Bernard Cornwell - Crackdown

“Don’t move!” one of the invaders shouted at me, then thrust me face down beside McIllvanney who had been similarly cuffed. A vast Chinook thumped down beside a green, then disgorged a jeep which tore up the carefully manicured grass with its spinning wheels.

An American officer paused at the lip of the sand trap to speak into a small hand-held radio. “Stingray Alpha, Stingray Alpha, this is Stingray Dolphin, Stingray Dolphin. All secure in this area. I say again, all secure in this area. Dolphin out.” The man gave McIllvanney and me an incurious glance then walked on.

“I’m not into drugs!” McIllvanney shouted after the officer, who ignored him, so the Ulsterman looked back at me. “Nick! You know me, I hate drugs, so I do! They’re an abomination!” He evidently believed that by convincing me he could convince all the world of his innocence.

But I was not listening to McIllvanney. I was lying with my face in the sand and with agony ripping up my left arm, but I was also suddenly and sublimely happy. The word Stingray had confirmed all my suspicions. The senator had tried to radio Stingray, and now Stingray had come, because Stingray had always been meant to come, and that meant Ellen was safe.

And Ellen had always been safe.

The good guys had her, not the bad guys, but the good guys who had wanted me to help them. It had been the good guys who had caused Ellen to disappear, then encouraged me to take revenge for that disappearance by attacking Murder Cay. The Americans could not have legally searched Murder Cay because the Bahamians would not have given their permission, but the world would forgive the Americans if their forces, conveniently exercising close to the island, responded to an emergency call for help from an American senator who had travelled to Murder Cay on the innocent mission of seeking his missing children; and if the British government complained about such a Grenada-like invasion of the territory of a sovereign and Commonwealth nation, then the Americans would reply that they had also been rescuing the hide of a dumb Britisher who had only been trying to help the senator.

Thus had this whole night been planned. If either of the radios had worked then the cavalry would have ridden to our rescue long before the firefight developed, but the cavalry had always been waiting just beyond the radar horizon. Which all meant that I had been manipulated. The dictates of politics and public relations had decreed that this operation should look like a rescue mission, and my participation took away any suspicion that the operation had been planned in the Pentagon. The senator and I would be depicted as nobly heroic fools; Don Quixotes tilting at real giants and winning.

And the Maggot?

The Maggot, I imagined, would not exist. The Maggot would become invisible because the Maggot was surely an undercover man for either the DEA or the US Customs Service, or one of the myriad Task Forces that the Americans deployed against drugs.

“This one,” I suddenly heard the Maggot’s voice above and behind me, “you can shoot now. He’s only a stray Brit and no one could have any possible use for him.” Then he laughed.

“You bastard,” I said, then the Maggot cut off my plastic cuffs and lifted me with an extraordinary tenderness. He took me to a medic who gave me basic field care, and who wanted to chopper me immediately to the operating theatre of a naval ship, but I refused to leave Murder Cay. I had questions I wanted answered, and to seek those answers I walked along the beach with Maggot. “Who are you?” I asked him.

“Maggovertski, John.” He grinned through his black tangled beard. “Otherwise known as the Maggot. You know who I am, Nick. Failed football player, failing businessman, good old country boy, layabout, average pilot, extraordinarily talented beer drinker, gun collector, lover of loose women, lover of tight women, lover of any women, tennis coach extraordinary…”

“DEA?” I carried on the list for him. “US Customs? Special Task Force? CIA?”

“I kind of go deaf to some questions, Nick, on account of having banged my head against dickhead offensive linemen too often. But considering I’m just an easy-going party-loving animal with an aeroplane and a boat, you’d be amazed how many people confide in me their wishes and plans to introduce strange and narcotic substances into America.”

We walked slowly on through the cloying sand. The small lagoon waves flopped feebly on the beach. The painkiller was making me light-headed, but not foolish any longer. “So where’s Ellen, John?”

“So far as I know, Nick, she’s in an Embassy guest house in Nassau. She’s been well treated, though she didn’t think so. We kind of denied her a telephone, and kept her on a leash, and she was unhappy about that. In fact she was as mad as hell. I know you’re fond of her, Nick, but have you ever caught the rough side of her tongue? Jesus, she could strip the teeth of a running chainsaw! We were only keeping her in Nassau for her own protection, but you’d never have known it from the way she cussed us.”

I smiled. “Were you the one who took her to Nassau?”

“Smedley did. You met Smedley, right? I kind of arranged it, though.” The Maggot had the grace to give me an apologetic look. “Sorry, Nick. But, Jesus, when you telephoned and asked for my help? You were just offering us temptation, and I was always kind of bad at resisting temptation.”

“Screw you, mate,” I said, but without malice, for I liked the Maggot, and he had been clever, so very clever. Instead of flying Ellen direct from Straker’s Cay to Nassau he had taken her to Freeport and allowed her to complete as much of her planned itinerary as possible, thus making it seem even more plausible that she had been kidnapped. “But why couldn’t you have told me the truth?” I asked.

“Think about it, Nick. If you’d known this whole party was being laid on and paid for by the US government, would you have put your miserable hide on the line for us?”

“No,” I confessed wisely and truthfully.

“And you were just too good to overlook,” the Maggot said with an indecent relish. “A trained soldier, and the son of the great Sir Thomas Breakspear! Even the Brits can’t object to us rescuing Sir Tom’s dear son from the narcotraficantes .”

“But why did I have to do the killing?” I cut across his foolery with the bitter question.

He gave me a shrewd glance. “Because you were a marine, Nick.”

“Not in your Navy.”

He walked in silence for a few paces. “It’s a war against drugs, Nick, and we’re not going to win it unless we fight as cruelly and as pitilessly as the narcotraficantes . Not that we thought there’d be any killing here. Damn it, if the senator hadn’t thrown his radio at the bloody dog, no one would have got shot! It wasn’t meant to be like this.”

“It never is,” I said, and I thought that Ellen was right, and that this whole damn crooked business should be brought into the open so that no one could make profits so huge that they were worth the fighting and the dying and the lying and the stealing and the misery.

“Anyway, it’s over now.” The Maggot was uncomfortable with my dismay and hurried the conversation on. “I guess we owe you a big thank you, Nick. Not, of course, that I speak for the US government, you understand. In fact, and you may quote me, the US government is just like any other government; a load of fat-assed faggot lawyers who only understand how to spend people’s taxes but who can’t even piss downwind unless their aides show them how to do it. So I would hate you to spread a rumour that I was in any way associated with those pin-headed dickbrains, and do I make myself plain?”

I smiled. “Yes, Maggot, you do. You don’t exist, am I right?”