Robert Jones - Blood Tide

“Something’s happening in there, Chief,” the lookout said. “Back in the mangroves. Could be Charlie.”

Culdee looked through his glasses—they were Leitz 9 × 35s, clear and crisp. He’d won them off a West German news photographer in a poker game at Cam Ranh Bay. He focused them and saw the dusty green mangrove leaves snap sharp. There was movement beyond the web of twisted branches—darkness and light; black cloth, pale skin—like a priest dimly glimpsed through the screen of a confessional. The light was fading fast, though, and Culdee saw a string of cormorants angling along just above the tops of the mangroves and the last light shining golden-green on the coconut palms back of the beach. He spun the wheel to port and pointed the bow toward the movement.

Drake, the gunner’s mate, was already hunkered behind the twin .50s. Culdee heard him work the retracting handle back; he heard a click, then the second pull to seat the round. He looked astern. Earhart, the young engineman, was at the aft gun mount. The diesels grumbled and farted at low revs, and small waves slapped the fifty-foot hull. They were heading straight into the last of the sunset, and the light on the water couldn’t be worse. There was coral all along the coast that could tear your heart out. Culdee kept a sharp eye out for the quick, shy swirls that broke over reefs and niggerheads. The water was shoaling fast.

Then he saw something awash, right in close to the mangroves. At first it looked like the body of a man. Then it looked a lot bigger.

“Could be a crate or something,” the lookout said. He was using the twelve-power glasses. “Maybe wrapped in a tarp?” he added.

There was no more movement in the trees, but that didn’t mean anything. They were about three hundred yards off the beach now, and it was getting dark fast. There is no twilight in the tropics.

“Hey, Guns,” Culdee yelled topside. “Cut me down some of them mangroves.”

“Aye, sir! ”

The .50s slammed; great white flocks of egrets lurched screaming into the dusk. Leaves flew, big chunks of purple and white wood went soaring off crazily, whole stands of trees slowly toppled. There was no answering fire.

“Maybe it was just water buffalo,” the lookout said doubtfully. But buffalo would have run, or at least bellowed.

Culdee dropped the engines into neutral. The crate, or whatever it was, still lay sloshing in the shallows.

“Put a couple of rounds into that thing,” Culdee told the lookout.

There was an M16 racked on the port wing of the bridge. The lookout snapped the selector lever to semi and popped the crate twice, then a third time for good measure. Nothing screamed. Nothing blew up.

“Okay,” Culdee said. “I’m going to bring her in so you can grab that thing with the boat hook. Use the handle like a sounding pole, up there in the bow, and yell the depth back to me. Remember, we draw three feet.”

The hell of it was they had only the old French charts to go by up here in the North. Even the most recent of them was fourteen years old, and some dated back to the 1930s. A lot of typhoons had blown through since then, a lot of sand had shifted from one spot to another. In waters like these, whole reefs could die and be born again in a new place while your back was turned. It was worse in the delta. Down there, where the alligator navy lived, each monsoon season laid a new grid of channels and shoals over the mouth of the Mekong. They ran PBRs in the delta that drew only a foot and a half of water. Glass-hulled thirty-two-footers that could go like stink once they got up on the step. But they ran on those damned jet motors—Jacuzzis, the white hats called them—and the impellers were constantly jamming with water hyacinth. Up here, at least, the water was clean and clear. In good light you could read a beer-can label on the bottom in ten fathoms. Count your blessings . . .

But Culdee knew he was evading the main issue. He smelled a rat, and the rat’s name was Charlie. It could be a setup. Sucker you in to check out whatever Charlie had left in the water, then cut loose with everything they’ve got. On the other hand, maybe the Swift’s appearance had interrupted a resupply mission. Maybe there was a sampan, courtesy of Uncle Ho, tucked away behind the mangroves, in one of the thousands of invisible inlets that notched the coast. He had his orders. If he didn’t go in and check it out, he’d be facing the green banana for sure. It he did go in and it was a setup, the only banana he’d face would be the one Charlie’d left for him to skid on. After that, he wouldn’t have to face anything.

They eased up toward the shore. The only sounds were the burble of the exhaust, rising now and then to a peevish blat, the croak of a night heron on the hunt, and the whine of mosquitoes, piercing as a dentist’s drill. The light was becoming subaquatic.

“Almost four feet,” the lookout said. The bottom of the boat-hook pole looked black in the dusk, like a dipstick pulled from a sump of dirty oil.

“Three and a half.

Nothing moved in the mangroves. All the birds seemed to have flown.

“A touch over three . . . I think I can reach it now.”

He extended the pole, leaning far out over the bow. A silver comma winked in the gloom—the hook.

“Got it.”

As he pulled back on the pole, the crate rolled slightly, sucking in the easy wash. Then the hook slipped. There was something dangling over it—pallid, snaky, angling back into the mangrove roots. Det cord . . .

Oh, fuck! In his mind’s eye, Culdee saw Charlie hunkered back in the swamp, the ends of the wires scraped bare, one in each hand. Charlie brought the ends together . . .

“Hey!” the lookout yelled, his voice cracking like a teenager’s. “It’s a fucking wi—”

Flash.

Culdee was in the water, warm as blood, red as blood. It was blood, blood full of twitching meat. A severed hand sunk through it. A tattoo on the back of the hand—Culdee checked numbly: he still had both of his. The tattoo, he suddenly saw, was a tiger head, fangs dripping blood. Underneath the blood, VUNG TAU ’66. The hand turned over as it sank; small fish darted and ripped at the flanges that fanned from the wrist. Drake’s hand—he had a tattoo like that . . .

The Swift was down by the bow. There was no bow. Big chunks of it continued to splatter down all around Culdee when he lay in the water far away. No, quite close, actually. No, pretty far away. Lights winked in the mangroves like giant fireflies. It was gunfire, but Culdee couldn’t hear it. The roar in his ears was too loud. The stern of the Swift was cocked high against the sky. Culdee saw the muzzle flash of the aft .50 caliber still pumping strings of fire into the mangroves—Earhart. But then the .50 went dark, too. They got him.

Culdee floated. He couldn’t move enough even to dog-paddle away into the dark. Something eased out of the solid wall of mangrove roots—a sampan. Low voices chattered in dink. Guys were poling at the high-curved stern. There was a glint of weapons—AKs. A dink up on the bow was leaning on a long, skinny pole . . . with a hook at the end.

At first Culdee thought it was the lookout’s boat hook, blown back into the mangroves by the blast of C4 that blew off the bow of the Swift, and the men along with it. But it was a gaff. Culdee’d seen them on the fishing boats he’d interdicted—hand-forged, rusty, spangled with scales and encrusted with dry fish slime, but honed to a bright point at the recurved tip. He thrashed weakly, like a played-out pompano.

The dink leaned over through the darkness and gaffed him through the shoulder.

FOUR