Bernard Cornwell - Crackdown

“The police should see them,” I insisted.

“You are a fool, Nicholas Breakspear,” Ellen said, but not in an unkind manner.

“I’ve already advised the Defence Forces that the police should look at the boat,” I said.

Ellen gave another of her long-suffering sighs. “The dragons won, Nick, and the knights errant lost. Don’t you know that? You’ve delivered the message, so now forget it! No chart. No cartridges. It’s over. No heroics!”

She meant well, but I could not forget Hirondelle , because something evil had stirred in this paradise of beaches and lagoons and palm-covered islands, and I wanted the authorities to take the damp torn chart and to find just what lay at the end of its carefully pencilled line. So I shrugged off Ellen’s cynical and doubtless sensible pleading, and went topsides to take the helm. Wavebreaker ’s wake lay white and straight across a brilliant sunlit sea on which, far to our west, I could see a string of grey warships that were American naval vessels come to the Bahamas for an exercise called Stingray. The sight of the flotilla reminded me of my time in the Royal Marines, and I felt a rueful envy of the American Marines who had this tropical playground with its warm seas and palm trees for their training. I had learned the killing trade under the bitter flail of Norwegian sleet and Scottish snow, but that was all in my past, and now I was a free man and I had just one more charter to skipper, after which I could mend my own boat and sail her on new paths across old oceans.

Just as Hirondelle had sailed to her adventure.

But, in its place, had found a coral scrap of land called Murder Cay. And there died.

We docked at midday. The deserted boatyard was swimming in heat. It was well into the charter business’s low season, so the vast majority of Cutwater’s yachts had either gone north for the summer or were sitting on jackstands out of the water. A couple of our bareboat yachts were still at sea, and Wavebreaker had one more paying charter to complete, but otherwise McIllvanney’s yard had the torpor of tropical summer about it. Even Stella, McIllvanney’s long-suffering secretary, had taken the day off, leaving the office locked, which meant I had to walk into town to find a public telephone from which I called the Bahamian Police and told them about Hirondelle , and added that I had rescued a chart and a handful of cartridges from the stricken boat. The police sounded surprised that I had bothered to call them, and I walked back to the boatyard feeling strangely foolish.

Ellen laughed at my punctiliousness. Doubtless the police had responded to my call by sharpening their cutlasses and charging their muskets, she mocked, in readiness for an invasion of Murder Cay?

“I didn’t mention Murder Cay,” I said. “I just told them about the bullet damage to the boat and about the chart.”

“Well now that you’ve single-handedly won the war on drugs, perhaps you can do something useful, like scrub the deck?” We had only this one day to resupply and prepare Wavebreaker for her last charter, which meant the schooner had to be refuelled and provisioned, her carpets must be vacuumed, her bilges poisoned against rats and cockroaches, her galley made spotless, her deck scrubbed and her brightwork polished.

In the middle of the afternoon, when it seemed that the work would never be done on time, Bellybutton arrived at the yard. Bellybutton was McIllvanney’s foreman, and for a few seconds I dared hope that he had come to help us, but instead he told me that one of the bareboat thirty-three-footers was in trouble. “The man radioed that his engine broke,” Bellybutton grumbled, “so I have to fetch the idiot in Starkisser .” He was pretending that the errand was a nuisance, though at the same time he was grinning with pleasure at the thought of taking McIllvanney’s brand new sportsboat to sea. Starkisser ’s midnight-blue hull had metalflake embedded in its fibreglass so that the sleek boat seemed to scintillate with an internal and infernal dark blue light. She had to be one of the fastest production boats in the islands; her twin big-block engines could hurl the three-ton wedge-shaped hull at over eighty miles an hour, and it worried neither McIllvanney nor Bellybutton that at such a speed a man could not hear himself scream and that even the smallest wave shook the bones right out of their flesh.

“There ain’t a girl in creation who don’t melt after a ride in Starkisser ,” Bellybutton liked to boast. His real name was Benjamin, but no one ever called him Benjamin or even Ben. To the whole island he was Bellybutton. It was rumoured he had earned the nickname by biting the navel clean out of a whore who had displeased him, and I found the rumour all too believable for he was not a pleasant man. In fact he was a black version of McIllvanney himself; rangy, knowing, tall and sarcastic. “Mr Mac wants to see you tonight,” Bellybutton leered at me, as though he suspected I would not enjoy the meeting. “He says you’re to go to his place at sundown.”

“Why isn’t he in the yard today?” I asked.

“Mr Mac’s taking a day off!” Bellybutton said in an indignant voice, as though my question had impugned McIllvanney’s honour. “He has business to take care of. He had to take a boat to Miami, and that’s why he give me the keys to Starkisser . You maybe want to take Miss Ellen for a ride in Starkisser? ” He dangled the sportsboat’s keys enticingly. “I won’t tell Mr Mac, long as you give me a ride on Miss Ellen when you’re done.” He laughed and obscenely pumped his lean hips.

“You’re an offensive shit, Bellybutton,” I said in a very friendly voice, but he had already turned his attention away from me because a car had suddenly appeared in the yard. It was a long white Lincoln with black-tinted windows. The car slid quietly between the cradled yachts to stop just short of Wavebreaker ’s pier. Apart from the crunching sound of the tyres the Lincoln’s approach had been silent and oddly sinister.

One of the passenger doors opened and a very tall and very black-skinned man climbed slowly into the sunlight. “A friend of yours?” I asked Bellybutton, but his eyes widened, he muttered a curse and, instead of answering, he dashed frantically towards Starkisser ’s pontoon.

The tall black man who had emerged from the Lincoln was dressed in a dark blue three-piece suit that looked incongruously heavy for such a hot day. He wore the elegantly cut suit over a white shirt and an old Etonian tie. He was impressively built; thin hipped and wide shouldered, like a boxer who could punch hard and dance lightly. He looked calmly around the yard, then put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses before slamming the car door shut.

Bellybutton had thrown off Starkisser ’s lines and now let the sportsboat float away from the pontoon as he unclipped her jet-black cockpit cover. Then, plainly frantic to escape the elegant man, he punched the boat’s engines into life. The echo of the twin motors crackled back from the nearby buildings like the sound of a battle-tank firing up for action. Scared pelicans flapped away, and Ellen came up from the galley to see what had caused the commotion. Bellybutton gave one last look at the man walking along the dock, then shoved Starkisser ’s tachometers way into their red zones so that the dark blue powerboat stood on her tail and screamed out to sea as though the devil himself was on her tail.

“A guilty conscience is a terrible thing.” The tall black man chuckled, then sauntered across Wavebreaker ’s gangplank. Once on deck he stopped to admire Ellen who was dressed in a brief pair of shorts and a faded tank top. Even with her glorious hair scraped back into a loose bun, and with her hands and face smeared with soap and sweat from the exertions of scrubbing the galley stove, she looked utterly beguiling. The black man momentarily took off his sunglasses as though to examine Ellen more closely and I saw he had very hard and very cynical eyes that were suddenly turned full on me. “You must be Breakspear.”