Ocho dragged as many people under it as he could, then lay exhausted on the board deck in the shade, his tongue a swollen, heavy, rough thing in his dry mouth.
Sweating. He was going to have to stop sweating like this, stop wasting his bodily fluids. Stop this exertion.
Nearby a child cried. She would stop soon, he thought, too thirsty to waste energy crying.
He sat up, looked for Dora. She was sitting in the shade with her back against the wheelhouse. Her father, Diego Coca, lay on the deck beside her, his head in her lap. She looked at Ocho, then averted her gaze.
“What should I have done?” he asked.
She couldn’t have heard him.
He got up, went over to where she was. “What should I have done?”
She said nothing, merely lowered her head. She was stroking her father’s hair. His eyes were closed, he seemed oblivious to his surroundings and the corkscrewing motion of the drifting boat. His body moved slackly as the boat rose and fell.
Ocho Sedano went into the wheelhouse. Above the captain’s swollen corpse the helm wheel kicked back and forth in rhythm to the pounding of the sea.
Ocho held his breath, turned the body over, went through the pockets. A few pesos, a letter, a home-made pocketknife, a worn, rusty bolt, a stub of a pencil, a button … not much to show for a lifetime of work.
Already the body was swelling in the heat. The face was dark and mottled.
He dragged the captain’s stiff body from the wheelhouse, got it to the rail and hooked one of the arms across the railing. Then he lifted the feet.
The dead man was very heavy.
Grunting, working alone since none of his audience lifted a hand to help, Ocho heaved the weight up onto the rail and balanced it there as the boat rolled. Timing the roll, he released the body and it fell into the sea.
The corpse floated beside the boat face up. The lifeless eyes seemed to follow Ocho.
He tore himself away, finally, and watched the top of the mast make circles against the gray-white clouds and patchy blue.
When he looked again at the water the captain’s corpse was still there, still face up. The sea water made a fan of his long hair, swirled it back and forth as if it were waving in a breeze. Water flowed into and out of his open mouth as the corpse bobbed up and down.
The long nights, the sun, heat, and exhaustion caught up with Ocho Sedano and he could no longer remain upright. He lowered himself to the deck, wedged his body against the railing, and slept.
“That freighter that left Gitmo last week, the one carrying the warheads?”
“I remember,” Toad Tarkington said. “The Colón, or something like that.”
“Nuestra Señora de Colón. She never made it to Norfolk.”
“What?” Toad stared at the admiral, who was holding the classified message.
“She never arrived. Atlantic Fleet HQ is looking for her right now.”
Toad took the message, scanned it, then handed it back.
“We sent a destroyer with that ship,” the admiral said. “Call the captain, find out everything you can. I want to know when he last saw that ship and where she was.”
In minutes Toad had the CO on the secure voice circuit. “We went up through the Windward and Mayaguanan passages,” Toad was told. “They were creeping along at three knots, but they got their engineering plant rolling again and worked up to twelve knots, so we left her a hundred miles north of San Salvador, heading north.” The captain gave the date and time.
“The Colón never arrived in Norfolk,” Toad said.
“I’ll be damned! Lost with all hands?”
“I doubt that very much,” Toad replied.
Toad got on the encrypted voice circuit, telling the computer technicians in Maryland what he wanted. Soon the computers began chattering. Rivers of digital, encrypted data from the National Security Agency’s mainframe computers at Fort Meade, Maryland, were bounced off a satellite and routed into the computers aboard United States.
On the screens before him he began seeing pictures, radar images from satellites in space looking down onto the earth. The blips that were the Colón and her escorting destroyer were easily picked out as they left Guantánamo Bay and made their way through the Windward Passage.
The screens advanced hour by hour. The three-knot speed of advance made the blips look almost stationary, so Toad flipped quickly through the screens, then had to wait while the data feed caught up.
Jake Grafton joined him, and they looked at the screens together.
The two blips crawled north, past Mayaguana, past San Salvador, then they sped up. The destroyer turning back was obvious.
As Jake and Toad watched, the blip that was the Colón turned southeast, back toward the Bahamas archipelago. Then the blip merged into a sea of white return.
“Now what?”
“It’s rain,” Jake said. “There was a storm. The blip is buried somewhere in that rain return. Call NSA. See if they can screen out the rain effect.”
He was right; the rain did obscure the blip. But NSA could not separate the ship’s return from that caused by rain.
“See if they can do a probability study, show us the most probable location of the Colón in the middle of that mess.”
The computing the admiral requested took hours, and the results were inconclusive. As the intensity of the showers increased and decreased, the probable location of the ship expanded and contracted like a living circle. Jake and Toad drank coffee and ate sandwiches as they waited and watched the computer presentations.
Jake wandered around the compartment looking at maps between glances at the computer screen and conversations over another encrypted circuit with the brass in the Pentagon. The White House was in the loop now — the president wanted to know how in hell a shipload of chemical and biological warheads could disappear.
“What do you think happened, Admiral?” Toad asked.
“Too many possibilities.”
“Do the people in Washington blame you for not having the Colón escorted all the way to Norfolk?”
“Of course. The national security adviser wants to know why the destroyer left the Colón.”
Toad bristled. “You weren’t told to escort that ship, you were told to guard the base. Escorting that ship out of the area wasn’t your responsibility.”
“Somebody is going to second-guess every decision I make,” Jake Grafton said, “all of them. They’re doing that right now. That comes with the stars and the job.”
“Hindsight is a wonderful thing.”
“I’ll be out on the golf course soon enough, and the only person who will second-guess me then will be my wife.”
Despite the best efforts of the wizards in Maryland and aboard ship, the location of the Colón under the rain of the cold front could not be established. Jake gave up, finally.
“Tell them to move forward in time. Let’s see where the ship was after the storm.”
But when the rain ceased, the computer could not identify the Colón from the other ship returns. There were thirty-two medium- to large-sized vessels in the vicinity of the Bahamas alone.
Toad stayed on the encrypted circuit to the NSA wizards. Finally he hung up the handset and turned to the admiral.
“They can assign track numbers to each blip, watch where they go, and by process of elimination come up with the most likely blips. There is a lot of computing involved. The process will take hours, maybe a day or two.”
Jake Grafton picked up the flight schedule, took a look, then handed it to Toad. “Put the air wing up in a surface search pattern. Let’s see what we can find out there now.”