Robert Jones - Blood Tide

Culdee walked the surf line, kicking seashells, while the two talked in Tausuq. Balabatchi looked like a slippery customer, all right. Never had Culdee seen a slier, more devious face. If there were two sides to any confrontation, you could bet that the One-Eyed Crocodile would not only play both of them but would also find a third and a fourth side as well, to make sure.

When Sôbô returned to the boat he looked worried.

“Blast!” he said. “Bala tells me someone made an attempt on Millikan’s life last night. Some kind of book bomb. Didn’t kill him, though, didn’t even scratch him. But now he’ll be on the alert. Stone the crows! These bloody Moros and that asinine old padre. . . . But let’s get a move on. We’ve got business at Balbal.”

“What about Miranda?” Culdee asked. He suddenly felt his heart beat double time.

Sôbô glanced at him, his black eyes glittering like go stones. “Out of our hands now, old-timer. You remember what Moltke said? ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy.’”

TWENTY-FOUR

Kasim slowed the motor as they approached the reef off San Lázaro. Miranda could see the big, low, stucco-walled house that by its size alone proclaimed itself Millikan’s place. Following along the shore, she saw the fast-boat basin tucked in among the mangroves. The tin roofs of sheds flashed through coco fronds on the higher ground. Kasim cut the engine, and they drifted just inside the reef.

“We pretend to dive conchas here,” Kasim said. “Seashell, hey?” There were face masks, snorkels, and swim fins in the bottom of the boat, the equipment all well worn and mismatched, typical island diving gear. “We work slow— despacio —to shallow water. Very easy. Never look ashore. Just peek. You look hard though later, hey? When you rest from dive on outrigger?” Miranda and Freddie nodded.

The reef was a ruin. Great screeslopes of dead coral scarred its inshore margin. Huge elkhorns lay toppled and shattered across the bottom, and a brain coral the size of a small sedan, white as something you’d find in a pickling jar, lolled stem-side up, where dynamiters had blasted it in search of hiding grouper. A few patches of eelgrass had managed to survive, or perhaps invade the devastated ground, and Miranda moved slowly over them picking up shells. She saw nothing of value—no Gloria Maris certainly, not even any conus shells or tridacnas, just horse conchs, or something quite like them.

Even the reef fish were few and far between—a few anemic-looking sergeant majors, a lone squirrelfish poking along as if in a trance, its colors vivid against the rubble. On one dive, Miranda thought she spotted the antennae of a rock lobster swaying at the mouth of a crevice, but when she checked it out, it proved to be nothing more than the wires of a rusted fish trap. She saw not a single moray eel. No wonder. The dynamiters had left nothing.

“This is no good,” she told Kasim after half an hour. “No one in his right mind would dive this reef for shells. It’s all dead down there. Anyone ashore who’s watching us will know we’re just pretending.”

“You find pretty shell?” Kasim said joyfully. His eyebrows shot upward in delight. “Bring me, I sell, we make mucho dinero .”

Freddie blew his snorkel beside her and pushed back the mask.

She repeated what she’d told Kasim. “He doesn’t understand,” Freddie said. “A lot of these old Moro, they don’t swim, sure don’t dive.” He said something to Kasim in Samal, the old Moro’s tribal tongue. “Okay,” Freddie said. “Let’s just move inshore steadily now, in the boat, make a slow pass. We check it out, then go.”

As they neared the shore, they saw plenty of activity in the fast-boat basin. Men hustled from boat to boat, loading things, lugging oil drums and what looked like ammunition boxes. The ragged pulse of revving engines sounded like a swarm of hornets preparing for war.

“I count a good ten boats in there,” Miranda told Freddie. “Maybe more; I can’t see into that far bay. Too much shade. How many men do you make out?”

“Thirty, forty,” Freddie said. “They run so fast, can’t keep count.”

Just then a boat idled out from under the shade and into the channel. Miranda saw machine-gun barrels sticking up at angles beside the windscreen. A man stood on the engine housing, glassing them. He was short but wide-shouldered, steady as a rock on the swaying deck, and he seemed to be wearing a navy fatigue uniform. He pointed to them and yelled something to the Tausuq at the Thunder’s helm. She leapt toward them.

“We run?” Kasim asked. He looked nervous for the first time since Miranda had met him.

“No,” she said. “Not fast enough, us. We wait, pretend we just fishermen.” And lots of luck, she thought.

“Let me talk,” Freddie said. “You go back by the motor, pretend you’re fixing it. Don’t let them see you face to face.”

Crouched by the engine, Miranda heard them talking in Moro or some other language. The wide man had a hard, military-sounded voice, imperious. Freddie whined and faltered, obsequious as a frightened islander certainly would be in such circumstances. Kasim said nothing. Miranda cut one quick glance behind her. Kasim was up in the pump boat’s bow, easing his way out of the wide man’s line of vision. He was peering curiously, wide-eyed and simple seeming, into the Thunder’s cockpit, where the driver stood watching the dialogue between Freddie and the wide man. The wide man had a big hunk of one ear missing . . .

Then everything happened at once. The wide man began to draw his pistol. Freddie dived toward him, they grappled and teetered on the Thunder’s gunwale. Kasim was in the Thunder’s cockpit, his bolo flashing bright in a downward arc. There was the bang of the wide man’s pistol, the juicy thwop of Kasim’s bolo. Freddie and the wide man toppled into the water. Kasim yelled something to Miranda, gesturing her into the fast boat. She jumped . . .

“ God-damnit! ” Commodore Millikan, watching the whole proceeding through his binoculars from the boat-basin dock, suddenly danced with fury. “Idiot!” He watched the Thunder race off in a boil of white wake. Torres and the man from the pump boat were still flailing in the water. “I’ll shoot that stupid fuck!” he yelled. The crewmen around him edged away. “Billy Torres has the brains of a sea slug—no, less.” He’d told Torres to bring the pump boat in, no fuss, no palaver, certainly no guns. The commodore wanted to talk to those people, at his leisure. If they were just innocent fisherman, all right, he’d let them go. No sense in alienating the locals any more than necessary. If they were part of this plot, whatever it was, he’d find out. So Billy gets into an argument and draws his fucking .45. . . . Trigger-happy Flips! Idiots, all of them!

The commodore waved a boat over, jumped in, and ran out to where the men in the water were still fighting. The islander, if that’s what he was, had a knife in one hand. Billy had him by the wrist, trying to shake the knife loose. Both men were spluttering, coughing, blood dripping from their faces and diluting in the splash. Then Billy got the knife away from the islander.

“Don’t kill him, Billy!” the commodore roared. “Kill him, and you’re dead!” He had his own pistol out now, and he fired it into the sky. Billy was still trying to cut the islander. The commodore shot into the water beside him. He had to shoot twice more before Billy got the message.

He looked up at the commodore, rage still hot in his eyes.

“All right, Billy,” the commodore said, trying to gain control of himself. It was hard, with the 9-millimeter Walther in his hand. “We’ll take him ashore and ask him a few questions. As I told you to begin with! ”