CHAPTER I

MAY DE LORD BE WIT’ US

When a new pocket of lights flared farther to the east through the deep blackness of the night, Sol Campbell finally vented the rage that had been eating up his insides, and with an intimidating Yo Rude! issued the prelude to his duel. He seemed to stand on higher ground as his voice rose above the rest to ask, Wha’ dem lights over dere be? Tell me, nuh—wha’ dat light yonder be, if it ain’ St. Kitts? Instantly, the roar of the engine receded and the surge behind the boat caught up with its hull, softly thrusting the sixteen passengers forward. Awash at sea, The Rambler drifted helplessly in no particular direction. The calm Caribbean waters rocked the boat melodiously, intensely, in the middle of the night, as its 115-horsepower diesel engine gargled on idle. Every now and then a wayward wave or ripple crashed against the underside of the hull, letting out an empty thump that reverberated inside the men aboard. There was no moon. The night, dark and clear all at once, was made thicker by a sinister haze which veiled the stars and the lights in the distance. Behind the wheel, on the bridge of the thirty-five-foot boat, a bitter argument ensued.

Rude Thompson, captain for a day, had been entrusted to take The Rambler to the northwestern shores of St. Kitts in order to meet local members of the insurrection at the stroke of midnight. But that very stroke had gone at least half an hour earlier, as they’d seemingly found themselves off the coast of, not St. Kitts, but the neighboring St. Eustatius.

The men had gathered at Island Harbour, on the northeastern end of Anguilla, that very day to pack the boat with guns, ammo, and a few provisions for the journey. The mission had been kept secret and the men involved had camped near the training site at Junks Hole Beach for the past three days, away from their families for added security. The Rambler was loaded for the sixty-five-mile journey southward on Friday, June 9, shortly after lunch. Alwyn Cooke, the mastermind behind the plan, showed up uncharacteristically late. He wore his usual gray pressed trousers and white cotton shirt buttoned up to the top. Yet there was something ragged about his looks—something that went beyond the three-day beard and the sunken rings around his eyes. He brought with him the dark green canvas bag in which, ten days earlier, the police task force had intended to take their guns, before they were expelled from the island.

At that time, Inspector Edmonton, head of the police task force, had carried the bag to the Piper Aztec that was supposed to take him and the remaining four members of the force back to St. Kitts. On his way from the small wooden building that was Wallblake Airport to the equally small propeller aircraft sitting on the dust strip, he was met by Rude Thompson, Gaynor Henderson, and the collective indignation against the man whose ill judgment had led to widespread violence months before, during the Statehood Queen Show. Rude’s first request for Inspector Edmonton to drop de bag an’ go on was more of an order. The inspector’s reluctance to obey gave Gaynor the opportunity he craved to restore the pride that had been taken from him three months earlier, on the evening when he was thrown in the dungeon. So, emboldened by the circumstances, Gaynor took a .32 pistol from behind his back and shoved it right inside Inspector Edmonton’s mouth, until it polished his uvula. You ever taste de taste of lead in you mout’? Inspector Edmonton had no chance to reply. You better drop de bag unless dis is de last t’ing you ever wan’ taste.

Alwyn Cooke had thought the gesture excessively violent, but ten days had shaken Anguilla’s world, and he presently approached with the same bag, except that it now looked heavier, bulkier. Come to de back of de truck. Is t’ree more of dem back dere. His shrill voice cut through the air and opened up the silence. By three in the afternoon, The Rambler was loaded with most of the equipment the police force had left behind: six Lee-Enfield Mk III* .303 rifles, such as the ones used during World War I; five Winchester Model 54 .30-06 rifles, the predecessor to the famous Model 70, launched in 1936; four M1 Garand .30-06 semiautomatic rifles; four M1 .30 semiautomatic carbines; eight hundred rounds of ammunition; two boxes of dynamite; four detonators; and four cans of tear gas. In addition to the material confiscated from the task force was a supply of more modern equipment from the USA, including five automatic .25 handguns, three .32-caliber pistols, and, crucially, two M16 automatic rifles and two Browning M1919 .30-caliber machine guns, both of which were popular at the time with the American army, particularly in Vietnam.

However antiquated, The Rambler was equipped with an arsenal big enough to arm a small militia. Which is precisely what Alwyn Cooke, Rude Thompson, and the rest of the organizers of the operation expected to find in St. Kitts that night awaiting their aid. They would be in for a surprise—but not yet. Right now, burdened with the weight of sixteen passengers plus five hundred pounds of guns and ammo, the main concern was how much the boat could carry without sinking. Therefore, provisions for a trip that was to last at least nine hours were kept to a bare minimum: a demijohn of water, some dry crisps, and homemade johnnycakes—a local delicacy made of cornmeal and traditionally baked by women for their men to eat on the journey (later transfigured into johnny)—freshly prepared by some of the more diligent wives.

