XV
In the waning moonlight, I switched off my running lights. Cuda Key was a mile or two ahead of me; a black hump of foliage and fortress on the gray sheen of roiled two-a.m. storm sea.
It had taken me about an hour and a half to get to Bahia Honda, running up on the rough Atlantic side, the Sniper ramming through the heavy roll of ocean like a country-boy fullback. I had run without lights until I got to the big bridge, letting the green bleep of the Si-Tex radar system lead me through the night. Just off Sugarloaf, the radar had picked up something big moving two miles or so off to starboard. I had shut the engines down, drifting, and took a good look through the Bushnell zoom scope. It sucked in all the available night light, revealing to me a big white cruiser heading shoreward from open sea. Like the Sniper, it ran without lights.
One more drug runner; one of the thousands that operate under stealth and get rich in the Florida Keys.
On a different night, a later day, I might have waited and intercepted them. Because I was after them all. Every unmoraled son of them. And I would take them all, one at a time, or die trying. But on this night I had bigger game in my sights. I grimaced at the guy’s good luck; promised him another meeting on another night, then started my engines and got back under way.
I had discussed tactics with Colonel Westervelt. And we had come to only one mutual conclusion: save for only the one or two obvious diversions I would have to set up to save lives, the rest I would have to play by ear. My only orders were to cause enough chaos so that, when the federal boys arrived with their warrants later on in the dawn, there would be enough unhidden and undestroyed evidence to put the lock on the Senator and his little army for fifteen years or more.
How I went about it was up to me.
I nosed Sniper around into the harboring shoals of Friend Key Bank and let her drift back on the incoming tide before dropping the big bow Danforth. When I had played out plenty of scope for the rising tide I set another hand anchor, then switched off the sweet bubble of twin GMC engines. In the sudden silence, I could hear muted voices coming across the water, from Cuda Key. People were awake on the island. People were moving about. But it couldn’t be because of me. Something was up.
The storm was moving upon the chain of Keys now, swinging, as it usually does, around to the northwest: big gusts of wet wind followed by the flash of lightning, the momentary vision of rough green seas, and the flickering darkness of a westering moon beyond the stream of thunderheads.
It would be some nasty night.
I had a long swim. More than a mile. Normally, in those seas, it would have taken longer than I could allow. But with me I had brought the Navy’s version of the Farallon-Oceanic underwater propulsion vehicle. It used two motorcycle batteries for power, had a 109,000-candlepower headlight, and could pull me along at nearly five knots. I couldn’t use the headlight, but I needed the speed. Colonel Westervelt had outfitted me with the UPV, and with new Navy-issue mask and fins and snorkel. I didn’t like them as well as my old stuff, but they would serve. He had offered me tanks, but I had refused. For one thing, I had them aboard if I needed them. But I didn’t need them. As much as I had used scuba gear in the Navy, I still preferred free diving. I liked to be able to move underwater unencumbered. I liked to be able to shift quickly from water to land. That’s what I had been trained to do. With tanks, it’s hard to tell a good diver from a great diver. But free diving separates the men from the boys.
I rechecked my gear. RDX explosives, plus detonators. Cobra crossbow and plenty of shafts. Webber dart pistol with twenty-six darts—one of them loaded with the scorpionfish poison. Two thermite grenades. Wise underwater penlight. And my Gerber fishing knife—not built for survival, like the Randall, but it was razor-sharp and would do until I got the Randall back.
I took a rolling, windy moment, sitting on the teak boarding deck of the Sniper, to go over my plan of attack. And, after rearranging the order of the darts in the Webber, I spat in my mask and slid into the stormy water with the UPV.
It was a rough trip: high, windblown waves, a foul tide, and a nasty cross chop. The red four-second flasher blinked fitfully off the mud-and-coral shoals behind the bridge. I felt ready, alert, filled with adrenaline and a well-honed purity of purpose.
Revenge.
They would pay for killing my loves, my life. Those who didn’t die would go to prison—Stormin’ Norman would see to that.
And those who did die would die slowly, by my own hands.
I skirted the eastern edge of Cuda Key, away from the boat docks on the channel, then moved along the southern bank, the warm hum of the UPV covered by the roar of wind and waves.
I gained access to the island on the same mud flat, beneath the same cover of mangroves, as before. I checked the hiding place among the arching roots to see if my old gear was there. It wasn’t. They had found it. And, I assumed, they had found my little Boston Whaler, too. And done what with it? Sunk it? The boat was impossible to sink—even if they cut it in half. I hoped it was tethered down at the boat dock. If it was, that would be my way back to the Sniper.
