“If this system works,” I called back to her, “and the engines start, then you can have all the power you want.” The ship’s batteries could be charged from either the generator or the main engines. “But not lasagne, for God’s sake. You must have something edible in that damned freezer?”
“I’ll put you in the damned freezer,” Ellen threatened. “There is nothing wrong with my lasagne!”
I decided not to pursue that argument. Instead I gingerly worked the screwdriver towards the jubilee clip. “If I drop the screwdriver,” I said to no one in particular, “then I will know there is no God.”
Something clanged on the hull. Ellen, believing it was the sound of the screwdriver falling, laughed.
“That wasn’t me,” I said. The screwdriver’s blade was in place now, and the clip was tightening nicely. “Did either of you launch the power skiff?” To me the clang had sounded like a metallic object striking Wavebreaker’s hull from the outside, and the aluminium skiff was the likeliest contender, except that both Thessy and Ellen assured me that the skiff had still been hanging from its davits when they last looked.
“It must have been a floating log,” Ellen suggested. “The lagoon’s full of flotsam.”
“Probably.” I finished tightening the clip. “That’s done, so it seems there must be a God after all.” I wriggled backwards and suddenly the whole hull rang like a giant bell, then, through the bell’s lingering and deafening echo, I heard something heavy scrape harshly down the ship’s side, and I realised that the throbbing I had noticed earlier had not been the sound of waves, but rather the underwater sound of a propeller. “We’ve got visitors.” I sounded surprised.
Thessy was still holding the torch, so Ellen ran back to the companionway steps. I began to ease myself up through the hatch in the engine-room gratings when suddenly I heard the clatter of footsteps on the deck above my head. I grimaced at Thessy, suspecting that we were about to be the victims of a US Coastguard search, but as I pulled myself free of the hatch I heard a man’s voice shouting in urgent Spanish. Ellen, halfway up the main stairs, seemed to sink back with a look of sad resignation on her face. Then she gave a small scream.
“What the hell...” I began, but then a man appeared on the companionway steps, driving Ellen backwards, and I understood why Ellen had screamed. The man was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle.
And Rickie, I realised, had been cleverer than I. Rickie, I suddenly knew, had won.
I realised, too, that it was my own fault. I should have known that an addict like Rickie would not have risked days of deprivation by disabling a ship. Instead he had crippled Wavebreaker because he had known that his supplies were coming to Sea Rat Cay and, in that knowledge, he dared not let the ship move away from the rendezvous. And I also understood now why Rickie had taken such an interest in the ship’s radio equipment, for he had always planned to use the radios to summon his friends to his side.
“Oh, God.” I picked up a two-foot-long steel wrench, but it was a forlorn gesture in the face of a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
The gunman had already reached the foot of the stairs. He was wearing jet-black fatigues and had a blue scarf about his neck. He was a young man, whose darkly tanned face had a scarred chin and dumb animal eyes that made his gaze terrifying. He jerked the Kalashnikov’s barrel upwards, indicating that he wanted all three of us on deck. When we hesitated he shouted at us in Spanish.
“Ve have to do vot he says, Nick.” Thessy was resigned to the defeat and was sensibly trying to accustom me to its reality.
The man shouted again, presumably ordering Thessy to be quiet and to move quickly, then he looked at me and gestured that I should drop the wrench. I let it go, and the sound of its fall was the humiliating knell of surrender.
The gunman stepped back as I walked out of the engine room. He was giving me no room to attack him, but instead kept the gun’s wicked-looking barrel aimed firmly at my belly. He jerked the gun again, indicating that I should follow Ellen and Thessy up to the deck.
I obeyed, to find that the evening sun was slanting prettily across Sea Rat Cay. The wind was almost gentle now and the sea beyond the lagoon’s narrow entrance had calmed to a long and shivered swell. A frigate bird, its wide wings and forked tail silhouetted handsomely against the wash of red sunlight, swooped above the island. An osprey was fishing the far end of the lagoon, its talons scraping a white line of foam across the darkening still water. All that remained of the storm were a few high scraps of cloud which, touched red on their undersides, flew west as though they fled the night.
