Charles Williams - Aground

The plane had stopped now; it swung about, facing north. The engines roared and it began to gather speed. It went past them over a mile to the westward, lifted from the water, and began to dwindle away in the void. He felt sick. Morrison came up the ladder behind them, followed by Ruiz.

Morrison sat down on the corner of the deckhouse with the BAR across his legs, and said, “All right, let’s get this scow off the mud. What do we do first?”

“Jettison those guns,” Ingram said coldly.

“Come again with the jettison?”

“Throw ‘em over the side.”

“Don’t bug me, Herman. The guns go on that island—”

Ruiz broke in suddenly, in Spanish. “Look! The plane returns.”

Ingram caught himself, but too late. He’d already turned to look. He saw Morrison’s jocose grin, and was filled with a dark and futile rage. That swept the series; he’d been made a fool of by all three of them—Hollister, Morrison, and now Ruiz.

But it hadn’t been a deliberate trick; the plane was turning and coming back. “Hit the dirt!” Morrison barked. He grabbed the gun and ducked down the hatch after Ruiz. Ingram watched it silently. Maybe Avery did suspect something. But it was turning again now, in a steep bank only a few hundred feet above the water some miles to the north of them. It was as though Avery was trying to see something below him. At that moment the radio blared in the cabin. Morrison spoke from the hatchway. “Get on the horn. He’s calling you.”

He ran down the ladder. Morrison had already started the transmitter. He passed over the handset and stood to one side, holding the gun. “Careful what you say, and watch me.”

He pressed the transmit button. “This is the Dragoon back. What is it? Over.”

Avery’s voice filled the cabin. “There’s something in the water down here. Hold it a minute. I’m coming over it again.”

They waited in tense, hot silence unbroken except for the scratching of static in the loudspeaker. Rae Osborne watched from the hatchway. Then Avery’s voice came on again. “It’s a body, all right. Probably one of your thieves. Seems to be naked except for a pair of shorts. If you bring the raft, I can land and get him aboard.”

He glanced at Morrison. “Tell him you’ll pick him up,” the latter ordered, “and take him into Key West.”

He repeated this.

“Very well,” Avery agreed. “Might save a bit of international red tape, at that. I make the position about three miles north-northeast of you. If you get here while the water’s still flat, you won’t have any trouble finding him. There are some birds sitting on him.”

He saw Mrs. Osborne shudder at the image. Morrison gave a curt gesture that said: Get rid of him. He signed off, and replaced the handset. When they went on deck again, the plane was fading away in the northeast.

Morrison perched on the corner of the deckhouse once more. “Now, how many of those guns do we have to unload?”

Rae Osborne stared at him. “But what about the man?”

Morrison shrugged. “So what about him?”

“Aren’t we going to do anything at all?”

“Like giving him artificial respiration, maybe? He’s only been dead for three days.”

She took a step toward him, the green eyes blazing. “I’ve got to see him.”

“A waterlogged stiff? Honey, you need help.”

“Listen,” Ingram said, “it won’t take more than thirty minutes to row out there and see if she can identify him. She may know who Hollister was.”

Morrison shook his head. “Fall back, Herman. I couldn’t care less who Hollister was, and we’ve got more to do than stooge around the ocean looking for him.”

“I’m going out there,” Rae Osborne said. She started past him toward the raft, and violence erupted in the sunlit morning like the release of coiled steel springs.

Morrison caught the front of her pullover, yanked her toward him, and slapped her back-handed across the face. She gasped and tried to hit him. Ingram lunged at him just as he drew back his arm and shoved, sending her sprawling along the deck. Ruiz’ arm flashed down, swinging the slablike automatic. Pain exploded inside his head and he fell forward against Morrison, who stood up, pushed him off with the BAR, and chopped a short and brutal right to the side of his jaw. His knees buckled and he fell beside Mrs. Osborne. When he tried to get up, the deck tilted and spun, and there was no strength in his arms. He dropped back. Blood trickled down across his forehead and fell to the deck in little spatting droplets just under his eyes.

“Don’t ever try that again, Herman,” Morrison said. “You’re a big boy, but we’re in the business.”

6

In a moment he was able to sit up, wincing with the pain in his head. Rae Osborne had pushed to a sitting position with her feet on the cockpit cushions. She had an inflamed red spot on the side of her face, and there were tears of frustration and rage in her eyes. “You’re not much help,” she said.

He mopped at the blood on his face with a handkerchief, but succeeded only in smearing it. He threw the handkerchief overboard. A vagrant breath of air riffled the water astern and a gull wheeled and cried out above them in the brassy sunlight. This was about as helpless as you could get, he thought; he’d lasted less than three seconds.

Morrison spoke to Ruiz. “As soon as the Champ’s able to row that raft, we get started. Go down and begin taking the lashings off those cases.”

Ruiz went down the ladder. “How much will we have to unload?” Morrison asked.

Ingram stared coldly. “How would I know?”

“You’re the expert.”

“I don’t even know what you’ve got aboard. Or where the tide was when you piled up here.”

“I don’t know about the tide, but I can tell you what’s aboard. Six hundred rifles, thirty machine guns, fifty BAR’s, a half dozen mortars—”

“I don’t need an inventory. I mean tonnage. Have you got any idea what it weighs?”

Morrison thought for a moment. “The ammo’d be the heaviest. We’ve got over a hundred thousand rounds of thirty-caliber stuff in those two staterooms. I’d guess it all at six to eight tons.”

Ingram made a rough calculation based on a water-line length of fifty-five feet and a beam amidships of sixteen. Call it thirty-five cubic feet displacement per inch of draft at normal water line. Each ton would put her down nearly another full inch. No wonder she’d looked low in the water.

“You’ve got her overloaded at least six inches. If you’d hit any weather she could have foundered or broken her back.”

“Never mind that jazz. How much do we take off?”

“Probably all of it. How long have you been on here?”

“Since Saturday night.”

“And this is Wednesday. She’s never moved at all?”

“No,” Morrison said.

“Has the tide ever come any higher than it is now?”

“How would I know?” Morrison asked. “You think we got anything to measure it with?”

“Use your head. Has the deck ever been any nearer level than it is right now?”

“No. This is about it.”

“Then congratulations. Apparently you plowed on here at full speed on the highest tide of the month.”

“So what do we do, sit here and cry? Let’s get going.”

“If you were bound for the Caribbean, why were you on a northerly heading when you hit?”

Morrison gestured impatiently. “We were trying to turn to get out of here. It was night, like I said, and we couldn’t see anything. And all of a sudden we heard something that sounded like a beach.”

“You turned the wrong way. But I don’t get what you were doing in here over the Bank in the first place. You should have been at least ten miles to the westward.”