Crackdown

  And I prayed that there was a hell, too, a real hell, worse even than the cocaine addict’s anhedonia; a place of demons for Sweetman and his kind.

  “He hadn’t even reached the Gospels,” I said suddenly, and somehow the thought of Thessy’s serious face frowning over his ancient Bible broke the dam of my tears and I began to sob like a child. I was also shaking with the delayed terror of the fight, and Ellen reached for my hand and pulled my head down to her shoulder.

  Above us were a million stars, stretching for all eternity, their light coming from the time before history and perhaps, I told myself, beneath those stars, Thessy’s soul was arrowing towards the happiness his faith had promised him. There could be no such happiness for us. We snatched a few moments’ sleep, but not much, for the guns on Wavebreaker fired intermittently throughout the darkness, and we were galled, not just by the threat of Sweetman and his crew, but by our responsibility for Thessy’s death. In the rare minutes of sleep I dreamed of guns, of snatching up the sub-machine gun and finding it empty in the face of the Kalashnikovs, and I woke shaking and sweating and with Ellen scratching and cursing at the sand flies.

  I dozed again just before dawn, but was startled into full wakefulness by the cacophonous din of Wavebreaker’s sound system. Rickie was playing one of his ‘English music’ tapes at full blast and Sea Rat Cay’s birds screamed in protest from the trees. Nature’s storm had passed, leaving the world calm. Beyond the reefs the sea was a gun-metal grey, hammered flat and waiting for the sun’s annealing light.

  “I’m going to kill them,” I greeted the new day.

  “Amen,” Jackson Chatterton growled, “amen.”

  And the sun came up on an empty sea.

  Wavebreaker looked very pretty that morning as she lay in the encircling arms of Sea Rat Cay. The three of us crept across the island to keep a watch on our enemies, and we lay hidden under the palms and stared at the glory of a tropical lagoon in which the schooner’s long white hull and slender masts were reflected as cleanly as though the water was a sheet of polished glass.

  Rickie came on deck, carrying the Kalashnikov. He unfolded its stock and began firing randomly, sending bullet after bullet into the palm trees. He fired a whole magazine at a lumbering pelican, and missed. Robin-Anne brought him a mug of tea or coffee and flinched away from the gun’s noise before taking her own mug to the bows where she sat looking hunched and miserable. Rickie obsessively fired on, exhausting magazine after magazine. The noise was obscene. “I hate guns,” Ellen said beside me, “I do so hate guns.”

  An hour after dawn Miguel fired up Dream Baby’s motors. The powerboat was still tethered to the schooner. The blue smoke of her twin exhausts drifted across the water. It was evident that they were leaving, for Rickie and Sweetman dragged plunder from Wavebreaker and lowered it to Miguel on Dream Baby. Some of what they stole was practical, like the outboard motor from the skiff, but mostly they just collected whatever glittered or took their fancy; the television, lamps, pictures, and even the rugs from the stateroom. Robin-Anne ignored them.

  Rickie climbed down on to the powerboat’s deck as Sweet-man dragged the body of the gunman across to Wavebreaker’s gunwale. The body was that of the man whose shoes had beaten a dying tattoo in the scuppers, and now his corpse was unceremoniously tipped down into Dream Baby. Rickie leaped away from the dead man, but I saw Miguel apparently push the corpse into a locker. It seemed they were taking their own dead away, but I saw nothing of Thessy’s corpse and I felt again the idiot, wonderful, helpless hope that he might yet be alive.

  Sweetman took the Kalashnikov from Rickie, then went and stirred Robin-Anne by nudging the small of her back with the gun’s flash-suppressor. She looked round and he pointed her towards the waiting Dream Baby, clearly indicating that it was time for her to leave. For an instant I hoped Robin-Anne would show some reluctance, and that she might even call my name to let us know that she left Wavebreaker against her will, but she jumped to her feet and strolled back down the deck with Sweetman, and she even held the Kalashnikov for a moment while he lowered the last of McIllvanney’s scuba sets over Wavebreaker’s gunwale and on to Dream Baby’s after-deck. Robin-Anne returned Sweetman the gun, then climbed gingerly down into the sports-fisherman. I saw Miguel turn and speak to her, then heard her laughter come clean and clear across the water. Overnight, it seemed, Robin-Anne’s resolve to say no had been melted in the fierce heat of cocaine’s euphoria.

