11

The night was not as clear as its immediate predecessors, but the army of clouds that scudded across the star-laden sky, concealing and revealing the moon like the folds of a magician’s cloak, more than made up in beauty for what had been lost to clarity. The breeze was stiffer too, ruffling the waters of the Florida Straits, and brushing Marker’s hair across his eyes.

The Slipstream Queen was holding a position about forty miles south-east of Vaca Key, close to the centre of the Straits’ shipping lane. It wasn’t the most comfortable place to be – they had already twice been obliged to make way for passing oil tankers – but it marked the optimum position for picking up the signal from the tracking device.

On the map Cafell had drawn two lines connecting the position of the Tiburón Blanco with the two ends of the Florida keys archipelago. Assuming the submarine was headed straight for US territory its course had to lie inside the relevant segment. Cafell had then drawn a third line dissecting the segment, and found the point on that line which was thirty miles distant – the range of the tracking signal – from its outer edges. And just to be on the safe side he had moved the point forward a couple of miles.

And here they were, with at least another half an hour to wait, staring out across the shining sea.

‘It doesn’t get any better,’ Marker murmured. The emotional knots of earlier that evening had untied themselves, or perhaps been untied by his guardian angel the sea. He felt the tingling sense of anticipation which had always accompanied action, be it a training exercise in Poole harbour, an anti-smuggling operation in the Hsi Chiang estuary or a terrorist alert on a North Sea oil rig.

The minutes ticked slowly by. All thirty of them, and then another ten, and another ten.

‘Fuck,’ Marker growled, turning away from the screen to stare at the ocean, as if willing the waters to yield up the missing submarine.

‘Yes,’ Cafell hissed happily beside him.

A faint signal was palpitating on the edge of the circular screen. Both men watched as it slowly took on substance, and worked its way millimetre by millimetre towards them.

‘It’s coming straight at us,’ Marker said.

‘Not quite,’ Cafell cautioned.

Another ten minutes and it became apparent that if the submarine held to its present course – and there seemed no earthly reason why it should have plotted itself anything other than a straight line – it would pass about a mile or so to their west. ‘If it’s headed for the mainland I’d put my money on Channel Five,’ Cafell said. ‘It’s between Fiesta and Craig Keys,’ he added, pointing them out on the map. ‘The water’s just about deep enough for them.’

‘How about getting there first?’ Marker suggested. ‘The longer we can keep ahead of them, the less distance we’ll fall behind when we have to transfer to the Vickers.’

‘OK, but what if they’re heading for one of the Keys . . .’

‘They aren’t. There’s too many people around, too many potential witnesses. They’re heading for the Everglades. You could lose an army in there.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Cafell agreed.

‘We can always turn back,’ Marker added.

‘Sold.’ Cafell engaged the cabin cruiser’s engine and turned towards the north, matching its pace to the signal on the screen from the submarine behind them. ‘It’s doing nearly twenty knots,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘That’s what the sneaky beaky said,’ Marker muttered, using the Marine slang for Intelligence.

‘Some boat,’ Cafell said admiringly. ‘It would make a lovely Christmas present for the boss.’

An hour passed by, the dark line of the Keys slowly emerging on the north-western horizon. They were back inside American territorial waters now, and someone was obviously watching, because a call came through on the emergency radio band demanding that they identify themselves and their destination. The former was easy enough, but they didn’t know the latter, and given their current course they could hardly claim to be heading home to Key Vaca. After a quick glance at the map Cafell plumped for Naples on Florida’s Gulf coast as the destination likely to cover the most eventualities.

‘We could have asked them to talk to our friends in Key West,’ Marker said, after they had been given a clean bill of health, ‘but I didn’t fancy having to spend most of the night explaining ourselves in triplicate.’

‘Dead right,’ said Cafell.

The bridge across Channel Five was now visible through the nightscope, but to the naked eye it was still buried in the dark background. Occasionally a vehicle’s headlights would swoop up the long arc of the invisible causeway and down again, like twin planets in flight across the sky.

Another boat was passing under the bridge in their direction, and ten minutes later, as it passed fifty yards or so off their starboard bow, the voice of a silhouetted female could be heard shouting, ‘We need another man.’ Whether this was because they were numerically one short, or because they were not happy with the one they had, was not explained.