The Rambler was loaded and ready to go by about three in the afternoon, but the sun wouldn’t set until some four hours later. The island, in complete control of the rebel government for the previous ten days, had been inaccessible to foreign traffic for forty-eight hours. Oil drums were carried in pickup trucks and lined up on the dirt strip of the airport to prevent any aircraft from landing, and all beaching points (there were no ports in Anguilla) had been guarded and officially closed to the outside world in an effort to keep any news of a plan which was largely unknown to the population in the first place from leaking to the enemy.

Consequently, at three in the afternoon of Friday, June 9, 1967, The Rambler became the first boat to leave Anguilla’s territorial waters in two days. It sailed eastward from Island Harbour, and faced the tough Atlantic tides off the northeastern part of the island, before making the choppy journey past the cliffs of Harbour Ridge. Then it reached the treacherous seas off Captain’s Bay, only to drift into the narrow passage between Windward Point, the easternmost part of the island, and Scrub Island, a midsized cay to the east that still housed a dirt strip built as part of that obscure episode of World War II—the Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement.

By four in the afternoon, The Rambler was cutting across the strait between Anguilla and Scrub, steering away from the waves that rolled in all the way from Africa, and heading in the general direction of St. Kitts and the rest of the Caribbean atoll. The first three miles of the passage were expected to be among the roughest of the day, but the sun still burned ferociously in the sky and the men aboard The Rambler still itched with desire to reach St. Kitts and get to the task at hand as the boat left Scrub Island behind on its port side and stopped challenging the high crests of the vigorous sea in order to roll with them toward Tintamarre, a.k.a. Flat Island, about ten nautical miles away.

Like Scrub, Tintamarre is a midsized cay just off the (northwestern) coast of its bigger sister island, St. Martin, which had little of interest for honest citizens outside one or two unspoiled beaches of white sand and turquoise water. Like Scrub, the island is flat enough to home a dirt strip, but with facilities in Dutch Sint Maarten to the south, Scrub Island to the east, and Dog Island to the north, the American army felt adequately prepared to monitor the traffic and disrupt the passage of German U-boats through the Anguilla channel. Perhaps understandably, their plans did not foresee the apparition of Jan van Hoeppel, a mercenary adventurer—half Quixote, half Saint Exupéry—who, in collaboration with the Vichy government across the French Caribbean, would foil the American initiative and develop a sophisticated replenishing station in Tintamarre for the Nazi navy to enjoy fresh fruit and water from Martinique, from Guadeloupe, from Dominica, while their submarines were refueled and replenished.

Alas, German interest in the Caribbean was short-lived, so when the traffic diminished and, indeed, the bad guys were defeated, van Hoeppel turned to aviation for inspiration: he already owned a four-seat, high-wing, single-engine Stinson Reliant, which he dubbed La Cucaracha, so he flattened the ground in Tintamarre, invested the money he had made collaborating with the Vichy in two ten-seat Stinson Model A trimotors and a six-seat Stinson Detroiter, and, just like that, established the first operational airline in the northeastern Caribbean: Air Atlantique.

Van Hoeppel had long shifted his focus from airplanes to real estate, and the role he plays in this tale hangs in the balance of untyped words, but as sixteen restless men approached the western shores of Tintamarre on the first stage in their voyage, the remnants of a fleet that had been reduced by frequent accidents and decimated by a severe hurricane more than fifteen years back glowed with a rare air of grandeur, of relevance, as if, somehow, one impossible dream could be mirrored in another. Then Alwyn Cooke intervened. Cut de engine. Rude Thompson looked at his comrade with a trace of disbelief, but did not venture as far as to question the order. A few seconds elapsed before Wha’ we do now?—a voice so anonymous echoed that it seemed to each of the passengers in the boat as if they had all asked the question at the same time. We wait for night to fall, and the ensuing silence filled the air separating the flat soil of Tintamarre to the starboard and the angled hills of St. Barths in the distance, shadowed in the center by a thick pocket of rain that poured down somewhere at sea, between The Rambler and the island.