  Sweetman alone stayed on board Wavebreaker. He went below decks and stayed out of sight for about five minutes, then he reappeared and swung his long legs over the rail. He lit a cigarette, then unslung the Kalashnikov and began firing burst after burst into the island’s shoreline.

  “Jesus!” Jackson Chatterton swore. This firing was far more purposeful and far more dangerous than Rickie’s earlier random shooting. Sweetman was methodically raking the shadowed edge of the beach, guessing that we would be hidden somewhere just above the high water line, and his bullets ripped like saws through the leaves as, burst by burst, the rounds came nearer to us. I heard Sweetman change the magazine, then I put my arm over Ellen’s shoulder and held her down low as the next burst cracked wickedly above our heads. Scraps of brittle palm rained down on us. Bullets smacked and whined off a limestone outcrop while a thousand birds were screeching their objection to the sky.

  The firing suddenly stopped. I hardly dared lift my head for fear Sweetman would see the movement, but then I heard Dream Baby’s engines thud into gear and I looked up to see the gaudily camouflaged powerboat accelerating away from Wavebreaker.

  Which was sinking.

  For a second or two I thought I must be dreaming, then I realised Sweetman must have opened Wavebreaker’s seacocks while he was below decks. The schooner was delicately heeling towards us, and I could see she was already settling at the stern, and I knew that within a very few minutes she would lurch down to the lagoon’s sandy bed. The big sea-water inlets that fed the engine’s cooling pipes must have been wrenched away and the water would be gulping up into the bilges and over the engine-room gratings.

  “Oh, the bastards,” I breathed.

  Dream Baby, the 666 of the Anti-Christ dark on her bows, slowly circled the lagoon; Miguel was at her wheel, while Sweetman had climbed to her flybridge from where he was peering into the green shadows on shore. Chatterton wriggled backwards as I forced Ellen’s head down again. I think we all stopped breathing. I heard the throb of the powerboat’s motors come very close to us, and I waited for the ripsaw sound of the assault rifle’s automatic fire, but we must have been too well hidden for there were no shots. Instead, Miguel took the boat very slowly and very gingerly towards the rocky beach sixty yards to our left. I was certain that Sweetman planned to come ashore, and I was wondering how the three of us were to escape his execution when I saw that Sweetman had exchanged the Kalashnikov for a boathook and, standing now at Dream Baby’s bows, he was fishing in the water for the body of the second gunman; the one I had blasted off the swimming platform.

  It took all Miguel and Sweetman’s strength to haul the body on board. Rickie refused to help, and Robin-Anne must have stayed below in Dream Baby’s cabin. I still half expected Sweetman to land and try to hunt us down, but he must have feared what could happen to him in the dark tangle of steamy vegetation that covered Sea Rat Cay for, once the second corpse was securely aboard, Sweetman ordered Miguel to reverse Dream Baby away from the shore. Jackson Chatterton breathed a sigh, while Ellen was crying softly with relief at our escape.

  Miguel steered Dream Baby under the schooner’s canting stern and Sweetman, a cigarette in his mouth, raised the rifle and fired a long burst into the belly of the power skiff that was still hanging from its davits, then he raised the barrel and fired another derisive burst to riddle the red ensign with bullet holes.

  “The bastard,” I said.

  “Don’t be so ridiculous,” Ellen said, “it’s only a flag.”

  Then, with one last derisive burst of
bullets that were sprayed indiscriminately into the trees, Dream Baby’s engines were given full power and she seemed to stand on her stern as she accelerated into the lagoon’s narrow entrance. The motors screamed as her stern drives churned the sea to spray, then she was gone.

  Wavebreaker creaked as she settled further over, while the waves of Dream Baby’s wash foamed and broke in the lagoon entrance. I stood and walked to the water’s edge.

  “Mind those turkeys don’t come back, Nick,” Chatterton sensibly warned me. If Dream Baby had suddenly reappeared at the lagoon entrance then I would have made an easy target, but I could hear the receding beat of the boat’s engines going further and further away from Sea Rat Cay. I stood at the water’s edge and watched Wavebreaker sink.

  She took twenty minutes, but then, with one last graceful fall, her masts canted over until they were pointing towards the tops of the island’s tallest palm trees. A wave of blue water pulsed away from the hull to break on the lagoon’s shore.

