Nick Carter - The Black Death

That is what I thought. In ten minutes she was back at me again. We were, it seemed, now going to get down to the real business of the evening. She hadn’t been kidding about everybody doing everything to everybody. And I had a technician on my hands. I have been around, God knows, but this gal knew tricks that I had never heard of.

A couple of hours later I woke up on the floor beside the divan. My nose was in the carpeting — the lack of perspective distorting the rose pattern a bit — and I felt like I had been worked over by the KGB in one of the Kremlin dungeons. My lips were swollen and sore, raw on the inside, and I had a clutter of little bites all over me. Exactly as though an enraged swan had been pecking at me. It was a pretty good simile at that.

She was asleep on the divan, on her side, curled into a fetal position with one arm flung over her face. I listened to her breathe for a minute, then I summoned my strength and got up and put on my shorts and my cap — why the cap I don’t know — and found a flashlight and went looking.

I started at the bow and worked back. The Sea Witch was loaded. Man, was she loaded! She had been stripped of every fixture that wasn’t absolutely necessary to make room for cargo. And what a cargo! I was impressed. Whoever had loaded her had done a professional job, too, because she was balanced just right, with no list, and the cargo secured so it couldn’t shift.

I took my time. Lyda would sleep for a few hours and anyway it didn’t really matter — she would expect me to find this stuff sooner or later. I made a rough mental tally:

9 recoilless rifles, 57 mm.

Rifle and hand grenades, 15 crates each, smoke and fragmentation.

Machineguns, some fifty of them, ranging from the old Chicago drum magazine Thompsons down to modern U.S. and Jap and Swedish weapons.

Mortars, 20, with at a guess some 7000 rounds.

200 mines. Mines! Some of them were anti-tank, some the old schu mines, the deballers that came up and burst in your crotch.

Five old Browning machineguns, heavy, water cooled. Shades of World War I.

Rocket grenades.

14 crates full of small arms, everything from Colt .45s to Jap to Italian to one ancient Webley Naval revolver that needed wheels to transport it.

About a thousand rifles of every make and vintage: Mausers, Mis, Krags, Springfields, Enfields, AKs, Ml6s, a few, and even an old Italian Martini. A flintlock wouldn’t have surprised me, or a jebel.

Ammo for all the above. Ammo in plenty. I guessed at nearly a million rounds. Here the amateur showed, because the ammo was jumbled every which way and it would be one hell of a job to unsnarl it and fit ammo to gun.

Radio equipment — some modern, some old, transmitters and receivers and a couple of modern transceivers.

Walkie-talkies, World War II.

Medical supplies in plenty.

Field phones and drums of wire, DR4s from World War II. Batteries, tools, one small generator, dismantled.

Uniforms — old Army surplus fatigues with caps, green.

Insignia — freshly stamped of shiny brass, a circlet with a black swan inset. Stars, bars, eagles and leaves as of U.S. Army. I could just visualize Lyda wearing four stars. That was a little too much so I sat down and had a cigarette. There was a whole case of them. C rations, too, and some aged Australian bully beef.

I smoked and I thought. Even as packed as she was the Sea Witch should be able to carry fifteen to twenty men. That wasn’t much of a force for an invasion of Haiti, though it has been tried with fewer, and that meant she was hoping to pick up her main force after she landed. Had intended to, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to invade now. Unless it was over my dead body. I didn’t like that thought much. I tossed my cigarette out a portlight and went back to the stateroom where all the comforts of life were concentrated.

Lyda was still sleeping. I tossed a light blanket over her and took a shower in the owner’s deluxe tiled bathroom. As I showered I thought and I grinned and I got to laughing. It did have its funny side — There was the Sea Witch , like any harmless rich man’s pleasure craft, lying innocently at anchor in the 79th Street basin. Right in the midst of thousands of cops and FBI and CIA and, as I now knew, an unknown number of Papa Doc’s goons. The Tonton Macoute. Carrying enough powder to blow half of Manhattan out of the water. No wonder she had been in such a sweat to get the cruiser out of there.

I toweled myself dry, still laughing. Then I stopped laughing. I was stuck with all this hardware. There was no way, nor any time, to unload it! 1 would just have to take it with me and hope I could keep her hot little hands away from it. Orders were not to let her use it on Papa Doc.

I didn’t want her using it on me, either.

I went back into the stateroom to get dressed. Lyda was still sleeping. Just to make sure I put the beam of the flashlight on her face for a couple of minutes and watched her eyes and listened to her breathing. She wasn’t feigning.

Clothes were a minor problem. My Savile Row suit was already ruined — I intended to put it on the expense account if I got out of this mess — but the suit didn’t matter. What mattered was that it would be cold at sea, in April, and my thin dress shirt — already a mess — and the suit jacket just wouldn’t do. I needed some working clothes.

I had noticed some OD sweaters, Army surplus, packed away with the uniforms up forward and I was about to go and outfit myself when I noticed the large built-in wardrobe near the bathroom door. Out of curiosity, and just to check it out, I took a look.

The wardrobe was chock full of her clothes. Suits, dresses, slacks, etc., all neatly arranged on hangers. It came to me then that Lyda must have been living aboard the cruiser for some time. Sort of a floating apartment, and she had been lucky — or the Tonton Macoute had goofed it — because they obviously hadn’t spotted the Sea Witch as her hideout.

There were a dozen pairs of shoes on the floor of the wardrobe. Behind them, back against the wall, were a couple of shiny black hat boxes. When I saw them something buzzed in my brain — long habit and experience, I suppose — and I got the feeling that something, somehow, was a little off key. Lyda was not the type of girl who wore hats.

I pulled the hat boxes out into the light and opened them.

She nodded slowly. “I told you that last night. I have to trust you. I have no choice.”

I nodded back. “You are so right, Lyda. In a lot of ways. For the moment I am the only protection you have against the Tonton Macoute. And if I wanted to double-cross you all I have to do is take this floating arsenal down to the Battery and turn you into Customs and the Coast Guard. You would get at least five years, and Papa Doc’s men would be waiting for you when you came out. They don’t forget.”

She smothered a yawn. “You’ve been all over the boat, I suppose. You found everything?”

I grinned at her. “You knew I would.”

“Yes. I knew you would. So what are you going to do about it?”

I had been thinking about that. I had come to no decision yet, but I said: “One thing I could do is toss all that hardware overboard as soon as we’re at sea.”

Her eyes narrowed again, but she only made a little gesture of annoyance and said, “All that money, Nick! We worked so hard, saved so long, made such terrible sacrifices to get it. I’d like to salvage what I can.”

“We’ll see,” I told her. “No promises. And don’t try to kid me, Lyda. The HIUS raised that money to ransom Dr. Romera Valdez — not to buy guns so you could go after Papa Doc. In a sense you’ve embezzled that money and diverted it to your own purposes. That’s another rap against you if we ever want to use it.”