“Nick!” The girl underneath me was suddenly insistent, and even offended that I had ignored her so far.
“What the hell is it?” I asked irritably.
“You’re kneeling on my legs, Nick. I really think you should know that you’re hurting me.” It was Donna, who sounded very aggrieved. “Please, Nick! If you could just try to be a little more thoughtful?”
“I’m sorry.” I moved off her legs and wondered if she ever wore anything other than the flimsy bikini.
She smiled drenching forgiveness on me. “Good evening, Nick. And how are you this evening?”
“Donna?” I said blankly. I had recognised her, but I still could not quite come to terms with meeting her thus amidst the dust and smoke of this bullet-torn room.
“I’m good, thank you.” She had assumed I had asked her how she was, which I had not, but nor was she ‘good’ either, for she was very close to hysteria, but Donna had been wonderfully brought up and even amidst the grenades and bullets she was doing her best to remember her Episcopalian manners. I looked back out of the window and saw that the jeep driver was still crouching behind his vehicle, then he suddenly showed his face because he was staring upwards towards a throbbing noise that seemed to fill the whole sky and I saw that the jeep driver was Matthew McIllvanney.
“Did McIllvanney bring you here?” I asked Donna.
“Of course he did!” she said brightly. “That’s Matthew’s job.”
“So what’s he doing here?” I had to shout because the throbbing noise had turned into the percussive blows of helicopters coming lower and lower, and some of the helicopters were equipped with bullhorns through which men were shouting in Spanish and English. They were yelling that we should throw down our guns and stand still. A searchlight sliced down from one of the hovering machines. “What’s McIllvanney doing here?” I asked Donna again.
“He sometimes stays overnight, then tomorrow he’ll take Dominica and me back to Nassau.” She gestured at a tall and very pretty black girl who cowered at the foot of the other bed. “Dominica’s my partner,” Donna explained.
“Your partner?”
“At doubles. We play tennis with Susan and Felicity.” Susan and Felicity evidently formed another part of the pile of lubricity that quivered on the wreckage-littered floor.
“What is this?” I asked. “Bloody Wimbledon?”
“It’s the cabinet minister,” Donna explained primly. “He pays us to play tennis in our altogether while he takes videos of us.” She gave a little laugh of embarrassment. “And I have the most awful backhand,” she confessed, as though the cabinet minister might have noticed.
“You play naked tennis?” I asked in utter bewilderment.
Donna nodded. “Yes, Nick. Though of course we all take care to put on some sun-blocking cream first.”
“Fuck me,” I said, but in astonishment rather than hope, then I stared round the bullet-shattered bedroom. A teddy bear, its stuffing disembowelled by a half-inch Browning bullet, lay close to a wide-eyed Maggot who seemed only just to have noticed the half-naked company he was keeping. Robin-Anne, looking like an orphaned waif among a company of princesses, was scrunched down at the far end of the room. “Have you seen a red-haired girl here?” I asked Donna. “Called Ellen?”
“Oh, no.” Donna did not even need time to think of her answer.
I glanced out of the window. McIllvanney was on his feet, hands in the air. A helicopter’s lights were just above him, and its rotor was thrashing the nearby palm trees and whipping dust up from the ground. “Stay here, John!” I shouted at the Maggot.
I almost screamed as I climbed through the broken window. My left arm hit the wall and the pain was suddenly blinding. Shreds of metallic insect screen and shards of glass caught and ripped my bloodied fatigues, but somehow I managed to get my right foot on the sill, hauled myself through the broken frame, and jumped down to the ground. A blinding searchlight immediately pinned me from the sky. “At this time,” an American voice said, “you are required to stand still.” The men in the helicopters did not know I was a good guy; to them everyone on the ground was a suspect. “Drop your weapon,” the voice ordered me, “put your hands over your head, and stand still.”
“Piss off!” I shouted. They could not have heard me for the metallic voice was now repeating the orders in Spanish. I ignored the helicopter. The Scorpion was in my right hand, blood and dust and plaster sheeted my left arm, and my ribs were hurting. I guessed that by dawn I would have bruises like hoofkicks all over my chest where the flak-jacket had stopped Sweetman’s bullets.