It had just gone five when the diesel engine of The Rambler fell silent. The first ten miles of the journey had taken a good two hours, but the sun still hung high in the sky, far above the horizon line. Alwyn Cooke intended to minimize the chances of being caught crossing the St. Barths channel by lingering near Tintamarre until night had fallen. On Friday, June 9, 1967, the sun set at 6:46 p.m. The tropical crepuscule, short-lived and dramatic, shed daylight for another half hour. Hence, The Rambler and its crew had to sit tight and wait out at sea, off the eastern end of Tintamarre, for two full hours. Of which, the first thirty, forty minutes were spent in utter silence, as if Alwyn Cooke’s instruction had dropped a tacit curfew on words.

But it had not been Alwyn Cooke, nor anyone else, who had imposed the silence. Instead, it was the simultaneous reaction of sixteen men, all far too absorbed in their own worries to notice the world outside. To the three American mercenaries aboard The Rambler, all scarred from their exploits in Vietnam, this might have seemed like a natural reaction. However, to the average West Indian, a group of sixteen men sitting in silence for this long in a small boat was an aberration. A talkative people steeped in a long tradition of humor and faith, West Indians are not prone to fall silent—to let pass an opportunity to lambaste one another with a copious dose of pique—on any occasion. But this was more than just an adventure, and more was at stake than any of them would have cared to admit: here were joined at once interests that were national and personal, common and individual; here was invested much hope, much time, and much money—money to pay for guns, money to pay for experienced men of war, money that in Anguilla in 1967 simply did not exist. Many of these thoughts never even crossed the minds of any of the sixteen men aboard The Rambler. Nevertheless, the tension, the fear, the uncertainty that reigned was adequately represented in this drawn-out silence that lasted from the moment Alwyn Cooke uttered his order to wait for night, until sometime after six, when the red sun approaching the horizon inexplicably triggered in the young Walter Stewart a need to hum the melody of “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”

Walter Stewart sat at the back of The Rambler, where the fumes of the diesel engine had sent him on a dizzying slumber from the start. But the boat had been drifting for a good hour, and, if anything, the pervading smell was of sweat and salt, of men at sea, and Walter had often gone out fishing with his grandfather, Connor, the head of the Stewart family from Island Harbour, and sometimes they had traveled as far north as Sombrero Island, forty miles away from Anguilla and right in the middle of the Anegada Passage, so Walter knew for a fact that what he was feeling was not seasickness, and yet he could not help the vacuum in his stomach, and the spinning inside his head, and the dryness in his mouth, the taste of bitter fullness in his larynx.

Although Walter was merely a kid—barely fifteen years old—he had been part of the revolution from the start. He had been there, getting his placard smashed on his head, in January 1967, when Rude Thompson and Alwyn Cooke recruited people to follow Chief Minister Bradshaw during his official visit to the island; he had proved one of the most vociferous hecklers at the speeches the statesman from St. Kitts had tried to deliver in Anguilla to “discuss” the concept of statehood; and he had been there again, watching from a safe distance, as the very same policemen who had so magnanimously shared their tear gas with the crowd left the island in an equally gallant gesture, on the morning of May 30.

Ten days later, the commitment and loyalty of Walter Stewart toward the revolutionary cause was neither challenged nor questioned. What was being put to the test, however, was his stomach—until the sun, hanging low over the horizon, reddened by a thickening mist, put a hymn he loathed in his mind. Then, slowly, he let out a wail, which turned itself into a quiet hum, which led to a whisper. By the time he started whistling the tune, Mario Gómez, one of the American mercenaries onboard, had had enough. What the hell are you singing that for, boy? The only lord who can help you now is this: and he held the long, angular shell of a .30-caliber missile upright in his left hand, between his index finger and thumb. His pale young face squirmed in a failed attempt to look tough. Who the hell would put all that junk in a deserted rock, anyway? asked Gómez, referring to the carcasses of whatever remained of the fleet of Air Atlantique. Corporal Gómez did not think Walter Stewart would be headstrong enough to go on with his gospel, but he did not want to risk it either, nor did he feel in the frame of mind to allow the protracted silence to continue. Meanwhile, Glenallen Rawlingson, a quiet, determined young man with bulging eyes, inward-folded lips, and an anthropoid gait, was also happy to break the silence. He was tall and thin, and darker than the average Anguillian. Unlike most of the men in the expedition, he did not stem from the eastern end of the island, but from the more central South Hill. In a spontaneous burst of energy, he explained, maybe to Corporal Gómez, maybe to everyone else, how once, not too long ago, Flat Island had been an important source of income to Anguillians. My uncle did till de soil of dat land, when it belong to Mr. D.C. Glenallen spoke the truth, but for those who did not know the story it was hard to imagine, adrift, awaiting the end of the day, that anything at all might have ever taken place on that godforsaken rock. Yet Glenallen’s voice was less abrasive than the silence it replaced, so Corporal Gómez and the rest of the crew allowed him to continue his tale about an eccentric Dutch heir who had come to this far corner of the earth to dissociate himself from the civilized world and who had decided to set up his kingdom in Tintamarre, where he built a luxurious palace and raised cattle and grew cotton and, implausibly, became a major purchaser of Anguilla’s one and only export: labor. Alas, there was to be no happy ending to the fairy tale. D.C.’s death was mysterious, sad, and, as all death must be, lonely, but also categorical, because he failed to plant in Tintamarre or in the womb of his beloved Elaine Nisbet, or anywhere else for that matter, the seed of his spring and consequently brought with the end of his life the end, too, of his lineage and of a Caribbean extravaganza like no other. But this episode is too important to be dispatched as an aside. So let’s press the pause button and allow D.C. van Ruijtenbeek to linger in space for the time being, while we call upon the voice of the great Héctor Lavoe to put an end to Glenallen Rawlingson’s anecdote with the unmistakable melody of Todo tiene su final / nada dura para siempre . . .

