13

On Russell’s watch the second hand momentarily merged with the hour and minute hands. With butterflies dancing in his stomach and adrenalin coursing through his veins he started down the slope to the shoreline.

He had left the safety of the hide soon after dark, and surreptitiously worked his way down through the fields to the hilltop observation point he had reached the previous night. From there he had watched the last ferry arrive, the children dragged home to bed, the cooking fires doused, the kerosene glows dimmed one by one. Now only the two armed thugs were left, sitting on the beach end of the dock, their feet hanging just above the sand.

The four-hour wait had given Russell ample opportunity to both study their habits and work out the safest line of approach. The two men were each on their fourth beer, and though neither was showing any obvious signs of drunkenness – Haitian beer, as Russell knew from experience, was not the most potent in the world – the gaps between their visits to the end of the dock were growing noticeably shorter.

Why they should choose to walk all of fifty feet to piss in the sea when there was a perfectly good beach right next to them, only they could know. In Russell’s experience such self-consciousness was refreshingly absent from most ‘undeveloped’ cultures. But maybe an inability to piss with someone watching was as crucial an indicator of development as cellular phones, microwaves and MTV. Not to mention transplant surgery.

Whatever the reason, he was grateful. It put a distance between the two men, and that would give him a chance.

He reached the shoreline about a hundred yards to the west of where they were sitting. They were talking with their backs to him, but every now and then one would turn his head, and Russell had no desire to play Creeping up on Grandma with two men toting Uzis. Instead he inched his way into the water, wishing the slope of the beach was steeper, but grateful for the noisy swish of the waves. Once the water was deep enough he began to swim, heading in a wide circle for the end of the dock.

The water was warmer than he’d expected, and dirtier too. Reaching his destination, he hauled himself in between the line of pilings and started pulling himself hand over hand towards the land end, where the four dangling feet were silhouetted against the sand. On his way he examined the boats which were tied up on either side, and realized with dismay that the outboard motors had been removed from those boats that normally carried them. He was going to have to row across the strait.

He provisionally picked out a red boat with the name Dolores, and moved on, reaching the point where the waves clawed at the sand about five yards from the four hanging legs. He could hear the two men talking quite clearly now – in Creole, he thought.

Russell lowered himself slowly on to his stomach in the gently breaking waves and began dragging himself slowly up the beach. When he was level with the waving feet he pulled himself up into a crouching position and waited. His breathing sounded far too loud, his heart was hammering like a road drill, and at any moment he expected one of the men to jump down on to the sand and smile at him over the barrel of his Uzi. Or simply blow him away.

But the minutes went by, the men kept talking, and occasionally flexing their feet. Every minute or so Russell would hear the sound of beer glugging out of a bottle and down a throat.

And then two legs suddenly disappeared, and the planks above his head shook with the feet walking away down the dock. Ten seconds, he thought, inching forward towards the still-hanging feet. Another two to get the dick out. And three more to reach mid-piss.

With both hands he grasped one of the offered ankles and pulled with all his might. A shriek split the night, and the man came crashing down on to the beach in front of him, landing head first in the sand. As Russell dived for the fallen gun another shout came from the far end of the dock, swiftly followed by the sound of running feet.

Russell’s finger found the trigger and he turned, still on one knee, as the running man’s silhouette loomed into view on the dock above. Both guns seemed to open fire at the same moment, but only Russell had a clear view of what he was aiming at. The Haitian was lifted into the air, and seemed to hang there for a moment, like a man bungling a backward somersault, before he crashed down with a sound of splintering wood into one of the small boats parked on the far side of the dock.

The other man, Russell discovered, had been knocked unconscious by the fall.

In the village a couple of lights had appeared, but no one ventured out to investigate, and within a few minutes the lights had been extinguished. Russell used his length of rope to tie up the unconscious man, and gagged him with one of his own socks. Then he walked quickly down the dock to the boat he had chosen, slipped its mooring, jumped aboard, and picked up the oars.

He had more than five hours of darkness left, which should give him all the time he needed. Soon the dock was disappearing from view, swallowed up in the larger silhouette of the hills behind the village.