“At this time.” the metallic voice began again in English, and I thought I recognised the flat nasal tones of the DEA agent, Warren Smedley.
I stared up into the blinding vortex of wind, dust and light. “Shut the fuck up, you illiterate freak!”
Amazingly, the illiterate freak shut up, or perhaps the helicopter pilot just moved the machine away towards more open ground, but whatever, I was suddenly left alone. But McIllvanney had also heard my shout, recognised me, and began to run. I ran after him. Ahead of us a helicopter landed and spilt armed men on to the fairway. A light had been set up to illumine the radio mast so that it would not prove a hazard to the aircraft. Everything, I thought, had been so well planned, then I saw McIllvanney jump to take shelter in a sand trap.
“Freeze!” I screamed at him, he looked back, and all he could see was the Scorpion in my right hand, and the sight of the small gun scared him into utter immobility. He stood petrified as I walked through the pelting wind of sand and palm scraps and smoke that was being lashed outwards by the helicopter’s rotors. McIllvanney began shaking his head as I got close to him. “Down!” I shouted.
He dropped into the sand. I slid into the sand trap, then knelt on his belly and rammed the Scorpion hard into his face. “This time it’s loaded,” I shouted at him, “and I’ll rattle bullets round your poxy skull if you don’t tell me the truth. Where’s Ellen?”
Another helicopter landed not far from us, its rotors kicking up a further slew of dust and sand. The bullhorns were bellowing their orders, trying to scare a whole island into quiescence. Blue-uniformed men with helmets, flak-jackets and M16s were jumping from the grounded machines, while yet more helicopters were flying in from the sea; their red, green and white navigation lights showing like bright jewels through the rifts of smoke that hung in skeins above the island.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know!” McIllvanney shouted. “I don’t focking know!”
“You brought her here!” I was shouting like a maniac, and all around me the air was filled with the noise of engines and the stench of kerosene, and the smoke from the burning house and the sound of men calling orders. “You’re fucking lying!” I rammed the Scorpion’s tiny barrel hard into the soft flesh under Mclllvanney’s right eye. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know! For Christ’s sake, I don’t know!” He was terrified. “I didn’t bring her here! On my honour, I didn’t!”
“You lied to me!” I shouted. “You gave me all that garbage about Ned Carraway! All the time you were just wanting to bring Ellen here for these bastards to kill!”
He stared at me with what had to be genuine amazement. “Ned did call me!” he protested. “He couldn’t reach his wife because she was with her parents, so he called me instead because he knew Ellen worked for me! But I haven’t seen her since the day you left with the twins on board Wavebreaker.”
I stared at him. Another helicopter reared back, flared its rotors and thumped down to spill yet more armed Americans on to Murder Cay’s nine-hole golf course, which was beginning to look like Panama City on the day of the American invasion. Slowly I was beginning to see what must have happened. “Is Ellen here?” I asked McIllvanney, but more softly.
“No! They’ve been looking for her, just like they’ve been looking for you.” He was almost crying in his eagerness to convince me of the truth. “They keep asking me where she is, bu
t I don’t focking know! Billingsley wanted to know, because he’s the one who offered me money for a night in bed with her, and Sweetman never lets up about her, and now you’re asking me, and I don’t focking well know where she is! I just don’t know! I’m not a magician! I can’t make the bint appear when I don’t know where she is!”
“She’s not here?” I asked, not because I needed another denial, but rather in sheer astonishment.
“She’s not here!” McIllvanney screamed, and I realised that Sweetman had lied about raping Ellen. He had lied because it had amused him to send me to my grave in abject misery, and he had very nearly succeeded.
McIllvanney had inadvertently spat at me in his desperate efforts to persuade me, but he need not have been so frantic for I believed him anyway. I had been deceived, but not by McIllvanney, and not even by Sweetman—at least, not seriously. The illusions had been made by others. I flinched with pain as I stood up and shuffled away from him. I let the Scorpion drop into the sand. “You can get up now,” I said.
