“Take a look at this chart, Bannerman,” he said to the quartermaster. “Our position’s about here. Show me how you’d take us to Ocho Puertos.”
Bannerman leaned over the table for several moments, and then placed his forefinger on the chart. “I’d go back here, sir, to Looe Key, and then come right, into the channel. Then I’d steer right again, down the center of the channel.”
“Uh-huh,” Forman said. “Thank you.”
And another thing, Forman thought. How did the captain know a boat was going to come out of the marina when there hadn’t been any radio messages or signals of any kind? How in hell did he know?
“Bridge, this is the captain.”
Forman went into the wheelhouse. “Bridge, aye,” he said into the tube.
“Let’s get under way, Mr. Forman. Is that plane still orbiting overhead?”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“Tell her the situation is under control, and she may carry on.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Do that by radio, if you can.”
“I think we were able to raise her earlier, sir.”
“Very well. And send me a messenger.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The ship got under way at 1330, on a heading of two-zero-five, just as the captain had ordered. Standing on the bridge, Forman gave his commands to the helmsman and the engine order telegraph operator, and watched the amphibious plane dip its wings in farewell, and then begin climbing and moving in the opposite direction, back toward Miami.
As the ship steamed past Looe Key and turned right, into the channel, the coxswain walked into the radio room with a clipboard. He went directly to the transmitter, where Danby was reading Erskine Caldwell.
“Hey, man,” the coxswain said. “Captain wants this to go out right away.”
“Check,” Danby said. He put down his book, and looked at the message:
Danby was not in the mood for cut-and-dried reports to Miami, not after Erskine Caldwell. He looked at the message again, reading it over briefly in preparation for sending, and hesitated a moment when he saw the word ZUG preceding the text. He almost asked Reiser, who was a radioman first class and his superior, whether he should send the message just this way. But Reiser was over on the other side of the radio shack, talking to one of the ship’s cooks, probably about getting some pies for the radio gang if he would only pipe into the galley some of that corny country and Western music the cooks liked so much. Danby looked at the message again. Well, he thought, it’s in the captain’s handwriting, I guess he knows what he’s doing. His finger hesitated over the transmitter key only an instant longer.
Then, rapidly, he began sending.
A copy of the message was brought to Forman on the bridge a few minutes before the boat came alongside. Forman read the message and initialed it, and then asked the coxswain, “When did this go out?”
“Few minutes ago, sir.”
The message did not bother Forman at all. There was something unassailable and trustworthy about the bold capital letters of a radioman’s typewriter. If anything, the message seemed to clarify and simplify all the events of the past few hours. Moreover, the boat about to come alongside imbued all of the captain’s earlier commands with an almost poetic inevitability.
“You’d better lay to the starboard side, coxswain,” Forman said. “Roxy may need a hand there.”
“Aye, sir.”
The boat came alongside at a minute before 2 P.M.
She was a thirty-four-foot cabin cruiser with two men on the command bridge, and another four men in the cockpit. The bridge was perhaps twelve feet above the boat’s waterline, so that Forman had to look down on the boat from where he stood just outside the wheelhouse of the Mercury. The two men on the bridge were wearing khaki. The men in the cockpit were wearing dungaree trousers and chambray shirts. For a moment Forman felt as if he were looking at some Coast Guard officers and enlisted men who had accidentally put to sea in a Chris-Craft.
“Ahoy,” the man sitting at the wheel said. “My name’s Clay Prentiss. We’re supposed to pick up a woman here and take her back to shore.”
“That’s right,” Forman called down. “Stand by a minute, will you?”
He went back into the wheelhouse and picked up the sound-powered telephone. He waited until the captain answered it, and then said, “Captain, the boat’s alongside.”
“Very well, ask them to come aboard for the woman.”
“Will we need a stretcher, sir?”
“Negative,” the captain said, and hung up.
He thought he had handled it well up to now. He thought he had got by without making the mistake he’d been dreading ever since the pair had come aboard. He still did not know what they wanted, other than passage to Ocho Puertos. Well, he’d given them their goddamn passage, taken them through the channel and close to the beach, and now their boat was alongside and they’d be going ashore.
He thought he had handled it well.
The two men came up the rope ladder on the starboard side of the Mercury. Lieutenant Forman, having been relieved of the deck, had come down from the bridge and now stood just aft of the forward stack, waiting to greet the men. Roxy, the chief bosun, crouched to the right of the ladder and offered his hand to the first man as he reached the top rung. The man took Roxy’s hand, sprang onto the deck and began reaching into his shirt just as the second man’s head showed above the deck.
Forman saw the quick motion of the first man’s hand, and knew instantly he was reaching for a weapon.
“Roxy!” he shouted. “Watch it!”
Roxy turned at the sound of the lieutenant’s voice and saw the gun coming out of the man’s shirt. For a moment he was too stunned to move, and then the opportunity for movement, the opportunity for action, was gone. The second man had reached the top of the ladder. His elbows were clear of the ship’s side and resting on the deck; there was a pistol in his hand. Don’t, Roxy thought, you’re too late, and then ignored his own advice to himself and kicked out at the gun. The man with his elbows on the deck wasn’t fooling around. He fired twice, catching Roxy in the groin with the first shot and in the stomach with the second shot. Roxy, caught by the momentum of his own powerful kick, knocked backward by the force of the high-caliber slugs, performed an awkward sliding fall, one leg high in the air, the other slipping back in the opposite direction as he skidded across the deck and then fell backward onto his own arm.
Forman grunted and closed his hands around the first man’s throat and then gasped in surprise at what felt like the flat end of a railroad tie being slammed into his stomach. The blow sent him spinning back some five feet to collide with the bulkhead of the radio room. He reached for the grab rail, suddenly unable to breathe, and then looked down and saw that the front of his khakis was covered with blood. More armed men were scrambling up the rope ladder. An armed man came out of the passageway leading from the captain’s cabin. The door to the radio room opened. There was another shot. Forman saw Danby, the radioman who had come rushing out of the radio shack, suddenly clutch his hand to his face and pull it away and fall back with a giant red smear between his eyes. Oh my God, they’ve killed me, Forman thought; there’s a hole in my belly.