Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  The senator joined me in the tangled sodden mess and, with a cry of triumph, produced the spare VHF radio, which had been protected from the sea by a waterproof case. He extended the radio’s stubby aerial, then crouched under the tiny bluff that edged the beach. “Stingray, Stingray,” I heard him gabble, and I guessed that the adrenalin and fear had curdled his memory.

  “The word you want is Mayday!” I called to him.

  “Mayday, Stingray. Acknowledge please.” He spoke with frantic urgency, so much so that it seemed to me that he must have lost his marbles, but then he offered me a curiously reassuring smile. “It’s OK, Nick, help will come.”

  “Sure,” I said. “God will send a flight of killer-angels.” I cupped my hands and shouted at the Maggot to join us. “Bring the machine-gun!”

  “What do we do now?” The Maggot asked when he reached us. The senator was fumbling with the transmit button, still desperately filling the airwaves with his message.

  “We’ll work our way south.” I nodded towards the scrub-land that edged the airstrip. “We’ll carry as much ammunition as we can, and dump the rest. We’ll cross the island and steal one of the boats from the anchorage.” I grinned, pretending a confidence I did not feel.

  “Nick! Nick!” The senator interrupted me. “It’s the radio! It’s not working!”

  “You want Channel Sixteen,” I said patiently, “and just shout Mayday into it, then tell whoever answers that we’re under attack on Murder Cay.”

  “But it’s broken!” the senator insisted, and I could see he was close to panicking again. I took the radio from him and found that a neat hole had indeed been punched clean through its casing. The radio must have been hit by one of the rounds fired from the powerboat, and it was now useless. “But we need it!” The senator stared at me, appalled.

  “Forget it!”

  “We’ll be stuck here!” The senator was shaking again.

  “We won’t be stuck here! Trust me!” I pushed the Maggot’s bag of spare ammunition at the senator. “Carry that. We’re going to be all right, I promise! Let’s go!”

  We hurried south, leaving the shattered boat behind. Our enemies, their night vision still not recovered from the flare’s brilliance, did not see us leave for, after a moment or two, they resumed firing at the base of the radio mast. I heard their bullets ring clear in the night, then a more muffled sound made me turn and curse.

  “What?” the senator asked worriedly.

  But before I could explain a sudden explosion cracked huge and violent in the lagoon. The plume of smoke and water shot fifty feet into the air. “The bastards have got a mortar!” I said in astonishment. The muffled sound I had first heard had been the mortar firing.

  “Not bad for a bunch of narcotraficantes,” the Maggot said in wry admiration. “So where did they get that baby? Do you think they stole it from the Colombian army?”

  “Who the hell cares?” The senator flinched as another bomb exploded far away. “I need a radio! I need a radio!”

  “We’re going to find a radio!” I snapped. “We’re going to find a boat, and boats have radios. So come on!”

  Our enemy had lost us for the moment, but I feared for our survival all the same. The mortar fired another bomb towards the base of the radio mast, but sooner or later the drug-runners would realise we had abandoned that shelter and then they would turn the lethal bombs towards the rest of the small island which offered precious little cover from the explosions. Which meant our best hope lay in finding a boat and then, ignominiously, running away.

  We walked across the island, hidden from our enemies by the scrub that grew thickly to the north of the airstrip. The Maggot seemed excited by the gunfire, while the senator was merely desperate to find a radio. He had a moment’s wild hope when he noticed a twin-engined plane sitting under a crude palm-thatch shelter, but when the Maggot climbed on to the aircraft’s wing and opened its door, he saw that all the aircraft’s instruments and controls had been ripped out. “It looks like my plane,” he announced cheerfully.

  “I need a-” The senator began his demand, but I was bored with his whining insistence and cut him off too sharply.

  “I told you! We are going to find a fucking radio on board a fucking boat!”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” the senator complained.

  “Don’t squabble, girls,” the Maggot said, “not when we’re having such fun.”