Cafell slowed the Slipstream Queen and concentrated on keeping to the deep-water channel under the bridge. Once they were through into the deeper waters of the bay he idled the engines and brought the boat to a drifting halt.

‘She’s still coming,’ Marker said, his eyes on the screen. He looked at his watch. ‘About forty-five minutes behind us.’

They settled down to wait, hoping that the Coast Guard was not observing the interruption with a suspicious mind. The palpitating dot on the screen inched slowly across the circular screen as the time passed.

‘They’re close to the bridge,’ Cafell calculated. ‘Now we’ll see which way they’re headed. My guess is that they’ll hardly change course at all.’

As the next fifteen minutes went by it became apparent that he was right. They got the boat underway again and set off in pursuit, only slowing to match the submarine’s pace when Cafell reckoned they were five minutes behind her. Traversing the bay took about an hour, and it was almost four o’clock when the leading boat approached the twelve-mile territorial limit off Cape Sable. Not much more than ninety minutes of darkness remained.

The submarine changed course slightly, moving in on a diagonal heading towards the coast.

Cafell studied the map. ‘It has to be here,’ he said, holding it in front of Marker and jabbing it with his finger. ‘Lostman’s River. It’s the only channel into the Everglades which is deep enough.’

‘Let’s close the gap,’ Marker suggested. Staring straight ahead at the dark line of the distant coast, he caught sight of something moving out of the corner of his eye. It didn’t take more than a few seconds to make out what it was. ‘Oh shit,’ he muttered.

The Coast Guard cutter was on an interception course, and at maximum speed if the noise of the 210-foot vessel’s engines was any guide. Its powerful searchlight was already on, waiting to bathe them in its glare.

The thought of attempting to outrun the pursuit flashed through Marker’s mind, but was swiftly dismissed. For one thing he wasn’t sure they could, and for another he knew the cutter carried both a radar-guided three-inch cannon on its foredeck and a fast helicopter on the helipad amidships.

‘Heave to,’ he told Cafell.

The cutter drew up alongside them, some twenty yards away, and the searchlight was turned full on the two SBS men. Another light picked out the submersible in the water behind them. A megaphone-amplified voice asked them to state their business in United States territorial waters. Shadows dancing on the cutter’s deck looked suspiciously like a boarding party preparing itself.

‘If they come across turn off the tracker,’ Marker told Cafell quietly. Then he cupped his hand and shouted across the gap: ‘We are British naval officers engaged in a police action against British citizens. We have clearance from the US Navy and US Coast Guard to operate in your waters. You should have the name of this boat on file. Our password is Key Limey.’

There was a pause, presumably for the Coast Guard officer to swallow his disbelief. ‘Please stay in view,’ he ordered them, with a hint of courtesy in his tone. ‘We’ll run a check.’

The two men waited in the searchlight’s glare, conscious of the eyes watching them from the cutter’s deck, not to mention the fingers that would be sweating on triggers. Five minutes passed, and then ten, without the officer reappearing.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Cafell asked. ‘We’re going to lose the signal.’

‘Someone in Key West can’t believe their ears,’ Marker guessed. ‘They’ve probably decided to wake up Baskin or Jiménez for confirmation. Either that or they’re wondering why we haven’t shared any new discoveries with them.’

Another five minutes passed, and Marker was wondering whether throwing a tantrum would be counter-productive, when the searchlight abruptly went out. ‘You’re free to go,’ the voice boomed through the megaphone. ‘Sorry for the hold-up.’

Marker acknowledged the message with a wave, and tried to rub the light out of his eyes. ‘Go,’ he told Cafell.

The Slipstream Queen surged forward. Looking back, Marker watched the cutter beginning a long turn towards the south. At least it hadn’t been given orders to follow them.

‘We’ve lost the fucking signal,’ Cafell said.

‘Not for long. You said there was only one channel, right? Get in there.’

‘And what if I’m wrong?’

‘Then we’ll have to turn the whole fucking Everglades upside down until we find them.’

The cabin cruiser headed north as fast as its engines and the towed submarine would allow. They were still about twenty-five miles from the mouth of Lostman’s River when the signal reappeared, faintly at first but more strongly all the time. Marker took the wheel as Cafell transposed the dot’s position from the screen to the map. ‘They’re about five miles up the river,’ he said eventually. ‘And they seem to have speeded up,’ he added. ‘The deep-water channel looks a bastard to navigate. I reckon they’re running on the surface.’

