water. When you see one chasing your fish the guide will usually tell you to lower your rod and let the fish run from the shark. That usually doesn’t work as well as snapping the fish off. Either way, the fish is tired and the shark is not and dinner is pretty much served. This doesn’t happen every day, but every week or so I’d reel in half a fish. Bernard’s Cay had a lot of sharks.

  The first time I went out by myself bonefishing, I stepped out into a grassy flat with a large white sand area in the middle that was right next to shore. My plan was to eye the sand for fish coming in off the grass. I was only about ten feet from the beach—the water just topping my boots—scanning the sand, waiting. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement—three bonefish had come around behind me about a foot from shore. The water was less than six inches deep—that’s how shallow these fish can go. I froze. They swam by a couple feet from my legs, their eyes considering me, probably figuring I was an ugly piece of driftwood. They wandered away about thirty feet from me into the center of the white sand and began nosing the bottom. I flipped my fly next to them and one slammed it. That was the first fish I caught on my own.

  By November, I used guides only a day or two a week. I’d gotten good enough to guide myself without letting the fish sneak up on me. I would bicycle to flats close to the island and wade them. Even with all the clothing and headgear, I was brown as a nut, and my feet were calloused and toes splayed. Full beard. Shaggy brown hair, with a gray streak. I’d gone native.

  I had a lot of time by myself to reflect on everything that happened. In the evenings I would return to the lodge, where I had a room. Meals were served and there was a bar where the other anglers who came and went spent their evenings. I did too, sometimes.

  A beer at my side, I was in the bar but at the fly-tying table off to one side. This is the setup for tying feathers, fake fur, and plastic fibers onto hooks to imitate the small shrimp and crab that the fish eat. I was working on a new pattern. There were four anglers at the bar swapping stories when the lodge owner came in. Her name was Tim, a handsome brunette with large blue eyes, business-like most of the time, but she knew how to swap stories and jokes with the men. And of course she could be seductive when she wanted to be. I first met her at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center. She was one of the counselors. I got to Portsmouth two months before Trudy was admitted, and Tim and I hit it off. I suppose it wasn’t very professional, or discreet. No matter—I didn’t really know Trudy at the hospital, just knew who she was, so it wasn’t until later that we bumped into each other in Edgewater and fell in love.

  Tim and I were friends first, lovers second. So I thought. I was the one who broke it off when I learned she was also my handler, and that I had been handled. Didn’t keep me from doing missions, though, once I got over it, once Phil Greene bought it. Or from coming in from the cold when things got too hot. She may have become a lodge owner and fly instructor, but she was also still a handler. I had no idea how many others she tended.

  “Mike, you working on the permit fly again? I saw you wading Turtle Bight again.”

  “The crabs out there are different near the mangroves than they are out on the flat.”

  “You see your permit again?”

  “I did.”

  “He refuse your fly again?”

  “He did.”

  Unlike bonefish, a permit is a large, silver, disc-shaped fish with back, flowing fins top and bottom, a large eye, and a forked tail. They like to eat crabs and can be very hard to catch. When they feed on the flats their big forked tail waggles in the air as they nose the bottom.

  I looked up from the fly I had just finished. “He showed up on the incoming tide and poked around those outer mangroves, the ones out by themselves. I cast a Merkin crab fly to him again and he turned and gave it a good look before wandering back to the deep water. So I went over to those outer mangroves and chased up some crabs with my foot. They’re a little purple, I think as camouflage around the mangrove roots. Gum?”

  “Thanks.” Tim pulled a stick from the pack. “Give her a go. You might tie in some of that new synthetic material to the next one, the leggy stuff. Permit like that. I’ll have the guides stay away from there on the incoming tide until you and that permit work things out.”

  “Thanks, Tim.” Put another hook in the fly-tying vise, and began wrapping thread along the shank with the bobbin.

  “So how does San Diego sound? There are lots of apartments and condos with decks there, lots of money and jewelry.”

  I paused. “West Coast, hm?”

  “East Coast is done for you for a long while. We have people in San Diego who can set you up.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Tim. “Is momma bird kicking me out of the nest?”

  She stuck out her lower lip and looked at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t say that. But you can’t stay indefinitely. You know you have to redeploy sometime.”

  And if I didn’t?

  “What’s the fly fishing like there?”