Half an hour went by, and though the mainland hardly seemed to grow any nearer, Russell felt happy with his progress. With the moon shining down on the sea, the heavens filled with stars, it was possible to forget for a moment what might be waiting on the farther shore, and what he had left behind in the compound on Tortuga.

It was through this precarious sense of well-being that the first shouts of distress reached his ears, and for a moment he thought it was his conscience playing tricks with him.

But it was a boat, a small boat drifting towards him, sitting unusually low in the water. At least two of its occupants seemed to be shouting at him.

He rowed towards the other boat, and soon came alongside. It wasn’t much bigger than the Dolores, but it was carrying a load more suited to a boat three times the size. A huge mound of belongings filled its centre, and seven people were wedged around its edges. One, a middle-aged woman, was holding a baby in her lap. The other five – two adults and three children all under twelve – were baling for all they were worth.

In vain. The boat was already knee deep in water, the tops of its sides only a few inches above the level of the sea. It was sinking.

‘America!’ the woman with the baby shouted at him, as if she thought he was waiting for a password.

Other eyes looked imploringly in his direction.

This was what they called instant karma, Russell thought. Someone up there was trying to tell him something.

He manoeuvred his boat alongside and gestured for the Haitian family to come aboard. The woman came first, and the baby was passed over to her. The children were next, and then the mother. With each new arrival Russell’s boat let out a creak of alarm and sank lower into the sea.

The father was now beginning to transfer the pile of belongings from the sinking boat.

‘No,’ Russell told him, shaking his head for emphasis. The man gave him a look which seemed to say: Don’t you understand, these things are our life?

Russell shook his head again. Already it was obvious that they wouldn’t make it across the strait. He mimed to the Haitian that he could try towing the belongings, and at this the man’s eyes lit up. He stepped nimbly into the stern of Russell’s boat and reached out an arm for the bow of his own.

Russell turned the Dolores back towards Tortuga and begun rowing, conscious of the children’s eyes staring up at him. The baby began to cry, and the mother started singing a soft Creole lullaby. Halfway to the shore he heard a despairing sigh behind him and knew that the other boat had taken the family’s belongings to the bottom.

The child’s wail seemed to grow stronger as they neared the beach, but it didn’t matter. Russell’s eyes had already picked out the men waiting on the dock.

The dark mangroves slid slowly by on either side, as the Slipstream Queen made its unhurried way up Lostman’s River. The moon had risen an hour before, and was playing hide-and-seek with the fleet of clouds that were moving across the star-laden sky. One moment the waters of the river would offer a shimmering carpet, the next a black mirror.

Dubery was at the wheel, Cafell reading the chart. Finn was sitting on the bow with the nightscope, looking out for any uncharted obstructions. Marker was in the lounge, checking through their equipment one last time.

They had been on the move for three hours now, since receiving Franklin’s confirmatory message. This time they had secured advanced clearance for their passage through US territorial waters from the authorities in Key West, and had rashly promised a return on their American hosts’ hospitality before the night was out. The US Customs Service Air Division at Homestead had been alerted to expect an incoming call sometime around dawn.

It was almost two o’clock now, and they were nearing the spot where they had anchored the cabin cruiser the previous week. As they passed it Cafell showed Dubery where the crocodile had lain, jaws at the ready. He didn’t mention that they were passing over the spot where they had sunk the dead gunman.

In the lounge Marker heard both comment and omission, and decided that this team of four had gelled as smoothly as he could have hoped. He wasn’t sure he had much in common with either of the two newcomers – Dubery was a bit on the earnest side, Finn still young enough to think the world revolved around him – but then Cafell wasn’t exactly his idea of a soul mate either. The important thing was that they all felt confident enough in each other’s abilities to make full use of their own, and after three days together Marker was pretty sure they did.

Any lingering doubts about team chemistry had been removed the previous evening. Emerging from his sleep shift Marker had come upon the other three practising cabrioles on the stern deck. Not that he knew them by that name. Finn’s pocket encyclopaedia, it turned out, contained diagrams of the eight basic ballet steps, and his SBS comrades were practising number eight, leaping into the air with one arm outstretched, and two legs fluttering against the other. And laughing fit to burst.

