by Lou Cameron
But it didn’t. Not right away. Captain Gringo and Gaston heard the signal, but knew they’d have to wait a few minutes for results. They were not the only ones who heard the pistol shot, of course. So Don Diego came back out on his veranda and called out to demand who was making all the damned noise while he was trying to sleep. His scattered guards looked blank. Then one called out, “I’ll go have a look, Patron! It sounded like it came from the powerhouse!”
Captain Gringo muttered, “Shit,” as the guard started ambling across the field the way he wasn’t supposed to be going, fortunately slowly. Then he stopped and turned as, from the veranda, Don Diego screamed, “Oh, no! My house is on fire!”
That had been the general idea. As planned, the overloaded, fuseless wires in the walls of the plantation house were spitting sparks and igniting dozens of electrical fires all through the house by now. But Montez knew only that his house was on fire and kept yelling at his men to do something about it, muy pronto.
They all ran for the house at once, abandoning their work gangs for the moment, and so, as they all bunched up in one place, Captain Gringo rose to his feet, braced the Maxim on his hip, and opened up on them with a deadly stream of hot lead!
It worked pretty good. As half or more fell writhing to the ground, Don Diego and the others dashed into the house for cover, which wasn’t such a great idea with the house on fire and Captain Gringo raking the frame walls with slugs no tin or wooden siding was about to slow down enough to matter.
Meanwhile, Forsythe popped out of the treeline farther down and called out, “Come to Papa, Children!” as he waved the confused and frightened workers his way. They didn’t all run home to Papa. But the ones who just ran were moving out of the Maxim’s way, so it evened out. Captain Gringo popped the fresh belt Gaston handed him into his hot weapon and, with a clear field of fire now, proceeded to chop hell out of the plantation house while the fire helped a lot by bursting out through his many bullet holes.
Don Diego was on fire too as he ran out screaming like a stuck pig with two others following, also dressed in burning rags. The others were still waving guns. So Captain Gringo dropped them with one burst as Don Diego ran on a few yards, fell face down among his opium poppies, and rolled over and over, screaming in agony. Captain Gringo didn’t shoot him. They didn’t owe the fat prick any favors.
The big Yank shouldered the smoking Maxim and said, “That should do it. Let’s go.” So they did, calling out for Forsythe to join them. The big Jamaican’s voice sounded strained as he called out from the jungle, “I can’t, Mon. I don’t feel so good right now.”
They found him sitting against a tree trunk, holding both hands to his guts. Captain Gringo dropped the Maxim and knelt to see how bad he was hit. He was hit pretty bad. Captain Gringo asked, “Jesus, how did that happen, Jamaica?”
Forsythe replied, “Beats the shit out of me, Mon. One minute I was waving at everybody and the next thing I knew I was on my ass with one hell of a tummy ache! I hope you got the one who winged me, Mon.”
He wasn’t winged. He was dying. But Captain Gringo said, “We must have. They hardly got off any shots at all before they were on the ground roasting. Where did all the workers go, Jamaica?”
“Hell, how should I know, Mon? When they seen me go down they just kept running. That’s … gratitude … for … Oh, shit!” And then he let go to spill blood and guts in his lap as he slumped over sideways, dead.
Gaston said softly. “He was a good man, non?”
Captain Gringo said, “Don’t rub it in. It was a one-in-a-million lucky shot. We’ll leave him here for now. We have to speak to a lady about a submarine she owes us.”
*
The Spanish wreck was right where Fisi had said it was. They’d never have found it without native help. The long gray metal cigar rested on the shallow bottom of the once more land-locked lake with a good thirty feet of rocky beach between its stem and the open sea. Its decks were awash but, as Fisi had said, the conning tower and deck were high and dry. The decking was less than knee deep under the placid surface, and a dark doorway set in the side of the conning tower stood agape, as if in sinister welcome.
There was no anchorage for the schooner near enough to matter, so Captain Gringo and the others working for Hakim had to leg it over with their gear. He wasn’t sure it was such a hot idea to bring the two wives along. But when Herta and Eva heard that they meant to make camp by the wreck and work through the night if need be, they insisted on coming along. The Greek crewmen who helped them carry the gear over were smarter. They all went back to the Peirene and Antigone’s cooking.