As I hid my UPV and stuck my mask, fins, and snorkel into the little knapsack, I heard the noisy step of someone approaching. I flattened myself against the warm muck of the mangrove bank and watched.
Two men with flashlights. They approached each other from opposite directions, both beyond the high screen of fence.
Guards. The Senator had posted guards. So, he suspected that someone was on to his little operation. And he was concerned enough to take military-style precautions. I looked forward to my meeting with the Senator. I wanted to look him in the eye.
I lay there and listened to them talk. They lit cigarettes, traded jokes, and laughed. Two drug-culture aces. I saw their stringy hair and bleak faces in the flare of the lighter.
“Stayin’ dry, Romeo?”
“Shit no, man. Real bummer of a night. Senator’s nuts, man. Gettin’ paranoid or somethin’.”
“I know where you’re comin’ from there, brother. Makin’ us walk this fence all night long.”
“Hey—got any little thing to set me right?”
“Some herb, amigo, that’s it. That bastard Ellsworth is keepin’ the C locked up nice an’ tight until the boat’s loaded. Like incentive or somethin’. Wants the brothers to work faster.”
“Shit! I’m losin’ it, man. Can’t stand all this . . . this quiet. Ain’t nobody gonna try this island again. Not after they gave that last jerk the float test.”
“Hah! Float test. You kill me, Romeo.”
“Yeah—hey, give me one o’ those numbers. Christ, packin’ a gun like John Wayne, an’ them goddam dogs stalkin’ around like vampires or somethin’—I need a little somethin’ to settle my head.”
They rambled on for a few more minutes, shared a joint—the sweet musk of it drifting my way, then dissipating in the storm wind.
And then they moved away, in separate directions, each grumbling and moving the beam of his flashlight along the fence mechanically.
I crept up to the fence and pulled the strap of the Cobra crossbow off my shoulder. It is an amazing weapon, and it felt good to be holding one, ready for use, again. It is built of a light, tough alloy and has a draw weight of about 150 pounds. That means that the average man couldn’t normally cock it more than once. But with the ingenious self-cocking device built in, a child could manage it. The small aluminum arrows can cover the length of a football field in little over a second and it has a maximum killing range of around three hundred yards. I checked the first shaft, making sure the rubber cap was in place and that I had added the single lead sliver for balance.
I gave the first one, Romeo, about fifty yards. He had stopped to light another cigarette. I lifted the Cobra, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger.
F-f-f-f-f-iTT!
The blunt-tipped arrow hit him in the back of the head, and the young druggie dropped as if he had been magically deboned. His flashlight rolled down the slight incline to the fence.
A silent weapon.
Silent and deadly.
I checked on the other guard. He was about the same distance away, in the opposite direction. He hummed a tuneless little melody. He had heard nothing.
I added another shaft, cocked the Cobra, took aim, and fired. The arrow whistled toward him, quartering the strong wind and adjusting its flight just as I had planned. It dropped him in midstride.
He groaned once, then lay quiet.
I took out a stout length of rope and tossed it over the limb of the gumbo limbo tree. I pulled myself up into the tree, returned the rope to the big thigh pocket of my commando pants, then swung back down onto the ground, inside the confines.
I kept low, measuring my steps. I went to the first one, Romeo, took his pistol, shut off the flashlight. With shorter lengths of rope I tied him. I checked his heart. He was still alive. With surgical tape from my hip pocket, I gagged him. And then I moved back along the fence to the other fallen guard and did the same.
Poor little dopeheads. They would wake up with some kind of bad headache. A sudden flash of lightning revealed the two of them to me: sour-smelling shapes looking, in the white glaze of rain, like dirt heaps over a new grave.
They weren’t dead, but they might just as well be. If it wasn’t prison, it would just be more drugs and more drugs, until their brains rotted away.
They were not my real adversaries. They were really just victims; victims like Janet and Ernest and Honor. And Billy Mack. Victims of the big money boys; the human prey of the drug kingpins who remained safe and aloof, shielded by their wealth or their government positions.
But a handful of them weren’t safe. Not tonight. Tonight, the hunters became the hunted. Tonight would become for them a stormy epic of revenge. Death for the brainrakers; death to the cocaine and heroin dream makers.
I retrieved the two aluminum shafts and moved on, toward the big house.
When I reached the base of the mound, I could see that the whole island was awake, mobilized.
Ten to fifteen men, rough-looking guys, black and white, carried boxes and paintings and small pieces of furniture from the house to the boat. Lights were on everywhere. This would be no easy job.
