Donald Hamilton - The Intriguers

I licked my lips and said thickly, aloud: "Port your helm!"

"What?"

"A big girl," I said, forming the words with a difficulty that was only partly feigned, since my throat was pretty dry, "a big girl like you ought to learn right from left. Port your helm, she said, and there went the whole damned ballgame!"

She played up instantly. "But port is left, and that was the way we were supposed to go-"

"And helm means tiller, sweetheart; and when you shove the tiller to the left, the boat goes to the right."

"But you didn't have a tiller!"

"What difference does that make? You're supposed to figure the way a tiller would go and steer accordingly, even when you're using a wheel. Where did you learn your seamanship, anyway?"

Martha said, with real indignation, "But you're crazy, Matt! When you port your helm with a wheel, you go left, I'm sure you do! It wouldn't make sense otherwise!"

I said, "What really wouldn't make sense would be to have a command mean one thing on a boat that steers with a wheel and exactly the opposite on a boat that steers with a stick. Just how confusing do you want to get? What if the wheel breaks down and you rig a jury tiller, do you right away start giving all steering commands the opposite way, on the same damned ship-"

The door opened, and in they came, figuring, I guess, that they weren't going to learn anything significant from technical argument about seamanship, and we didn't seem to be getting around to any interesting subjects. There were two of them, nice, clean-cut, American-boy types- well, actually they were in their thirties, but they'd never outgrow it. They both had smooth Florida tans. They were both wearing short-sleeved jersey sports shirts, light slacks, and the kind of expensive seagoing sneakers that are designed to get a death-grip on the wet, slanting deck of a hard-driven sailing yacht.

They were real pretty, all except the guns they kept brandishing in a very self-conscious way. They untied our ankles, set us on our feet, and used their firearms to prod us up the steps and through the low, ventilated doors into the houseboat's galley, a symphony in stainless steel. There we made a full hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and climbed another short stairway-I guess the nautical term is ladder-into a pilot house with lots of windows all around, located directly above our recent prison cell.

A big steering wheel and a lot of motor controls and instruments dominated the far end of this elevated greenhouse. To one side was a bank of electronic equipment being monitored by a young black man with less hair than most, these Afro days. He had headphones on and was perched on a stool in front of the closed sliding door, half-glass, that gave access to the deck to starboard. The man-groves were right there, just beyond the railing. We were tied up against the bank in a small cove.

To port was an L-shaped settee and a card table holding a lot of official-looking papers. The settee held my heavy, scope-sighted rifle, and Herbert Leonard. He'd washed off the mud he'd picked up diving off the dock and combed his hair. He was wearing clean light slacks and a flowered sports shirt. He looked up at our entrance, seeming annoyed.

"No, no, I don't want them up here!" he said irritably. "Take them into the rear cabin. I'll be along in a minute."

We were poked with the firearms once more, escorted back down the stairs-excuse me, ladder-and aft through the galley into another well-windowed compartment with a dinette to starboard and a kind of built-in sofa or lounge to port. Another sliding door led out to the short stern deck, but this door was also closed, presumably to keep the mosquitoes out and the air conditioning in.

Off the stern of the houseboat lay my little craft. She seemed to be floating all right, but I doubted there was enough left of her propeller, after hitting bottom at full throttle, to make her very useful for getaway purposes. There was a spare wheel on board, of course, but I'd never changed props on a motor that big, and it would take me some time to figure out the drill. Well, escape was not the immediate problem. If all I'd wanted to do was escape, I could have been safely on board the Frances II this minute.

The yellow runabout was not in sight, and I had seen nothing of its pilot. There were no other small craft visible, either, or any of the camouflaged pseudo-commando characters who'd participated in the attack on Cutlass Key. Apparently Leonard's amphibious forces had withdrawn, with their casualties.

"Sit down!"

That was my guard, shoving me onto the lounge. He seated himself on the end of one of the dinette benches across the way and showed me his gun once more. It was a perfectly ordinary Smith amp; Wesson, in no way unique. He seemed to be quite proud of it, however.

"If you want to try something," he said, "go right ahead, you dirty professional assassin! After the way you murdered Patterson down in Mexico and March and TolIey in Arizona, not to mention all the good men you shot down in cold blood this morning, all I need is an excuse, just one little excuse!"

I looked at him more sharply, alerted by his blustering voice, and realized that he was scared. It always surprises me a little. I mean, I never feel particularly scary; and I felt even less so than usual that morning, with my chest aching, the back of my head throbbing, the camouflage mud still coated on my face and hands, and my hands tied behind me. But dirty or clean, healthy or unhealthy, tied or untied, I apparently frightened him. His companion, facing Martha from the end of the other dinette seat, didn't seem very happy, either. It told me what attitude to employ. I fell into the spirit of the occasion and became the deadly, bloodthirsty old pro annoyed by a couple of ineffectual novices.

"What did you boys do," I asked lightly, "flip a coin or something?"

"What do you mean?" my guard asked.

"How did you decide who'd get stuck with the dull chore of shooting me, when the time came, and who'd get all the fun of putting a lot of holes in the pretty lady-"

"Pretty lady, hell!" said Martha's specimen. "Just because she's put a dress on doesn't make her a lady in my book, even when she isn't all plastered with mud! We saw the greasy specimens she was associating with down in Mexico. This country would be a damn sight better off if all the filthy hippie types, male and female, were lined up against a wall and used for target practice, leaving the country to clean, decent people; real Americans!"

That scared me, a little. It was the first hint I'd had of the motivation behind Senator Love's secret crusade, as abetted by Herbert Leonard and his handsome young followers. There's nothing more frightening to me than a character who thinks he knows what a real American is- mainly because it generally turns out he's convinced it's somebody just like him. It seems an odd notion to me. I certainly don't want to live in a country populated with people just like me, God forbid! Anyway, I figure there's room for a little variety in a nation as big as ours.

I said, "You know, that's not half a bad idea. At least a little practice sure wouldn't hurt you boys any, judging by the gent who tried to plug me down in Guaymas-it's too bad he couldn't swim any better than he could shoot. And how many rounds did those characters let off this morning without hurting anybody but a poor old black man; and that was an accident, a ricochet off the water. Yes, I think a little target practice would do wonders for you lads; and you might try a few driving lessons, too, while you're at it. Those two jerks near Tucson were kind of pitiful, really. I just hated to shut the door on them like that and send them out into the rocks to die. 1 mean, it was kind of like going around knocking little kids off their Christmas tricycles-"