‘Why not?’ Marker asked. ‘It’s still dark and there’s no one in there to see them.’

‘It won’t be dark for long,’ Cafell said, looking first at his watch and then at the eastern sky. Was that the first hint of light above the dark coastline or was he just imagining it?

He turned back to the tracking screen, and for the next half hour the dot’s position hardly moved, reflecting the fact that they were travelling in roughly the same direction at roughly the same speed. When it did eventually move, it was to perform a slow U-turn. The distance between the two craft was shrinking. ‘They’ve stopped,’ said Cafell.

‘Where?’ Marker asked from the wheel.

Cafell took the map across. ‘Somewhere on the northern shore of this lake,’ he said, pointing it out. ‘The closer we get, the better the fix we’ll get. It’s called Hell’s Lake, by the way.’

‘That figures,’ Marker murmured. They were now approaching the mouth of the river, and the sky above the mangrove-covered banks was definitely lightening. As the land grew closer they could hear the swelling racket of the dawn chorus.

‘How far up-river can we get?’ Marker asked.

Cafell studied the charts again, and then the mangroves off the starboard bow. ‘The water doesn’t look low,’ he said. ‘So all the way, if we’re careful.’

‘I wouldn’t like to sink our benefactor’s boat,’ Marker said.

‘I wouldn’t like to be in it when you do,’ Cafell said, pointing a finger towards the nearer of the two banks. In the dawn twilight a long, dark shape was moving slowly across a flat stretch of grey mud beneath the overhanging trees. ‘Are they crocodiles or alligators around here?’ he asked.

‘Both,’ Marker replied, slapping at a mosquito on his neck.

They headed up the river, keeping to the deep-water channel, which mostly followed a line slightly closer to the southern bank than the northern. The river itself rapidly narrowed over the first couple of miles, and then its width stabilized at around a quarter of a mile. On both banks the mangroves looked and felt like walls: dense, impenetrable, almost uniform in height. And nothing rose up behind these walls, no taller trees, no hills, no signs of human occupancy. There was only one escape from this river, and that was the river itself.

There was no longer anything to be gained by speed – the submarine had reached its destination, the darkness was almost gone – but there was a lot that could be lost in waters as treacherous as these. Marker took it slowly according to the chart, with Cafell lending the use of his eyes from the bow in difficult-looking stretches.

Several miles went by, and the mosquitoes grew ever more annoying, but then the river began to widen once more, and the attacks abated. ‘We’re about two miles from Hell’s Lake,’ Cafell announced. ‘And about half a mile short of what looks like a decent anchorage.’

‘How far from there to the sub?’

‘About four miles.’

‘Sounds good.’

The sun had cleared the wall of mangrove now, and the river had widened to the extent of constituting a small lake. In the lee of a headland on the northern shore they found both Cafell’s suggested anchorage and their second crocodile. The reptile ignored them at first, lying resolutely still on its patch of mud, but then it slowly started raising its upper jaw, as if it was miming Tower Bridge.

‘They have no strength when it comes to opening their jaws,’ Marker said conversationally, as they manoeuvred the submarine around to the side of the cabin cruiser. ‘All the power is in the slamming shut.’

‘So this one’s just getting prepared.’

‘I think it’s ready,’ Marker said. The crocodile’s jaws were now at right angles to each other.

The two men concentrated on loading what was needed into the battery-operated Vickers, and then clambered one by one down through the hatch and on to the wooden floor of the submarine’s belly. Despite the wide windows the interior felt decidedly cramped.

As Marker checked the dials and gauges on the pilot’s console Cafell clanged shut the hatch and screwed the locking wheel tight. ‘Ready to go,’ he said.

Marker switched on the engines, which began to vibrate with an almost melodious hum. He then started the two propellers turning, the starboard slightly slower than the port, as he wanted to move off in a slight turn to starboard. The Vickers edged its way out towards deeper water.

The two men had decided that, for the first half of this short voyage, the risks involved in pranging some uncharted underwater obstruction greatly outweighed the risk that they might be spotted on the surface by unfriendly eyes.

