Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Shee-it.” We had at last taken off from Nassau and were banking north to where three American warships sliced white water. I opened us each a beer, then idly unfolded the aviation chart that the Maggot had stuck down between our seats. It looked very different to a nautical chart and made little sense to me, but I gradually deciphered some of the meaning from its weird markings.

  “You ain’t going to have fun,” the Maggot said suddenly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You ain’t going to have fun with two goddamn cocaine addicts. That stuff is the hardest to kick.”

  “So the senator told me.”

  “And there ain’t no magic pill that will do it.” Maggovertski sounded unusually sombre. He lit a cigarette. “I hate cocaine,” he said finally, and he surprised me by saying it for the Maggot had always struck me as one of life’s rebels. If he discovered a new rule he would immediately seek a way of breaking it, and I had assumed that he would have some sympathy with those who flouted the laws against drugs, yet there was no denying the genuine anger in his voice when he talked of cocaine. He must have sensed my puzzlement, for he offered a reluctant explanation. “I knew a girl who got hooked on cocaine. She taught in a health club; aerobics, that kind of thing, and the next we knew she was wearing hot pants on a street corner in New York and strutting her stuff at the cars. Jesus, if you knew how hard we tried to get her off that damned powder.”

  “Did you succeed?”

  He paused, and finally shook his head. “Last time I saw her she was doing a peep-show in Pittsburgh. Hell, Nick, I tried to get her out of that place, but she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was shovel that crap up her nose, and if that’s how someone wants to pass their time, then there’s diddly-squat you can do to stop them.”

  He had sounded immensely sad as he spoke, and I wondered if the girl had meant more to him than being merely a casual friend, but I did not like to ask and Maggovertski was clearly disinclined to explain more, so I just stared down at the aerial chart, and I suddenly noticed, in an otherwise empty space beneath an intersection of two air corridors, the tiny island of Murder Cay. The chart, either printed before the government’s name change or else blithely ignoring it, noted the existence of a 2500-foot paved airstrip. “Is 2500 feet long for a runway?” I asked Maggot.

  “Two five? Short as a quarterback’s dick.” He was evidently still thinking of the girl, for the obscenity was automatic and his voice was clipped and distant.

  “Have you ever flown into Murder Cay?” I asked him.

  The big shaggy head turned to look at me. He frowned and sucked on his cigarette and I somehow got the impression that my question had annoyed him, but when he answered his voice was mild enough. “It’s a snakepit, Nick. Leave it alone.”

  “So who are the snakes?” I insisted.

  “The dickheads who bought the place, of course.” He paused to pull on his beer bottle which, emptied, he tossed out through the tiny triangular window at his left elbow. “I ran a couple of passengers there before the dickheads bought the island. It was a real nice place two years ago; nothing but luxury houses for the super-rich, but then the snakes bought it and they’ve painted a big yellow cross on their runway. You know what a big yellow cross on a runway means? It means keep away if you want to go on living.”

  “So who are the new owners?” I tried again.

  “Never been introduced to them, Nick.”

  “Drug people?”

  “Of course!” The Maggot assumed I had already known that.

  I looked down at the chart and saw that the island was not so very far off our course, and I knew that the Beechcraft was brim-full with fuel. “You fancy having a look at the island?”

  The Maggot laughed. “What’s made you feel suicidal? Did you get bored with waiting for Ellen to drop her panties?”

  “I’m just curious,” I said with as much innocence as I could muster, “but of course, if you’re scared of the place...”

  “Oh, damn you.” I had reckoned that an accusation of fear would sting the Maggot, and even before he interrupted me he had banked the plane westwards. He snatched the chart off my lap and worked out a crude course for the remote island. “So why do you want to stir the bastards up?” he grumbled.

  I told him about Hirondelle and how Deacon Billingsley had lied about the yacht’s fate, and I confessed that though there was nothing I could do about a corrupt policeman, nor about what I strongly suspected had been the murder of a yacht’s crew, I was still curious about the island.