Back in The Rambler, where it’s unlikely that anyone had ever heard of Héctor Lavoe, except perhaps for Corporal Gómez, who had Borinquen running through his veins, the atmosphere on the boat loosened somewhat, awarding an air of normality to a situation that was anything but normal. When the sunset arrived it caught most of the men off guard. The tide had taken The Rambler slightly to the north of Tintamarre and the sun could be seen sinking in full behind the mass of water separating Anguilla from St. Martin. There was no afterglow. There was, however, a significant glow emanating from the fully restored and expanded electricity lines in St. Martin, which, since the devastating passage of Hurricane Donna in 1960, had been carefully developed on both sides of the island. Anguillians living on the southern shores were confronted with this sharp reality daily, but the men aboard The Rambler were mostly from the north and the east. Ahead of them the calm sea, tainted yellow, orange, pink, served as background to the silhouette of St. Martin towering above the pitch-black outline of flat little Anguilla, where not only had the government deemed it economically unviable to supply electricity to the six thousand islanders, but even the archaic telephone system which had been in place prior to Hurricane Donna remained, seven years later, derelict and unrepaired.

Invigorated by the beauty, by the powerful symbolism of the scene, Alwyn Cooke entrusted the mission to the heavens with a May de Lord be wit’ us and gave the order to Le’s go. The intrepid bunch was on its way again to meet its unlikely destiny.

The night had settled, there was no moon, and The Rambler, slow and overloaded, rocked between the dim lights of St. Barths, barely visible behind a curtain of mist to the east and the small pocket of life by St. Martin’s Orient Bay to the west. It was not until two hours after they had departed Tintamarre that the first major crossroads of the night was reached. The lights of Gustavia, the main settlement in St. Barths, had been left behind a good half hour earlier, and Pointe Blanche in St. Martin could barely be seen in the distance behind the boat. The Rambler had been cruising smoothly at the desired speed, just over ten knots an hour. Rude Thompson knew that all he had to do was point the ship due south and in less than three hours they would see the lights of St. Eustatius, at which point he would steer gently to the west, just a few degrees, not more, to take the sloop through the channel between St. Eustatius and St. Kitts and come straight into Sandy Hill Point. Here a friendly motorboat was supposed to be awaiting their arrival to escort them to the final meeting point at Half Way Tree.

All this sounded plain and simple, and it would have been so, had The Rambler been equipped with the most rudimentary of navigational tools, such as a compass. But The Rambler was a boat used exclusively to bridge the seven-mile channel between Anguilla and St. Martin, which never required anything more than mediocre eyesight, and it had never been intended as anything other than a means of transportation for leisure purposes or a smuggling run, which in Anguilla at the time was as much a national pastime as a way of earning a living. And Rude Thompson, captain for a day, had never stepped aboard The Rambler before the afternoon of Friday, June 9, 1967, when the boat had been floated at Island Harbour and loaded with a small arsenal of old guns.

Everybody had been too busy then, minding their own business, to realize the instrumental void on the bridge of the thirty-five-foot boat, and Rude Thompson had not thought of it until he found himself at the helm of a drifting vessel off the coast of Tintamarre. Before the fall of the night, and with Anguilla to the north as his point of reference, Rude picked up an old piece of orange chalk and marked the cardinal points on the wheel of the boat. So once he heard Alwyn’s coarse Le’s go, he fired the engine and pointed The Rambler in the direction that his makeshift compass told him was south, using as frame of reference the lights along the eastern coast of St. Martin and those on the western side of St. Barths to make the appropriate corrections.