Marker smiled at the memory and went forward to join the other two on the bridge. Hell’s Lake was not much more than a mile ahead, and it was time to decide whether or not to douse the boat’s lights. They were not intending to bring the vessel within three miles of the Anhinga Lodge, but it was always difficult to judge how far sound travelled across water. If the bad guys heard the boat, then it would be better if they could see it too.

‘If we leave the lights on,’ he suggested to Cafell and Dubery, ‘then as far as they’re concerned we’ll just be one more boat cutting across the southern end of the lake on our way to the Everglades Waterway. There must be several boats a day doing just that.’

‘In the daytime, yes,’ Cafell said, ‘but not in the middle of the night.’

‘I don’t think the noise will carry,’ Dubery said quietly.

‘Actually neither do I,’ Cafell said.

Marker sighed. The engines seemed awfully loud to him, but maybe that was because he was listening to them. And it would be better not to raise any questions at all in the minds of the enemy. ‘OK,’ he said eventually, ‘let’s go for broke. But do your best to keep the engine noise down.’

‘You got it,’ Cafell said in a mock-American accent.

The entrance to the lake came into view, and a few minutes later the Slipstream Queen was venturing out on to the wide waters. Cafell kept them close to the southern shore, where, unless the enemy had acquired state-of-the-art thermal imaging since Marker’s previous visit, they would be hidden in the dark line of mangroves.

Lights were already visible across the lake. With the aid of the nightscope Marker could make out two illuminated windows in the lodge, and what was probably a kerosene lamp burning on the end of the jetty.

The Slipstream Queen was now far enough away from the course the submarine would take. Marker gave Dubery the cutthroat gesture, and the Scot turned off the engines. In the bow Finn gently lowered the anchor into the lake.

The four men gathered in the lounge, and all but Dubery pulled on their wetsuit hoods. Using the pools of moonlight offered by the windows they applied the dark camouflage cream to the exposed parts of their faces and checked their equipment.

Satisfied, they went out on deck. Once the Kleppers had been quietly let down into the water, Finn and Cafell slid down the rungs and clambered aboard. Marker lowered the waterproof bag containing the camcorder and PRC 319 into the empty seat beside Cafell, and then climbed down to join Finn in the other canoe. Both crews pulled the spray-deck sheet over their heads, clamped it in place, and pulled the paddles from their pockets in the outer skin. Then with a wave of the hand from Marker they turned silently out towards the centre of the lake.

Standing on the deck, Dubery watched them go, frustrated at not being with them, but also remembering the day of his departure from Poole, and Helen telling him on the phone that she had no desire to be a widow at twenty-four.

Some six hundred miles to the south-east, Russell was wondering why he was still alive. When he had been returned to the camp that morning Joutard had made it clear that he would have one more chance to use his surgical skills, and that then he would be given the opportunity to experience the process from the patient’s point of view.

But the operations were over, the helicopter long since gone, and he was still in the land of the living. Maybe there had not been enough time for Calderón to harvest both him and the man he had killed on the dock the previous night, several of whose bones, and both of whose corneas, had gone with the helicopter.

Maybe he had another week in hell, Russell thought. But at least he had saved that Haitian family, and he would be going out with a better opinion of himself than the one he had lately become used to. He had tried.

The quality of Joutard’s hospitality had naturally dropped. Russell was back in the room where he had first seen Emelisse leaning over his face like an angel. And this time they had thought to board up the window from the outside, as well as lock the door.

He had been given one chance and blown it. And he had the distinct feeling that one was all he was going to get.

As the wilderness lodge grew nearer Marker left the paddling to Finn and devoted all his concentration to the nightscope. Before the angle became too obtuse he was able to pick out an occasional movement through one of the lighted windows, as if someone was walking across the room behind them. But there was no sign of enemy activity outside the lodge or on the jetty.

The mysterious disappearance of a colleague the week before had obviously been attributed to accident. They had found the upturned canoe and made the logical deduction as to the whereabouts of its former occupant.

In the lead Klepper Cafell veered away from the shoreline to pass an unusually ambitious root, and raised an arm to give the following canoe advanced warning. They had paddled about three miles now, on a course that hugged the lake’s western shore, and were now not much more than half a mile from their destination. They had gambled on finding a suitable landing spot on this side of the lodge – Marker knew from experience that there were none on the other.

