MacDonald turned to watch the radar screen. For a while, the three small blips continued to close on them, and he began to fear that they were going to take their chances with the destroyer. He knew that on their mother ship they were radioing for instructions and calculating the odds.
“The captain is getting very upset and a little bit nasty,” Garcia told him. “National pride is at stake now. He has threatened to call for air support if they do not break off immediately and vacate the area.”
For a few more anxious seconds, the blips continued to close, and were now almost certainly within sight of the trawler. Then they peeled off and took a wide circle, and reformed heading back towards the mother ship. The relief and jubilation on the bridge was a tangible thing.
Now they had only the destroyer to worry about.
11. PAST AND FUTURE
Getting off the boat was tricky, but was a well rehearsed routine by now. All along the gulf coastal area were oil platforms, many in this region no longer staffed or supported but run automatically. A few were shut down entirely, either because they had played out or gotten to a low point where they were more economically kept in reserve. They stood in the water like odd prehistoric sentinels, and the trawler entered their silent domain on its way to link up with the destroyer. In the confusion of blips on any observer’s radar screen, it was possible to actually stop briefly by one of the derelicts, if only for a minute or two, allowing anyone aboard to jump off. Maria was still in no shape for this sort of thing, but she knew she had to see it out, and she explained to Angelique what had to be done.
As they came up to the small metal dock of a rusting platform, MacDonald shook hands with Garcia and then jumped over to the structure. Angelique did the same, and together they were able to pull Maria across. As soon as they did so. the trawler accelerated and swung away, still keeping close to the line of platforms though and taking it slow and easy.
“What will happen to them now?” Maria asked him.
“They’ll be all right. They’re a legitimate operation whose main job really is fishing—shrimp trawling, mostly—and they’ll link up with the destroyer, be taken into a Venezuelan port, searched, and interrogated, then finally released. They’ll head east from here along the coast to Panama, so they should be safe from retribution. Speaking of safe, we ought to get up and in. That thick cloud cover is already starting to break up, and we’ll be naked to satellite photography after that.”
It was a long, desolate climb up to the top of the platform on a network of ladders and scaffolding, and the thing was covered with rust and not very inviting nor really all that safe. The superstructure had been mostly dismantled and taken away for use elsewhere, leaving only a flat top of rusting metal, but just below, between the platform and the supports, was a small area that still offered some shelter. The corridors and tiny rooms looked like those in a submarine, but a couple still had serviceable cots in them and the tiny galley obviously had been upgraded and cleaned and stocked with a limited amount of canned and dry goods and one small sink actually had water.
“Go easy on that water. It’s a little rusty because of the pipes but it’s good. Mostly collected rain water and hard as a rock, but it’ll do until we can get off this can,” MacDonald told Maria.
The place was hot enough to be almost an oven in itself, yet Angelique shivered inside it. It felt cold, dead, lifeless, and the only sign of life were the massive amounts of bird droppings that covered much of the area exposed to the outside.
“What do we do now?” Maria asked him, feeling the desolation of the place herself.
“We wait. I don’t know how long. Considering the welcome, they’ll be cautious in coming for us, that’s for sure. We could probably go a week or ten days with the stuff that’s here, but I’m afraid there’s no showers and no change of clothing so it can get pretty raunchy. There’s also no electricity, I’m afraid, so except for a couple of flashlights here that we’ll have to be real careful using and a few camping style lanterns that are located so they won’t show from the outside, that’s about it. There are a few navigation lights on the platform connected to a master electrical cable running under the water, but we weren’t able to find a good way of tapping them without being detected.”
Angelique said something to Maria, and she translated. “She wishes to know if we must stay inside this thing all the time. It bothers her.”
“No, just keep to the bottom catwalks, and get back in at the first sign of a boat or plane. After dark is best, but be careful. No lights outside, and none until you’re well in here and away from any windows.”
It was not a comfortable time for any of them, and least of all for Angelique, who took to spending almost all her time outside, walking the catwalks and just sitting and staring out to sea. She felt very mixed up inside as well as out, and she tried to sort it out as best as possible.
Somehow, she’d always retained the romantic feeling towards Greg, always thought of him as her savior and perhaps eventually her lover, but she’d seen his face when he’d first laid eyes on her as she now was and she’d felt his fear of her, a fear that had only partly diminished. He was still the handsome and confident agent, it was true, but she was no longer of his people, his color, his customs and understanding. She had changed radically, and for the first time now she was feeling what that change really meant.
To make matters worse, it was clear that he and Maria were at least physically attracted to one another, a condition made worse by their close quarters and by the fact that they really had little choice but to go around nude. She felt, somehow, betrayed by both of them, the only two people she really had in the world. It was Greg whose affection, whose love, she craved, yet oddly, she knew that even had he been and done what she dreamed of she did not dare go far with him. Her power, her one edge over this modern world, was dependent on her remaining chaste from the pleasures of all men. And in that loneliness and jealousy she cast a spell, without ever really consciously realizing she had done so.
It was a dark, moonless night, their third on the platform, and Maria came to her at the far catwalk. Greg, as he did much of the time, was up listening to the small short wave receiver, getting the news and listening for a pickup cue at one and the same time. They conversed in Hapharsi.
“It hurts me to feel you so troubled, my mother.”
Angelique stared out into the darkness, watching the lights of the other platforms and an occasional ship’s light in the distance. “I ache with the knowledge that I am the only one of my kind,” she responded. “Until now, I had not thought of this truly as a curse.”
Maria, unbidden, began to rub Angelique’s shoulders and back, and it felt good. “You must not think so. You are whole, and you feel, and you are attractive.”
“I repulse the sight. Even the men of the boat reacted to me not as a woman but as some sort of strange thing, an animal.”
“You are beautiful to me,” Maria whispered, and with that and the sensation of the fingers massaging and caressing the energy flowed from Angelique into Maria, an energy born of tension and desire and feelings she did not understand.
Angelique did not stop it; in fact, she encouraged it, and allowed it to go quite far. But she did stop it, at last, using willpower to stop it short and dampen down the artificially raised ardor, and afterwards she felt even more unclean. It felt—unnatural somehow. Deep down, she was still the innocent small town Catholic girl and it just didn’t seem right and proper to her, somehow. Perhaps worse than that, it had been artificially induced, not arising out of genuine love or even attraction. It was, however, the shock to her system that she needed.