And there, on Wavebreaker’s deck, like the pirate-conqueror of a captured ship, was the white-coated, black-dressed and ponytailed Jesse Sweetman who bowed with pleasure as Ellen appeared from the companionway. “My sweet soul’s rare delight,” he greeted her, “my dearest lady. The last time we met, you lit such a blaze in my soul that you were forced to extinguish it, but with what, my delicious one, will you extinguish my ardour now?”
Ellen said nothing.
Behind Sweetman two armed men watched us with wary, hostile eyes while alongside Wavebreaker, and grinding against her hull, was the dazzle-painted boat that bore the number of the Beast on her sharp-nosed prow. Dream Baby had fetched us into nightmare, and Rickie, emerging in triumph from his cabin, crowed with delight.
There were four of them, including Sweetman, and all four were armed. I saw two Kalashnikov rifles, one with a wooden stock and the other with a metal folding stock, an American M16 rifle, two pistols, a pump-action shotgun, and an Israeli made Uzi equipped with the 64-round magazine. For all I knew there might have been other weapons aboard Dream Baby, or in the sea-bags that the gunmen had dumped amidships on Wavebreaker’s deck, but what I saw was more than enough. Two of the gunmen were evidently peons; mere thugs brought along as muscle; while the third, whom Sweet-man addressed as Miguel, visibly carried some authority. He gave orders to the peons and was treated with evident respect by Sweet-man. Miguel had a merciless slash of a mouth, a steeply receding forehead that suggested something simian and unfeeling, and oddly blank eyes. He carried the pump-action shotgun.
There were four of them and there were four of us. Ellen, Chatter-ton, Thessy and myself were made to stand in the cockpit with one of the peons on the deck in front, and the other by the mainmast behind us. I had spent much of my adult life close to guns, I had fired them in anger and been fired on in return, but I had never before known the sheer bowel-watering fear of standing unarmed in the face of weapons held by men who, so far as any of us could tell, had no scruples about using them. If I was scared, and if Jackson Chatterton, who had known war, was also scared, then I could only guess at the terror which Thessy and Ellen must have been enduring.
There were four gunmen, four of us, and then there were the twins. At first they both stood close to Sweetman, and I saw Rickie explaining to his sister just what was happening and why, or rather I assumed that was what he was doing for he spoke too softly for any of us to overhear his words, but suddenly Robin-Anne broke away from her brother and ran to our group where she impulsively threw herself against me and wrapped her arms around me. I put a protective hand about her thin shoulders. “I’m not going!” Robin-Anne turned and shouted at her brother. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!”
Sweetman laughed at her defiance, while Rickie was gibbering with delight at the sheer drama of the moment. The first thing he had demanded when he reached the deck was a hit of cocaine, which Sweetman had happily provided from a black leather pouch that was strapped to his belt. I had watched Rickie snort the powder, then, moments later, I had watched the extraordinary change of mood sweep over him. He was suddenly manic, on top of the world, able to do anything.
What he really wanted to do was to hurt me, but Sweetman and Miguel restrained him. “There’ll be time, dear Rickie,” Sweetman said, then gave Rickie the Uzi to hold. Rickie pointed it across the darkening lagoon towards the palms and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon was not coc
ked and would not fire. Sweetman ignored him, and I watched, terrified, as Rickie tried to work out how to make the sub-machine-gun function.
Miguel had gone below to search the boat, and he must have found the missing fuses for suddenly the deck-lights, mounted just beneath the lower spreaders on both masts, came on to flood Wavebreaker’s long deck in a brilliant pool of yellow brightness. Rickie, the gun now slung on his shoulder like a totem, was boasting to Sweetman of his cleverness in disabling the schooner, but Sweetman was only half listening; he was staring at Robin-Anne who, quivering and hunched, was still holding me tight. “Come here,” Sweetman suddenly said to her.
“No.” Robin-Anne gulped the word, then repeated it more strongly as though each repetition reinforced her desire to stay away from Sweetman’s evil. “No, no, no, no!”