About a hundred yards from the boat-house they were forced to concede that there was none on this side either. At least they had no problem finding somewhere to tie up the canoes – there were about a thousand roots per square yard to choose from. The three men slipped quietly out into the waist-deep water and started wriggling and twisting their way towards dry land, passing the bag with the camcorder and satellite radio forward hand by hand in a leapfrogging sequence. All three men had experience of waterproof containers proving themselves otherwise.

They reached dry ground later than Cafell and Finn hoped but sooner than Marker expected. He unzipped the bag and gave the radio to Cafell, the camcorder to Finn, and kept the bag for himself. Then in single file they started slowly forward in the direction of the lodge. Soon they had their first glimpse of the light on the end of the jetty, and another few minutes brought them to a position just inside the trees which ringed the helipad behind the lodge. The helicopter – an Enstrom 280 FXA Shark – had already arrived.

Marker brought finger and thumb together in the prearranged signal for Finn to use the camcorder, and the corporal squirmed a couple of yards further forward to get a clear shot. Just in case, Marker also spent a few seconds memorizing the helicopter’s number.

A raised voice suddenly disturbed the calm, causing all three men to freeze. The silence that followed lasted only a second, before a wail of laughter filled the air. It was only the men inside the lodge, having what sounded like a good time.

‘Party animals,’ Marker murmured to himself. And their party was about to get crashed.

It was about seventy-five yards from where they crouched to the front of the lodge, and most of it was in shadow. It was worth the chance, Marker decided, if only to check on the strength of the opposition. ‘I’m going for a closer look,’ he whispered to Cafell and Finn, and before the former could start an argument he was gone, darting over the open ground, along the side of the outhouse, and across the gap which separated it from the lodge.

An oblique look through the nearest window showed there were no curtains, only a mosquito screen. Marker moved away from the lodge, heading for a position in the shadows from which he could get a better look inside the room. Having found one, he took a single quick glance inside and sank to his haunches, letting his mind retrieve the image.

There were four men sitting around a table at one end of what looked like a games room. There was a table-tennis table behind them, and a pool table beyond that. Three of the men looked Hispanic, and none of them was older than thirty. The fourth man was sitting with his back to the window, but the hat and long hair looked more than familiar. It was the Indian he had seen on the creek.

One more look, Marker decided. Like many men with Special Forces experience he was a firm believer in the sixth sense – if you stared at anyone for long enough they became aware that they were being observed. The trick was to keep the vision peripheral, and just take it all in like a camera.

He rose slowly to his feet, took a second look, and sank back down. One of the Hispanics was wearing a shoulder holster, but there were no other weapons on display. If they had SMGs – and there was every reason to think they did – then they were probably leaning against the men’s chairs, or maybe out near the main door. There was no way of knowing.

Satisfied he had seen all there was to safely see, Marker took the same route back to Cafell and Finn, and recounted in whispers what he had discovered.

‘Can I go and take their pictures now?’ Finn asked.

Marker grinned at him and looked at his watch. ‘Time we were in position for phase two,’ he said.

He collected the three MP5s, wrapped them in the bag which had carried the camcorder and radio, and rammed them into a convenient growth of ferns. Meanwhile, Cafell and Finn had both taken a ball of dark twine from their belts and tied one end around the trunk of the nearest tree. Marker and Finn then moved further back into the undergrowth and turned towards the lake, unrolling Finn’s ball behind them. A few minutes later they reached the shoreline close to the spot from which Marker had first seen inside the boat-house, and started looking for the best camera angle.

Cafell had headed off in the opposite direction. According to the largest-scale map they had managed to find, the thick vegetation surrounding the lake rarely extended more than a hundred yards inland, and he was hoping to find a suitably open space in which to use the radio. His hundred yards of twine was nearly exhausted when the light began to brighten, almost imperceptibly at first, but then with increasing speed, as if a bright grey sun was rising. Cafell found himself standing on the edge of a sea of grass which stretched away under the stars as far as the eye could see. He stepped forward on to this strange plain, and found himself up to his knees in water.

He snorted at his own stupidity, and retreated to the dry ground of the hummock. After tying the end of the twine to a convenient tree he wedged the satellite set into a cleft between branches, and set off back through the trees, using the twine as a guide. At its end he transferred to Finn’s line, and followed that down to where the other two had set themselves up behind a particularly tangled web of roots, with the camcorder’s lens peeking out in the direction of the boat-house and jetty.

