George Bartram - Under the Freeze

“I need your boat,” he said to the blond one, who was sitting up, massaging his neck and shaking his head as if he had learned how to do it from an old movie. “The Coast Guard will pick you up soon.”

The blond one looked helpless. He looked all of nine years old.

“Berth the boat at number thirty-seven at the Boca Chica marina. I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

The young man tried to speak, but whatever Repin had done to him had turned his voice into a gull’s squawk.

“And take care of your partner. There’s a medical kit just inside the hatch, to the right. There’s a book in it if they didn’t teach you what to do. The refrigerator’s full. Help yourself to the booze — after you take care of your partner. I’ll check it when I get back and submit a bill to the Agency.”

The young man tried to squawk again.

“Your partner’s a good man. Learn from him. Don’t be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed next time.” Tarp stepped across the dark man, who was unconscious. “He’s a got a twenty-two slug just above the knee; the kneecap’s okay, but you ought to clean the wound and make sure he doesn’t bleed too much. It’s all in the book.” Tarp swung a leg over and sat with a foot in each boat. “Never trust older men. And never trust an old man at all, even when he looks dead.”

He went aboard the other boat and Repin followed and cast off; Tarp hit the starter and nosed the boat out into the Stream.

Thirty seconds later they were racing for Cuba. On the friendly radars, their signal would show as a strange but not yet dangerous movement. By the time people understood what had happened, it would be too late.

He had taken the boat in by dead reckoning without radar or sonar and with the radio giving a three-second signal every seven minutes on the frequency Repin had specified. They were off the Cuban coast above Viñales, sitting dead in the water now, with Latin music coming and going on the land breeze like a sound from another decade.

“It seems to be okay,” Tarp said once. Everything was very quiet, except for the music. There should have been a patrol boat and a radar sweep, at least.

“Is all fixed. Is very efficient.”

The ocean seemed endless with no lights. It was as if they were sitting in the sky, space above and below and all around. The air was salty and damp and warm; everything was strange and therefore menacing — the leap of a fish in the void, the random slap of a tiny wave on the hull. Because he had nothing better to do, Tarp slid the .22 into a plastic bag and taped it to the underside of the open hatch cover, then he went around the boat checking weapons: shotgun on the bridge, AR-15 in the scuppers, the Weatherby and the Agency man’s rifle in the cabin.

“When the Cubans come, you talk to them. I’m staying out of sight.”

“ Da , is embarrassment for them to see you. To them, you are American paid to bring me back, nothing more.”

“Your Spanish okay?”

“Good enough.”

But not very good , Tarp thought. Repin was like the English in the old days; in Asia, he had spoken the local languages in a guttural pidgin that the locals mocked. His Spanish was probably like that, too, serviceable but not tactful.

The radio crackled and a voice broke in clearly in Spanish. The volume had been set too high and they both jumped and then laughed.

“Large Bear, this is Rum Bottle,” the radio said. “Large Bear, this is Rum Bottle.”

“Talk to him,” Tarp said. “Just press the button on the mike.”

Repin put his mouth very close to the microphone. “Rum Bottle, is the Large Bear over this way.” His Spanish was terrible.

“Identify, Large Bear.”

Repin plodded through a string of numbers.

“Breaking radio contact and approaching,” the radio said. “End communication.”

Tarp waited until he heard the Spanish boat’s engines, then he picked up the AR-15 and boosted himself up to the flying bridge with it in his hand. He squatted there, feeling suddenly how flimsy the spray rail was and how easily he and this rented boat could be blown away. They would never get a better chance.

I’ve gotten very pessimistic about this operation already , he thought. It’s tainted , for sure .

“Large Bear, show your lights.”

He reached up and flipped on the running lights. The engine noise was very loud now, a menacing growl, as if the other boat were stalking around them in the night. Then, almost with his lights, a bright beam shot across the water ahead of the boat and swept quickly over them.

They’re good , he thought, and he ducked as the light came over the flying bridge. Repin was standing on the deck below him, and Tarp saw him in the white glare, legs spread, arms folded, seeming to dare the lights’ brilliance. You’ll never get a better shot , Tarp thought, but no shot came.

The patrol boat swung in close. The searchlight went off and a battery of small lights on her starboard rail shone down into the sportfisherman, which was lower in the water, with the flying bridge two feet below the other’s deck. Tarp saw two sailors at the rail, and then they scuttled away and a man in an officer’s cap leaned over toward his own deck.

“Large Bear?”he said.

“How?” Repin said in his clumsy Spanish.

“Come aboard, please, Citizen.”

There was a ladder down the patrol boat’s side with a platform at the bottom and a light shining on it. Repin stepped over to the platform, grabbed the metal rail of the ladder, and pulled himself across.

“The captain of this American boat?” the officer said.

“He is to be taking it home.”

“Where is he, Citizen?”

“Of what is that the importance?” Repin was at the top of the ladder now. He and the officer were almost nose to nose, their heads silhouetted against the glow of the ship’s lights. “Make you for Havana immediate!”

“Where is the American?”

“This is not of relevance! The arrangement is for me to be gone to Havana.”

“Precisely, respected Citizen. I have orders to deal with this boat, however.”

“This boat was not in the arrangement.”

“Precisely, Citizen.”

He called an order. His voice sound strange and faraway, like one of the sounds from the dark water. Repin wanted to protest, but the officer was drawing him away from the rail.

There was a thump, and Tarp’s boat rocked.

Boarding me , Tarp thought. Some arrangement .

A hand light flashed a beam in his stern and then a second joined it and came swinging forward. Tarp waited for one of them to come up the ladder, but one of the lights disappeared into the hatch and he knew that the man holding it had gone into the cabin under him.

There was a narrow space between the spray rail of the flying bridge and the handrail just above it. He could look up through this gap at the patrol boat. Now, squinting up, he saw a black mass between him and the lights on the boat; it seemed to grow larger and to float above him. His boat rocked hard to that side, and a big hand gripped the rail right above his head. Somebody had jumped from the patrol boat to the flying bridge.

A silhouetted head rose above the rail next to him.

Tarp struck upward with the butt of the shotgun, thrusting up and out, taking the boarder just below the chin. There was a strangled rattle and a gasp, and then the man was pitching backward, the hand sliding off the rail and clawing at the throat as he went back and down into the space between the patrol boat and the sportfisherman. Tarp was on his feet as the man hit the water, and he fired once down into the waist of his own boat where the hand light was, then pumped the gun and twisted, firing again at the lights above him, three quick shots as fast as he could work the mechanism, the twelve-gauge booming into the dead-still night. The lights shattered. Tarp was moving then, twisting, crouching behind the spray bulkhead, and there was a clatter of automatic fire under him as the man down in the cabin fired up through the ceiling at him, firing wildly, firing in confusion, nervous, firing out of bravado and fear and instinct, firing a little off because he knew where the patrol boat was and he knew where his own people were supposed to be; and Tarp felt pain along his left calf (thinking, Serves me right for gunning down the Agency man ) and he dove for the blackness of his own deck, dove over and beyond the flashlight that had fallen to the deck there and was stabbing its light toward the open hatch like an arrow.