The Detonators (4 page)

I made a note to warn Mac, in Washington, that our current man in Miami would bear watching. We’d had a very good part-timer there named Brent, but he’d quit and married the boss’s daughter; and Mac was now a grandpa. A six-pound girl, if it matters. But Jerome was obviously not of Brent’s caliber; and any agent in an escort situation who thinks more about his own feelings than about the person he’s been assigned to help and protect has to be used with caution. It occurred to me it was something I could well bear in mind myself.

I went to bed. It seemed that the phone rang again almost immediately; but my watch said it was four-thirty in the morning.

“Mr. Helm?” It was Amy Barnett’s voice. “Mr. Helm, I just got a telephone call from the coast guard. My father’s gone absolutely crazy; he’s stolen back his boat and put to sea!”

“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms, Miss Barnett? If it’s his boat, how can he steal it?”

“Oh, stop it! You know what I mean. They’re going out after him, and they want me to come along; I can’t imagine why.”

“I can,” I said. “They want you to witness the fact that this time they picked him up very gently and legally.”

“They want you, too. Representing your agency, I suppose.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute. Bring a heavy sweater, if you’ve got one. The Gulf Stream is supposed to be a warm current; but I understand it can still get pretty chilly out there in the Florida Straits.”

The moment I put the phone down it rang again. That was the U.S.C.G. with my official invitation to the hanging.

The Coast Guard vessel was a sizable boat as boats go, but it was not one of the long, lean, junior-grade destroyers you sometimes see wearing that slanting orange stripe up forward on their wicked-looking white hulls. Our transportation, although it carried the same stripe, was less naval in appearance: a husky, beamy, planing-type vessel in the forty-foot bracket. It bristled with antennas and searchlights, and the deckhouse was crammed full of interesting electronics gear. At least I suppose it was interesting to somebody.

I recognized a radar set; also a Loran, since I’d once had to master one in order to find my way home on a boat with a very dead crew I’d helped make that way—well, most of the way home; we ran into a little more trouble eventually. Fortunately, there had been an instruction book handy, and I hadn’t found the apparatus all that difficult to figure out. However, there were other black boxes here that I couldn’t identify, also with touch-type keyboards and luminous windows displaying magic numbers that undoubtedly meant something to somebody. There were also radios of various persuasions: SSB, VHF, and even a little CB stuck into a corner like an afterthought. There really wasn’t much room left for people, but I helped Amy brace herself in a neutral corner.

She’d lost some of her prim and proper look; it’s hard for a girl to look prim in jeans. The round collar of a neat white cotton blouse showed above a light-blue sweater that emphasized the blue of her eyes and played down the gray. Her soft light-brown hair was still, or again, neatly pinned up about her head. I reminded myself that I must not be prejudiced against her because of an ancient hurt of my own, for which she had not been responsible. It shouldn’t be hard to treat her fairly, I told myself; she wasn’t bad-looking, even in pants. Then the cabin lights went out. On deck they went through the routine of casting off the lines, and finally we were off.

“I don’t think it would be advisable to sit down, even if there were someplace to sit,” I said above the muted rumble of the engines. “I don’t know how fast this thing travels, but some of them can break your back when they really start to go, if you aren’t prepared to absorb the jolting with your knees.”

They’d given us a mystery man for company, wearing khaki uniform pants like the rest; but his navy-blue watch cap and turtleneck sweater carried no insignia of rank. He was a compact man of medium height with regular WASP features and a dark Mediterranean skin—it had to be more than just a deep tan—but his eyes were gray and the shape of his face was strictly Anglo-Saxon. Well, we’re all kind of scrambled genetically these days, but I had a hunch the Swedes and Scots in my own ancestry got along a little better than the widely diverse racial types, whatever they were, that had produced him. Thick black hair and strong white teeth. Age fifty, give or take five. Now he showed the fine teeth in a tolerant smile at my assumption of nautical knowledge.

“It shouldn’t be that uncomfortable, Miss Barnett,” he said. “There’s not much sea running out in the Straits this morning, and we won’t be making that much speed. We won’t need to. He can’t have got very far. We should have his location by radio by the time we get out the channel.”