The gamble paid off – only the eyes of several great white herons followed their progress eastward. A hundred yards short of Hell’s Lake Marker brought the craft to a stop, and Cafell took a final reading on the exact location of Arcilla’s submarine. ‘There,’ he said, pointing out the spot on the map. ‘And here,’ he added, pointing out another not too far away, ‘looks like a good place to resurface.’

Marker nodded, and reached forward to open the vents. As the water swished into the tanks the submarine sank into the river, three feet, six feet. . . Marker closed the vents and turned on the outside lights. The craft was suspended between the river’s bed and surface, with only a few feet to spare in either direction. He started the propellers again, and the Vickers moved forward into the slightly deeper waters of the lake.

The water was not particularly clear, but there was little doubt they would be visible from the air. The thought suddenly struck Marker that a helicopter might have been waiting for the sub, might even now be taking off and wheeling out across the lake . . .

No, he told himself. It would be heading east towards Miami or north towards Tampa.

‘How are . . . ?’ he started to say, when a dark shape exploded into view through the submarine’s front windows, and just as quickly disappeared from view. The second approach, though, was slower. It was a dolphin, no, two dolphins, and they seemed to want to play.

For the next fifteen minutes, as Marker steered the Vickers across the wide lake, the two creatures kept them company, entertaining each other and the SBS men with an underwater display which included everything from looping the loop around their craft to close-up smiles in the observation windows. It was distracting, potentially dangerous, and downright wonderful. When the dolphins, apparently bored by their new friend’s rigidity, finally took off for pastures new, the two men felt a rare sense of loss. Both knew that they had seen something few other humans would ever see: one intelligent species trying to play with another.

Cafell, meanwhile, was responsible for navigating them safely to their destination, and at times his powers of concentration were severely tested. But he stuck with it, not least because he knew that their surfacing in the wrong place might well prove fatal. There was no knowing what weaponry the enemy might have on hand, and there wouldn’t be much chance of escaping in the submarine once their presence was discovered. Not in water this shallow, anyway.

Finally they neared the appointed spot. The bottom of the lake had been slowly rising for some time, which fitted in with Cafell’s calculations. ‘Another fifty yards,’ he told Marker. ‘But slow.’

They had moved forward around twenty yards when the slope of the lake bottom suddenly steepened. ‘Here,’ Cafell said.

Marker switched off the propellers, turned off the lights and stopped the engine. ‘Here’s hoping,’ he said, and started emptying the tanks. The Vickers rose in the water, rocking gently from side to side. A dark and ragged line of vegetation swam into focus through the ruffled water, and then they were on the surface, and looking quickly round to see where they were.

Cafell’s navigation had been spot on. The submarine was sitting in a small cove, surrounded on three sides by a wall of mangroves. Only the open lake was visible through the entrance to the cove. ‘They’re around that headland,’ said Cafell. ‘Probably only about three hundred yards as the crow flies.’

Marker did a quick calculation in his head. ‘I shouldn’t be more than an hour,’ he told Cafell.

‘Should I wait here or take her back down? If I take her down the noise of the engine might carry,’ Cafell said.

‘I guess you’d better just keep her where she is,’ Marker replied. Having pulled the hood of the black wetsuit over his head he was now applying camouflage cream to his face. Next he double-checked that the camera was in the waterproof pouch at his belt, the silenced Browning High Power in the waterproof holster. He took one look at the Heckler & Koch MP5SD, which was still wrapped in its reinforced cling film, and decided that in this instance mobility was more important than fire-power.

‘Ready,’ he said.

Cafell was already unscrewing the hatch. ‘Watch out for crocodiles,’ he said seriously, as Marker clambered up and out on to the top of the submarine.

‘Thanks for reminding me,’ Marker said sarcastically. The only wildlife in sight was a black cormorant perched on a mangrove root some twenty yards away. ‘Won’t be long,’ he said, and slid down into the water.

He only had to swim a few yards before the bottom came to meet him. He waded ashore, and found his path obstructed by the dense mangroves. ‘Should have brought a fucking machete,’ he muttered to himself.

He squeezed through a narrow gap, and then another, and another. It was like being trapped inside an enormous hedge, with the added complication that he was standing in three feet of water. Already the hour he had set himself was beginning to look optimistic.

