Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“I don’t think I like to be your boss,” he said.

He lifted the receiver off its cradle for a moment, then set it back down again.

“This isn’t good,” he told Pablo. “We thought we dealt with responsible people, you understand. This is trouble for us and we don’t need it.”

Pablo looked at the folder and said nothing. One by one he had heard the small boats taking off; the last boat was alongside now and the people in it were calling for their chief in low hisses. The armed man in the hatchway looked from Pablo to the last boat.

“ Hay que matarlo ,” he said to his chief. “We have to kill him.”

“Y la barca ?” the chief asked, watching Pablo. “What about the boat.”

“Sink it.”

The leader looked as though he were about to smile. From the envelope in his hand he took a roll of bills and threw it on the chart table. Pablo saw that there were hundreds. On the top at least.

“It’s enough for one man. Two men in this country make less in a year. Now get yourself and your boat away from us.”

Pablo’s outrage made him speak without thinking.

“You see what he’s doin’?” he demanded of the second-in-command. “He’s grabbing money that’s mine. He aims to keep it himself.”

“ Hay que matarlo ,” the man with the rifle said.

“No,” the leader said. “Now,” he told Pablo, “go while you can.”

The two men went out of the cockpit and began climbing into the last waiting whaler. Pablo hobbled out after them. The whaleboat was floating free now. Pablo leaned down over the rail.

“I can’t make it,” he called to them. “I’m hurting and I don’t know my way out there.”

Someone started up the outboard.

“Look,” Pablo shouted, “that bread’s no good to me now. I got no place to go. Let me join up with you guys. I’m trained, you understand. I swear to Christ, compadre , I’m your man!”

“Some other time, eh,” the leader in the boat said. “You’re tough.” And the outboard disappeared into the darkness, its throttle held low.

“You stole my money, you fuck!” Pablo screamed. Probably no one heard him. There was no point trying to shoot at them; they were out of sight and shots would bring the law.

Thinking of the law, Pablo looked around quickly. The pier lights had gone out and the only light in view was the aircraft beacon on the mountaintop over the little harbor. Seaward, the breeze was as gentle as ever but a quarter moon was rising now, to show the lines of the Cloud against it. He looked at the ocean, lightly moonlit, and a wave of pain and exhaustion passed over him. The sight of it filled him with dread. He was afraid. He could not go back to it now.

Then the thought came to him that the town they had passed during the afternoon could not be far. A seaport — with great freighters loading up at cement piers. City lights had been going on there. He might find a billet on one of the ships. There might be buses, even an airport.

He wiped his brow, counted the money on the chart table and discovered that he had something less than fifteen hundred dollars in American bills. Fifteen hundred and a diamond — he would take his chances at sea no longer, in a boat full of blood, among reefs. He decided to set out for shore.

There was a tiny, self-righting aluminum dinghy set in davits just behind the lazaret housing. Pablo went aft for a look and found the davits and the lowering windlass wire rusted and corroded; the only piece of bad maintenance he had encountered aboard the Cloud . It took him the better part of an hour, using engine wrenches and even chain cutters, to get the dinghy over. When it was afloat, he secured it by a painter to the rail. For an outboard and an oil can, he forced himself to go down into the lazaret again but he found none there, nor anywhere else aboard. The lazaret had oarlocks and a set of mismated aluminum oars. Pablo put them in the dinghy.

In the cockpit chair now, he went over Callahan’s Loran charts, trying to find out where he was. The aerial beacon was on all the charts and the town to the north was called Puerto Alvarado. Even on the detailed charts it didn’t look like much but it would have to do. Around his boards it was Reef City. If he put the Cloud on almost any southerly bearing it would hit marbles; a course between two-ten and three hundred would send it into the outer reef and if it went fast and far enough it would strike hard enough to break up and sink in deep water. He saw now that he had made it to the marker buoy by sheer miracle. He would never, he was sure, have made it out.

He spent a few minutes going through the vessel, opening every hatch and porthole and watertight door that he could find. He supposed there might be sea cocks down in shaft alley — but he had no time to find them now. In the saloon he found a life jacket and a laundry bag. He put the life jacket on and tightened the Dacor knife about his good leg. He would leave the guns where they were. They were only incrimination now and excess weight. The diamond, the pills, and the fifteen hundred he wrapped in the laundry bag to stash it in the dinghy.

Pablo gave the Cloud just enough power to set her heading for the outer reefs and took up the anchor. The anchor came up clean, to his relief and gratitude. With the course set he untied the painter that secured his lifeboat, and as the little boat drifted shoreward, he shoved the diesel throttle forward for flank speed.

When he hit the water, he found it warm, although cool enough to make his leg hurt. His wound made him think of sharks, and he paddled breathlessly for his floating dinghy, hauling himself aboard by the strength of his arms and his one good leg.

He was into his second rowing stroke when the shrimper struck. There was a double wall of coral there and it must have been just below the surface because the Cloud barreled over the first barrier as though she had turned amphibian, plowing over it, hardly seeming to slow, but ripping her seams fore and aft. Yet the rudder shaft and the engines had come through and not until she took the second ridge did there sound, together with the tearing of wood, the crash of suffering metal, the hopeless hissing rattle of a smashed machine.

Her guts on the reef, the Cloud raised her forepeak in the moonlight. Pablo, resting for a moment on his oars, watched the bow gradually sink as the weight of water billowing into the after compartments shifted forward on the fulcrum of the coral and commenced to take her down. A few small fires were burning in the after sections, there was a silent explosion, a fiery puffball burst itself to cast a moment’s glow on the bland easy ocean. Then another crash, another little firestorm, and she turned completely over on her bow and settled, upside down, beneath the surface. Pablo, still watching as he rowed, could not be sure whether the white water he saw in the faint moonlight marked the tip of the reef or some exposed part of the vessel. If she had not cleared the second wall altogether she might be settled on a slope, in shallow water, easily visible. He put the thought out of his mind. In time, he hoped, all thoughts of her would pass. Things would be different.

He rested on his oars again, breathing in the sweet smell of land, and checked the bag for his diamond, his money, his pills. They were all in place. So, gritting his teeth, he pulled on for the black shore behind him.

Holliwell found the restaurant hangar of the Paradise aswarm with the people who called themselves contractors. The crowd and the noise surprised him; he had not brought a watch and he had supposed it was the middle of the night.

For a while he stood under the palms outside, looking in at the party. Someone called his name and he turned to see Mr. Soyer smiling at him. Mr. Heath was sitting beside him and across the table from them were Olga and Buddy. They all found him in some way amusing.