  “Billingsley’s a bastard.” The Maggot, who had lived long enough in the Bahamas to learn and relish all the important gossip, growled the verdict. “You want to stay upwind of him.”

  “McIllvanney says that Billingsley owns a house on Murder Cay.”

  “That figures,” the Maggot said gloomily. “The dickheads know that the best way of keeping the Americans off their backs is by buying themselves a slice of the local law.” His disgruntled voice made it seem as though the precautions of the drug smugglers formed a personal affront to his patriotism.

  Yet if anyone’s patriotism should have been affronted by what happened in the islands, it was the Bahamians, for they were forced to endure the indignity of having another nation’s law-enforcement agencies operating in their waters. The islands had always been a smugglers’ paradise, and had proved a perfect place to stockpile cocaine before running it across the narrow Straits of Florida to the waiting American markets. The American government had pressed the Bahamians to clean out the drug lords, but instead the trade had flourished until the Americans finally insisted that their own coastguard be allowed to patrol Bahamian waters. A scintilla of Bahamian pride was preserved by the presence of a native officer on every American boat or helicopter, but no one really believed the polite fiction that the local officer was thus in command.

  “But we ain’t in command either,” the Maggot said sourly. “We can stop a boat at sea, but we sure as hell can’t put a foot on dry land without Bahamian permission. And you can bet your pretty ass that your policeman friend is making sure that permission to search Murder Cay is never given, or if it is, that the guys on the island are well warned before our boys get anywhere near.”

  “We?” It was so incongruous to hear the Maggot aligning himself with the forces of law that I was forced to ask the question. “Our boys?”

  “I keep thinking of that girl in Pittsburgh,” he said with a bitter ruefulness, “and how the bastards who run the peep-show have to put sawdust on the booth floors every hour. You don’t get much lower than that, Nick, and if anyone wants to kick the balls of the people who put her there, then those are my guys.” He paused to light another cigarette, then nodded through his scratched windscreen. “I reckon that’s your snakepit, Nick.”

  Far ahead, and blurred by the heat haze, there was a bright green dot of an island ringed by coral-fretted water. No other land was visible. The Maggot turned in his seat and rummaged in his camera bag until he found a battered Nikon and a roll of black and white film. “Take some pictures for me. You never know, some customer might want a snap of Murder Cay one day.”

  By the time I had loaded the camera we were already close to the reefs that formed the Devil’s Necklace. The shadow of our plane skipped across the bright sea, then flickered over the outer coral. We were approaching the island from the south-east, coming with the wind at a height of six thousand feet. The island was shaped rather like an anchor. The airstrip, with its unfriendly yellow cross that warned strange aircraft from landing, had been built across the curved flukes of the anchor, which otherwise seemed to be covered in low scrub, slash pine and sea-grape. The surprisingly big houses were all built on the western side of the north-south shank of the anchor that was thick with palm trees and vivid with bright blue swimming pools. The rest of the shank was a long narrow golf course, punctuated with sand traps. I twisted in the seat to see that there were a dozen or so boats m
oored in the protected crook of the easternmost anchor fluke.

  The Maggot dipped the starboard wing to let me take a picture of the deep water channel that dog-legged in from the west. We flew above the skeletal radio mast and I stared down at the row of huge houses. No one and nothing stirred there.

  “They spent a fortune developing the place,” the Maggot said, “but the rich folks never came, so they sold it to the rich dickheads instead.” We flew out across the northern reefs.

  “One more pass?” I asked John.

  “Why not?”

