On the beach, the wind lashed at a tarpaulin, pulling it free from the crate it was protecting. Angel leaped to his feet and ran for the tarpaulin as it flapped into the air like a giant bat. He clasped the tarpaulin in his arms and brought it fluttering to the sand. Annoyed, he dragged it back to the crate. The wind drove the rain against the crate’s exposed raw wood as he struggled to cover it again. On the sides of the crate two stenciled Spanish words screamed a warning in bold black letters:
The trouble with hanky-panky, Sondra Lasky thought, is that you can’t complain to the hotel management if the faucet leaks.
Roger Cummings was just a human being, just a person like any other person walking the streets of Washington or anyplace else. And being only a person, he could be expected to notice a good pair of legs outside the Bureau of Printing and Engraving every day of the week except Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. Being only a person, he could be expected to eventually try a pickup. Who wouldn’t? Being a person, and also a man besides, he could naturally be expected to finally leave a girl in the lurch in the middle of a swamp infested with cottonmouths and crocodiles and probably wild naked Florida Indians with their hair in bangs.
Or maybe not.
That was where the hanky-panky came in.
Maybe Roger Cummings the person was leaving her in the lurch and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Roger Cummings the person was really in trouble someplace, maybe he’d got hit by a truck on the highway, or bitten by a snake in the swamp, or scalped by one of those wild Indians — who could tell? Maybe Roger Cummings the person wasn’t really being a rat at all; maybe he was gasping for breath and calling her name, with one hand stuck out of the water, all covered with mud like Stewart Granger — who could tell?
But Sondra couldn’t call the management to tell them the faucet was leaking, because then she would have to say she was here with Roger Cummings, who was a United States senator. And if anybody found out that Roger Cummings the senator was maybe in trouble, wow, he would really be in trouble!
So what the hell, he was a big boy now.
If he wanted to go wandering off across the swamp into some one-horse town that was having its yearly fire, that was his business. As for her, there were plenty of things she could do with her time, instead of hanging around a Godforsaken dump on the edge of the ocean when maybe a hurricane was coming. Wasn’t that what they were saying, or was it the other way around? Was the hurricane going?
The rented car had been left in the garage by Roger. She had driven it to Key West. The NO SMOKING-FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign went on at the front of the Twin Beech. Sondra fastened her belt and then glanced in turn at the other three passengers in the small airplane, making sure they had also obeyed the sign. The pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker system. He told them at what altitude they would be flying, and he told them the temperature in Miami, and he said they would be there in fifty minutes.
At 8 P.M. the Key West tower cleared the plane for takeoff, and it taxied down the field into the wind.
They heard the plane on Ocho Puertos.
The sailors in the storage locker, the men and women in the houses along the beach and in the room behind the marina office heard the sound of the airplane and listened to it cautiously at first. The sound came from a long way off, a steady rumble that moved closer and closer. As the plane approached, they allowed themselves to hope. They had been waiting for salvation for a long time now, had been waiting since dawn for someone to deliver them, and now they heard the sound of the approaching airplane and hoped silently that it would land here on Ocho Puertos, wished desperately that it would be an amphibious Coast Guard plane that would put down on the water and rescue them.
The plane was overhead now.
Some of the people in the town dared to raise their eyes.
There was a brief moment where hope hung suspended. The sound of the plane seemed to indicate it was preparing to land, and yet at the same time seemed unchanged. The steady rumble remained unbroken. The plane droned noisily in the sky.
They listened until there was nothing more to hear.
Fang was the one who finally ripped the hole in the screen door. He had been clawing at a small tear for the better part of three hours, and now he had enlarged the hole enough to squeeze through, first his head and then his body. An odd feline shudder of triumph seemed to work down the length of his back to the tip of his tail as he crawled through the hole and onto the slate patio outside. Fong was right behind him.
They were starving.
Their mistress had not fed them, and they prowled the beach like wild scavengers now, sniffing the air, waiting to pounce on anything that seemed even barely edible, willing to eat carrion or drink blood, ready to accept sustenance from whoever or whatever offered it.
It did not take long for the other cats to discover the hole in the screen door. In five minutes’ time the beach was alive with prowling crying desperately hungry animals.
Their eyes glowed greedily in the darkness.
Luke could hear voices inside.
With the .45 in one hand, he stood with Cates and the corpsman on the main deck, just outside the hatch to the radio room, and tried to ease the door open. The door was locked.
On his right, some three feet from where they stood before the door, a ladder led to the bridge deck and the wheelhouse. The plan as they had outlined it below in the executive officer’s quarters was simple and direct, and necessitated silence and speed. The silence was imperative because the bridge was only three feet to the right, eight feet above, and sixteen feet forward of where they stood. They could not risk any shots or shouts that would bring help from the wheelhouse before they could radio Miami. The speed was essential because Jason Trench had sent one of his men down with Bunder more than a half hour ago, and he might begin wondering about him at any moment now. If he became concerned, he might possibly call the captain’s cabin and get no answer; his man was alone down there, bound hand and foot, and stuffed into the captain’s berth.
The plan was to unlock the door with the key they had taken from the exec’s cabin, rush the men in the radio room — from the outside, it sounded as if there were two of them, but there might be three, or even four — and silence them. Cates would then warm up the transmitter if it was not already in operation, and send his voice message directly to Radio Miami in Perrine. That was the plan. The only tricky part was overcoming the men inside before they could shout a warning or fire a shot.
“The key,” Luke whispered.
Cates handed it to him. They looked at each other for a moment. Cates nodded. Behind them Bunder wiped his lip. Luke slipped the key into the lock slowly, soundlessly. Inside, the men were laughing. He turned the key. The tumblers made a small clicking sound, but it was drowned by the laughter of the men inside. The door was unlocked.
Luke took hold of the handle.
“Ready?” he whispered.
“Ready,” Cates said.
“Ready,” Bunder said, and wiped his lip again.
Luke pushed on the handle and threw open the door to the radio room just as the ship’s loudspeaker erupted with sound. Bunder and Cates were rushing past him into the room, but Luke stopped short because the loudspeaker was calling him by name. The loudspeaker was shouting in its scratchy mechanical voice, “Luke Costigan, we know you are aboard, we have the girl on the bridge. We will kill her if you do not surrender,” the loudspeaker was bellowing like the echoing voice of God, “We will kill the girl, we will kill the girl, we will kill the girl!”