It was just after four o’clock, and they probably had the better part of two hours to wait. They did so mostly in silence, occasionally stretching cramped limbs, and intermittently scanning the dark lake for a sight of the submarine. Finn found himself thinking about the boating club on the River Lea where he had first discovered that escape was possible from the oppressive world of Hackney’s high-rises. Crouching in a foot of water wondering where the water moccasins were wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind for a career, but he had no regrets. He might be halfway between the frying pan and the fire, but at least that meant he was out of the fucking frying pan. And who knew – he might land in a beautiful woman’s lap. Eventually.

Cafell was thinking about his father, and what the old man would think to see him here. It wasn’t the sort of war he had fought in, that was certain. But the days of the big boats were over, whether on the surface or beneath it. His dad thought that was sad, but Cafell, for all his love of naval history, didn’t agree. In this sort of war, where canoes replaced battleships, the individual counted for more. Every man on this mission had real responsibility, whereas three-quarters of the men on his dad’s nuclear sub were just there to keep the damn thing running.

Beside him, Marker was remembering a summer with his parents in one of the south coast resorts. Hastings, he thought it was. They had been playing in some murder mystery on the pier, and he had been given a small part himself, comprising a grand total of three lines. The third of these had been the last of the play: ‘Mummy, where are they taking Daddy?’

He smiled to himself and wondered what they were doing now. Probably sitting at home in Highgate, watching themselves on TV, glasses of wine in hand, puffing away at their cigarettes. And here he was five thousand miles away, loitering among the mangrove roots. The whole family was half insane.

The minutes dragged by, and the setting of the moon deprived the lake of its silver sheen. Every now and then they heard laughter or good-natured shouting coming from the lodge. A single bird began to sing, and then another, and almost at once, or so it seemed, the rest of bird-kind was joining in. The sky above the lake’s eastern shore began to lighten, bringing the small, dark shape of the submarine gradually into focus.

The men in the house had seen it too. There was the sound of a door slamming, the clump of feet on wood, and then three of them came into view around the wall of the boat-house. The two Hispanics clambered down the steps where Marker had shot their late comrade, one of them carrying the kerosene lamp, the other some sort of customized cradle. The Indian sat down on the top step and lit a cigarette.

Where’s the fourth man? Marker wondered. The distant sound of rotor blades turning supplied the answer. He turned and gave the thumbs up to Cafell, who immediately melted away into the vegetation.

Finn looked enquiringly up at Marker, who shook his head. He wanted to be sure that the sound of the submarine’s passage would drown out the whirr of the camcorder, and it was still a hundred yards away.

The two men on the walkway were talking to each other in Spanish, a language neither Marker nor Finn understood. Both were wearing open-necked shirts and slacks, and both were carrying handguns, one in a shoulder holster, the other in his belt. The Indian seemed unarmed.

The noise of the submarine was now loud enough, and Marker gave Finn the signal. The phrase ‘you’re on candid camera’ floated out of some deep recess in his mind.

By this time Cafell had retrieved the PRC 319 and was wading out into the sawgrass swamp. The message, giving the helicopter’s identification number, had already been keyed in. He sent it in a single burst. In the Poole operations room someone would be noting down the precise time the message was received, and using it as an approximate guide to the helicopter’s time of departure. This, along with the location of the lodge and the helicopter’s number, would then be phoned through to the waiting US Customs Service.

Back at the lake shore the submarine was being guided into the boat-house. Once it was secure, one of the crewmen clambered out into the yellow glow of the kerosene lamp, and stood there straddling walkway and submarine. His partner began passing out the Belzer-Kountz machines, and he handed them across to the men on the walkway, who placed them side by side in the carrying cradle. There were four of them, and two other containers of a different kind. Once they were all loaded in, the two Hispanics took hold of the rope handles at either end of the cradle and carried it off in the direction of the helicopter. The second crewmen followed the first on to the walkway, and handed a small package across to the now hovering Indian, who stuffed it inside the top of his trousers.