  “And a bit lower?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” He had turned to fly around the eastern edge of the island’s encircling reefs and was now staring intently at the houses, searching for any signs of danger, but it seemed as though Murder Cay was deserted. “What the hell,” the Maggot said, and he wrenched the plane round in a tight turn until we were aimed plumb at the island’s southernmost tip, then he dropped the nose ready to make one high speed and low level pass above the Cay. “That’s friendly!” he shouted over the engine noise, and he pointed through the windscreen at the concrete airstrip which not only had the yellow cross painted huge at its western end, but also had two trucks parked in its centre line, thus making it impossible for any plane to land. Despite the obstructions it was clear that aircraft did use the runway, for it was marked by the black rubber streaks of fresh tyre marks, but the two trucks, together with the yellow cross, were evidence that the runway could only be used by invitation.

  We slashed across the shank of the island, then we were over the anchorage and I had a glimpse of a sailing boat’s shadow black on the bed of the lagoon before our own winged shadow whipped across a gaggle of powerboats. We were going too fast to see any details of the moored vessels so I just snapped a random photograph and, at the very same instant, the Maggot swore and banked and rammed the throttles hard forward.

  We were side-slipping, starboard wing down, falling to earth with our engines howling. I flailed for support as the camera flew up to the padded ceiling. The Maggot whooped, dragged the stick back and our earthwards wing lifted and suddenly we were screaming just above the palm trees, close to the tiled roofs and at a speed that seemed to be doubled because of our proximity to the ground. The camera, re-entering the world of normal gravity, dropped hard beside my shoes. Beer bottles were everywhere. One broke, shattering liquid across the side windows. I had a glimpse of a fair-haired girl staring wide-eyed and terrified from a tennis court, her racket held loose by her side and tennis balls scattered at her feet and, though the trees and buildings and gardens were nothing but a high-speed blur, my mind nevertheless registered with a startling clarity that the girl had been completely naked. The plane’s engines were screaming. We whipped over the northernmost house, across the beach, and thus out to sea again. “What the hell?” I managed to ask.

  “They fired at us! goddamn tracer bullets! Jesus!” The Maggot did not seem scared, but rather stung by the challenge. We were over the lagoon now, racing towards the northern strands of the Devil’s Necklace, but low enough so that the wash of our twin propellers was whipping the blue water into a wake of white-hazed foam. “Shee-it!” The Maggot said with inappropriate exultation, then twisted his head to stare back at the island. “Let’s go see them again!”

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” I asked, but I might as well have saved my breath because the plane suddenly climbed, banked, then began descending fast towards the island again. The Maggot was growling to himself, relishing the confrontation. Sunlight reflected from a window among the palm trees to lance a sliver of dazzling light at our cockpit, then the reflection was gone and we were at sea level, engines screaming, and I fumbled for the camera, prayed it had not broken when it fell from the ceiling, and took another picture just before Maggot lifted the aircraft’s nose so that we swooped up and over the palm trees that edged the beach.

  He jinked left, then right, throwing the plane into such steep and sudden turns that I was alternately jerked hard against the cockpit’s side window and then against his broad shoulder. The Maggot was not taking evasive action but quartering the ground in search of our enemy. “There!” he said abruptly and threw the plane straight again, but this time dropping the nose, and I saw a jeep churning dust from the dirt road which ran the length of the island’s long shank, between the golf course and the houses, and just as I saw the jeep so the red tracer bullets began climbing from a machine-gun mounted in the back of the vehicle.

  “Oh, Jesus wept,” I said, snapped a last picture, then ducked down in momentary expectation of the windscreen shattering into a million bright scraps.

  “Fuck you,” the Maggot screamed at whoever fired at him and I looked out of the Beechcraft’s side window to see palm trees going past at over 150 miles an hour and above us. Above us. Truly. And I thought it really had been a very good life, a fun life, despite Ellen never having gone to bed with me, and I wondered if my father would even notice my death, then the Maggot whooped with glee, hauled back on the stick, and our plane was screaming up into the wide blue lovely bullet-free sky and the Maggot was laughing and slapping my shoulder. “Wasn’t that just the best goddamned fun you can have this side of a blanket?”

  “Was it?”

  “You missed it?” He sounded aggrieved and astonished.

  “Missed what?”