  Our enemies were having less fun than before. They still fired some sporadic shots across the golf course, and their mortar thumped another half-dozen bombs towards the beach where we had landed, but their firing was tentative, almost as though they were puzzled by our lack of response. Or perhaps they were merely distracted by their other problems, the chief of which was that the fire, which the Maggot had started by shoving a flare into the generator’s petrol tank, was burning much more fiercely now. I saw a palm tree flash into sudden bright flame and spew sparks that whirled away across the island’s narrow waist. The light of the fire was bright on the big house with the tower and the small radar aerial.

  We were far beyond the light thrown by the crackling flames. Instead we were hidden deep in a cloaking darkness as we walked past one of the big black trucks that still blocked the island’s runway. Off to our right we heard an engine start up, then a pair of headlights flared bright across the golf course and I suspected that the jeep with its rear-mounted machine-gun had been sent to find us, but the vehicle drove north, away from us, so for the moment we could safely ignore it.

  We hurried on while, to our north, the jeep enfiladed the concrete foundation block of the mast and the heavy machine-gun pumped a stream of futile bullets into the shadowed space which we had long vacated. I knew it would only be seconds now before they discovered our absence, after which our enemies would begin searching the island in earnest.

  But then, at last, the lagoon’s anchorage stretched open and serene in front of us. A dozen boats floated on the water’s sheer black surface that was glossed red by the flames. Closer at hand was the ruined beach house which offered a shadowed hiding place where the three of us crouched just a few paces from the water’s edge. “What we have to do now,” I said, “is swim to the nearest boat, turn on its electrics and call for help.”

  “I’ll go,” the Maggot said.

  “No!” The senator insisted. “I will.”

  “You both go,” I made the decision, “and I’ll give you covering fire from here.” One of us had to stay behind to offer protective fire. “Swim slowly.” I took the Kalashnikov from the Maggot. “And don’t splash. Once you’re on board, stay there! If I can’t reach you, then try and get yourselves the hell out of here.”

  The Maggot frowned at the note of resigned pessimism in my voice. “I’ll stay with you, Nick.”

  “I don’t need anyone to stay with me,” I said petulantly. “They’ve lost us, so there’s no immediate danger, but the sooner we’re all on the boat, the better. One of us has to be arse-end Charlie, and that one’s me. So go!” I turned away from them, intimating I had no more to say, and hefted the Russian machine-gun on to the makeshift breastwork of the ruined wall. I aimed the gun at the nearest house which was no more than two hundred paces away. The building was dark and seemingly deserted.

  The Maggot and the senator abandoned their boots and flak-jackets; then, wearing only their lightweight fatigues, they waded into the lagoon and breast-stroked through the limpid black water. The Maggot had strapped the M16 across his back, but had left his sub-machine-guns on the beach. The closest motor-cruiser, a sports-fisherman, was no more than sixty yards away.

  I watched them swim for a moment, then turned to stare towards the blazing fire which silhouetted the southernmost houses. Stingray. That was the word the senator had used on the radio, and Stingray was the name of the US naval exercise that had filled the Bahamian seaways with lean grey ships and the island bars with boisterous sailors. I turned and gazed at the two shapes which swam so soft and
slow towards the powerboat. Stingray. And I remembered how, on the day that the senator had come to find me on Straker’s Cay, he had gone on to a reception at the American Embassy in Nassau where he had met officers from the Stingray fleet. And that very same day he had turned up in the unlikely company of the Maggot. And that reminded me of an earlier question: exactly how had the senator found the Maggot?

  The two men had reached the transom of the big sports-fisherman, and I watched as the Maggot’s huge dark shape moved cautiously up the boat’s stern ladder. A few seconds later I heard a splintering crack as the main-cabin door was forced. I guessed the Maggot was now searching for the electrical master switch. After that he would have to find the secondary switches to power the radio circuit, then discover the radio itself.