As Herta and Eva started putting pots and pans on the campfire by the hidden lake and Horgany, DuVal, and Olsen pitched the tents and piled the gear neater, Captain Gringo, Gaston, and Keller paddled out to the wreck in a dugout provided by their spooky Black Carib friends. They had to paddle their own canoe because once the natives had shown them the place they’d all run off to avoid its obeah. Even after they’d given her a swell spooky skeleton suit Fisi insisted the wreck was cursed and that they were on their own.
As the dugout bumped against the submerged steel hull and Gaston leaped aboard in ship-deep water to secure it, Keller sniffed and said, “My God, what’s that awful smell?”
Captain Gringo said, “Obeah. I sure hope you guys can tell what went wrong without having to go below. Don’t bodies pickled in salt water smell swell?”
As they all got aboard, sort of splashy, Keller waded about a bit and said, “The hull seems sound enough, topside. I don’t see how they could have taken green water aboard, even in a bad storm, even with that one hatch open.”
“I was afraid you’d say we have to look at the bottom. I wonder if we can get at it from inside. Unless that was an awfully big minnow I just saw over that way, the storm trapped some sharks in here as well. I doubt they’ve been getting much to eat in here, cut off from the sea so long.” He waded to the open hatch, looked in, and added, “Oh boy!”
The inside of the conning tower was of course flooded shin deep. But that wasn’t what bothered him. The two bare bloated corpses floating face down in the fetid water looked too rotten to move without having them fall apart and stink even worse.
Keller gagged at the reek of rotting flesh but was man enough to sniff and say, “I don’t smell any chlorine now.” So Captain Gringo said, “By now the batteries have been washed clean. Unfortunately for these two Black Caribs, they came aboard too soon. The rest of the crew must be below, unless some got over the side to feed the sharks a light snack. It looks like you’re going to need your diving gear, Keller. Unless you can tell something from the few pipes and gauges I see in here.”
Keller muttered something about his hard hat and pump as he stepped inside gingerly, avoiding the dead natives, for an examination of the little visible evidence. Captain Gringo and Gaston remained outside. They didn’t know beans about submarines and the smell was bad enough on the shin-deep deck.
Keller soon came out, gasping for air, and said, “Nothing. Nobody opened any wrong valves. Not that I’d have expected them to. They were running on their internal-combustion engines when they went aground in here. That’s no surprise, either. They’d never have found this inlet had they been running submerged on their batteries on a dark stormy night.”
“The batteries were fucked up with sea water anyway, right?”
“We don’t know that. The sea water may not have gotten to them before they grounded. If you want an educated guess, I’d say it appears they ran for what they thought was shelter, grounded on a rocky bottom, and sprang a leak. Probably not such a bad one, if there was time for anyone to get out, with the flooded batteries generating poison gas inside.”
Gaston looked down at his submerged feet and said, “Merde alors, I’d never call what happened a slow leak!”
Keller shrugged and said, “It’s been here long enough to fill with water from a bathtub tap. I’ll know more once I have a look below with my d
iving gear. But I don’t think we have much of a mystery here. The Spanish crew displayed just plain poor seamanship. They’d have been all right if they’d just ridden out the storm in a watertight vessel. But they chose to run it aground on rocks, like greenhorns.”
Captain Gringo said, “We’ll have to do better than that if we expect Hakim to pay us off. The Spanish navy may or may not have been dumb enough not to pick a crack crew after spending so much money for this cigar. But I’m betting her skipper had his reasons for putting in here and I imagine Hakim wants to know why, too.”
So they went ashore to break out Keller’s diving outfit. But it just didn’t seem to be Keller’s day. He swore in rage as he hefted his hard hat and said, “The goddamned glass plates are missing! Who in the hell could have stolen them, and why?”
As the others gathered around, concerned, Captain Gringo took the helmet from Keller to examine and growled, “The who was our mystery guest in the hold the other night. The why is easier. Nobody would notice clear glass missing, down there in the dim light. The glass wasn’t broken out. I can see the bastard simply unscrewed them quietly. I’d say someone doesn’t want us looking too closely at that wreck’s pressure hull, unless we have a mad glass collector among us.”
