The lieutenant was a master at beating around the bush. I decided to try the quick jab approach. "Commerce? Inhabitants?"
"There is a sizable salvage operation on Deechapal, and we estimate some five hundred total inhabitants on the seven islands." With that he clammed up and I knew the ball was in my court. Either I had to get more aggressive or the information flow was going to stop right where it was.
"I repeat, Lieutenant Poqulay, the outside world is unaware of the magnitude of what went on there."
The little man liked the sound of his title and name linked together, and the tightness in his face lessened a little. His narrow brown eyes darted fore and aft. It was an invitation to leave the onlookers behind while he and I went somewhere else and elevated our give and take to the third level. I followed him to the bow of the Sloe Gin where he lowered his voice and leaned forward.
"You are a wealthy man, Mr. Wages?"
"Poor as a church mouse."
Poqulay smiled. "Perhaps… but this very fine ship belongs to someone. And your equipment is both new and in good repair. To me, Mr. Wages, these things indicate the availability of money."
"Not mine. It belongs to my boss."
The little man's face brightened. The hook was baited. If he was greedy enough, he would snap it up. "Tell me, is there great interest in what happened at Deechapal?"
"Americans are very big on disasters. We love 'em — tornados, assassinations, big fires. The only requirement is that they happen a long way off and kill people we don't know. That way it doesn't get messy and personal."
Poqulay sucked on his cigarette and studied me. He was just enough off balance for me to feel comfortable. "May I be straightforward, Mr. Wages?"
"By all means."
"For certain considerations I could arrange for you to see firsthand the magnitude of the devastation that has beset our lovely Deechapal."
Poqulay was right — that was about as straightforward as it gets. The question I had to ask myself was whether I was going to learn anything that was worthwhile. Was it going to help me get any closer to finding Bearing Schuster's cylinders? I was curious and so were a lot of other people, but curious wasn't a good enough reason. In a sense, Poqulay's offer only complicated things. He had to be thinking — if this man is a scientist, he will be interested. Was it a distraction? I came back at the lieutenant sounding slightly out of control, excited about the possibility of viewing firsthand what had happened to my old stomping ground.
"What kind of consideration?"
Poqulay wasn't timid. "Five thousand."
Even though it was Bearing's bread, I made the appropriate wince.
"Americans dollars," the little man added.
I left Lieutenant Poqulay standing on the foredeck contemplating his Caribbean paradise, went aft, summoned the ladies and told them the deal. Hannah, surprisingly, was all for it. In fact, she was even excited about the prospect. It was Maggie who held back.
"I figure we've got seven hours of sunlight. It would take us a good three hours if we pull anchor and take the Sloe Gin, but if we can con Poqulay to taking us over in his trusty little gunboat…"
"I'll stay here and develop the pictures from our two dives," Maggie volunteered.
Hannah leaped to the fore. "Count me in," she insisted.
Exercising my limited authority, I had Queet join us. The way I figured it, the presence of Queet stacks the odds in my favor no matter what the other guy has going for him.
I went forward and informed Poqulay that he had a deal. That was the good news. Then I laid the bad news on him. I didn't have the 5000 American dollars. When I told him he would have to follow me into Negril to get his money, the deal almost went sour, but greed won out and he bought it. He gave me a stiff salute and reboarded his own vessel. There was a brief, somewhat animated conversation with his own men, then he gave us the signal to come aboard.
Entering the harbor at Deechapal brought back some good and some painful memories. Emotionally I still refer to them as the Gibby years. She was with me when we came to get Mary Mary and the old woman told us the awful news that Papa Coop was dying. All of that flooded back now — unpleasant memories of unpleasant times.
Even now, I didn't know which hurt the most — seeing Coop, his withered body and fried brain, babbling like a disoriented child, tearful, fearful and suspicious, or the fact that I knew it was about time for Gibby to be going out of my life again. She had been around for a couple of months — for her, a record.
To enter the harbor you had to thread your way through a maze of coral outcroppings. Schuster Laboratories had wanted it that way. It was a kind of natural protection for their one time multimillion dollar facility, the facility Alonzo Zercher had more recently turned into the hub of his drug empire.
The harbor was sheltered on both sides by sheer walls, which in some places managed to reach up to 100 or more feet above the surface of the water.
The eloquent Poqulay had turned suddenly taciturn as we entered the disaster site and continued that way even after the small boat rested at anchor. I was beginning to wonder if he regretted his deal.
If I rightly remembered the geography of the Cluster, it was close to 75 miles in circumference. There were any number of inlets, bays and harbors. Papa Coop used to claim that a man could hide anything in the Cluster — from a diamond to an entire city — and the natives would never even know about it. All of which led me again to conclude that the Westmore patrol effort was more for show than anything else.
It was while I was mulling that fact over in my mind that I began to notice something decidedly different about the then and now of the place. It was late in the afternoon, the beach was directly ahead of us, but it didn't look like the beach. It looked like a barren strip of moonscape. For the most part the trees were defoliated, and there was an absence of color. Everything was reduced to slate grays on slate grays and dull browns on dull browns. Also, there was an overpowering stench, the same kind of stench we had experienced the previous night on the Bay Foreman. Poqulay and his men had already tied handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces. Hannah was quick to see that the three of us were similarly equipped.
Poqulay eased us into a slip that looked like it had been specifically engineered to accommodate the creaking patrol boat. The men secured the vessel while the three members of the Prometheus team stood in horror, viewing the devastation.
There were two bodies on the pier. One had a somewhat human form while the other was probably a dog. It wasn't the sort of thing a person could be certain about. Both bodies were bloated into grotesque, unrecognizable shapes that defied description. Both appeared to be a charred black. The more human of the two forms had a gaping hole in the area where the throat would normally be. The other had a large ugly cavity in the abdominal area. They reminded me of the dried substance one thinks he sees beneath the dusty wrappings used to protect the remains of mummies in museum exhibits.
Hannah was quick to caution me as I crawled over the side rail. "For God's sake, Elliott, don't touch anything."
The Deechapal beach was littered with corpses, all of them bloated by the body gases trapped in their decomposing remains. Each of them had blackened and twisted into near unrecognizable distortions. It was like a war zone or a battle scene, only in this one neither side could muster any survivors.