Randy White - Hunter's moon

In the silence that followed, I wondered if I’d pushed too far. I was relieved when a man with better English interceded.

“We are soldiers. Guests of your military-but this is secret. You know war games? But we can’t get goddamn engine started. We are supposed to be at a certain location by midnight but now we have this goddamn trouble.”

He used slang like an ornament, profanity learned from a book. I couldn’t place the accent or his static progressive verbs. Indonesian or Middle Eastern. It meshed with the million-dollar reward.

“You’re foreigners.”

“Yes… Singapore. America’s friends.”

He sounded friendly, but I didn’t buy it. I’d worked with Singapore’s Special Operations Forces. Pros, very tough, and they didn’t carry AK-47s.

“If you’re friends, lower those goddamn guns.”

The friendly terrorist thought for a moment, then pretended not to understand. “We must find location named ‘Palm Island Resort.’ ”

“In this fog? Palm Island’s six or seven miles of thin water and oyster bars. Good luck.”

“Yes, good luck. Already too much bad. You know way?”

He’d missed my meaning, but I replied, “Palm Island? Sure.” I nodded, and made a vague gesture with the vodka bottle, maybe pointing east toward the mainland or west toward the Gulf of Mexico. I didn’t have a clue. “It’s not far. I could run it blindfolded.”

The men were getting impatient. One of them held my canoe’s forward thwart. The boat rocked precariously as he reached beneath his seat. “Engine. You fix?” He was holding an object vertically. A small knife.

“They haven’t made the engine I can’t fix.”

He touched the blade to his neck. “Then fix. ” I pretended to take a gulp of vodka, then thrust the bottle toward him. He was so surprised he nearly dropped the knife. “Have a drink. You’re not mad, you’re just thirsty. But move your ass first. I need room to work.”

I live next to a marina and it’s a rare week that I don’t help some newcomer start his boat. The problems are typically minor because small outboards require only three essentials: fuel, air, spark. It simplifies troubleshooting.

The plastic gas tank was full, fuel hose connected. I removed the hose from the engine and sniffed. The smell of gasoline should have been strong. It wasn’t.

As I said, “I need a screwdriver or a knife,” I felt the boat shift. I turned. Knife guy had moved behind me, close enough that his knee brushed my back. He had a full, black beard, heavy glasses.

He was positioning himself to cut my throat-probably as soon as I got the engine going.

“Perfect,” I said. “Thanks.”

The man didn’t react for a moment when I reached to take his knife. Then he knocked my hand away.

“Hey, you want your motor fixed or not? I need a knife. ”

The friendly terrorist was listening to the patrol boat, trying to gauge its heading-not easy because of the fog, but also because the diesel engines now blended with a familiar, rhythmic thumping. It was the sound of an approaching helicopter.

Tampa Coast Guard was joining the hunt. Or maybe a military chopper from nearby MacDill Air Base.

The man snapped, “Folano!,” then added a few anxious words I didn’t understand.

Folano slapped the weapon flat-bladed into my palm, then was silent, letting his anger fill the boat. The knife had a polished handle and a short, curved blade. Nice. I touched a finger to the edge-sharp. No wonder he didn’t want to loan it.

I said, “Appreciate it, Folano,” then turned and removed the engine cowling.

Once again, I found the fuel hose. It had a standard quick-clip connector with an inset brass bearing. The bearing functioned as a valve. I squeezed the primer bulb, then used the tip of the knife to push the valve open. Gas should have squirted. It didn’t.

I unscrewed the gas tank’s plastic cap and heard a vacuum rush. Open a fresh jar of pickles and the sound’s similar.

A vacuum. That was the problem. They hadn’t opened the air vent, so gas couldn’t flow. A common oversight.

I opened the vent; replaced the cap.

The engine would start. But I wasn’t done.

“Hand me that red flashlight.”

I was working on a forty-horsepower outboard, an older OMC, with the throttle and gearshift built into the tiller. A lot of power for a small boat. I searched until I found the internal safety switch. It had distinctive wiring, yellow and red. Bypass the safety switch and an engine will start in gear.

Dangerous.

I cut the wires, then twisted them together, bypassing the safety switch.

I found the carburetor, inserted the knife, and bent the butterfly plate wide open. The engine would now get maximum fuel delivery no matter how the throttle was manipulated. There was no way to stop the gas flow without cutting the fuel hose.

The engine was now rigged to start in forward gear, at full speed.

Very dangerous.

It’d taken me less than two minutes. With my back to the men, I locked the engine cowling in place, then pretended to lunge after something I dropped.

“Damn.”

“What now has happened wrong?”

I stared into the water for a moment before I sat up and took the vodka from the bearded man. This time, I really did have a drink.

The friendly terrorist asked, “Why have you stopped working on the engine?”

“It’s fixed.”

“How can you be certain? You haven’t started it.”

The patrol boat was still cruising the island’s west side, maybe confused in the fog, but the helicopter was closing in.

“Trust me, it’ll start.” I patted the seat next to me. “Give it a try.”

I made room as the bearded man said something, then tried English. “Where knife?”

I jabbed my finger at the water. “Down there, knife.” I was looking at the bad knot they’d used to tie my canoe to the inflatable. If the rope didn’t break, I’d have to cut it free-which is why I’d wedged his knife securely into the back of my belt after pretending to drop it.

The bearded man growled a reply as I took the special strobe flashlight from my pocket and braced myself. The friendly terrorist’s hand was on the throttle.

I watched him lean toward the starter cord. The man put all his frustration into that first pull…

Ignite a rocket on the rear of a small boat and the results would have been similar. When the engine fired, the inflatable catapulted into the fog like a dragster. Men in front were thrown backward. The bearded man landed face-first in the bilge. The friendly terrorist would have been launched over the engine if I hadn’t grabbed him by the belt.

I was going overboard myself soon. I didn’t want his company.

Over the engine noise, he shouted, “This goddamn thing! How to stop my crazy motor?” The man wrestled with the tiller handle. He couldn’t reduce speed and the transmission wouldn’t allow him shift to neutral without decelerating. “Son of a beech. What bad shit is now happening?”

My canoe, still tied to the inflatable, became a wild, swinging rudder. It caused the little boat to veer left, then right, as we tunneled an accelerating arc through the mist. Fog sailed past my face as if driven by a twenty-knot wind. It was inevitable that we’d soon hit something-an island, an oyster bar, rocks. I didn’t want to be aboard when it happened.

I had the high-tech flashlight in my hand. When I punched the switch, it began to strobe with a dizzying, irregular rhythm. Each starburst was intensified by fog, each microsecond of darkness magnified the boat’s speed. My brain was unable to process the chaos and I had to blink to stem the sudden vertigo. The terrorists felt it, too: four faces frozen, wide-eyed, with each explosion of white.