It crossed my mind that I should get to the caretaker, Jimmy, first. He had seemed like a pretty harmless old man, and I wanted to put him safely to rest, out of harm’s way. And I was just about to make my move, to flush from the pepper bushes in which I was hiding, across the little shell clearing to his cottage, when I heard the low trio of growls, and the galloping footfalls of the Dobermans.
There was no doubt what they wanted to do. They wanted to rip my throat out; to get as much of me as they could before their master arrived and pulled them off.
But I was ready this time.
They charged at me from behind. I jumped to my feet and whirled around. The Webber dart pistol was already out, cool in my hand. In a flare of lightning, glistening in the steady rain, they looked like the hounds of hell: jagged teeth bared, ears pointed batlike.
There was no barking this time. They were ready to kill.
I shot the first two in rapid fire. Their momentum brought them crashing into me like eighty-pound sledges. I could smell the sharp musk of wet dog as they knocked me to the ground and sent the dart pistol spinning out of my hand.
And then the third one, the big red Doberman, was on me, slathering to get at my throat. I knocked the hot dead weight of the other two off my chest, and got to my knees just as the red one hit me. I felt his teeth snap deep into my left wrist, but I had him by the neck. I rolled backward, using his momentum, kicked him hard in the stomach, and kept a tight hold on his throat as he flipped over me.
Even in the steady roar of wind and rain I heard the gunshot snap as his neck broke. With one ghoulish whimper, the Doberman lay dead.
I got shakily to my feet. A spoon-sized chunk of flesh was missing from my wrist. It was bleeding—bleeding bad. Quickly I cut out a piece of pad from my old watch sweater, then wrapped my wound tightly with the surgical tape
It would do.
I took a deep breath, trying to settle myself. Two hundred yards away, the men working on the mound had heard nothing. They wore shiny wet rain slickers and bore their loads with dismal resignation. The rain was falling harder now, the lightning coming with loud regularity. Steam rose from the shoulders of the men, and it looked as if each of them were possessed by a slow, smoldering fire.
I recovered the dart gun in a blaze of lightning and headed for the caretaker’s cottage.
He sat in the same old chair, beneath the same lamp, reading one of those slick porno magazines. He had the centerfold out. Through the corner of the window, over his shoulder, I saw the paper goddess looking strangely and pathetically alone, as all of them do. The old man flipped the page and studied the hand-scripted reproduction of her centerfold application. She was born under the sign of Virgo, her hobbies included all of the newest cult favorites, and her career dreams were torn between neurology and creative writing. She was nineteen years old, a year older than April, and already she was the surrogate lover of a million leering faceless men who would treasure her dearly in their loneliness—until next month.
I stayed close to the cottage and crept around to the door. Quietly, I swung it open and pointed the dart gun at the old man’s chest.
“What the hell . . . !”
“Calm down, Pop. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He held his hands up like a robbery victim in a film western.
“You can put your hands down, Pop. All I’m going to do is tie you up and gag you. Some people will be here in the morning to let you go. If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from them.”
He put his hands down, reached for his old pipe, reconsidered, and eyed me warily. “Okay if I smoke?”
“Yeah.”
He picked up the pipe, his hands shaking. “How’n the hell’d you get away? Thought Ellsworth kilt you fer sure.”
“I managed. You don’t have to know any more.”
“Lord a’mighty, that knock he give you on the back o’ the head that night was hard enough to kill a hog.”
“I’ll do the talking, Pop. I’ve got a score I want to settle. Where is Ellsworth?”
“Don’t know an’ I don’t care. He’s ’round here on the island someplace, yelling orders out like a slave owner. I quit ’em, I did. Quit ’em this afternoon. Told’em I’m sicka their nasty ways. An’ I meant it.”
“Are they pulling out tonight, or tomorrow night as they had originally planned?”
He looked surprised. “Mister, you are a shrewd one. How’d you know that? Didn’t know it myself, only guessed it. Heard somethin’ about that creepy little Lenze fella gettin’ arrested. Saw them loadin’ the boat an’ put two an’ two together.”
“And I hope you also figured that they would kill you before they left—because they will. If I don’t get to them first.”
He looked even more surprised. “Can’t say as I did figure on it. But now that ya mention it, I guess you’re right. Makes sense. They’re an evil pair, them two. I tol’ em that to their face, I did.”
“How about the girl, Pop? Bimini. Is she all right?”
“The nigra woman? Hain’t seen her in a day or two.”
“What about the Senator? You think he’ll be on the boat tonight?”
The old man rubbed his face and toyed with the pipe. “Doubt that seriously, mister.”
“And why’s that?”
He lit the pipe, hands now calm, blowing blue smoke across the room as the rain pelted down. “ ’Cause the Senator hain’t here, mister. Left in one of them heliocopters ’bout an hour ago.”