“I’ve got nothing to do with the drugs!” McIllvanney shouted at me. He was still on the ground; still shaking. “You tell them that, Nick! You tell them! I’ve never messed with drugs! You know that! I just bring them girls. And they’re good girls, the best!”
“I know,” I said, then a man yelled at me from the edge of the sand trap to put my hands up, and another uniformed man jumped down to hold an M16 at my stomach while a third man grabbed my wounded left arm and, ignoring my yelps of pain, slapped a plastic handcuff about my bloody wrist then dragged my right hand down and cuffed my wrists together. The invading Americans were immobilising everyone; only later would they divide the black hats from the white hats.
“Don’t move!” one of the invaders shouted at me, then thrust me face down beside McIllvanney who had been similarly cuffed. A vast Chinook thumped down beside a green, then disgorged a jeep which tore up the carefully manicured grass with its spinning wheels.
An American officer paused at the lip of the sand trap to speak into a small hand-held radio. “Stingray Alpha, Stingray Alpha, this is Stingray Dolphin, Stingray Dolphin. All secure in this area. I say again, all secure in this area. Dolphin out.” The man gave McIllvanney and me an incurious glance then walked on.
“I’m not into drugs!” McIllvanney shouted after the officer, who ignored him, so the Ulsterman looked back at me. “Nick! You know me, I hate drugs, so I do! They’re an abomination!” He evidently believed that by convincing me he could convince all the world of his innocence.
But I was not listening to McIllvanney. I was lying with my face in the sand and with agony ripping up my left arm, but I was also suddenly and sublimely happy. The word Stingray had confirmed all my suspicions. The senator had tried to radio Stingray, and now Stingray had come, because Stingray had always been meant to come, and that meant Ellen was safe.
And Ellen had always been safe.
The good guys had her, not the bad guys, but the good guys who had wanted me to help them. It had been the good guys who had caused Ellen to disappear, then encouraged me to take revenge for that disappearance by attacking Murder Cay. The Americans could not have legally searched Murder Cay because the Bahamians would not have given their permission, but the world would forgive the Americans if their forces, conveniently exercising close to the island, responded to an emergency call for help from an American senator who had travelled to Murder Cay on the innocent mission of seeking his missing children; and if the British government complained about such a Grenada-like invasion of the territory of a sovereign and Commonwealth nation, then the Americans would reply that they had also been rescuing the hide of a dumb Britisher who had only been trying to help the senator.
Thus had this whole night been planned. If either of the radios had worked then the cavalry would have ridden to our rescue long before the firefight developed, but the cavalry had always been waiting just beyond the radar horizon. Which all meant that I had been manipulated. The dictates of politics and public relations had decreed that this operation should look like a rescue mission, and my participation took away any suspicion that the operation had been planned in the Pentagon. The senator and I would be depicted as nobly heroic fools; Don Quixotes tilting at real giants and winning.
And the Maggot?
The Maggot, I imagined, would not exist. The Maggot would become invisible because the Maggot was surely an undercover man for either the DEA or the US Customs Service, or one of the myriad Task Forces that the Americans deployed against drugs.
“This one,” I suddenly heard the Maggot’s voice above and behind me, “you can shoot now. He’s only a stray Brit and no one could have any possible use for him.” Then he laughed.
“You bastard,” I said, then the Maggot cut off my plastic cuffs and lifted me with an extraordinary tenderness. He took me to a medic who gave me basic field care, and who wanted to chopper me immediately to the operating theatre of a naval ship, but I refused to leave Murder Cay. I had questions I wanted answered, and to seek those answers I walked along the beach with Maggot. “Who are you?” I asked him.
“Maggovertski, John.” He grinned through his black tangled beard. “Otherwise known as the Maggot. You know who I am, Nick. Failed football player, failing businessman, good old country boy, layabout, average pilot, extraordinarily talented beer drinker, gun collector, lover of loose women, lover of tight women, lover of any women, tennis coach extraordinary.”