  “Just so-so. But you have the Pacific at your feet, plenty of places to travel pretty easily from there. Baja, Fiji, Vanuatu. There they go after other fish, bigger ones. And there are plenty of beautiful women there. I know Trudy was special, but you have to put that behind you at some juncture. I don’t think you need me to suggest that the next gal in your life should not join you in your missions. You can’t say we didn’t warn you last time. It isn’t in The Clause.”

  “When were you thinking I should go?”

  “I’ve got your tickets for next week.”

  “I think I just fell out of the nest. Anything I should know?”

  “About what?”

  “This seems a little sudden.”

  “Sometimes the decisions come down that way. There may be a mission coming up there in San Diego, I don’t know. Tie your flies, and go get that permit.” Tim stroked my cheek and went to the bar to chat up her angler guests.

  I finished the fly I was working
on, bought a bourbon, and took it to my room. I was asleep a half-hour later.

  Fifty-one

  The morning before I was supposed to leave it was sunny with a light breeze. Good conditions. My bags were all packed, my flight left around noon.

  One last time I saddled the bicycle and headed out to Turtle Bight—I hadn’t seen a permit since tying my purple crab pattern. While wading out to that clump of mangroves, I was reminded of another Western. It was a funny one, about an ambitious, sarcastic gunslinger, played by James Garner, who was passing through a town. Of course, the townspeople hire him to be their sheriff to protect them from a local gang. He throws one of the gang in a jail—a jail with no bars around the holding cell—and manages to scare the inmate into staying put. The rest of the gang begin a series of attempts to break out their comrade but are undone by the gunslinger in inventive ways, like sticking his finger in the end of a pistol. Of course the gang is foiled, and the town is happy, but all along this gunslinger had been warning the townsfolk that he had only taken the sheriff job temporarily because—ultimately—he was on his way to Australia. It’s a better movie than it sounds. I liked that part, though, where he’s always telling people that he’s on his way to Australia. The commitment to a personal agenda over the expectations of others sat right with me.

  Sure enough, as the flats at Turtle Bight flooded with the incoming tide, I saw the dorsal fin of that permit slice the water’s surface as he came into the shallows, headed for that mangrove clump with the purple crabs. I put my new crab fly in the air, cast it next to the clump, and then waited for that permit to draw near enough to see it. I knew where he was headed, so why not get the crab cued up and in place before the permit got there? Less chance of spooking the fish.

  The permit went to the far side of the clump first, and I lost sight of him. I thought maybe he’d eaten and left when that tail flopped into the air near my fly. I leaned forward and gave the line a small strip.

  The tail turned, angled at my fly.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi …

  Another small strip.

  He followed.

  Another small strip.

  Tug.

  Big strip.

  That tail slammed the water and the shallows exploded. The permit shot out toward deep water, my reel screaming as the line peeled off.

  On the second run the permit wrapped me on that mangrove and escaped.

  I’d rather have landed the fish, but I’d fooled him. I’d figured it out and made it happen.

  Reeling up, I headed to shore at the point. Crunching over the beach litter, I turned the corner of the brush.

  There was a man in what looked like a mechanic’s jumpsuit standing at the water’s edge. His back was toward me.

  Hair: short and gray.

  Neck: pale, a white man.

  He stood very straight looking out to sea.

  I slowed. “Hello?”

  He turned.

  One half of his face was badly scarred, the ear gone. He held out his right hand and there was a piece of wrinkled paper in it.

  I stopped a few paces away.

  “Your gum wrapper.” The accent was Eastern European.

  It was Vugovic.

  The first seconds I don’t remember. I know I saw the flash of a knife but I can’t picture it. I felt the icy slash across my chest.

  My memory clicks in mid-dash down the beach toward the point. My eyes saw blood on my chest. My ears heard him behind me, grunting as he ran. My nose smelled my own perspiration. I veered into the skinny water hoping that would trip him up. He was just strides behind me.

  I turned the corner of the point, around a clump of mangrove.

  Tim was standing on the beach, in cutoffs and a black bikini top, wide-eyed when she saw me. In one hand she held a spear gun.

  I vectored away from her out along a spit of sand into a little less skinny water.

  To run in the water like that is hard and I didn’t know how long I could keep it up. You have to lift your feet as high as possible to keep from tripping.

  Shark: dead ahead, in slightly deeper water, the black form unmistakable.

  I was bleeding.

  I was splashing.

  That dark shape with the fins out to either side changed course and vectored toward my path.

  He smelled the blood.

  He heard the thrashing.