  Thessy and I had rerigged her well. Even when she finally toppled, her topmasts did not break. She settled on her starboard flank, her port side just out of the water and her long masts reaching out across the lagoon. I waited till I was sure she had settled firm, then I swam out to her, hauling myself up her almost vertical deck to perch on her rail that was just four feet above the lagoon’s rippled surface. I sat there, feeling the misery of a man who has lost a boat. I had never been very fond of Wavebreaker, but she had still been mine to command, and now she was a sad sunken wreck.

  Ellen and Chatterton followed me. “We can’t refloat her,” I greeted them. Doubtless Wavebreaker would be salvaged, for she was hardly damaged, but we had none of the equipment that was needed to rescue her. “So we’ll have to call for help.”

  Ellen gingerly climbed up to sit beside me. She looked nervously around, and I guessed she was frightened of seeing Thessy’s body, but there was no sign of it. There was a big streak of blood on the patch of exposed deck beneath us, but no corpses.

  “What do we do?” Ellen asked dully.

  “First we find some fresh water and food, then we get the hell out of here.” I was trying to sound optimistic, but Chatterton and Ellen seemed sunk in gloom. I left them, slipping off the rail and swimming down the deck, past the cockpit, then down to the huge lockers which opened on to the swim platform. Beneath me, in the astonishingly clear water, I could see a Kalashnikov lying on the sand. Near the gun were the piles of cut halliard wires that Rickie had dumped overboard. A ray flapped its wings to swim across the heap of wires as I opened the portside locker where Rickie’s scuba equipment had all been stored. All three sets had been stolen, but Sweetman had left the old face masks that Thessy and I had sometimes used when we dived to check that our anchors had bitten into uncertain ground. I pulled one of the masks free and fitted it over my eyes.

  I swam back to the sunken companionway above which I took a deep breath, then kicked my way down to the galley. It was dark as Hades inside the sunken boat and I lost my bearings and began to panic. I flailed to find an exit, hurt my arm on the stove’s edge, then saw a dim green light filtering from the companionway stairs. My chest was bursting, but I kicked my way to the stairs and shot back to the surface where I gasped for breath and found myself shaking.

  Ellen had donned the other mask. She took a breath, jack-knifed, and dived elegantly down. I followed more clumsily, this time pushing back the hatchway’s sliding coaming to allow more light into the galley area. I sank down to join Ellen and saw that she was already opening the supply lockers. Air bubbles dribbled from her mouth to join the mess of cornflakes and flour that floated around her. She turned with two bottles of Perrier, and I thrust myself back out of the way so as not to obstruct her.

  The three of us sat on the rail and breakfasted on Perrier. We were thirsty as hell. Afterwards I swam to the stern and pulled the lanyard on the life-raft’s canister, which opened like a fibreglass clamshell to expose the expanding orange-coloured raft which began to unfold as its gas canisters automatically discharged into the inflatable tubes. The raft had a canopy, so would offer us shelter from the sun, and it also had some iron rations and two flasks of bitter-tasting water. Best of all, though, it had an Epirb.

  Sweetman and Rickie had forgotten the Epirb, or perhaps neither had known that it existed. “What the hell is an Epirb?” Jackson Chatterton asked as I towed the raft towards the exposed patch of Wavebreaker’s hull.

  “An emergency position indicating radio beacon.” I offered him the full name, then unfolded the device’s radio aerial and simply tossed the buoy into the water. It floated there, already transmitting its distress signal to any passing satellite or aircraft. “Within about five minutes,” I told Chatterton, “the US Coastguard in Nassau will know we’re here, and they may think we set the beacon off by mistake, but they’ll still send someone to take a look.”

  Two hours later, as we still waited for rescue, Ellen suddenly remembered her notebooks. “I’ve got to have them,” she insisted.

  I knew she kept her precious writer’s notes in the stern-cabin that she had shared with Robin-Anne, but I did not want her to risk her life by swimming back to that cabin where she could so easily be trapped underwater. I tried to dissuade her by saying that the notebooks would surely be soaked and illegible by now.

  “I’m not a complete idiot,” she said with a touch of her old asperity. “At sea I keep the notebooks in a waterproof plastic case.” Even so, she saw the danger of trying to swim from the companionway back to the stern-cabin, so instead suggested that we break the big stern windows.

