Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Is it that bad?” Julie asked.

  “It could be,” I said bleakly.

  Julie paused. “Is it to do with that trouble on Wavebreaker?” The gossip had clearly run the island’s waterfronts like wildfire, and I could not blame Julie for being curious, so I gave her a brief account of what had happened at Sea Rat Cay, and talking of it made me think of Jesse Sweetman and his peons, and of Thessy shot, and of Jackson Chatterton drowned, and of happiness snatched away. Not three weeks ago I had thought myself so close to paradise; with nothing but a boat to mend and a girl to take to the farthest corner of the world, but then the senator had persuaded me to help his kids and now I was bereft and close to utter despair. I took a pull at my beer that had at last warmed to a drinkable temperature. “If Ned had wanted a cook”—I was worrying at this one like a bad tooth—”would he have called for Ellen?”

  “Of course he would! Ned’s always had an eagle eye for a pretty girl.” Julie laughed with pleasure at the thought. “And if Gwen has had to leave Hobgoblin then he’ll be desperate because he’s got a dream of an off-season charter at the moment—a whole lot of scuba fanatics from Germany, and I know he’d love them to book again next year—but I tell you, Nick, he would have called me if there had been a real problem with Gwen because I’m the one who would have had to arrange her replacement.”

  “But not if you were in Nassau?”

  “He’d have called me!” she said patiently.

  It was hopeless. I stared down at the verandah’s wide floorboards as Julie tried to cheer me up. “She’ll turn up, Nick! Ellen’s an independent girl!”

  “Yeah, she’ll turn up,” I said without enthusiasm or belief.

  “You want some lunch? Soup and a spam sandwich? Warmed-up baby muck? Minced turnips and custard? Name your pleasure.”

  I shook my head. The gun was a hard lump in my back. “Can I use the phone?”

  “Go ahead.” She hospitably waved me towards the house.

  “It’s only to call a taxi.” I was reassuring her that I was not planning to call London.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the Maggot’s house.”

  “You don’t want to pay for a taxi.” She stood up. “We’ll pile the half-and-halves in the back of the van and I’ll drive you. It will be nice to see the Maggot’s ugly face again.”

  “I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

  “Shut up and hold this.” ‘This’ was the baby, which took one look at my face and burst into tears.

  I prayed to God the Maggot was home. I had searched everywhere and found nothing, but the Maggot had been with Ellen on the day she had disappeared so if anyone knew what had happened to her, then surely the Maggot was that person.

  If the Maggot himself was still alive. Which now we drove to find out.

  The Maggot’s house was built in a filthy section of a failed and dilapidated industrial park which was a wasteland of used cars, broken buildings, and toxic wastes. A tidal creek wound its way through this depressing landscape, but it would have been stretching matters to say that the creek was filled with water; it was in fact a noxious sludge of mud-edged chemical horror. The Maggot’s house overlooked this oil-slicked sump, in which his fishing boat was berthed, thus enabling him to boast of his ‘sea-views’. He claimed that the neighbourhood could only improve, and that its undoubted proximity to the sea made his ‘house’ into a prime investment.

  The prime investment had once been a frozen-food warehouse, which meant that its only windows were in the old upstairs offices facing the creek. The rest of the building had hugely thick concrete walls and heavy steel doors which suitably protected the Maggot’s rare collection of firearms. Yet even the Maggot was dimly aware that living within a concrete and steel box was not wholly desirable, so he had bought some lumber from one of the failed businesses in the industrial park and made himself a verandah on the creek side of the box. From the verandah he enjoyed a fine view of the oil-storage facilities on the far bank of the chemical soup.

  Julie braked outside this elegant dwelling that still carried a faded sign on its gate ordering deliveries to the left and collections to the right. There was no sign of the Maggot’s red Firebird, indeed the only sign of life was the Maggot’s immense Rottweiler that began barking and chewing at the chain-link fence as soon as Julie’s van stopped by the gate. I wound down the window. “Tatum! Shut your face!”

