“Even at night?”
“Nah, but look around—can you see the waves? It beats war with nazis, but still, it’s not the same.”
“Alaska, then. Hmm. Sounds like a possibility. Maybe you can grow pot for me.”
“Maybe.”
“Speaking of which…” They rock on the water. Tash falls asleep. Sandy keeps a hand on the tiller, worrying about his friend. Maybe he’ll mention it to Jim. Maybe Jim will think of something to say to Tashi. So many troubles, these days… alliances going bad left and right… things falling apart. What to do, what to do?
In the predawn he starts awake, then falls into a doze. He’s half-awake, now, watching gray swells surge up and down under his fingertips, up and down, up and down, up and down. There’s a light mist smoking off the swell tops, liquid turning to gas. There is a lovely glassy sheen to the water’s surface, it’s so smooth, so smooth. Maybe he’s dreaming. The terraced benches of the island are obscured by mist, the gray hills rise out of it as on the first day, an unreal solidity intruding into a liquid world. Everything seems surreal, dreamlike, mesmerizing.
Suddenly there’s a creak, and a forty-foot yacht has hove to alongside them. Three men jump down onto the deck of the cat, frightening Sandy. The thumps and the sudden tilt of the deck wake Tash, and he appears out of his cabin to stand beside Sandy. Sandy still feels like he’s in a dream, he’s too groggy to move. The three strangers form a chain and small metal drums are hefted over the water onto the cat’s middeck, behind the mast.
While they’re at it, right in the middle of their operation, there’s a deep crump from the island, followed by a huge sonic boom. BOOOOMM!!!! Whoah!
That’ll wake you up. Tash stares out to sea. “Look there, quick,” he says urgently, and points. Sandy looks. A black dot, just over the water out on the horizon, skimming in over the mist… it’s moving fast and jinking from side to side as it approaches, zoom past the two boats faster than Sandy can turn his head, and crump into the island. BOOOM! a racking sonic boom, like the fabric of the world has been ripped. And another dot has appeared out there.…
Bizarrely, the strangers from the yacht have continued to sling the drums over onto their deck, not missing a stroke, completely ignoring the missiles screaming overhead. When there’s twelve drums on board they stop. One man comes back to them. “Here.” A card is put in his hand, the man hops up to the deck of the yacht. It pulls away, all its sails angel-wing white over the mist. Around the southern tip of the island, and gone.
Sandy and Tash are still staring at each other, wordless and bleary-eyed. Here comes another skittering black dot, another crump, another shattering roar. “What are they?” Sandy cries.
“Cruise missiles. Look how fast and low they fly! Here comes another one—”
Skimming black dot. One every couple minutes. Each sonic boom smacks their nerves, makes them jump. Finally Tash stops waiting for them to cease. He checks the drums on the middeck, returns. “I guess we’re the proud owners of twelve drums of aphrodisiac,” he says. BOOM! The mast is quivering in the blasts of air. “Let us get the fuck out of here.”
40
Late that afternoon they are approaching Dana Point harbor, under the fine rugged bluff of Dana Point. This is where Bob Tompkins asked them to bring the boat. But then Tash spots two Coast Guard cutters, lying off the jetty. They appear, through binoculars, to be stopping boats and boarding them. “Sandy, I don’t think we should try to go in past those two, not with this cargo.”
“I agree. Let’s change course now before it gets too obvious we’re avoiding them.”
They tack and begin a long northwesterly reach to Newport, using the auxiliary engines to gain speed. Sandy will just have to call Tompkins and tell him the goods are elsewhere. Tompkins won’t be overjoyed, but that’s life. No way they can risk a search by the Coast Guard, and it looks like that’s what they’re doing. Could they be searching for Sandy and Tash’s cargo? Sandy doesn’t like to think such obviously paranoid thoughts, but it’s hard to avoid them with what they’ve got aboard.
An hour later Tashi climbs the minimal mast halyards, with some difficulty, for a look north using the binoculars. “Shit,” he says. “Look here, Sandy, let’s cut back toward Reef Point.”
“Why?”
“There’s Coast Guard off Newport too! And they’re stopping boats.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wouldn’t kid you about something like that. There’s a lot of them, in fact, and I think—I think—yeah, a couple of them are coming this way. Making a sweep of the coast, maybe.”
“So, you’re thinking of dropping the stuff off?”
“Right. And we’d better be quick about it—it looks to me like they’re only stopping cats of about our size.”
“Damn! I wonder if they’ve been tipped off?”
“Maybe so. Let’s get the drums back on deck.”
Tashi descends and they quickly lift the metal drums out of the cabins. The cat is slower in the water with the drums aboard, but the effect is least when they’re clumped right behind the mast, so that’s where they put them.
Tashi takes the tiller and brings them in past the reefs of Reef Point, a beachless point on the continuous fifty-foot bluff that makes up the old “Irvine coast,” from Corona del Mar to Laguna. The top of the bluff in this area is occupied by a big industrial complex; just to its right are the condos of Muddy Canyon.
Tash motors them further in, out of view of the buildings on the bluff above them. “That’s where Jim’s dad works,” Tashi says as he luffs to a stop in waist-deep water, just outside the shorebreak. Happily it’s a day without surf. “That’s Laguna Space Research, right above us.” He tosses the boat’s little anchor over the side. “Hurry up, Sandy, those cutters were coming south pretty fast.”
He jumps overboard and Sandy picks up the drums and hands them down to him. Both of them handle the drums as if they were empty; adrenaline is about to replace their blood entirely. Tash takes the drums onto one shoulder and runs them up the mussel-and-seaweed-crusted boulders at the base of the sandstone bluff. He puts them into gaps between boulders, roots around like a mad dog to find small loose boulders to place over them. Sandy jumps in and rushes from boat to shore with the drums, huffing and puffing, splashing in the small shorebreak, skidding around on the slick rock bottom in search for better footing. They both are panting in great gasps as the sprint exertions catch up with them.
Then all the drums are hidden and they’re back on the boat and motoring offshore. No sight of other boats. Ten minutes, perhaps, for the whole operation, although it felt like an hour. Whew.
They motor west until they can circle around and approach Newport again, from out to sea. Sure enough, off Newport harbor they’re stopped by a Coast Guard cutter, and searched very closely indeed. It’s a first for both of them, although it resembles police searches of their cars on land. Sandy has thrown all the eyedroppers overboard, and he is polite and cooperative with the Guardsmen. Tash is grumpy and rude; they’re doing good detainee/bad detainee, just out of habit.
Search done, the Guardsmen let them go impassively. They motor on into the harbor, subdued until they get into the slip and are off the boat, onto the strangely steady, solid decking. Back to the parking lot and Sandy’s car, away from the scene of the crime, so to speak. Now, no matter what happens to the Rhinoceros, they are safe.
“Pretty nerve-racking,” Tash says mildly.
“Yeah.” Despite his relief, Sandy is still worried. “I don’t know what Bob is going to say about this.” Actually, he does know; Bob will be furious. For a while, anyway.