Thomas Harris - Black Sunday

When she was sure, she told Hafez Najeer these things and Najeer found it good.

Now, with the explosives at sea, moving toward the United States at a steady twelve knots in the freighter Leticia, the entire project was threatened by Captain Larmoso’s treachery and perhaps by the treachery of Benjamin Muzi himself. Had Larmoso interfered with the crates at Muzi’s orders? Perhaps Muzi had decided to keep the advance payment, sell Lander and Dahlia to the authorities, and peddle the plastic elsewhere. If so, they could not risk picking up the explosives on the New York dock. They must pick up the plastic at sea.

THE BOAT WAS FAIRLY STANDARDin appearance-a sleek sportfisherman thirty-eight feet long—a “canyon runner” of the kind used by men with a lot of money and not much time. Each weekend in the season many of them blast eastward through the swells, carrying paunchy men in Bermuda shorts to the sudden deeps off the New Jersey coast where the big fish feed.

But in an age of fiberglass and aluminum boats, this one was made of wood—double planked with Philippine mahogany. It was beautifully and strongly made and it had cost a great deal. Even the superstructure was wood, but this was not noticeable because much of the brightwork had been painted over. Wood is a very poor radar reflector.

Two big turbocharged diesels were crammed into the engine room and much of the space used for dining and relaxing in ordinary craft had been sacrificed to make room for extra fuel and water. For much of the summer, the owner used it in the Caribbean, running hashish and marijuana out of Jamaica into Miami in the dark of the moon. In the winter he came north and the boat was for hire, but not to fishermen. The fee was two thousand dollars a day, no questions asked, plus a staggering deposit. Lander had mortgaged his house to get the deposit.

It was in a boathouse at the end of a row of deserted piers in Toms River off Barnegat Bay, fully fueled, waiting.

At ten a.m. on November 12 Lander and Dahlia arrived at the boathouse in a rented van. A cold, drizzling rain was falling and the winter piers were deserted. Lander opened the double doors on the landward side of the boathouse and backed the van in until it was six feet from the stern of the big sportfisherman. Dahlia exclaimed at the sight of the boat, but Lander was busy with his checklist and paid no attention. For the next twenty minutes they loaded equipment aboard: extra coils of line, a slender mast, two long-barreled shotguns, a shotgun with the barrel sawed off to eighteen inches, a high-powered rifle, a small platform lashed on to four hollow floats, charts to supplement the already well-stocked chart bin, and several neat bundles that included a lunch.

Lander lashed every object down so tightly that even if the boat had been turned upside down and shaken, nothing would have fallen out.

He flicked a switch on the boathouse wall and the big door on the water side creaked upward, admitting the gray winter light. He climbed to the flying bridge. First the port diesel roared and then the starboard, blue smoke rising in the dim boathouse. His eyes darted from gauge to gauge as the engines warmed up.

At Lander’s signal, Dahlia cast off the stern lines and joined him on the flying bridge. He eased the throttles forward, the water swelling like a muscle at the stern, the exhaust ports awash and burbling, and the boat nosed slowly out into the rain.

When they had cleared Toms River, Lander and Dahlia moved to the lower control station inside the heated cabin for the run down the bay to Barnegat Inlet and the open sea. The wind was from the north, raising a light chop. They sliced through it easily, the windshield wipers slowly swiping away fine raindrops. No other boats were out that they could see. The long sandspit that protected the bay lay low in the mist off to port and on the other side they could make out a smoke-stack at the head of Oyster Creek.

In less than an hour they reached Barnegat Inlet. The wind had shifted to the northeast and the ground swells were building in the inlet. Lander laughed as they met the first of the big Atlantic rollers, spray bursting from the bows. They had mounted to the exposed upper control station again to run the inlet, and cold spray stung their faces.

“The waves won’t be so big out there, sport,” Lander said as Dahlia wiped her face with the back of her hand.

She could see that he was enjoying himself. He loved to feel the boat under him. Buoyancy had a fascination for Lander. Fluid strength, giving, pushing with support reliable as rock. He turned the wheel slowly from side to side, slightly altering the angle at which the boat met the seas, extending his kinesthetic sense to feel the changing forces on the hull. The land was falling astern now on both sides, the Barnegat Light flashing off to starboard.

They ran out of the drizzle into watery winter sunlight as they cleared the shore and, looking back, Dahlia watched the gulls wheeling, very white against the gray clouds banked behind them. Wheeling as they had above the beach at Tyre when she was a child standing in the warm sand, her feet small and brown beneath her ragged hem. She had followed too many strange corridors in Michael Lander’s mind for too long. She wondered how the presence of Muhammad Fasil would change the chemistry between them, if Fasil was still alive and waiting with the explosives out there beyond the ninety-fathom curve. She would have to speak with Fasil quickly. There were things that Fasil must understand before he made a fatal mistake.

When she turned back to face the sea, Lander was watching her from the helmsman’s seat, one hand on the wheel. The sea air had brought color to her cheeks and her eyes were bright. The collar of her sheepskin coat was turned up around her face and her Levis were taut around her thighs as she balanced against the motion of the boat. Lander, with two big diesels beneath his hand, doing something that he did well, threw back his head and laughed and laughed again. It was a real laugh and it surprised her. She had not heard it often.

“You are a dynamite lady, you know that?” he said, wiping his eye with his knuckle.

She looked down at the deck and then raised her head again, smiling, looking into him. “Let’s go get some plastic.”

“Yeah,” Lander said, bobbing his head. “All the plastic in the world”

He held a course of 110 degrees magnetic, a hair north of east with the compass variation, then altered it north five more degrees as the bell and whistle buoys off Barnegat showed him more precisely the effect of the wind. The seas were on the port bow, moderating now, and only a little spray blew back as the boat sliced through them. Somewhere out there beyond the horizon, the freighter was waiting, riding the winter sea.

They paused at midafternoon while Lander made a fix of their position with the radio direction finder. He did it early to avoid the distortion that would be present at sundown and he did it very carefully, taking three bearings and plotting them on his chart, noting times and distances in meticulous little figures.

As they roared on eastward toward the X on the chart, Dahlia made coffee in the galley to go with the sandwiches she had brought, then cleared away the counter. With small strips of adhesive tape, she fastened to the countertop a pair of surgical scissors, compress bandages, three small disposable syringes of morphine, and a single syringe of Ritalin. She laid a set of splints along the fiddle rail at the counter edge and fastened them in place with a strip of tape.

They reached the approximate rendezvous point, well beyond the northbound Barnegat-to-Ambrose sealane, an hour before sunset. Lander checked his position with the RDF and corrected it slightly northward.