Gray daylight was sneaking up on us now; and the lights of Miami—or was it Miami Beach here?—were going out along the heavily built-up shoreline as we threaded our way between the buoys of a pass leading seaward that was unfamiliar to me. But then, while I’ve had to learn how to handle boats after a fashion in the line of duty, it’s not my sport. I’ll take a horse or a four-wheel-drive vehicle and some nice desert of mountain scenery any time I’m offered a choice; to hell with a lot of salty water that leaves you sticky when you swim in it and can’t even be used to mix a drink with.

I said, “His location is no problem. Why should it be? Didn’t anybody bother to look at his maps? Excuse me, charts, sir.”

He didn’t look like the kind of man who’d be impressed by a lot of greasy sirs; but when you’re dealing with the uniformed services it’s always best to play safe. There was no telling what rank he held, but there was no mistaking the fact that he had some. Respect is cheap and doesn’t hurt a bit. At least I’ve never found it very painful, although I’ve worked with some younger agents who’d much rather be tortured than polite.

“Belay the sirs,” he said. “The name is Sanderson. What do you mean, Helm?”

I said, “If I know Doug Barnett, he’ll have it all worked out on paper, where he’s going from here. He’s a very systematic guy with a very systematic master plan. He told me about it once. As I recall, after Miami his next stop was to be Bermuda, about a thousand miles away, out in the open Atlantic.”

Sanderson was watching me closely by the dim glow of the instruments around us. “We figured he’d head straight across to the Bahamas,” he said. “Less than fifty miles. We do have certain arrangements with the authorities over there, but we’ve got to be diplomatic about taking advantage of them. Once he’s in Bahamian waters, it’ll take a certain amount of red tape to get him back.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You talk as if you’re dealing with some kind of criminal in flight. As far as Doug Barnett’s concerned, he’s an innocent man who was attacked by pirates masquerading as law-enforcement officers. They stole his boat and beat him up and kidnapped him… Don’t argue with me, sir. I’m not the guy you’re chasing. I’m just telling you the way his mind is working. Remember he’s carried a badge of his own for a good many years; your pretty uniforms and fancy collar decorations don’t mean a damn thing to him. I don’t mean he’s nuts or anything. He simply refuses to accept your authority anymore; and he’s just taking back his boat going right on with the cruise you interrupted so rudely. If you leave him alone, everything will be fine. If you don’t, well, he’s ready for that, too.”

“He broke the law—”

“What law says you can beat a sick man over the head for unknowingly having a couple of ounces of pot on his boat?”

“The captain or owner of a vessel is responsible for whatever is found on board.”

I stared at him unbelievingly. “You must be kidding? You mean that if I invite three friendly couples for a sail on the big yacht I don’t have, the pretty wife I don’t have will have to take the women into one cabin while I take the men into another. And then we’ll strip our guests and examine all their bodily orifices for contraband—my nonexistent wife will have the harder job there, since she’ll have an extra orifice to deal with in each case. And then I’ll slice open the shoulder pads of the men’s jackets while she breaks off the heels of the women’s shoes and does some jacket work herself, not to mention some dress work, to make sure nothing’s hidden there. We’ll rip open any suspicious seams of all their garments. She’ll hack apart the women’s purses and I’ll chop apart the luggage. You never can tell what’s hidden inside a purse or suitcase lining, can you? And then at last I’ll tell our happy, naked guests to haul their ruined belongings to their cabins. Sorry about that, folks; the law says we’re responsible, so we had to make sure. Now, if you can find yourself some clothes that aren’t in rags, you can get dressed and we’ll have a nice drink to the lovely cruise we’re going to have.” I grimaced. “Jesus, Sanderson! I thought drugs were
your
job. Are you going to issue a badge to every boat owner so he can enforce your laws for you while you play golf or go fishing? Talk about passing the buck!”

Sanderson’s dark face was impassive. “If you’re quite finished with your lecture, Mr. Helm, perhaps you’ll condescend to tell me where you think your colleague really is.”

I glanced at my watch. “It’s five-thirty in the morning. Doug apparently disappeared around nine last night. Say it took him an hour to reach the boat and get it under way, and another hour to get clear of the harbor, that’s eleven o’clock, right? So we can figure he’s been on course for six and a half hours. What speed does his boat make? There’s not a hell of a lot of wind and he doesn’t have much power, does he? Most sailboats don’t, as I recall.”