  The senator climbed the stern ladder. None of the Colombians seemed to have noticed what was happening in the lagoon. What had the Maggot called the Colombians? Narcotraficantes, I had noted his use of that word, and wondered at it, because the Maggot was not usually a man to dignify someone with a proper noun when an improper word would suffice. I stared at the dark shape of the boat from which the Maggot was undoubtedly sending the radio message. But to whom?

  Illusion, I thought to myself, everything is illusory. Truth is so slippery. The art of politics, like the art of the theatre, is to create a perfect illusion. It had taken a politician to make a simulacrum of Camelot in the twentieth century, and he had done it so perfectly that no one noticed that the Knights of the Round Table were being sent to be slaughtered in Vietnam.

  The voters had wanted the illusion. “You have to remember,” my father liked to say, “that the bard was wrong. Not all the world’s a stage, most of it is an auditorium instead. Some of us are born to entertain, while the lumpen mass is born to be amused. But do remember, dear boy, that it is that lumpen audience which pays, and we performers who take their money. I make a bad audience, but am a great and rich performer; while you, Nick, are in danger of becoming a poor and astonishingly credulous spectator.” He had despised my naivety, wanting me to make the falsehoods of the stage into my avocation, but I had rebelled, preferring credulity to skill, innocence to knowledge, and naivety to cynicism. I still preferred truth to lies, yet somewhere in this night’s darkness I knew there was a great dark lie that I had been made to serve.

  “Nick!” the Maggot suddenly hissed across the black water. “Nick! It’s OK! Come on!”

  The summons undoubtedly meant that the radio message had been successfully sent, and doubtless the sensible thing for me to do was to join the two Americans on the boat, but it was dawning on me that I had been tricked and harried into coming to Murder Cay to ride shotgun for a purpose that had never been revealed; and I sensed, too, that no one but me cared what might have happened to Ellen. The senator did not care if she was raped and had died, because he had his own agenda. But Ellen had become my agenda.

  So I ignored the Maggot’s summons.

  Instead, I stood up, looped the belt of heavy linked cartridges around my neck, and picked up the machine-gun. While my enemies regrouped, I would find my woman. My cue had come at last, and it was time to leave the credulous audience and become a performer, making my entrance according to a stage direction I would write myself; enter from the night a deceived lover, armed and angry, seeking truth.

  The Maggot hissed at me to join them on board their boat. I walked away. I was angry, but at who and what I was not sure. My anger made me careless. I made no attempt to hide, but just strolled up the beach carrying the heavy Kalashnikov.

  My actions were not quite so foolhardy as they seemed, for the beach on the eastern side of Murder Cay was backed by a sand bluff nearly six feet high, and, by stooping, I could have walked almost the whole length of the island concealed from anyone who might have watched from the houses. But at that moment I did not care about concealment for the madness was on me; the insane conviction that I was armoured by righteousness and that no harm could therefore come to me.

  A mortar bomb fluttered far overhead, dropping somewhere near the runway. A white parachute flare followed the bomb to explode over the island’s centre before drifting down behind its straggling plume of brightly lit smoke. Another flare was fired to burn brilliantly above the ruined beach house. The flares cast shadows as black as the mouth of hell, and I was walking in one such inky shadow.

  I was walking towards the northernmost house which I believed belonged to Jesse Sweetman and to which, I was sure, Ellen had been taken. Sweetman had made no secret of his lust for Ellen, and he could clearly afford to pay McIllvanney his pimp-price. I trudged clumsily, my boots sliding in the treacherous sand. I had to negotiate the awkward pilings which supported the wooden piers that jutted off the sandy bluff and led to the private docks. I tripped on a discarded sailboard and banged my head on the low slanting trunk of a palm tree that grew across the sand. The linked ammunition looped round my neck clinked with every step, and the Scorpion slung from my left shoulder kept swinging to crash tinnily against the Kalashnikov, but no one heard me through the din of mortar explosions and the crackle of random gunfire. I plodded heavily on, walking like a man in a dream, and I was still moving in that same dreamlike unreality when I reached Sweetman’s house. I took no soldierly precautions, but simply climbed the wooden steps from the beach and walked across the marble-paved terrace as though I was a welcome visitor. The madness told me I would survive, and perhaps the madness was right, for no one saw me, and no one challenged me, and no one fired at me.