A sudden movement in the water ahead stopped him in his tracks. The snake, striped like a tiger, only in dark brown and beige, swam away into a tangle of roots.

Marker breathed out heavily. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, he thought. Maybe they should just tell the Yanks the whole story and head on home.

But first he had to find out whether Russell was here. With more than a little reluctance he started forward again.

His luck changed. The swamp and its wilderness of roots gave way to more solid ground and slightly sparser vegetation. Marker rechecked the compass on his wrist and walked on, his boots sinking into the moist soil, his eyes constantly sweeping both ground and foliage for snakes. According to the map it was only a hundred yards or so across this headland to the shores of a narrow creek.

It took almost fifteen minutes, and Marker’s relief on catching his first sight of the creek was almost his undoing. He was just about to slide back into the water among the tangled roots when a strangely familiar sound halted him in his tracks.

He crouched down behind a gnarled trunk and found a small window on to the river in the wall of vegetation. He could hear the faint swish of a paddle being deftly wielded by an expert, and the canoe suddenly came into view. In the stern sat a man in jeans, T-shirt and felt hat. The feather in the latter went with the stereotypical Native American face, but the Walkman didn’t. The leakage of noise from its earphones was providing the strangely familiar sound, one that Marker had last heard on a bus coming back from Bournemouth not ten days before. At this sort of volume, he reckoned, personal stereos would prove as dangerous to the Indians as white men or alcohol.

The sound faded into nothing, and Marker started making his way forward through the roots. He was within a couple of yards of open water when the view in front of him dramatically expanded. Across the thirty-yard width of the creek another wall of mangroves rose up, but a little way to his left the creek opened into Hell’s Lake, and around the far headland, some two hundred yards in the distance, he could see the corner of a wooden jetty. As yet he could see no buildings, but logic put them close to the shore behind that jetty. His spirits, somewhat depressed by the struggle through the undergrowth, began to lift once more.

With only his head above the surface of the green-brown water he moved slowly out from behind the mangrove curtain. The musical canoeist had vanished from sight round the next bend in the creek, and there was no sign of his having a colleague. Marker pushed off through the torpid water towards the far bank.

Getting himself ashore proved as difficult as before. As he fought his way through the interwoven roots Marker promised himself that on his return the SBS would launch a multimillion-pound research programme into the problem of movement through mangroves. There had to be an easier way.

Fifteen minutes and fifteen yards later he was back on relatively dry ground. The trees here were taller and more varied – he was on a hummock, one of those slight humps in a flat land which acted as a magnet to wildlife. There certainly seemed to be more birds in the foliage, and there were flowering plants growing out of tree trunks and branches. Some of these were orchids, he realized. The place smelled like a perfumed Turkish bath-house.

He removed the Browning from its sealed holster, checked that the compass on his wrist tallied with his inbuilt sense of direction, and resumed his progress. He had not gone much further when the vegetation ahead of him began thinning out. Soon he could make out the straight lines of something man-made through the foliage.

It proved to be the roof of a large one-storey wooden building. Marker crawled forward until he could see the end which was facing him. It was about thirty-five feet wide, and boasted two big windows, both of which appeared screened and shuttered.

To his right, behind the building, an area the size of a tennis court had been painstakingly cleared and covered in tarmac, but there was no helicopter sitting on the pad. One had probably departed as soon as the contraband had been transferred from the sub.

To his left, through a gap between the corner of the lodge and the forest, he could see more of the jetty and the lake beyond. There was no cover in that direction. He removed the camera from its waterproof pouch and took several photographs, before moving further back into the trees and starting on a course that would take him around behind the helipad to the far side of the lodge-like building.

The going seemed easy after the mangroves, and it took only a few minutes to reach a spot from which he could study the back of the building. This was about sixty feet long, and contained eight shuttered windows and one door. It had been constructed as a wilderness lodge, Marker guessed, a place to bring boy scouts of all ages for canoeing, bird-watching, orchid picking, whatever. There had to be at least a dozen rooms inside, and most of them were probably lined with bunk beds.

There was one separate outhouse to its right, and what looked like another closer to the lake shore. Maybe Russell was being held in one of them, Marker thought, though he couldn’t think of a single reason why he should be.

He took more photographs, then resumed his march round the perimeter, making sure to keep out of sight inside the trees.

