Two
A little less than twenty minutes after Hawk’s call, I headed down to Whiskey Cay’s main dock. Maria Von Alder went with me, clinging to my arm. The boat was already waiting there — a forty-foot cruiser, most of its paint peeling and rusted, its twin diesel engines idling. There were four men on deck.
One of the men, who was wearing a faded baseball cap, called out, “We’re all set to shove off, Mr. Dawes.”
“Be right with you,” I answered. I turned to say goodbye to Maria, and she gave me a long, demanding kiss.
“Remember, Dumplink,” she said — all the Von Alder sisters called their men “Dumplink’’— “stay away from those sisters of mine or I scratch the eyes out.”
“Mine or theirs?” I asked.
“All the eyes,” she said.
She gave me another quick kiss, and I vaulted onto the deck of the cruiser. The man in the faded baseball cap immediately cast off. As the cruiser’s powerful twin diesels throbbed to life, I saw a second boat sweeping in toward the dock. It turned suddenly and headed toward my cruiser, which was making swiftly toward the open sea, its prow knifing through the water, its bow making a rooster-tail of spray. Soon Maria Von Alder, still standing at the end of the dock, had shrunk to the size of a doll and then disappeared completely. Within minutes the island itself had vanished from view.
Suddenly I realized that the other boat was pursuing us. The familiar chill ran down my spine. Somebody had made a bad mistake — could it have been me?
I tried to figure it out, and quickly. Either the other boat was an enemy craft, trying to get at me, or I had let myself be picked up by the wrong boat and the other vessel was the one Hawk had sent to Whiskey Cay. Before I had a chance to work on it some more, the man in the baseball cap told me what I wanted to know.
“You will please do nothing foolish, Mr. Dawes,” he said. He shoved back a length of tarpaulin on the deck and snatched up a sawed-off shotgun that had been lying beneath it. The barrel was leveled at my chest.
At least he didn’t know my real name. But I still couldn’t explain how he knew I’d be waiting at the dock on Whiskey Cay for a boat. Either someone had been listening in on Hawk’s call or Maria Von Alder had given me away.
There was a shout from the man at the wheel of the cruiser, and the boat veered to starboard with a sudden lurch that almost knocked us all off our feet. Then we saw what the trouble was— a sinister silver object streaking through the water almost directly across our bow. The boat pursuing us had fired a torpedo, but the missile just missed us and went hurtling out to sea.
But that brief moment, with all hands on board the cruiser thrown off balance, gave me the opportunity I needed to pull out Wilhelmina, my modified Luger with a three-inch barrel. While I was with Maria on Whiskey Cay, I had kept it hidden in a secret compartment in my luggage. But before I left our suite that morning, while Maria was in another room, I had prudently slipped it into my crotch holster, which I wore inside my trousers so that I could reach the gun by opening my fly.
While the man wielding the shotgun was still sprawled against the railing, I crouched, unzipped, and yanked out the Luger. I could see the bug-eyed amazement on his face when the Luger appeared out of my fly. He yelled and swung the shotguns muzzle up, his finger tightening on the trigger. We fired simultaneously. Wilhelmina’s 9mm slug closed the gap between us a scant half-second faster. The bullet blew the man’s face away and sent him crashing through the railing and into the sea, his shotgun pellet blasting into the bulk-head behind me.
I moved quickly, grabbing a life jacket with one hand and stuffing the Luger back into its holster with the other. Then I jumped the railing into the sea. I guessed that the men on the second boat had been signaling me to try to get out of the boat when they fired the torpedo and that they were watching me through binoculars.
Despite the heat of the day, the water was shockingly cold when I hit and went under. Still clutching the life jacket, I bobbed up almost at once and began paddling away from the cruiser toward the second boat, now speeding toward me. Over my shoulder I could see the cruiser start to swing around in pursuit.
The cruiser was still midway in its turn when the approaching boat fired another torpedo. The sea missile whizzed past me, only about five yards away, and this time struck the cruiser midship. There was one hell of an explosion, and I was buffeted by violent shock waves that radiated through the water like electric current skipping across an exposed live wire. The cruiser blew apart, sending up a giant geyser of water, debris, and bodies.
Seconds later, the pursuing boat had pulled alongside, and helping hands were lifting me aboard. Once on deck, I saw that this boat was an exact replica of the cruiser that had just been destroyed; even to the flaking and rusted paint and the number of men aboard. But this time one of the men flashed a card with a United States seal and the Presidents signature.
“Sorry about the inconvenience,” the man said shortly. “We were late getting to the dock at Whiskey Cay. Somebody had performed a little piece of sabotage on our generators to delay us. When we saw the other boat pull away with you, we guessed what had happened.”
“Thanks,” I smiled. “You did a nice job of recovery.”
A real professional, he didn’t bother to acknowledge. Instead, he said, “Perhaps you’d like to change into some dry clothes before we reach our destination. You’ll find an outfit below in the cabin.”
I went below and changed into fresh denims, sweat shirt, shoes, and socks. They weren’t exactly Saville Row attire, but they were clean and dry. My rescuers hadn’t asked me any questions or volunteered any information. They were probably CIA, but I still didn’t have any idea how they planned to get me back to the mainland with the speed that Hawk had in mind.
When I went above again, the same man who had spoken to me earlier told me that we should be reaching our transfer point in approximately six minutes.
I nodded, but I still didn’t know what he was talking about. We’d been out of sight of Whiskey Cay for awhile, and from what I knew about this area of the Atlantic, there was no land for miles to the west except the U.S. All I could see were mountainous swells of blue sea on every side.
Exactly five minutes and fifty seconds later we came within sight of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and the man on deck with me said, “Here we are — right on the button.”
A score of jets, wings folded, were perched on the carrier like dark birds catching a brief rest before resuming flight. Some crewmen dropped a rope ladder as our boat pulled up alongside. I shook hands with my rescuers and then scrambled up the ladder. The cruiser had pulled away and was almost out of sight in the rolling sea before I had reached the deck.
The ship’s captain met me at the top of the ladder, snapped a salute, which I returned, and quickly hustled me to a jet that was waiting on the flight deck. The engines of the A-4 Skyhawk were already whining impatiently, anxious to be airborne. I shook hands with the pilot, a young redhead, put on flight clothes, and crawled into the rear cockpit. The pilot gave me a “thumbs up” signal, and we catapulted down the deck of the carrier and into the sky with breathtaking speed. When the President of the United States acted as your personal travel agent, the accommodations were strictly first class….
Three
The flight back to the States was swift and uneventful. Our destination was New York’s JFK airport, and we landed there on a Special runway that had been cleared for us. After the sun and clear skies of Whiskey Cay, I wasn’t prepared for the blustery, biting January cold of New York.