  Then the trance snapped as a shadow moved in the flowering shrubs off to my left, and I threw myself sideways, guns and ammunition crashing loud on the marble terrace, and I wrenched the machine-gun round to face the sudden threat, and the Kalashnikov’s steel-clawed bipod scraped on stone as my finger took up the first pressure on the trigger.

  Then I froze. Because the threat miaowed, then purred, then rubbed itself soft and warm against my right cheek. Sweat was pouring off me. “Oh, Jesus,” I blasphemed softly, and laid my head on my left forearm.

  An explosion jarred me back into alertness. It was a huge explosion, thumping my eardrums and pulsing a sheet of red flame high into the night. I guessed that the fire started by the Maggot had spread to a big tank of cooking gas that supplied the island’s largest house. I could see men running in the garden of that house, fleeing from flames that were leaping as high as the radar aerial on the small tower. A bush crackled into instant fire to stream golden sparks into the night. Behind me the lagoon was being fingered silver by the falling flares.

  Those flares were being sprayed haphazardly about the sky, just as the mortar bombs were now being scattered indiscriminately across the island’s open spaces. The mortar seemed to be emplaced in the garden of the house just beyond the raging fire. I could hear men shouting in that garden. Every now and then a machine-gun or rifle would open fire, but without purpose. The narcotraficantes had lost us. They were night-blinded by their own fire and by their flares, and they neither knew how many enemy faced them nor where that enemy was.

  The northernmost house lay silent and dark. A hot tub on its terrace seemed to be filled with molten silver where the crescent moon glossed its water. Beyond the tub was a black wall of glass in which one sliding window had been left open. A white curtain stirred in the gap, but I could sense nothing threatening beyond the curtain, and so I stood up and edged round the hot tub’s gleaming water to the open glass door. No one challenged me. I paused by the billowing curtain, listening, but I heard nothing to scare me, and so I walked unopposed and undetected into my enemy’s house. There was a distinct smell of perfume, as though an exotic woman had just left the darkened room. I stood, eyes wide, till a flare cracked apart in the southern sky to cast an eerie white glow through the open window, and I saw that I was in a long elegant room furnished with cushioned wicker furniture. More glass doors opened on to the central courtyard where a swimming pool reflected the flare’s harsh fire. The walls of the elegant room
were hung with fine antique prints; the home of a civilised murderer.

  I stood utterly still. I was trying to sense danger in this perfumed house, using whatever primitive instincts were left to me, but then a door opened deep in the house, and I saw the flicker of a candle flame and I realised that someone was walking down a long corridor towards me.

  One side of the corridor was formed by the glass wall that looked on to the central courtyard while the other was a lined with bookcases. Whoever walked between the books and the glass was shielding the candle flame with his hand so that his forward motion would not extinguish the small light.

  It was Rickie, and he came unsuspecting towards me.

  He was weaving slightly on the carpeted floor, and staring intently down at the candle. He had left the door at the far end of the corridor open and more candles burned in the room beyond, but I sensed Rickie was alone. He was humming to himself, concentrating on preserving the flickering fragile flame, then he saw the flash-suppressor of the machine-gun pointing at his midriff, and his eyes slowly came up to mine, and the candle dropped to extinguish itself on the floor.

  “Hello, Rickie,” I said gently.

  He was shaking. He could see me well enough, because I was illuminated by the candles in the room behind him, but I could only dimly see his face. What I glimpsed was not good. He looked ravaged and old before his time. His mouth opened and closed as though he was trying to speak, but he could not, then he began to back away from me with his hands held towards me. “You’re dead!” he said. “They told me you were dead!”