The second outhouse turned out to be a boat-house, built mostly of corrugated plastic sheets, with one side wall resting on dry land, another two on pilings in the lake. The fourth side looked open to the water from where Marker was standing.

He sat on his haunches among the trees, wondering what to do next. So far he hadn’t seen a single occupant, but he had to reckon on there being at least two people inside the lodge – the submarine’s crew. After a seven-hour voyage underwater it seemed likely that they would take a good long rest before heading back to the Tiburón Blanco. And in any case they would need darkness for the return passage through the shallow waters of the bay and the Keys.

They might be alone, though, and quite possibly sleeping.

At the very least, he had to check the outhouse, Marker decided. He carried on round the perimeter until he found the point of approach which offered the most cover, and began crawling out across the ten yards of open ground. There were no cries of discovery from the lodge.

The blind end of the outhouse lacked a window, so he was forced to risk the side facing the lake, which rendered him visible from the jetty and the front veranda of the lodge. One look in the window showed him the building was virtually empty, and certainly not a prison for Nick Russell. Marker turned away, and noticed with a leap of his heart what had previously been hidden from sight by the boat-house – there were two men on the jetty, both sitting in cheap plastic chairs.

Marker sank to the ground, thanking his lucky stars that the men had their backs to the shore. It made sense, since their task was presumably to frighten off unwelcome callers, and here in the western Everglades such visitors could only arrive by boat.

He studied the two men. One was Hispanic-looking and wore jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap. He was smoking a cigarette, and cradling what looked suspiciously like an Uzi sub-machine-gun in his lap. The other one, blond, was wearing a uniform which Marker didn’t recognize but which he guessed was that of a Park Ranger. Both men were wearing wraparound sunglasses.

He took out his camera, and was about to take a picture of their backs when the uniformed man got to his feet. He stretched, turned, and said something which made the other guard laugh. Marker depressed the shutter release, and then watched the man walk back up the jetty and disappear behind the boat-house. About half a minute later the sound of a screen door slamming came from the direction of the lodge.

Marker crawled back into the safety of the trees and considered what to do next. He had already exceeded his stipulated hour, but Cafell would give him at least as much time again before he started to worry in earnest. Just the boat-house, Marker told himself, and then he would head home to the sub. The prospect of fighting his way back through the mangroves was not an enticing one.

It took him only a few minutes to come within spitting distance of the lake, but the configuration of the shoreline made it impossible for him to see what was inside the boat-house without leaving the shelter of the trees. Fortunately this didn’t seem a risky proposition. There was only a short stretch of open ground between where Marker now stood and the top of the wooden steps which led down to the front of the boat-house. The view from the side windows of the lodge was obscured by the outhouse, and the line of sight of the guard on the jetty was blocked by the boat-house itself. Unless someone emerged from the front of the lodge at the exact moment Marker stepped out into the open there seemed little danger of his being seen.

He walked briskly across the space and on to the steps. The top one creaked slightly, and he took care to lighten his step as he descended the others. From the bottom a wooden walkway led in along the land wall of the boat-house. The Russian submarine and two canoes were tied up against it.

Marker had seen all that he needed to, but for a moment curiosity triumphed over caution, drawing him into the shadowed building for a better look at the submarine.

There was nothing much to see, of course. He would have to climb inside, study the controls, take the craft apart and put it back together again. One day, perhaps.

He crept back down the walkway, turned to ascend the steps, and heard a soft scraping sound from the path above. In the split second which passed before the man came into view Marker had braced his legs and brought the Browning into the classic two-handed firing position.

The Uzi was only halfway towards its target when Marker fired, pumping two bullets into the man’s torso and a third through his brain, cancelling the message en route to the finger on the trigger.

The sub-machine-gun clattered noisily down the steps, while the guard sank slowly backwards on to the path.

Marker caught the Uzi on its third bounce, with the unconscious air of a conjuror making a difficult trick look easy. His ears were straining for evidence that someone had seen or heard what had just happened.

All he could hear was the singing of birds, the faint breeze in the trees, the slurping of water against the boat-house pilings. He climbed the steps, grabbed the dead man’s feet, and half pulled, half slid him off the path and on to the top steps, where at least he was out of sight from the lodge veranda.

What to do? Marker stood there, his thoughts racing through the possibilities, and lingering for a moment over the memory of the only other man he had ever killed, a Chinese drug smuggler.