“Poor Robin-Anne.” Sweetman smiled at her, then he took from his pouch the shining black flask from which he had dispensed cocaine to Rickie. Elegantly, unhurriedly, he stepped over the cockpit coaming and thus down to our level. He kept his mocking eyes on Robin-Anne as he unscrewed the cap of the flask, then he stooped and laid a trail of white powder along the cockpit floor, and he continued it across the cushioned thwart, then he climbed back to the deck and, after streaking a line of cocaine across the cockpit’s teak coaming, he trickled the powder across the deck and all the way back to where Rickie was standing. Sweetman must have used a small fortune in cocaine to lay that beguiling trail.
Sweetman capped the flask, then took from his pouch a small white straw that he scornfully tossed at Robin-Anne’s feet. “Come, sweet one,” he crooned in his deep attractive voice, “come to me, Robin-Anne, you know you want it, you know you’ve been missing it, loving it, wanting it, and it’s here! Free!”
I held her tight, clasping her to me, but I felt her twitch as she looked down at the white trail.
“Robin-Anne!” Ellen was beside us, and spoke warningly. “Don’t!”
“You hold fast, girl!” Jackson Chatterton said.
“Dreams are made of this, Robin-Anne.” Sweetman, like some evil Prospero, passed his hand across the trail of cocaine. “It’s the best Bolivian rock, pure as ice and with a taste of paradise. And that is where we are going, my darling Robin-Anne, your brother and I are going to the land of heavenly plenty, where there is always abundant joy, and where you will never be alone again and where you will never be bored again and where you will never need worry again. But if you stay here, who will look after poor Robin-Anne when we’re gone? So come, my darling, come.”
“No!” I said.
“Don’t listen to him!” Sweetman’s handsome strong face smiled on Robin-Anne who had twisted her head to look into his dark eyes. “Come to me,” Sweetman went on, “because you’re one of us, Robin-Anne. You’re not a dull mud-person; you’re better than that, you’re finer than that, you’re purer than that! People like us are not tied by convention, we’re not hampered by caution. We have dreams, and we have daring, and we fly to the heavens while the mud-people disapprove of us and hate us because we are so very beautiful and they are so very, very dull.”
“No, Robin-Anne,” I said, but she shook my hand away from her shoulders and stared huge-eyed at the trail of powder; staring at it as though she had never seen such a substance before. She seemed mesmerised by Sweetman’s crooning voice, and I moved forward to hold her again, but immediately the thug in front of me jerked his Kalashnikov round and raised it to his shoulder so that I was staring dead into its threat. I froze.
Robin-Anne had not even noticed the gun or its movement. She was transfixed by the powder, lusting after it and hating it, and I heard her give a very faint moan, then suddenly she dropped to her knees and seized the straw and grovelled down to sniff a three-inch section of Sweetman’s long line.
He laughed.
Robin-Anne was on her knees, head on the deck, her bony backbone clearly visible through her thin shirt. She seemed to be crying. I stooped to pick her up, but the gunman fired, making Ellen cry aloud and Thessy gasp. The bullet whined overhead; a mere warning, but sufficient to make me straighten up, leaving Robin-Anne on her knees.
“So very simple,” Sweetman said scornfully. The wind fluttered the end of his ponytail’s black ribbon. If it had not been for his round metal badge with its anti-drug slogan ‘Just Say No!,’ he could have been an adventurer from the days of swashbuckling swordsmen and Spanish treasures.
Robin-Anne took a huge breath, as though she was coming to life, and suddenly her head jerked up and I saw that, though her eyes were wet with tears, she was laughing. She seemed hugely relieved, as if some terrible ordeal was at last over. She stood and, her feet inadvertently scuffing the powder, she climbed to where her brother waited for her under the harsh yellow deck-lights.
“Robin?” Ellen called sadly.
“It’s OK, Ellen”—Robin-Anne turned her sweet face towards us—”it’s really OK now.” She smiled at me. “It’s OK, Nick, I promise. Everything’s going to be OK!”
Sweetman gestured at the rest of the cocaine, his hand describing an arc of courteous invitation. “Would anyone else care to try my dream potion? Darling?” This was to Ellen.
Ellen said nothing.
“Why don’t you come here,” Sweetman tried to entice Ellen, “come to me.”