  I began to curve back toward shore but found the water getting deeper. Next to shore was a draw, like a trench with deeper, darker water created by the tides. I tumbled forward and plunged head-first into it. Now I was bleeding and swimming, with a shark nearby. The draw was only twenty feet across. The beach was five feet beyond that.

  It was exactly like those dreams when you’re being chased but struggle to move, the danger closing in, the desperation at the boiling point. This was a nightmare, but I was not asleep.

  Water was up to my armpits, and the muddy bottom clung to my feet. I could only hear my own gasps and splash as I lunged through the draw for that shore.

  Dragging myself into the shallow on the far side, I shot a look behind me, expecting to see the jaws of a shark or the flash of Vugovic’s knife at my feet.

  I didn’t.

  Vugovic was on the far edge of the draw, knee deep, knife in one hand, the other arm contorted, reaching for his back. He pivoted, and I saw the white shaft of the fish spear just below the shoulder blade where he couldn’t quite reach it, his blood mingling in the water with mine.

  In the distance beyond him was Tim watching from shore. Her spear gun: empty.

  Between them, a dark shape angled through the water and shot toward Vugovic.

  The first shark rolled and took Vugovic down by the one knee. He twisted and stabbed the shark in the head with his knife.

  Now there was even more blood in the water. Dark shapes vectored in from all sides.

  The second shark got him from the other side. It was only a three-footer, but with one swipe it ripped all the muscle from Vugovic’s upper arm as he was trying to stand up. He fell back to his knees, head just above the water.

  Those flat, depraved eyes locked on mine—not the shark’s.

  Vugovic’s.

  He grinned.

  He grinned like what was happening to him was nothing.

  He grinned like I was too weak to understand that being ripped apart by sharks didn’t faze him.

  Vugovic grinned because he was superior, and always would be.

  The next shark was larger, maybe a five-footer, and it rolled up out of the water and clamped its vice of white teeth onto Vugovic’s face with an audible crunch.

  The water erupted in blood, arms, legs, and fins as Vugovic was pulled under. More dark shapes vectored in for their share. Vugovic was still fighting even though the big shark had him by the head, its tail whipping back and forth above the water. A large, dark shape approached the draw to my right, and I scrambled the rest of the way onto shore in time to watch the six-footer turn away from me and veer toward Vugovic.

  Or what was left of him. Different sharks were fighting over different parts of the body by then, tails lashing the surface of the water.

  That Vugovic had managed to find me, that he had escaped the FBI, that this shitbag had tracked me all the way to that cay, that he had been following me for days to know to find me on that remote beach … all just to kill me … it was beyond terrifying. Gum wrapper?

  Tim approached.

  “Nasty cut you got there, sport.”

  I just shot her a look of dismay, my breathing all gasps.

  “You got sloppy, Gill. You dropped this back there on the beach.” She sat next to me and held out the gum wrapper.

  I managed to focus on it. My handwriting was on the wrapper, and i
t was the address of the fly shop in Manhattan. I didn’t even remember writing it down. But Vugovic must have found it at the Plaza, in my saddle bag.

  “Here, let me help you off with that shirt.” Tim ripped the shirt open, backed it off my arms, soaked it in sea water, and rolled it. “Hold this against the cut.”

  I did as instructed, still trying to get my breath back. “How did you … what were you …”

  “Gee, funny thing happened last week. We got word that Vugovic had been released. By accident.”

  “By accident?”

  “Yeah, pretty amazing. Somehow the ICE computers told them he was free to go.”

  Mouth open, my face contorted. “What?”

  “Even stranger, his name didn’t register on the No Fly List when he took the flight to Nassau.”

  “How is all this possible?”

  “How is anything possible?” She shrugged. “Our guess is that the NSA subsystem profiled you when the FBI started looking into Gill Underwood and decided that you were a liability to the intelligence community.”

  “Why would it think that?”

  “The odds. The odds were that coming to the notice of the FBI and making yourself a target threatened exposure.”

  Seemed to me it was the agency that put me in that situation.

  “What would someone at the NSA care if a handyman for the CIA is exposed?”

  “Not someone. The subsystem. It cares because it considers itself the guardian of all U.S. intelligence ops. Things have changed, Gill. Not like it used to be. Same as with us, there has to be a huge disconnect for X50 ops to continue undetected. That’s why we don’t even tell you what your mission is. We just put you in the situation and you figure it out. If the NSA subsystem operates on its own, there’s no paper trail, it covers up for itself and deletes X50 ops as it goes, and what people at the NSA don’t know can’t hurt them. Plausible deniability inside and out.”