He shook his head angrily. There would be plenty of time to worry about his soul – first he had to get his body home.

There was still no sign of an alarm. It didn’t look as if he would have any problem leaving by the same route he had used on his way in. Except, of course, that he couldn’t take the dead man with him, and the discovery of his body would scupper any chances they had of finding Nick Russell and nailing Fidel Arcilla. The Cuban would put his operation on ice, close the pipeline down, hide away one of his submarines. As of now, they hadn’t a shred of proof against any of his men, let alone Arcilla himself.

So how could he get rid of the dead man, and make it look like an accident? With three bullet holes in him, there was no way they could afford an examination of the body. It had to disappear, either in the forest or the lake.

The canoes riding in the water beneath the jetty caught Marker’s eye, and he tried to imagine he was looking down from above at the layout of lodge, boat-house and jetty. He decided that with any luck he could get to one of the canoes without ever putting himself in view from the lodge. It was risky, but no riskier than any alternative he could think of. And he wouldn’t have to deal with the fucking mangroves.

He lowered the dead man down the steps and on to the walkway. There he removed the blood stained blue T-shirt and baseball cap, knotting the former around one thigh and stuffing the latter into his utility belt along with the dark glasses. He tangled the Uzi round the guard’s wrist, lowered the body slowly into the water, and slid in beside it. Then he began swimming slowly towards the jetty some thirty yards distant, with one hand firmly grasping the dead man’s wrist.

The canoe tethered at the near end was not visible from the lodge. With some difficulty Marker bundled the corpse over its side, and then clambered in himself. He took off his wetsuit hood and put on the blue T-shirt, the baseball cap and the sunglasses. The dead man was not that much smaller than he was, and sitting down in a canoe . . .

Marker decided that climbing up on to the jetty to untie the canoe would be riskier than leaving behind a rope that had clearly been cut. They would have no idea why the guard had gone out in the canoe, so how could they expect to understand how much of a hurry he had been in? He reached for his knife, sliced through the mooring rope, and used a hand to push himself off from the jetty.

With the skill acquired by long practice he manoeuvred the canoe around the end of the T-shaped jetty, and then moved it along the other side, with the wooden pilings effectively masking him from anyone watching on land. From the end of the jetty he would have to cross about a hundred and fifty yards in clear view, before the trees on the first headland screened him once more.

He paddled fast, as if he was in pursuit of someone, taking care to keep his face turned away from the lodge. If anyone shouted after him, he would just wave his arms excitedly and point in the direction of the hidden cove, where Cafell was hopefully waiting with the Vickers.

But no one shouted, and when he finally risked a look back all but the empty jetty was hidden from view. He took off the baseball cap and dark glasses, and let the boat drift while he pulled the sodden T-shirt over his head. Marker had no desire to test Cafell’s reflexes by confronting him with what looked like a stranger in a canoe.

He rounded the headland beyond the creek, saw the Vickers in the distance and raised an arm in greeting. After what seemed like a long hesitation Cafell waved back.

The sardonic grin on the younger’s man’s face disappeared when he saw the corpse in the canoe. ‘No time to explain,’ Marker said. ‘Find something to weigh him down with. And hurry.’

Cafell disappeared into the body of the submarine, and re-emerged less than a minute later. ‘There’s nothing,’ he said.

‘Shit. We’ll have to take him with us,’ Marker decided. He hauled the dead map up, and the two of them somehow contrived to lift him on to the roof of the vessel, before bundling him in through the hatchway.

After collecting the sunglasses, Uzi and clothes and passing them to Cafell, Marker leant down, overturned the canoe, and shoved it away from the submarine. There was still no sign of the enemy. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Two minutes later they were submerged once more, and heading out across Hell’s Lake towards the head of Lostman’s River. As before, Marker took the controls and Cafell navigated. Neither man looked back at the body wedged behind them.

There was no sign of the dolphins on the return trip – perhaps they could sense the dead man on board, Marker thought – and the open-jawed crocodile had left his spot on the mudbank by the Slipstream Queen. There was no sign of it in the water either, but Cafell wasted no time as he waded the thirty feet which separated the boat from the nearby headland. There he found a heavy enough rock for their purposes.

