He learned to avoid her when he was angry and suspicious, and he spent some of his evenings brooding in his garage workshop. Others he passed trying to make light conversation with her, feigning an interest in the details of her daily routine, in the doings of the children at school.
Margaret was deceived by his physical recovery, and his success at his job. She thought he was practically well. She assured him that his impotence would pass. She said the Navy counselor had talked to her about it before he came home. She used the word impotence.
The blimp’s first spring tour in 1974 was confined to the Northeast, so Lander could stay at home. The second was to be a run down the East Coast to Florida. He would be away three weeks. Some of Margaret’s friends had a party the night before his departure and the Landers were invited. Lander was in a good humor. He insisted that they attend.
It was a pleasant gathering of eight couples. There was food and dancing. Lander did not dance. Talking rapidly, a film of sweat on his forehead, he told a captive group of husbands about the balonet and damper systems in airships. Margaret interrupted his discourse to show him the patio. When he returned, the talk had turned to professional football. He took the floor to resume his lecture where he had left off.
Margaret danced with the host. Twice. The second time, the host held her hand for a moment after the music had stopped. Lander watched them. They were talking quietly. He knew they were talking about him. He explained all about catenary curtains while his audience stared into their drinks. Margaret was being very careful, he thought. But he could see her soaking up the attention of the men. She drew it in through her skin.
Driving home he was silent, white with rage.
Finally, in the kitchen of their house, she could stand his silence no longer.
“Why don’t you just start yelling and get it over with?” she said. “Go ahead and say what you’re thinking.”
Her kitten came into the kitchen and rubbed itself on Lander’s leg. She scooped it up, fearful that he might kick it.
“Tell me what I did, Michael. We were having a good time, weren’t we?”
She was so very pretty. She stood convicted by her loveliness. Lander said nothing. He approached her quickly, looking into her face. She did not back away. He had never struck her, could never strike her. He grabbed the kitten and went to the sink. When she realized what he was doing, the kitten was already in the garbage disposal. She ran to the sink and tore at his arms as he switched it on. She could hear the kitten until the disposal’s ablative action disposed of its extremities and reached its vitals. All the time, Lander was staring into her face.
Her screams woke the children. She slept in their room. She heard him when he left shortly after daylight.
He sent her flowers from Norfolk. He tried to call her from Atlanta. She did not answer the telephone. He wanted to tell her that he realized his suspicions were groundless, the product of a sick imagination. He wrote her a long letter from Jack sonville, telling her he was sorry, that he knew he had been cruel and unfair and crazy and that he would never behave that way again.
On the tenth day of the scheduled three-week tour, the copilot was bringing the blimp to the landing mast when a freak gust of wind caught it and swung it into the maintenance truck, tearing the fabric of the envelope. The airship would stand down for a day and a night while repairs were made. Lander could not face a motel room for a day and a night with no word from Margaret.
He caught a flight to Newark. At a Newark pet store he bought a fine Persian kitten. He arrived at his house at midday. The house was quiet, the children were at camp. Margaret’s car was in the driveway. Her teapot was heating on a low fire. He would give her the kitten and tell her he was sorry and they could hold each other and she would forgive him. He took the kitten out of the carrier and straightened the ribbon around its neck. He climbed the stairs.
The stranger was reclining on the daybed, Margaret astride him pumping, her breasts bouncing. They did not see Lander until he screamed. It was a short fight. Lander did not have all his strength back and the stranger was big, fast and frightened.. He slugged Lander hard on the temple twice and he and Margaret fled together.
Lander sat on the playroom floor, his back against the wall. His mouth was open and bleeding and his eyes were vacant. The teapot whistle shrilled for half an hour. He did not move, and when the water boiled away, the house was filled with the smell of scorched metal.
When pain and rage reach levels far above the mind’s capacity to cope, a curious relief is possible but it requires a partial death.
Lander smiled an awful smile, a bloody rictus smile, when he felt his will die. He believed that it passed out through his mouth and nose in a thin smoke riding on a sigh. The relief came to him then. It was over. Oh, it was over. For half of him.
The remains of the man Lander would feel some pain, would jerk galvanically like frogs’ legs in a skillet, would cry out for relief. But he would never again sink his teeth into the pumping heart of rage. Rage would never again cut out his heart and rub it pumping in his face.
What was left could live with rage because it was made in rage and rage was its element and it thrived there as a mammal thrives in air.
He rose and washed his face, and when he left the house, when he returned to Florida, he was steady. His mind was as cool as snake’s blood. There were no more dialogues in his head. There was only one voice now. The man functioned perfectly because the child needed him, needed his quick brain and clever fingers. To find its own relief. By killing and killing and killing and killing. And dying.
He did not yet know what he would do, but as he hung over the crowded stadiums week after week, it would come to him. And when he knew what he must do, he sought the means, and before the means came Dahlia. And Dahlia heard some of these things and inferred much of the rest.
He was drunk when he told her about finding Margaret and her lover in the house and afterward he became violent. She caught him behind the ear with the heel of her hand, knocking him unconscious. In the morning, he did not remember that she had hit him.
Two months passed before Dahlia was sure of him, two months of listening, of watching him build and scheme and fly, of lying next to him at night.
When she was sure, she told Hafez Najeer these things and Najeer found it good.
