by George Foy
‘Sorry?’ the pilot asked, momentarily confused by the idea of woolly animals in the middle of the Caribbean. Automatically he thought of The Little Prince, where a flyer ran into a kid after a crash-landing in the deepest Sahara. The kid’s first words were, ‘Draw me a sheep.’ He shook his head to dispell the association.
‘The sheep,’ the Chilean insisted.
‘Dis is it,’ Eltonjohn explained.
Ship.
One of the old men crossed himself twice.
‘But, Señor, this sheep is a toy.’
‘It’s a fast toy,’ the pilot answered. ‘That’s what’s important.’
The Chileans looked wildly around them, but the inflatable had left and they resigned themselves to the inevitable with the grace of a civilization that had already weathered four hundred years of concentrated charity from the Catholic Church.
As he and Eltonjohn got the men belted down on the foam-rubber padding of the twin passenger sections, the pilot heard the distinctive held-breath scraping rhythm, the panting pipes of Andean music, and two of the men began to sing.
Si no encuentro mi amor en la tierra,
lo encontraré en la mar
Si no hay justicia en la sierra,
yo voy a caminar
he heard, before he dogged the hatches down.
He was halfway back to the starboard fighter canopy when the ECM alarm sounded. He sprinted the rest of the way, dangerously, because the hull-top was rounded fiberglass and wet from spray and therefore slippery as slush.
The green eye of the radar scanner display seemed to light up the cockpit. He strapped himself into the bolster-seat. ‘Eltonjohn,’ he yelled, ‘get back here.’ Fumbled on his audio helmet (‘Attack radar, 306 degrees,’ but he had no time for that now); pulling down the half-sucker, goosing the throttles—
But the islander is having trouble dogging down the starboard hatch and is still standing almost upright on the hull when the first lazy sulfur glide of tracers comes out of the horizon into the close confines of their realworld, spitting into the dark swells, snicking into the fiberglass for a second before feathering away.
Lucky shots. The pilot has no idea where they came from. The half-sucker screen is blank. Glancing fast at the ECM, he taps out the VR command. He is unsure why he does this. Seeing targets in 3-D will give him no more info than he has on the flat screen. He can barely spare the time to hook up the VR, he can spare no time to wonder why.
A second volley misses entirely, technicolor fireworks at someone else’s party. ‘Eltonjohn!’ he yells, ‘Get the fuck in here!’
There is no answer. No silhouette forward. It is not possible that those first tracers should have hit him. The odds against are too high, no fate so cruel.
A bubble of noise covers the boat. Turbine engines. A Viking takes over the world. It screams one hundred feet overhead like a giant bulbous-nosed bat, blocking the starlight. No rockets yet; the first Viking targets with laser, the second sends rockets down the laser beam. Sweat is greasing the space between his helmet and his scalp. ‘Hang on!’ he shouts again. ‘Eltonjohn, you hear?’ There is a round coaming beside that hatch, to protect the radar scanner. Eltonjohn will be fine if he just hunkers behind it.
The cockpit canopy whines down and locks. He shuts the port canopy too. Now the top of the half-sucker blooms with different lights. The pilot leans his head back so he can look through the clear half at the cockpit controls. He pushes the trim tabs to thirty degrees down, gooses the throttles to two-thirds, to attain planing speed. The old superboat drives up her bow, high on a swell, and crashes down so brutally she shakes. He spares a quick sympathy for the poor Indio bastards in the bow compartment, where the movement will be worst. Four, five more crashes, then the movement grows less violent. Miss Benthol is planing.
He pushes out the drive units halfway and alters the trim tabs to zero degrees, to keep the bow at a fifteen-degree angle. Checking the compass now, he pulls the boat around till the swells are more or less aft. These waves are definitely higher than the norm. Leans his head forward, making it easier to focus on the face-sucker’s top half.
In the stage-set world of VR, four large radar contacts glow, bright lavender, so close it feels like he can almost touch their lighted space. Two are airborne. Vikings. The two other contacts have no readout yet; both are so low they must be ships.
‘ADIZ radar.’ The audio is on, which is not how it’s supposed to work with the VR working but what the hell. ‘Attempting lock. Two-nine-three, 186.’