“This is ridiculous,” Ellen said in her most practical voice; the voice of a sensible liberal who knows that reason and good sense will always prevail, “you must know that you can’t maltreat us.”
Sweetman was delighted with the word. “Maltreat? My darling sweet treasure, I shall never maltreat you. I may make you moan with passion, and I may entice you to taste heaven in my arms, but maltreat you? Never.”
“You jerk.” Ellen’s liberalism evaporated somewhat, then she screamed in fear because the shotgun had suddenly blasted below decks. I heard Miguel pump the action, then the gun fired again.
“The radios, I expect,” Sweetman said helpfully. He took the Uzi from Rickie and, with a confident familiarity, cocked its bolt. I thought, for a horrid moment, that he was going to give the prepared gun back to Rickie, but instead he slung it on his shoulder and lit one of his pale blue cigarettes. “We shall lock you up,” he said, as though he had finished having his fun with us, “and in the morning we shall leave you. Rickie, of course, will come with me. That way he won’t have to endure the tedium of standing trial, will you, dear boy?”
It had clearly all been arranged. Rickie had suggested the cruise-cure because it would secure him the return of his passport and bring him to the Bahamas where his friend Sweetman would ‘rescue’ him from the courts. The only snag to Rickie’s plans had been my insistence on going out to sea, where even Sweetman could not find us, but even that inconvenience had been mitigated by Sweetman’s secret cache of cocaine. Rickie had never wanted to give up the drug, he had never wanted to face reality and he had certainly not wanted to face a judge; all he had ever wanted was to swamp himself in cocaine’s euphoria and Sweetman was arranging it. Doubtless, in return, Rickie had promised Sweetman a portion of his inheritance—perhaps he had promised the whole legacy, for six million dollars could buy a lot of chemical heaven. And twelve million dollars—I looked at Robin-Anne who now smiled on us with a vacuous benignity—could buy an awful lot more.
“But before I dispose of you for the night—” Sweetman drew on his cigarette, “will someone tell me what that is?” He pointed to the hangman’s noose that I had forgotten to take down and which now hung foolish and limp in the bright glare of the deck-lamps. “Well?” he insisted.
“I was expecting you,” I said with a very feeble defiance.
“Oh, you are so very droll.” Sweetman turned his thin handsome face to Rickie. “Reward him for being so very droll, Rickie.”
Rickie laughed, then jumped down into the cockpit. He approached me very slowly, betraying his nervousness, but he must have felt confident that I would not fight back so long as the guns were pointed at me.
&nbs
p; I saw the scorn on Sweetman’s face and knew that he was inviting Rickie to make a fool of himself, but Sweetman’s amusement did not mean that I would be allowed to make a fool of Rickie.
“Go on, dear boy!” Sweetman encouraged Rickie, “hit him.”
Rickie hit me. He put all his strength into that first blow, but I rocked my head to meet the punch and it hardly hurt. He began flailing at me, fist after fist, but he had no skill and cocaine had sapped his young strength, and as it dawned on him that he was neither hurting nor harming me he became even more desperate to do both. He spat at my face, thumped a feeble fist into my belly, and when I smiled at his impotence he launched a massive kick at my groin, but missed altogether and ignominiously thumped down to the cockpit floor.
He sat there, panting. The gunman facing us was grinning with gold-capped teeth as Sweetman shook his head with mock despair. “I shall have to show you how it’s done, Rickie.”
“No!” Ellen protested. “No!”
Robin-Anne giggled. “It’s OK, Nick!” she called, and I did not believe that she knew where she was or what was happening. She looked like some wan relic of flower-power stranded twenty years out of her time on Wavebreaker’s deck.
Sweetman, the gun still dangling from his shoulder, jumped down into the cockpit where, with scant courtesy, he dragged Rickie away from my feet. Rickie, out of breath and with grazed knuckles, stayed on the cockpit’s floor from which he took a pinch of cocaine that he inhaled as though it were snuff. I heard an air conditioner come on below decks, its current surge momentarily dimming the deck-lights, and I supposed that Miguel was going from cabin to cabin to see what he could find, explore or destroy.