“DEA?” I carried on the list for him. “US Customs? Special Task Force? CIA?”
“I kind of go deaf to some questions, Nick, on account of having banged my head against dickhead offensive linemen too often. But considering I’m just an easy-going party-loving animal with an aeroplane and a boat, you’d be amazed how many people confide in me their wishes and plans to introduce strange and narcotic substances into America.”
We walked slowly on through the cloying sand. The small lagoon waves flopped feebly on the beach. The painkiller was making me light-headed, but not foolish any longer. “So where’s Ellen, John?”
“So far as I know, Nick, she’s in an Embassy guest house in Nassau. She’s been well treated, though she didn’t think so. We kind of denied her a telephone, and kept her on a leash, and she was unhappy about that. In fact she was as mad as hell. I know you’re fond of her, Nick, but have you ever caught the rough side of her tongue? Jesus, she could strip the teeth of a running chainsaw! We were only keeping her in Nassau for her own protection, but you’d never have known it from the way she cussed us.”
I smiled. “Were you the one who took her to Nassau?”
“Smedley did. You met Smedley, right? I kind of arranged it, though.” The Maggot had the grace to give me an apologetic look. “Sorry, Nick. But, Jesus, when you telephoned and asked for my help? You were just offering us temptation, and I was always kind of bad at resisting temptation.”
“Screw you, mate,” I said, but without malice, for I liked the Maggot, and he had been clever, so very clever. Instead of flying Ellen direct from Straker’s Cay to Nassau he had taken her to Free-port and allowed her to complete as much of her planned itinerary as possible, thus making it seem even more plausible that she had been kidnapped. “But why couldn’t you have told me the truth?” I asked.
“Think about it, Nick. If you’d known this whole party was being laid on and paid for by the US government, would you have put your miserable hide on the line for us?”
“No,” I confessed wisely and truthfully.
“And you were just too good to overlook,” the Maggot said with an indecent relish. “A trained soldier, and the son of the great Sir Thomas Breakspear! Even the Brits can’t object to us rescuing Sir Tom’s dear son from the narcotraficantes.”
“But why did I have to do the killing?” I cut across his foolery with the bitter question.
He gave me a shrewd glance. “Because you were a marine, Nick.”
“Not in your Navy.”
He walked in sil
ence for a few paces. “It’s a war against drugs, Nick, and we’re not going to win it unless we fight as cruelly and as pitilessly as the narcotraficantes. Not that we thought there’d be any killing here. Damn it, if the senator hadn’t thrown his radio at the bloody dog, no one would have got shot! It wasn’t meant to be like this.”
“It never is,” I said, and I thought that Ellen was right, and that this whole damn crooked business should be brought into the open so that no one could make profits so huge that they were worth the fighting and the dying and the lying and the stealing and the misery.
“Anyway, it’s over now.” The Maggot was uncomfortable with my dismay and hurried the conversation on. “I guess we owe you a big thank you, Nick. Not, of course, that I speak for the US government, you understand. In fact, and you may quote me, the US government is just like any other government; a load of fat-assed faggot lawyers who only understand how to spend people’s taxes but who can’t even piss downwind unless their aides show them how to do it. So I would hate you to spread a rumour that I was in any way associated with those pin-headed dickbrains, and do I make myself plain?”
I smiled. “Yes, Maggot, you do. You don’t exist, am I right?”
“You are so right.”
Dawn was showing like a line of gun-metal above the horizon. The wind was rife with the stench of helicopter fuel, but beyond the coral reefs there would be a cutting cleanness to the air. I suddenly wanted to be away in my boat; just Ellen, Masquerade, and myself in great waters. I looked ruefully at my bandaged arm. “You’ve made it kind of hard for me to mend my boat, you big non-existent bastard.”
“The boat’s going to Florida tomorrow, Nick. You signed the papers, remember?”
I stared up into the Maggot’s strong face. “When was all this set up? After Sea Rat Cay?”