The Vikings will have problems with ADIZ, not only because it works poorly but because it does not work at all on surface craft.
‘Hey, fuckhead!’ the audio butts in again. ‘OTH radar. Seven point two four miles, 101. Weapons radar, 101.’
That’s a sea contact, the pilot thinks. A cutter. No patrol boats carry the bulky over-the-horizon system. The presence of a cutter raises questions he has no time to ponder.
The presence of the OTH raises problems he would sooner live without.
A Viking passes through the night, to port, at low altitude, maybe one thousand yards away. Tiny pink dots zip around the swells as the Viking’s weapons officer visually searches for his target with the laser.
‘Weapons radar, seven-two, lock, one-nine-five. Lock, one-nine-five. Nine point zero one miles.’
The pilot twists the wheel. Raising his head once more, peering through the clear half of the facesucker, he looks right and left at the ghostly foam. He waits for the perfect combination, low swells that have collapsed on each other, then slows way down on the starboard engine, and speeds up on the port. He does the same with the trim tabs – down to star-board ten degrees, up to port, to keep the hull even – pulling her as abruptly as he can on a southerly course, parallel to the line of waves.
‘Hang on, kid,’ he thinks, trying mentally to send Eltonjohn his message through the spray drenching the outside darkness.
He goes to three-quarter speed, simultaneously evening the trim tabs, pushing out the drive-units all the way. A cream fountain bursts, far to the left. Shellfire, six-inch probably. Looking up at the 3-D he sees the Viking ranges changing even as he watches. Eleven hundred feet, 187 degrees . . . 185. Circling like vultures for another run.
But rockets, even shells, are no longer the primary danger. Now the turboblowers are winding up to a shriek. The speedo needle nudges eighty-five knots. His fists grip the small wheel hard enough to crush wood. He makes constant little adjustments to keep the superboat screaming just on the backs of the same swells, holding the point of bow on the faint shine of spume marking the crests. Snaking around when he runs out of one wave to find the line of another. The boat smacks right and left as she zips along the ridges, tabs and rudders tearing stiff fifty-foot roostertails from the water, skittering uneasily sideways on the hard edges of her hull. This superboat chinewalks worse than any other he has ever been on.
He is sweating like a squeezed sponge. The only reason his hands don’t tremble is that he is holding the wheel so tight. One overcorrection, one tiny wrong nudge of the rudder and he will yaw too far from the ridge of wave. If this happens the boat will tip sideways off the line of swell. Her stabilizing wing will dip into the water, and the boat will cartwheel. Cartwheeling at eighty-five knots is not that different from cartwheeling at 125; she will simply disintegrate, come apart like a schoolboy’s poem in a million bits and splashes, spread herself all over the Caribbean.
‘You awake, fuckhead?’ the audio rasps. ‘Proximity alarm.’
Glancing upward, into the VR, to catch a sea contact glowing huge and just off his starboard bow. Shock shines white in the pilot’s brain. Then he realizes the patrol boat is so close that Miss Benthol, paradoxically, is quite safe – their relative bearings change so fast at this speed and angle that rocket launchers will not track.
Looking back down, through the clearview screen, his eyes dart right and left like a cornered seabird from wave-top to wave-top. Anomaly r
ises without other warning from the broad back of a wave just to starboard of him – radar scanners, the long stealth hull, the phallic launchers of a patrol boat – without extra thought he pushes the throttles against their stops.
Spray rips from the maddened props. The Miss Benthol III and the patrol boat share a range of waves for a second, but the superboat’s current speed is triple the patrol vessel’s, and he loses her in the vicious wake.
The cream fountains are all around again. One hits close by forward and the saltwater cloud it throws rains down like hail on the canopy. The turboblowers scream so shrill he cannot hear the audio. A contact blossoms on the VR, astern, grows fast, as fast as that search engine in the Wildnet. The night glows as a rocket passes close overhead, dims, it feels just like the AMRAAM that missed his Citation over Long Island.
The missile glows a second time as it detonates against the shoulder of a swell.
Hard rain rattles, once again. Miss Benthol is much too low in the water to be a good missile target.