  Tatum was reputed to kill anyone who did not know his name, but merely slobbered over those who did. The dog now whined and writhed with the pleasure at being recognised. The huge beast certainly did not look starved, but that did not mean the Maggot was at home, for I knew he had an arrangement whereby someone came by and hurled offal over the fence when he was away. “The place looks kind of deserted,” Julie said uneasily. “Are you sure you want to wait here?”

  The place seemed more than deserted; there was even an air of menace in its stillness, but I was desperate to see the Maggot, so I said I would wait. “Will you let me pay for your petrol?” I asked Julie.

  “Get out of here, Nick Breakspear!” She laughed, offered me a kiss, then enjoined me not to be a stranger.

  I climbed into the heat as the half-and-halves chorused their obedient goodbyes. “Invite me to your wedding!” Julie shouted, then she grated the worn gears as she drove the half-and-halves off for the treat of an ice-cream.

  Tatum was shivering with the anticipation of having someone to swamp in dog-dribble. The gate was chained and padlocked, but I knew the Maggot kept the key under a chunk of concrete that anchored one of the fence posts, so I found it, let myself in, and was immediately assaulted by half a ton of amorous Rottweiler. It was like being raped by a fur-coated Sherman tank, but I fought the brute off and, inch by inch, made progress towards the verandah stairs. Tatum finally allowed me to climb to the broad deck with its seductive views across the skim of oil that made a shimmering prism of the creek’s surface. Bronco-Buster, the Maggot’s long-decked fishing boat, was berthed at the end of a short concrete wall that carried a sewage overflow pipe to its outfall into the creek. The smell of the sludge was fairly overpowering, but this was high summer and, as the Maggot liked to say, you could not expect a prime real-estate investment to have everything.

  A second key was hidden on one of the rafters that supported the verandah’s canvas roof. That second key fitted a padlock which secured what had once been an upstairs office window, and was now a makeshift entryway into the Maggot’s kitchen. I struggled through the metal frame, then helped myself to a beer from the refrigerator and a tin of tuna from a cupboard. A steel door led from the kitchen into the rest of the house, but the Maggot did not make the key to that door available to casual visitors. He reasoned that his friends were welcome to drop by when he was not at home and more than welcome to avail themselves of his verandah, kitchen, beer, and scenic views, but he would keep the rest of his house private, and thus the steel door stayed locked unless the Maggot was in residence.

  I opened the beer and the tuna, found a fork, and took my makeshift lunch back to the verandah. I extracted the gun from my waistband, not as a precaution, but because it was uncomfortable, and laid it on a wicker table. I sat in the Maggot’s favourite chair, which he had bought from a company that specialised in dismantling old aircraft; this particular chair had come from a Boeing B52’s cockpit and was wondrously comfortable.

  The oil-storage tanks quivered in the heat. The scum on the creek slowly curdled the shimmering oil. The tide was dropping, leaving a greasy gunge on the newly exposed rocks that lined the channel. Rats scuttled along the near bank. The Maggot liked to sit on this verandah with some of his guns and blow the rats away, but for every one he killed it seemed a dozen came back. That was another reason the Maggot liked this house; he could fire guns to his heart’s content and no one complained of the noise for no one lived anywhere near. A few people worked in what was left of the industrial park, but only the Maggot lived here. I drank the top off the
beer, and waited for the rest to reach a decent temperature. Tatum had gone to sleep in the shade under the verandah’s deck.

  A truck whined and rattled on the road that was hidden from me by the bulk of the Maggot’s house. Nothing more moved for a half-hour until a car came up the road, and I hoped it was the Maggot, but instead the car drove into the warehouse next door where solvents were stored. I went back to the aircraft seat and stared at the tank farm across the creek.

  I did not want to admit the possibility, but suppose Ellen was dead? Suppose the Maggot had died with her? Perhaps they had been ambushed after leaving the Literacy Project office when they were on their way to Addendum’s marina, except that surely such an ambush would have made the newspapers? So perhaps they were alive? Perhaps their car had been stopped and they had been taken away at gunpoint? Supposing she was alive and...I could not even face that contingency, and I momentarily closed my eyes tight as though I could drive the horror of such a fate out of my mind.