The others started looking at one another uncertainly. Then Herta Keller asked, “Couldn’t it have been that Greek, Socrates? He’s missing, too, nicht wahr?”
“That might work,” Captain Gringo said dubiously.
Keller said, “We don’t know he drowned. There was that other schooner skulking somewhere near us, and if he just dove overboard with a life jacket or a float—”
“He could have been that brave, or dumb about sharks,” said Captain Gringo, “but we’re not going to be able to ask him about it now. How long would it take to cut new helmet ports if Venezis can spare us some glass, Keller?”
“Are you crazy? That wasn’t window glass the son of a bitch stole from my helmet, dammit! It would be suicide to dive without the original tempered, shatterproof ports!”
Horgany suggested, “The water out there isn’t very deep. Perhaps if we tried simply swimming down with our eyes open underwater, eh?”
Keller told him he was crazy, too, and Captain Gringo had to agree to the extent of mentioning the shark or more he’d spotted circling the wreck. Then he said, “Of course, if a guy who enjoyed holding his breath a lot were to swim down inside the hull, with a waterproof flashlight—”
Keller said, “Be my guest. Aside from God knows what sort of wreckage clogging the passages down there, the other dead bodies should be lots of fun to swim through!”
Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “I’d be no good down there. I wouldn’t know what to look for, even if I managed not to drown. Hakim wants a report on the tub’s naval architecture, not heroics.”
Olsen said he was willing to try. Captain Gringo didn’t ask the big Swede if he could swim. He asked if he was a naval architect. When Olsen said he just knew guns and engines, the American told him to forget it, explaining, “We know their engines were running, until they ran out of ocean. The question is why they made for the nearest uncharted shallows when they could have simply submerged and ridden the storm out below the wave surge.”
Keller said, “Maybe they were just chicken. It’s sort of hard to get used to the idea of sinking your vessel on purpose, so, if the skipper was an old clipper-ship type—”
“I doubt that,” Captain Gringo cut in, adding, “Hakim says Spain already paid good money for that vessel. No navy accepts a new ship without sea trials conducted by its own people. So Spain has to have at least a few guys who know how to dive a submarine, and it just doesn’t figure they’d put a total jerk-off in command of their one and only sub!”
Before anyone could offer any further suggestions, Gaston swore and pointed out to sea, shouting, “Regardez!” So when Captain Gringo turned to look he got to swear, too. A schooner was cruising just off shore. It was not the Peirene.
Herta Keller screamed, “Oh mein Gott! We have to get out of here before they see us!”
But Captain Gringo said, “They might not, if we don’t all yell at them at once. From out where they are, this should look like just a shallow cove, thanks to the rocky bank between the lake and sea. Let’s just keep our heads and let ’em sail by. If they’d spotted us they’d be heaving to, so no sudden movements, and, yeah, they do seem to be moving on. But we’d better send a runner to warn Venezis.”
DuVal said, “I’ll go. I once won some foot races as a schoolboy. But what are your orders, M’sieur?”
“Tell the Greeks to get the hell out of their cove and circle back for us after dark. If those clowns out there don’t spot anything too interesting, they should have given up on this island by then. Don’t bother coming back, DuVal. Just get going. There’s just about time if you run like hell!”
He and most of the others were staring after DuVal as the Frenchman tore into the trees, of course. So Captain Gringo’s back was turned to Horgany and Eva when he heard two shots in rapid succession! He whirled and went down on one knee as he drew his .38 to see Horgahy on the ground with Eva standing over him with her own whore pistol in hand, smoking. Horgany held a bigger flare pistol in his dead hand, too. Before anyone could ask why, the flare he’d fired exploded high in the sky above him, and Captain Gringo said, “Oh, swell!”
Eva Horgany said, “I tried to stop him. The bastard was a German spy!”
Captain Gringo lowered the muzzle of his own gun politely but kept it handy as he asked the Hungarian girl what she was.