“A two-cylinder Volvo-Penta diesel. A little over twenty horsepower.”

“Well, you know more about this stuff than I do, but even if he’s really pushing, six knots is about as much as he’s going to get out of that heavy boat even using both power and sail, isn’t it? Six knots times six and a half hours comes out to thirty-nine nautical miles. Oh, I forgot, there’s the Gulf Stream. Two knots of favorable current? Three? Say two and a half, average; I heard somebody use that figure once. Times six and a half, is what?”

There was a little pause; then Amy Barnett said softly, “Sixteen and a quarter miles. But—”

I said to Sanderson, “Okay, tell them to look about fifty-five miles up the line.”

“What line, Mr. Helm?”

I shook my head irritably. “What’s the big problem? Hell, he made no secret of his plans; he’s been telling everybody about them for years. I told you, he’s heading for Bermuda, only he can’t sail a direct course there because the Bahama Islands are in the way, right? He’s got to get out of the Florida Straits and into the Atlantic before he can settle on his final course. So he’ll figure to pass the northern end of the Bahamas reef by a safe margin before he swings northeast toward Bermuda.”

“You make it sound very simple, Mr. Helm. However, the fact is that Barnett is a fugitive from justice; he’d hardly adopt such an obvious—”

I sighed. “Goddamn it, why won’t you
listen
? He doesn’t give a good goddamn about your justice, Mister. This is a government agent just like you, except for being slightly retired, who asked for a little consideration from his fellow government agents and didn’t get it. Now he’s making his own rules and to hell with yours. To put it another way, he’s giving you one more chance to be reasonable; and speaking for myself, why can’t you do it? We have a fairly efficient and useful organization, Captain Sanderson or whatever your rank is. One day you may need a little help from us. So leave it now; let him go. Forget those two ounces of pot or however much it was, or go find the man to whom it really belonged; and we’ll forget the way you pushed our man around and beat him up when all he did was ask for a little break as a colleague recently retired from government service. Just one little phone call, but he wasn’t allowed to make it!”

After a moment, Sanderson spoke without expression: “So you think Barnett is heading for Matanilla Shoal, at the upper end of the Bahamas. But that’s well over a hundred miles, closer to a hundred and twenty, if I remember the chart correctly.”

I looked at him bleakly and shrugged. “Very well, sir. If that’s the way you want it. You’ll find your quarry somewhere on a line between here and Matanilla Shoal, wherever the hell that is. Probably about halfway there.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

I said, “Hell, finding him is no problem. You’d eventually have spread your search wide enough to manage it without my help. But just what do you plan to do when you find him?”

His gray eyes studied me thoughtfully. “An unarmed man in a slow boat shouldn’t present a tremendous problem, Mr. Helm.”

I laughed in his face. “You’re dreaming, Sanderson. What makes you think he’s unarmed?”

“We confiscated a rather fancy stainless-steel pump shotgun hidden behind the backrest of the main cabin settee.”

“So now you’re guilty of robbing him of his boat, his liberty, his eyesight, his future,
and
his gun. Haven’t you done enough to him?” The brown-faced man watched me without speaking. I said, “Don’t count on dealing with an unarmed man,
amigo.
That shiny, obvious pumpgun was just something to keep you happy if you looked. Or any other official interested in firearms. There’ll be other weapons on board—you can bet on it—hidden away well enough that even your hotshot searchers couldn’t find them. We make enemies in our line of work. Doug would be prepared to deal with a vengeful character settling an old grudge. And I understand there are real pirates around these days in certain waters, not just the ones in fancy seacop uniforms hijacking people’s boats under a pretense of legality. No, don’t think for a moment he’ll be an easy, unarmed mark a second time. One way or another he’ll be ready for you. So I ask you again, how do you plan to deal with him?”

“Just a minute.”

Sanderson moved forward to where the young officer in command of the boat stood beside the helmsman. There was a brief conference, which was moved to the chart table. Presently one of the radios was activated. The sound of the motors made it impossible for me to eavesdrop. It was full daylight now, and we were out in open water with the wedding-cake skyline of Miami Beach receding astern. I saw that Amy Barnett was regarding me with hostility.