  Maybe nothing had happened to her? Maybe she had just wanted to visit her friends in America? Perhaps she had gone back to the university where she had taught? I tempted myself with hope, while beneath me Tatum whined in his sleep, then growled softly. I tipped the beer bottle to my mouth.

  I tried to reassure myself that the Maggot would soon be home, booming with life and obscenities, telling me that Ellen had abruptly changed her mind and decided to fly to the United States. Perhaps she had sent me a postcard from the airport, which postcard would even now be waiting in the tiny post office on Straker’s Cay. The Maggot always called it Streaker’s Cay. He had a nickname for everything. The Denver Fairies, the Chicago Chicken-shits, the Philadelphia Sugar Plums, the Tampa Bay.

  Tatum barked, breaking my idle chain of thoughts and bringing me bolt upright in the pilot’s seat. The barking was frantic, but when the dog paused to draw breath I heard the twang of a chain fence under stress off to my right, and I turned that way, but could see nothing until Tatum suddenly appeared from under the verandah, accelerating into killing speed, and barking as he went; then the poor dog just seemed to disintegrate into blood, fur and offal as a shotgun crashed obscenely loud, and I realised that men must be breaking through the wire out of my sight round the corner of the house. I snatched up the gun and dropped to the floor. The violence of my motion spilt the heavy chair on to its side. I left it, crawling instead to the verandah’s edge. Tatum was a bloody mess on the dirt, but at least the dog had died instantly and was not twitching and whining in agony.

  The property beyond the chain-link fence was a dumping ground for dead cars. The sun reflected dazzlingly from a myriad scraps of peeling chrome. I could see no one trying to cut their way through the fence, nor any gaps already cut in the wire. I could see no one at all, but then the shotgun fired again from its vantage point among the wrecked cars.

  The shotgun fired a third time, pumped, fired once more, then fired a last time. The shots filled the stench-laden air with noise and swamped the verandah with a storm of lead pellets that whipped overhead, smashing the glass of a hurricane lamp that hung from the verandah’s rafters, but otherwise doing no harm. I was down behind the heavy timbers of the balustrade. There were small gaps between the timbers that let me watch the car graveyard, but I still could not see my enemies.

  All I could see were the heaps of rusting cars and the unbroken chain-link fence. Nothing more. I realised I was holding my breath, so I let it slowly out. I was alive. I was unhurt. I fumbled in my trouser pocket, found a handful of bullets, and loaded all six of the Webley’s chambers. I cocked the gun, then looked again through my small loophole. Tatum’s body was already busy with flies. Paraffin was dripping from the punctured reservoir of the hurricane lamp behind me. I could see no gunman at the chain-link fence.

  The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. The dog had been attracted to the fence because of the noise of the wire being cut or stretched, yet the fence was undamaged and my attackers had evidently retreated into the piles of scrapped cars, and I suddenly realised that they had merely used the noise of the fence as a decoy to draw the dog and my attention one way while they attacked from the other, and I rolled on to my back, sat up, and levelled the gun towards the top of the second flight of stairs which led up to the far side of the verandah. I was aware of being frightened, but I noted that my hands were utterly still.

  I could not see if anyone was climbing those far stairs. Nor could I see the concrete wall which edged the left-hand side of the property. That wall formed the rear of the small warehouse complex in which the industrial solvents were stored. I had watched a car roll into that yard only moments before, but I had thought nothing of it. The warehouse had a corrugated tin roof. Doubtless my enemies had crossed the roof under the cover of the shotgun’s fusillade, and were now approaching the verandah. Would they assault the stairs or try to fire up through the stout timbers of the deck? I dismissed the latter fear. I knew I had to concentrate on the likeliest threat, eliminate it, then worry about what else the ungodly might do.

  The fear was quivering in me. The beer and tuna were acid-sour in my belly, my left leg was shivering, my bowels were like water, my heart was racing; yet I had a gun, and my hands were rock steady, and I reasoned that I was facing the men who had hurt or killed Ellen, and all my consciousness seemed trained on the patch of light that marked the top of the far stairs. I was in shadow, but anyone who attacked me must come through that light and thus make themselves a target. That thought gave me confidence.