Eva said, “I was not his wife. He thought I was his mistress. He wasn’t Hungarian. He was a German who spoke enough Magyar to pose as one. But Hakim is hard to convince. So he paid me to seduce this two-faced rat and keep an eye on him.”
Gaston said, “I am sure you were well paid, M’mselle. But while we are standing here discussing the past misdeeds of a dead man, that trés fatigue ship out there seems to be turning about!”
Captain Gringo turned, holstered his revolver, and sighed. “When you’re right you’re right. Come on, let’s get back out there in the canoe. I mean now, Gaston!”
As the soldiers of fortune ran for the dugout, Captain Gringo called back to the other men, “Get yourselves and the women back in the jungle. Far. If this doesn’t work, a lot of shells should be landing around here any minute!”
As they paddled for the submarine, Gaston said, “Ah, oui, I see the plan. But how am I to fire that adorable deck gun with no shells, Dick?”
“There’s a rack of seventy-fives in the conning tower. I noticed them before, but didn’t think we’d ever need them this bad! Can’t you paddle any faster, dammit?”
“Not when you insist on going the wrong way. That schooner’s heaving to out there and they could have even heavier deck guns, non?”
“Shit, they don’t even know what they’re aiming for. They just stopped to figure out what that flare was all about. So we should still have surprise on our side.” They bumped against the submarine and leaped out to wade for the conning tower.
Captain Gringo said, “Get on the gun and aim it, dammit! I’ll only be a jiffy with the ammo.”
He didn’t take that long. As he sloshed toward Gaston and the deck gun with a heavy clip of four shells, the little Frenchman swung the German-made barrel seaward at the no-doubt German-made schooner and said, “Voilà, I can just hold them in my sights without hitting that stupid conning tower, if they don’t move behind it on me!”
He opened the breech. Captain Gringo braced the shell clip between his legs and slammed the first one home, asking, “What are you waiting for?”
Gaston said, “Stand clear,” and pulled the lanyard.
It didn’t work as planned. The deck gun fired swell. But the steel deck it, and they, were standing on peeled up and away like the lid of a sardine can, sending the soldiers of fortune ass over teakettle over the bows and into the water!
The shock of
cold brine closing over his head and ringing ears revived the stunned Captain Gringo enough to start swimming fast. It seemed to take forever. But in truth he’d made it to the shallows and was helping the groggy Gaston ashore before any shark in the neighborhood recovered from its own no-doubt ringing ears. Gaston spat brine, coughed, and asked, “What happened?”
Captain Gringo waited until they were back on dry land before he said, wheezing, “I think they should have used more rivets on that deck.”
They staggered toward the piled supplies. Nobody else was still about, of course. Captain Gringo picked up his machine gun, propped it over the piled boxes with its muzzle pointed seaward, and armed it. Gaston picked up a rivet that had flown all this way, shrugged, and said, “So much for German engineering. But why are you pointing that stupid weapon out to sea, Dick?”
“They’re hoisting a parley flag out there. Have you got something white to wave?”
Gaston pulled some bedding from one of the sleeping bags they hadn’t gotten to use here after all and proceeded to wave it back and forth, but said, “Oui, this should do it. But why argue when it’s so simple to just run, Dick?”
“Run where? Now that those fucks know we’re here, they can just lob shells at this little rock until it sinks. Heads up. They’ve seen our bed sheet. They’re putting a boat over the side.”
The soldiers of fortune waited until the landing party from the mystery ship grounded on the barrier beach. Then as the eight men from the longboat stood marveling at the hidden lake and wreck between them and the forted-up soldiers of fortune, Captain Gringo fired a short burst of automatic fire to show them he wasn’t a sissy before he called out loudly, “Over here. We’ll talk to just one of you!”
The distant figures went into a huddle. Then one started walking around the lake alone, hands polite. Captain Gringo waited until he’d made it around to their side and gotten within speaking distance before he snapped, “Far enough. State your name and business, pal.”
The man, dressed in ordinary seaman’s clothes but standing as if he had a ramrod up his ass, clicked his heels and said, “I am an officer and a gentleman. I am not at liberty to tell you more.”