All three men headed up the steps, the Indian carrying the lamp. As they disappeared from view the distant whine of the rotor blades accelerated, and Marker thought he glimpsed a dark shape climbing up into the rapidly lightening sky. The plastic boxes would be delivered all right, and the waiting patients would get what they had paid for, but if the US Customs people were on the ball then there would be no escape for the people who had banked the cheques.

‘Time to go,’ Marker whispered.

He and Finn extricated themselves from the roots and followed the twine back to its source, where Cafell was already waiting for them. They removed the MP5s from the bag, and replaced them with the radio and camcorder.

Marker led the way to the edge of the trees, and stopped there for a full minute, watching for movement in the dawn twilight. Then all three men moved off at a loping run, Marker and Finn towards the back of the lodge, Cafell towards the front.

Marker had assumed that the door at the back would be in use whenever the helipad was, and therefore unlikely to be locked. In fact it was wide open.

He found himself in a narrow lobby, looking at the spare machines which Colhoun had picked out on the photographic blow-ups. Ahead of him a passageway extended for some ten yards before opening into the wide entrance lobby. In the distance he could see the front door, wide open.

He could hear voices ahead, and decided they were probably coming from the room in which he had witnessed the card game, and which he presumed must open on to the entrance lobby from the right. With any luck all five men would be in the same room.

He remembered his conversation with the captain of the Argyll about stun grenades, and allowed himself a bitter smile before advancing stealthily down the passageway to the threshold of the entrance lobby.

The Indian walked into view, his face turned back towards the room he had just left, as if he was listening to a parting comment.

At the same moment one of the two Hispanics walked out past him, took one stride across the lobby in ignorance, and then caught sight of the two SBS men. His eyes almost jumped out of their sockets, and his right hand flashed halfway towards his shoulder holster.

‘Freeze!’ Marker whispered fiercely, and the man’s hand seemed to shift into slow motion as his brain registered the twin barrels of the two MP5s.

The Indian’s head had spun around at the sound of Marker’s voice, but either his brain was half asleep or he had somehow acquired - five hundred years of American history notwithstanding – a touching faith in the white man’s reluctance to shoot unarmed red men in cold blood. Either way he made a break for the door, arriving at it just in time to impale his stomach on Cafell’s MP5.

‘Qué pasa?’ the other Hispanic asked as he stepped out into the lobby like one more duck in a shooting gallery. He sounded more irritated than anxious.

By this time Marker had taken several quick steps forward, and there was no chance for the man to miss the menace of the MP5. He raised his hands in the air, and spat a torrent of Spanish in the direction of his fellow-caretaker. Marker yanked the automatic from the man’s belt, and took a cautionary look around the corner of the door to the communal room. As he had hoped, the two submarine crewmen were simply standing there looking lost. This wasn’t an eventuality they had prepared for.

The SBS men herded the Indian and the two caretakers back into the room to join them.

‘OK, boss?’ Cafell asked.

Marker nodded. ‘And find some rope to tie this lot up with,’ he shouted after his second in command.

Cafell disappeared through the front door. A few seconds later they heard the rushing sound of the flare being fired, and through the window Marker caught sight of the bright-green flash in the still lightening sky.

‘We are taking you with us,’ he told the five men. ‘Because we have questions to ask you. Refuse to answer them or make any kind of trouble and you will end up where your friend did, at the bottom of the lake. That’s right,’ he added, noticing the look of comprehension on a couple of the faces, ‘it wasn’t an accident. This is not our first visit.’

They looked at each other, and then at the SBS men. The crewmen looked disgusted, the caretakers looked confused, the Indian looked depressed. No one said anything.

After a few minutes Cafell returned, carrying a coil of rope and the package which had dropped out of the Indian’s belt. ‘Presents,’ he told Marker. ‘Our stuff’s on the jetty. Ian’s on the way. I’ll take one of the canoes and fetch the Kleppers.’

He disappeared again, and Marker kept the MP5 pointing steadily in the prisoners’ direction as Finn went to work tying their wrists together behind their backs. Once all five were securely trussed, he left Finn keeping watch, took out his knife, and sliced open the end of the package. There were three small plastic bags inside, each containing white powder. He cut a slit in one of them, inserted a wet finger, and tasted the powder, just to be sure.

‘Icing sugar, boss?’ Finn asked.