  “It’ll take something very heavy to smash them,” I said dubiously, then I remembered the heavy bolt-cutters that I had found on deck just twenty-four hours before, and which I had put back in one of the lockers built into the cockpit coaming. I donned the face mask again, dropped down deep into the water, then tugged back the locker’s heavy metal lid.

  And Thessy floated out.

  I gagged, swallowed water, retched, then kicked desperately to the surface where I choked and gasped on the warm air. Beneath me, with an obscene sluggishness, Thessy’s body bumped over the locker’s sill and floated slowly upwards. The sea-water had washed the huge hole in his skull clean and bloodless. I swam frantically clear, as though the corpse was somehow threatening.

  Ellen screamed.

  Overhead, suddenly clattering and driving the sea into a frenzy, was a US Coastguard helicopter. The Epirb had done its magic, but too late for justice, for Dream Baby had long vanished among far islands.

  So we rescued Thessy’s body, found Ellen’s notebooks, salvaged the bullet-ridden ensign, and flew away.

  Thessy was buried on Straker’s Cay, close to the small church where he had worshipped all his short life and the small seapool in which he had been baptised. The little church had a red-painted corrugated tin roof and a white wooden belfry and blue-painted walls in which huge unglazed windows were covered with palm-leaf blinds. Lizards clung to the walls and to the tar-soaked beams that held up the roof. The pews were old park benches made of wooden slats slotted into cast-iron frames, and every seat was taken and still more islanders crowded in to line the walls and fill the aisle. Ellen and I were the only white faces, and there was no face with dry eyes. We sang till we were hoarse, and then Bonefish wanted to sing some more, and so the congregation rocked back and forth as though the very strength of our voices and the rhythm of our clapping could propel Thessy to his better place beyond the river where one day we would all gather to be dressed in glowing silks and to live for ever in the place where there would be no more crying and no more sin and no more grief and no more death, but only sweet joy eternal.

  Flowers were piled by Thessy’s coffin, and more were heaped on the Mercy Seat above which the preacher stood to promise us the Resurrection, and the congregation shouted Hallelujah, before—still singing, and with the feet of the islanders stamping dust from the path that led from the church to the graveyard
—we carried Thessy’s coffin to the sandy cemetery with its painted wooden crosses and cheap jars of wilted flowers and its herd of goats and its view of the long, long sea beating eternally from the east; the sea that Thessy had loved and sailed so well. Jackson Chatterton helped carry the flowers, while Bonefish insisted that I helped carry his son’s coffin. Bonefish still called me ‘sir’, and his son’s coffin weighed so very little. Thessy’s head was resting on the defaced and bullet-torn ensign that I had rescued from Wavebreaker. It was not the flag of the Bahamas, but it was the flag that Thessy had sailed under, and he had been proud of it.

  Bonefish spoke by the grave. We would meet Thessalonians again, he promised, in that blessed land above, and we should not mourn for his son, for he had been translated into glory, gone to be with Jesus, and all the voices called Hallelujah—or rather all the voices except for that of Denise Harriman, George Crowninshield’s black aide from Washington, who had arrived late to represent the senator at the funeral, but who now looked desperately embarrassed by the ritual as though the primitive faith that now entrusted Thessy’s soul to God was an affront to her Washington sophistication.

  We lowered the box into the scrabbling dry soil, and we threw handfuls of sand that rattled on its lid, and then the minister read the twenty-third psalm as the flowers were heaped at the foot of the slowly filling grave. The senator had sent a wreath of white lilies and a handwritten note that expressed his deepest regret that he could not be present, but he promised Bonefish that he would visit Straker’s Cay soon, and he would try to make some sense, if any could be made, of Thessy’s death.

  Bonefish and Sarah, Thessy’s mother, were on their knees beside the grave, weeping and rocking, and I knelt beside Bonefish and tried to say how sorry I was, but I could not speak because my throat was hoarse and lumpish. The sun beat on my bowed shoulders as Bonefish put his arm across my back and said how grateful he was that I had been a friend to Thessy, and how I had been a hero to Thessy, and all I could think of was that I had let Thessy die and I began to cry. I could hear the sea crashing and scraping at the nearby beach, and I was glad that Thessy would have that noise in his ears for all eternity, or at least till the graves were opened and the dead flew up to meet their Lord.