The boat bangs as if she is traveling over cement. The fast patrol craft is capable of speeds up to sixty knots but the Miss Benthol is hitting 110 and still accelerating. The wheel shakes like a fully active ouija board in his hands. His eyes strain through the clearview screen. He lifts the tabs, bringing the bow up a hair. He is going so fast now he does not have time to correct if the wave he is on should drastically change shape. His heart slams, fear scritches at his bowels, but his mind has come free of white light and seems as clear as it has ever been. Rarely, in fact, has he felt so fully alive.
He has no idea how much time has passed. No cream fountains have appeared in the last minute, of that he is certain. The ridge of a swell gives out beneath him; he pulls back on the throttles, to three-quarter speed, to a quarter, and gives her ten degrees downward trim. Momentum dies. Barely planing now, he slides the craft deep into the hollow between two swells, and keeps her there.
The audio mutters ranges. The VR shows three seagoing contacts now, one of them at 4.72 miles, which is too close. According to the readouts, the attack radars have lost their lock. The Vikings are well to the south, flying a grid. The OTH picks him up at intervals.
He has no idea where he is.
He reduces speed even further and feels her settle into the water. He rips off his helmet, opens the canopy halfway and climbs out as quickly as he can on a spinal column that has been ground and twisted like a drill bit during the last few minutes. But there is no one behind the hatch coamings, no one behind the canopy.
Eltonjohn is gone.
His stomach takes the pain, familiarly, like a mother bear clasping her cub.
Back in the cockpit he jacks her sickly into planing mode till the speed reaches fifty-five. He flicks a chart diskette into the ECM.
The sat-nav gives him a fix that puts him only 2.48 miles west of the Double Headed Shot Cays. He is perilously close to their shoal water. He pulls the leather flying helmet back on, adjusts the half-sucker’s faceplate. The Vikings are no longer on VR. One of the sea contacts is only two miles away, to the northeast. A voice comes in very loud through the scanner. ‘. . . this is the Point Judith. The O’Grady’s got a contact just a couple miles west of the Shots. He seems to have stopped. We’re comin’ up on him fast, over.’
‘Roger, Point Jude, this is Cape Fear. O’Grady says we should circle in from the north, cut him off. We got him now, over.’
‘Nuke the motherfucker,’ another voice chimes in quietly.
Fury wells up inside his abdomen; it is unexpected in its intensity. The fury is mostly projected; he has never taken the government’s enmity personally but he will not let them disappear his Chileans the way they disappeared Eltonjohn, he will not let them sink Miss Benthol – not if he can help it. He knows his chances are not so good at this stage but he flips the all-channel toggle anyway, and presses his throat mike.
‘BON eats shit,’ he says. It is not intelligent, far less original, but it’s the best he can think of at short notice with the pain of Eltonjohn blocking his synapses on top of it.
Again checking the chart on the ECM screen he notices a detail he has not really picked up on before. The channel between the Double Headed Shots is thin and shallow but at its deepest it might just allow Miss Benthol to pass. The drawback is that the superboat will have to be planing at full tilt with her bow level when she goes through the channel because that is when she is highest out of the water. The channel is too shallow to putter prudently through.
It is insane; also it is their only chance. Anyway, the arrival of sadness has made him reckless. Eltonjohn, Carmelita, Roberto – in all that damage he bears a heavy load of responsibility. It makes no logical sense, it makes perfect emotional sense, but what he feels is this; if he has caused damage he should be prepared to risk it himself.
Moving the cursor on the chart screen he measures out a dogleg course, 016 degrees true, nor’nor’east at sixty knots for three minutes and twenty-six seconds; then through the gap between the Shots on 282 degrees, more or less in the same vector as the waves, which will be curving around in the shallow water to attack the coral of the cays directly at that point. He punches in the way-points, almost forgets to convert the true bearings to compass. It’s the kind of detail that kills you.
Two hundred eighty-two degrees true, plus 2 degrees westerly variation; 284 degrees.
He checks his watch, switches the ECM to active radar, turns off the chartlight. Gunning the engines, he reaches sixty knots, heading for the first compass bearing indicated. ‘Here we go, chiquita,’ he tells the superboat. He sees Carmelita’s face, pale and closed the way he last saw her. His lips tighten, his eyes narrow.