‘The very best,’ Marker agreed. ‘And just when we thought Comrade Arcilla had abandoned drug running in favour of spare parts.’

‘Seems a bit weird,’ Finn said. ‘They could have brought in a hundred times as much.’

‘True,’ Marker agreed.

‘And why give it to Sitting Bull here? Why not the helicopter?’

Marker looked at the Seminole. ‘Maybe in payment,’ he said, and a flicker in the man’s eyes told him he had probably hit the mark.

It was almost full light outside now, and through the window the Slipstream Queen could be seen approaching the jetty. He looked at his watch. Less than half an hour had passed since Cafell’s transmission – they probably had as much time again before the American authorities could put in an appearance. They would probably be too busy tracking the helicopter’s deliveries, but Marker was keen to avoid a potentially embarrassing argument over whose prisoners these were.

‘Time to go, lads,’ he told the five men, and led the way out of the lodge and down to the jetty, with Finn bringing up the rear. Dubery was easing the Slipstream Queen alongside, and Cafell was waiting to lift aboard the two Kleppers. Once this had been done the two men hurried round to the boat-house, where they loosed the submarine from its moorings and eased it carefully out on to the lake, before taking to the water themselves, and manoeuvring it across to the waiting tow-rope.

‘All aboard,’ Marker told the captives.

They filed on to the boat. One crewman and one caretaker were put in one of the two sleeping cabins beneath the stern deck, the remaining three men in the other. There were no locks on the doors, but there was only one narrow exit to the rest of the boat, and Finn was left to cover this with his MP5, just in case anyone had a brainstorm. So far Arcilla’s men had seemed too stunned to offer resistance or attempt an escape, and Marker wasn’t expecting any trouble in the near future. When the shock wore off they would still have nowhere to run.

As Dubery eased the Slipstream Queen away from the dock and took her back across the lake towards the Lostman’s River egress, Marker and Cafell went through the questions they wanted answered. Once they had the list, one of the two crewman was brought forward to the lounge area. He was a dark-skinned Hispanic, probably in his late twenties. At first he refused to say anything, other than that he didn’t speak English – ‘No hablo inglés,’ he repeated sullenly.

‘OK then,’ Marker told Cafell in a resigned voice, ‘we’ll have to do it the hard way. Go and get his partner up here, and then we’ll throw this guy overboard. His partner will talk.’

Cafell had taken two steps towards the stern when the man rediscovered his flair for languages.

‘My name is Miguel,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘What time are you expected back at the Tiburón Blanco?’ Marker asked. ‘We shall be asking your partner the same question,’ he added as an incentive to truth.

‘About four o’clock in the morning,’ the man said. ‘We leave from the lodge at nine.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Sí.’

Marker went on to extract a detailed breakdown of the Tiburón Blanco’s crew, and a sketch map of the boat itself. According to Miguel the two submarine crews greatly enjoyed the treasure-hunting side of their job and hated the long underwater voyages to and from Hell’s Lake. Angel Socarras, the captain and head of the operation, was a complete bastard. Miguel had never heard of anyone called Fidel Arcilla.

Nor had his partner, another Cuban-American, whose name turned out to be Jorge. He too thought Socarras was the man in charge.

The two ‘caretakers’ had never heard of Arcilla either, but they took their orders from a man named Hector Chavez, who ran Anhinga Lodge for ‘some corporation in Miami’. Their only job was to look after the place and scare off unwelcome visitors, particularly between Thursday afternoon and Friday evening. They assumed the contraband organs were going to a hospital, but didn’t know which or where. Once they had asked the helicopter pilot, merely out of curiosity, and been told in no uncertain terms to mind their own business.

The Seminole, who told them his name was Ricky Bowlegs, knew nothing of the wider picture. As Marker had suspected, the small shipment of cocaine was payment for services rendered – he and a few friends formed Anhinga Lodge’s outer defences, watching and listening out for any hint of danger, either from the law, the Everglades Park authorities or their own people. One Seminole man had needed a strong warning, their captive said phlegmatically. And one Park Ranger had seen more than he should, but he had proved more than willing to jump on the bandwagon.

Marker showed him the photograph he had taken the week before.

The Seminole sighed. ‘You boys are good,’ he said.

‘It’s a gift,’ Marker told him.