But Rude Thompson had not considered the effect of the tide, rolling at full strength from east to west once The Rambler hit the waters south of St. Barths. Or, if he did, he underestimated the force of the sea, such that, despite holding the helm steady within the lines that marked his south, The Rambler drifted somewhat—just marginally, not even a few degrees—to the west. The consequences of this minor inaccuracy would prove to be calamitous when, two hours later, as The Rambler soared through the northern Caribbean, the first tenuous lights flickered in the distance, dead ahead. Da’ oughtta be Statia right dere, announced Rude Thompson, oblivious to the fact that at the speed they had traveled and with a mist that grew thicker as the night grew colder, they could not yet be within eyeshot of St. Eustatius.

It did not even occur to Rude Thompson that this could be so, because in Rude Thompson’s mind all he required to confirm that, indeed, it was “Statia” right ahead of them, was for the lights of St. Kitts to loom in the horizon, marginally to the west of the lights which could already be seen. Never doubting he was right, Rude steered The Rambler to the east of the electric lights, roughly where he expected St. Kitts to appear. Less than half an hour after that, what he thought was St. Kitts emerged from the dark, farther still to the east than he had expected. It was not yet ten p.m., and at this rate Rude predicted they would reach the lights in an hour’s time at the most, putting them just about an hour ahead of schedule.

The announcement was greeted with excitement by the younger ones among the militants, but Solomon Carter had long shed the candid ingenuity that so often accompanies youth, and he had never been known for his optimism in the first place, and he had lived long enough to be aware that when life deals you a hand with a surprise card in it, seldom does it turn out to be a pleasant one. But Solomon was no alarmist—nor was he a fool: often the man behind the scenes, he allowed the attention of the people of Anguilla to focus on the more charismatic figures of Alwyn Cooke and Rude Thompson, while he was allowed to exert his influence on them behind closed doors. Solomon Carter had been the first man to whom Alwyn Cooke had revealed his plans to invade the island of St. Kitts, before, even, Rude Thompson, precisely for the sober attitude and levelheadedness that took an apprehensive—nervous, really—Sol Carter right up to the corner where Alwyn Cooke stood. Wha’s our speed, Al? Alwyn Cooke had not seen Solomon Carter approach in the darkness of The Rambler, and was startled by the question. He thought of scolding Solomon as he hesitated to give his answer. Then he thought better. Ten and a half knots. Solomon Carter knew they had kept a steady pace throughout the night—he had listened out for the engines—but he knew he still had to ask: We slow down? Before he saw Alwyn Cooke shake his head he’d already let out a long sucking noise, as he kissed his teeth in disgust. In dis sea an’ dis speed, how come we be ahead of schedule? Alwyn gave no thought to Solomon’s question, immediately passed it on to Rude Thompson.

Now, Solomon Carter was no expert in matters of seafaring, but it took more an elementary course in geography than a lifetime out at sea to understand that the latest set of lights populating the horizon could not be St. Kitts. When he explained to Rude Thompson that he thought the lights ahead of them came from Statia, and those to the west from Saba, he was greeted with a patronizing chuckle and an impatient Sol, when you last notice S’Martin behind? The dim lights at the southern end of St. Martin had disappeared an hour or so after The Rambler had sailed past Pointe Blanche. Wit’ dis mist you havin’ tonight you kyan’t see all da way to Saba out west. Dem lights west Statia, an’ dem in front St. Kitts.

Solomon Carter was not convinced by Rude Thompson’s explanation, and he made him aware of his concern, but before bothering to give the question further thought Rude found the need to emphasize his authority and discourage any further questioning by rhetorically asking, Who de captain, Sol? You or me? Solomon let out a fiery stare that ripped open the dark canvas of the night as he looked straight into Rude Thompson’s eyes before turning away from him and heading back to the aft of The Rambler. There, he waited patiently for the next set of lights to appear on the horizon line.

But Sol’s wait was cut short a few minutes later, when the lights ahead, brighter, larger by the minute, added to the numbing growl of the diesel engine, the violent rocking of the boat, and the dark flatness of the night chipped away at Gaynor Henderson’s spirit and broke his will. From the bottom of his burdened, frightened chest, Boy, too many people goin’ dead could be heard. The unexpected lament put an end to every idle conversation, to every useless motion meant to make the wait for the arrival in St. Kitts less tedious. For a moment, even the 115hp diesel engine went mute and toiled in silence. Until Harry González, the man sitting to the right of Gaynor Henderson, let out an exasperated What the fuck?

Too many people goin’ dead wit’ dis crazy plan, man, revealed a terrified Gaynor Henderson, who was, quite literally, scared shitless.