“Be right with you,” Jason said.
There was a silence.
“Jason?”
Her voice was curiously soft.
“It’s because I love you,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. Because I love you.”
He wished there were no choice. He wished there were only a single possibility for action, clear and undebatable. But unfortunately, there were several courses open to him, and the decision had to be made now, immediately, before the cutter got under way.
He could wait until that happened, of course. That was one possibility. He could lie here in the close darkness of the locker below the berth and wait until he heard the cutter moving out, and then wait until he was sure it was gone, and then simply go topside and take the boat back to
Provided they had left the keys.
But even if they hadn’t
No, the boat didn’t have a radio; he had talked to Joel Dodge about putting one in, but Joel had
The other way was to go aboard the cutter and try to stop them right there; no, that was stupid.
He slid open the locker door.
He knew that the five of them had left the boat already, and he knew that it might be only a matter of minutes before the cutter got under way. But he also knew he could not risk detection, not now, and so he moved with an exaggerated caution, sliding quietly out of the locker and then stretching to his full height and trying to work the cramp out of his shoulder, and then stooping to whisper, “Samantha,” and sliding open the door of the other locker.
She was asleep.
He almost burst out laughing, and then smiled instead and put his hand gently on her shoulder and whispered again, “Samantha?”
Her eyes opened instantly. She looked into his face, startled but immediately awake. He helped her out of the locker, and she peered past him into the empty cabin and asked, “Are they gone?”
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Sam, I don’t know what to do. Should I try to board the cutter and—”
“No,” she said.
“I want to stop them.”
“Then stay here. We can get the boat back to shore and notify the police.”
He hesitated again. “What if they’ve taken the ignition keys with them?” He looked at her searchingly, wanting her to convince him that it was really much safer and much wiser to stay aboard the Chris-Craft, get back to shore somehow, put the entire matter in the hands of the police.
“You can swim,” she said.
He shook his head. “We’re too far out. I’d never make it.”
“All right, someone’ll spot us right here. You wouldn’t have to—”
“In the dark?”
“The boat’s white. We can put on our lights, and—”
“Who’ll be out on the water after dark?”
“Someone, you can’t tell, there might be...”
“There might be,” he said. “Or there might not be.”
“Luke, it’ll be hours before they get to Cuba. We can certainly—”
“Seven hours,” he said. “Eight hours at most. Honey, we could spend the night out here without being seen.”
“But in the morning...”
“The morning is too late.”
“Look...”
“What?”
“Look, we’re... look, if the keys are up there, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“And what if they’re not?” Luke asked.
Benny Prager stood on the main deck of the cutter with his back to the rail and looked up at the wheelhouse where Jason and Alex were preparing to get under way. Below him and behind him the white Chris-Craft bobbed gently on the water. Above him and beyond him and around him the Florida night was dusted with stars, the air was balmy.
He sucked in a deep draft of sweet night air and suddenly felt the arm circling his throat and pulling him into the shadows near the forward stack. He tried to shout, but the arm was tight around his throat, unrelenting. He tried to free himself, he clutched at the arm with his fingers, tried to claw it loose; he opened his mouth and gasped for breath, he could feel himself getting dizzy, his lungs would burst, he was being dragged toward the rail, he was being lifted, his eyes were bulging, frantically he tore at the tight iron band black reeling Jason please help don’t night star.
Harry Barnes stood on the end of the pier and watched the ship move out.
Something was bothering him.
At first he thought it was simply the fact that Jason Trench — to whom he had given his trust and his loyalty and his devotion — had left without even saying goodbye. Well, that’s a white man for you, he thought, and stopped the thought before it went any further. That was not what he’d meant; he did not want to think that way. The only reason he was in this expedition at all was because he didn’t believe in all that black man-white man garbage. He believed in a free and united world without the danger of Communism hanging over it, without the threat of nuclear extinction overshadowing everything the human race tried to do. So he certainly didn’t mean that about Jason. Jason’s being white had nothing to do with his not stopping off to say goodbye. Jason had more important things on his mind than saying goodbye to just another one of the troops.
Still, he’d have liked to say, Good luck, Jase. Do it, Jase, he’d have liked to say. Go down there, and clear them out, get rid of them, Jase, take away the danger. Do it, man.
He’d have liked to shake Jase’s hand and tell him that.
Well, maybe Jase was sore because he’d let Costigan and the girl get away. And yet he hadn’t seemed particularly sore, even when they couldn’t find them. He’d just sort of shrugged it off and.
All at once, Harry knew what was bothering him.
He suddenly remembered that Costigan and the girl had been present when Clyde shot off his mouth. They knew exactly what Jason was planning, and now they were somewhere free and clear of the town while Jason was out there on the cutter, maybe heading into Navy guns.
Oh God Almighty, Harry thought.
I should, have told him, I should have warned him.
It was too late now. The cutter was on its way.
And then Harry wondered why he hadn’t told him.
The initial memory, the initial wash of feeling that came over Jason as he stood outside the wheelhouse on the bridge of the cutter and tasted the first tingling kiss of salt on his lips, the first sensation was one of unadulterated joy, of wild soaring freedom, the memory of those golden days aboard the 832 when the entire Pacific Ocean was his, the world was his.
Nine men in the crew, including himself, and a feeling he had never known before in his life, a feeling of belonging, a feeling of being liked and respected. At the university he had waited on tables in the student cafeteria and the upperclassmen had called him “boy,” as though he were a nigger. His older brother used to send him clothes he no longer had any use for, and then he went into the Army in January of 1942, immediately after Pearl Harbor, and stopped sending anything. His name was Caleb, his name used to be Caleb, he was killed in Italy some years later. By that time Jason was in the Pacific with his own command, and he didn’t learn of his older brother’s death until two months after it happened because that was when Annabelle’s letter finally caught up with him. Alex Witten, who was exec on the 832, an ensign from New Haven, Connecticut, looked at Jason as he read the letter and then said, “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Jason said, and crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it over the side. That night he got roaring drunk on grapefruit juice and torpedo fluid. Clay Prentiss couldn’t wake him the next morning, and thought he was dead because his eyes were partially opened and he was lying on his back like a corpse.