At 3.2 minutes the way-point alarm sounds. He lines her up to follow the scend of sea. He adjusts the course to 284 and kicks the throttles three-quarters of the way forward. Miss Benthol III rides up on her flat buttock-lines and starts skittering from wave to wave. She is listing a bit left, he notices. One of the bullets may have holed a port flotation tank. When she jumps a wave her port side starts to dip, lazily. It is a sign of extreme peril.
He adjusts the trim tabs, giving the starboard tab fifteen degrees downward angle and the port one close to twenty. The bow drops in response, the wheel stops pulling left so much.
A line of greater darkness seems to stretch right across the night. Somewhere in the middle of it there is a channel, quite thin in all dimensions. He risks another glance at the ECM’s screen. The sat-nav cursor is right on target, heading for the break between the cays.
Tracers sear like hot wires above them, then, inexplicably, cease.
The waves are breaking now, losing their form, churning into amorphous fields of surf that actually smooth the superboat’s passage. They are very close to the Double Headed Shots. He nudges the throttles forward again. Eighty-nine mph. The VR display is useless now, crammed full as an old attic with redundant radar echoes. The creaming surf spits into a curtain of spray before him. Tall black shapes of coconut palms rush out of the waves to his left – disappear. He has no way of knowing if he is really in the channel. All he can do is keep going. If he slows down, the keel will hit coral and the hull will turn into little crumbs of glass and metal and the flesh it carried. They are dead if they hit, they are dead if he slows. There is a curious freedom in this.
The dials look at him, sea-colored light with a message of systems still functional.
A long denture of coral grins to starboard and vanishes. He turns to port a hair. Checking downward, the cursor looks like it is stuck; it’s too big for the channel displayed on the chart diskette.
And then, all of a sudden, the water is much calmer. They are to leeward of the islands. The VR display shows a solid chunk of land as far as the radar will reach behind him. The OTH radar, too, is screened by the Double Headed Shots.
The patrol boats are far too big to negotiate the channel. It will take them half an hour to go around. The Vikings are overhead at four thousand feet,
but their own radar will not find him in the swells, and without surveillance craft to guide them they are blind.
He brings the tabs back to level, keeps the throttles on three-quarter setting, clicks the ECM display to small-scale.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Oh, la soeur Anne n’a pas de jambes,
Maman est toujours sâoulée
Et moi je fais la contrebande,
Laisse le bon temps rouler.’
Barataria folk song
Fifty miles to the northwest of the Double Headed Shots the pilot brought the Miss Benthol to idling speed and went forward to see how his passengers were doing.
They were not in good shape. A tracer round had pierced one man through the fleshy part of the calf. The phosphorus burned his flesh and he moaned and sweated in pain. The rest without exception had been violently seasick and the acrid stench of half-digested frijoles permeated the passengers’ sections. But none of them asked to stop, or go back. They, too, were fresh out of choices.
The pilot broke out the Miss Benthol’s first-aid kit. He gave them five minutes to get some air and clean up. As they washed themselves on deck he thought about what he was going to do now. He was originally heading for the Ten Thousand Islands but now he figured the Florida swamps, as the only half-empty stretch of mainland close by, would be the first place BON would search.
On the ECM he called up the latest Smuggler’s Bible update. The AWACS radar picket out of Homestead was down until 4:20 a.m.; anyway the synthetic aperture radar they used was calibrated for use against planes and though it could pick up surface traffic it was less than effective against small craft. The BON Vikings were behind him. The US Customs DC-3 ran a three-way pattern from Lauderdale to Key West to Sanibel but was on its way home.
The next satellite sweep was an hour and forty-eight minutes away.
He could head into the Gulf, then east to Sanibel. He looked at the chart again.
He had one further option. The Mississippi Delta lay some 550 sea miles to the northwest of here. The Miss Benthol was built for long-distance racing, and with her shallow draft could cut straight across the Gulf. Seven of her eight massive fuel tanks were still full. As long as the leak in the port compartment was not too serious, as long as he could maintain two-thirds speed, he could make bayou country by dawn. Once there he would have enough gas on tap to maybe find a village where he could hide the superboat from the Feds, for use some other day. He knew of several such villages, from the Smuggler’s Gazette, from Trade backfence, from talking to people like Gershwin.