  “I ran that turkey clean off the road! Shit, but I gave that bastard a headache!”

  “I think you gave me one too,” I said, then, very gingerly, I straightened up and twisted round to see that Murder Cay was far behind us and well out of machine-gun range. “You’re mad,” I courteously informed John Maggovertski.

  He laughed. “You’re the one who wanted to see the island.” We were gently circling northwards now, heading for home. “So now you’ve seen it.”

  I tried to relax, letting the cold air from the vent cool the sweat from my face. My right hand shook as I remembered the sudden fear of seeing the crimson tracer flick up from the ground. “Hell!” I protested. “They can’t just open fire!”

  The Maggot grinned through the black tangle of his beard.

  “Nick, they are richer than your wettest dreams, and like all the very rich they think they are above the law.” He was speaking very casually, but I saw that his right hand, like mine, was shaking. It is not pleasant to be shot at, and even the pleasure of being missed is spoilt by the mind’s habit of constructing alternative scenarios; if the machine-gunner had been a bit quicker to react, or had led us with more skill, we would now be nothing but a heap of molten metal somewhere in the sea-grape. The Maggot shook his head. “Do you have any idea just how rich these people are?”

  “Very, I imagine.”

  “There’s an island not far from here that has just two thousand inhabitants, and last year, Nick, according to a banker I sometimes fly to Miami, those two thousand dirt poor and unemployed islanders deposited 24.3 million dollars in the one and only bank on their impoverished little island.” The Maggot laughed. “Not bad, eh? And I do not believe that 24.3 million dollars a year is the average reward for selling coconut milk and conch shells to honky tourists. That money is pure commission, Nick, a mere ten per cent of the value of the cocaine that was stored on their island while it awaited transportation to the good old US of A; and neither you, nor I, nor even the dickheads in the Drug Enforcement Administration will ever know just how much money was not put in the bank, but stored in paper bags under the bed.” He sounded depressed by the thought, but then cheered himself up by asking me for a beer.

  I opened two bottles that I retrieved from the sticky mess on the cabin floor. We flew the rest of the way home in silence. It was not till we saw the captive aerostat balloon with its ever watching radar that the Americans had hoisted over Grand Bahama to probe for boats or aircraft smuggling drugs, that the Maggot again spoke, and by then he had recaptured all his old insouciance. “At this time, if you’d care to fold up your tray table and extinguish your hopes, we sha
ll land this little sucker. Thank you for flying Maggovertski Airways; please return the stewardess her pantyhose, put her in the upright position, and kindly pray that the tyres don’t blow.”

  They did not, and thus I came back to Wavebreaker.

  I went back to the Maggot’s foul house, where he kept his killer dog and astonishing collection of guns, and we sat on his makeshift verandah that overlooked a noxious and polluted creek and shared a few whiskies as he told me an incredibly tedious tale of how he had once sacked the quarterback of the San Francisco Sugar Plums. I retaliated with detailed instructions on how to bowl off-breaks to left-handers on a drying pitch, and we eventually declared a truce as we watched the sun sink across the oil-storage tanks beyond the creek. He offered me his spare bed for the night, but I could not stand the stench of the creek, and I wanted to make an early start on the work I had to do on Wavebreaker, so I caught the bus to McIllvanney’s boatyard. Naturally no one was there and the gate was locked and the top of the fence was rimmed with razor-wire so I could not climb it. I had not kept my old key, because I had hoped that my association with Cutwater Charters was done, so I was forced to carry my heavy pack into the tangle of dark alleys that lay behind the straw market and where I planned to find Ellen and borrow her key.

  A tribe of stray cats scattered as I turned into the yard where Ellen’s apartment lay. The archway was bright with the brass plates of the dozens of corporations who were registered at the address to avoid paying tax in their home countries. The courtyard was inhabited by three tethered goats that stared malevolently at me. The open-air stairways were shadowed with creepers and flickering with the eerie lights of televisions that glowed from within the screened windows of the small apartments.