  Except they threw a grenade instead.

  I saw its silhouette and knew I had lost.

  Except they threw too hard and the grenade thumped against one of the rafters and dropped sharply down to lodge just behind the solid lump of the Maggot’s fallen aircraft chair, which now protected me like a blast wall. I was counting the seconds since the grenade had appeared. I opened my mouth to equalise the blast and drew up my knees to protect my midriff, but I did not take the gun away from the bright space at the top of the far stairs.

  Which bright space was suddenly cracked apart with noise and flame. The canvas roof billowed, ripped and tore away as hot air punched at me with an appalling violence, but no shrapnel came at me. The heavy pilot’s chair slid six feet towards me, and the table was blown on to its side, but I was unhurt. The spilt paraffin had caught fire, its flames flickering across the verandah’s deck. The sound of the explosion still echoed, and it was during that echo that my attackers charged up the far stairs.

  I could not see them clearly, for the sunlight was too bright and I was half dazed by the explosion, but a part of my brain had gone back into its training and it was telling my body what to do. My enemies were charging up the steps and one of them was shouting like a fiend either to give himself courage or to intimidate me. I could only hear the one voice, but two pairs of boots. I also knew that my attackers would not see me immediately for I was in shadow, and the verandah was a chaos of fallen furniture, flame and smoke, and that blessed small scrap of my brain that had been programmed in the lethal skills of soldiering told me to hold my fire until I was certain of a kill.

  The first man, the one who was shouting, hurled himself on to the verandah. He was a young black man, short-haired, muscular, and carrying a Kalashnikov. I unthinkingly registered the distinctive shape of the curved magazine, and I saw the muzzle’s pale flames pricking the brightness as he began spraying the verandah with bullets, but like most inexperienced men he was firing too high. I knew there was a second man behind him, and I guessed the second man was the marksman. The first man had been committed to draw my attention, while the second was the expert, the executioner who would kill me while I was distracted by his noisy companion, so I shifted the heavy Webley a fraction to the right and waited for the second man, and I did not otherwise move a muscle, because movement attracts fire, and I waited for a full second while the first man hammered the verandah with bullets. I was inwardly gibbering with fear as I waited, but then the second m
an appeared. He could have been the first man’s twin brother. He panned his rifle round the verandah, saw me, and shouted a warning to the first man who had still not spotted me. I pulled the trigger.

  I was terrified, yet still the training held good. I was using both hands to steady the gun and I had taken my time. I had given myself all of a half-second to aim, and at that range a trained soldier could not miss, and I fired, and I saw the bullet shatter the second man’s throat and his shout turned into a wet gulp as he became airborne, flying backwards, his blood filling the open verandah in a sickening spray that was turned to incandescent red by the sunlight. The first man began to turn his gun back towards me, but the hammerlike recoil of the Kalashnikov’s automatic fire had been spinning his body and his aim away from me, while my arms had already soaked the massive blow of the revolver and were steady again and I knew he was going to fall to his right in a desperate attempt to escape me, so I fired that way and saw the dark fleck where the bullet hit his ribs. His whole chest quivered with the seismic shock of the bullet’s strike. The blow thumped him hard against the cement-block wall of the Maggot’s house, and there he stayed, suddenly leaning on the wall with dull eyes staring at me and the now silent gun hanging by his side.

  Then he sighed. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and he looked as though he was going to cry. He tried to lift the rifle, but it was as heavy as lead in his nerveless hand. He suddenly looked very young and very sad, like a child deprived of a toy. There were tears in his eyes that brimmed, then poured down his cheeks. He stared reproachfully at me, then made one last supreme effort to lift his assault rifle. I watched the muzzle rise towards me, felt the sudden panic, and so I fired a last time. The Webley’s heavy bullet obliterated the man’s face, wiping away his tears for ever. He slid down the wall, leaving a slime of blood on the concrete.

  Silence. The paraffin flames flickered blue. Bile was sour in my throat. Sweat stung my eyes. I noticed that my hands had begun to shake.