It was too smooth for a rope attachment, so they wrapped the body in a blanket with the rock inside, and then secured both ends with rope, creating what looked like a human Christmas cracker.

Out in midstream once more, they dropped it into the deep-water channel and watched it sink.

Cafell caught the grim look on Marker’s face. ‘You had no choice,’ he said firmly.

‘I know. Let’s get out of here.’

‘OK.’

Marker went inside to find some fresh clothes, and emerged ten minutes later with a couple of cans. Cafell had one eye on the river, another on the chart, and one hand on the wheel. He reached out the other for the beer. ‘So where do we go from here?’ he asked.

‘Home, I guess.’

‘Not England?’

‘No. Our villa in the Keys home.’

‘And then what? After twenty-four hours’ sleep, I mean.’

‘Good question,’ Marker said. ‘Any answers?’

Cafell shrugged. ‘I did have a few thoughts on the subject while you were out for your walk. And most of them were pretty depressing.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, we may know how most of it works now, but we don’t have a fucking thing that could be used in a court of law against Arcilla. We haven’t any evidence that any crime has been committed at all. And worse, I haven’t managed to think of any way we could get hold of any.’ He put down his beer and ran a hand through his hair.

Marker waited for him to continue.

‘There are two things we don’t know. No, three. One is what they’re smuggling, two is where they pick it up in the chopper, three is where it goes from the lodge back there. The obvious way to crack one is to follow the chopper when it leaves Provo, right? And the obvious way is to ask our friendly frigate to track it. But when we find out where it’s going we’re not really any further ahead. Say it’s Haiti – well, the government’s hardly going to sanction using the Royal Navy in Haitian waters, is it?’

‘No, but . . .’

‘Then there’s the Tiburón Blanco,’ Cafell went on. ‘That at least is in international waters. We could try and board them during the transfer from chopper to sub, but what’s to stop them throwing the drugs into the sea. And there goes our proof. There’s no law against having two subs with the same number. The only other option is to intercept the sub with the stuff on board. Trouble is, the bloody thing’s faster than we are. We’d have to catch it in a fucking great net or something. And that does sound more like James Bond than reality.’

‘OK . . .’

‘And one last thing,’ Cafell insisted. ‘Even if we do catch them with the goods, we still haven’t implicated Arcilla. As it is he’ll just say that his underlings were acting on their own, and using his treasure hunt as cover. He’ll probably be indignant as hell.’

‘Probably.’ Marker gazed at the wall of mangroves sliding by, an idea beginning to form in his mind. He let his unconscious take over the task of bringing it to fruition. ‘We have a more immediate problem,’ he said.

‘Which is?’

‘Our hosts. They may have given us the green light last night, but I have the feeling that this morning they’ll be expecting the explanation.’

Cafell laughed. ‘Which is?’

‘Fuck knows. If we tell them we were chasing a submarine they’ll want to know where it went. If we say we lost it they’ll think we’re incompetent. Either way they’ll want to take over.’

‘These are their waters.’

‘Yeah, but this is our op. They wanted us to nail Arcilla, and that’s what we’re trying to do. And I’m not sharing anything with the Yanks before I know for certain whose uniform that guy at the lodge was wearing.’

‘OK,’ Cafell said equably.

‘And anyway,’ Marker added, ‘I always thought the idea of the sea belonging to anyone was a load of bollocks.’

‘The Native Americans thought the same about the land,’ Cafell volunteered. ‘Are you sure the man you saw in the canoe was an Indian?’

‘Nope, but he looked like Hollywood’s idea of one.’

‘Maybe he was just passing through.’

‘Maybe.’

They stood in silence for a minute and more, watching the river widen to meet the open sea.

‘How about – we were on our way to RV with a possible informant,’ Cafell suggested. ‘But he didn’t show.’

‘He was scared off by the Coast Guard cutter,’ Marker added. ‘I like it. It’s thin, but so what – they aren’t going to call us liars. Not to our faces anyway.’

‘As long as they don’t take the Queen back,’ Cafell murmured.

‘Right. We’re going to need her for at least another week.’ Marker lobbed his empty can into the bin that had thoughtfully been provided. ‘And much as it pains me to say it, I think we’re going to need reinforcements from Blighty. Two should do for what I have in mind.’

‘And that is?’

Marker told him.