Now, with the explosives at sea, moving toward the United States at a steady twelve knots in the freighter Leticia, the entire project was threatened by Captain Larmoso’s treachery and perhaps by the treachery of Benjamin Muzi himself. Had Larmoso interfered with the crates at Muzi’s orders? Perhaps Muzi had decided to keep the advance payment, sell Lander and Dahlia to the authorities, and peddle the plastic elsewhere. If so, they could not risk picking up the explosives on the New York dock. They must pick up the plastic at sea.
6
THE BOAT WAS FAIRLY STANDARD in appearance-a sleek sportfisherman thirty-eight feet long—a “canyon runner” of the kind used by men with a lot of money and not much time. Each weekend in the season many of them blast eastward through the swells, carrying paunchy men in Bermuda shorts to the sudden deeps off the New Jersey coast where the big fish feed.
But in an age of fiberglass and aluminum boats, this one was made of wood—double planked with Philippine mahogany. It was beautifully and strongly made and it had cost a great deal. Even the superstructure was wood, but this was not noticeable because much of the brightwork had been painted over. Wood is a very poor radar reflector.
Two big turbocharged diesels were crammed into the engine room and much of the space used for dining and relaxing in ordinary craft had been sacrificed to make room for extra fuel and water. For much of the summer, the owner used it in the Caribbean, running hashish and marijuana out of Jamaica into Miami in the dark of the moon. In the winter he came north and the boat was for hire, but not to fishermen. The fee was two thousand dollars a day, no questions asked, plus a staggering deposit. Lander had mortgaged his house to get the d
eposit.
It was in a boathouse at the end of a row of deserted piers in Toms River off Barnegat Bay, fully fueled, waiting.
At ten a.m. on November 12 Lander and Dahlia arrived at the boathouse in a rented van. A cold, drizzling rain was falling and the winter piers were deserted. Lander opened the double doors on the landward side of the boathouse and backed the van in until it was six feet from the stern of the big sportfisherman. Dahlia exclaimed at the sight of the boat, but Lander was busy with his checklist and paid no attention. For the next twenty minutes they loaded equipment aboard: extra coils of line, a slender mast, two long-barreled shotguns, a shotgun with the barrel sawed off to eighteen inches, a high-powered rifle, a small platform lashed on to four hollow floats, charts to supplement the already well-stocked chart bin, and several neat bundles that included a lunch.
Lander lashed every object down so tightly that even if the boat had been turned upside down and shaken, nothing would have fallen out.
He flicked a switch on the boathouse wall and the big door on the water side creaked upward, admitting the gray winter light. He climbed to the flying bridge. First the port diesel roared and then the starboard, blue smoke rising in the dim boathouse. His eyes darted from gauge to gauge as the engines warmed up.
At Lander’s signal, Dahlia cast off the stern lines and joined him on the flying bridge. He eased the throttles forward, the water swelling like a muscle at the stern, the exhaust ports awash and burbling, and the boat nosed slowly out into the rain.
When they had cleared Toms River, Lander and Dahlia moved to the lower control station inside the heated cabin for the run down the bay to Barnegat Inlet and the open sea. The wind was from the north, raising a light chop. They sliced through it easily, the windshield wipers slowly swiping away fine raindrops. No other boats were out that they could see. The long sandspit that protected the bay lay low in the mist off to port and on the other side they could make out a smoke-stack at the head of Oyster Creek.
In less than an hour they reached Barnegat Inlet. The wind had shifted to the northeast and the ground swells were building in the inlet. Lander laughed as they met the first of the big Atlantic rollers, spray bursting from the bows. They had mounted to the exposed upper control station again to run the inlet, and cold spray stung their faces.
“The waves won’t be so big out there, sport,” Lander said as Dahlia wiped her face with the back of her hand.
She could see that he was enjoying himself. He loved to feel the boat under him. Buoyancy had a fascination for Lander. Fluid strength, giving, pushing with support reliable as rock. He turned the wheel slowly from side to side, slightly altering the angle at which the boat met the seas, extending his kinesthetic sense to feel the changing forces on the hull. The land was falling astern now on both sides, the Barnegat Light flashing off to starboard.
They ran out of the drizzle into watery winter sunlight as they cleared the shore and, looking back, Dahlia watched the gulls wheeling, very white against the gray clouds banked behind them. Wheeling as they had above the beach at Tyre when she was a child standing in the warm sand, her feet small and brown beneath her ragged hem. She had followed too many strange corridors in Michael Lander’s mind for too long. She wondered how the presence of Muhammad Fasil would change the chemistry between them, if Fasil was still alive and waiting with the explosives out there beyond the ninety-fathom curve. She would have to speak with Fasil quickly. There were things that Fasil must understand before he made a fatal mistake.
When she turned back to face the sea, Lander was watching her from the helmsman’s seat, one hand on the wheel. The sea air had brought color to her cheeks and her eyes were bright. The collar of her sheepskin coat was turned up around her face and her Levis were taut around her thighs as she balanced against the motion of the boat. Lander, with two big diesels beneath his hand, doing something that he did well, threw back his head and laughed and laughed again. It was a real laugh and it surprised her. She had not heard it often.
“You are a dynamite lady, you know that?” he said, wiping his eye with his knuckle.
She looked down at the deck and then raised her head again, smiling, looking into him. “Let’s go get some plastic.”
“Yeah,” Lander said, bobbing his head. “All the plastic in the world”
He held a course of 110 degrees magnetic, a hair north of east with the compass variation, then altered it north five more degrees as the bell and whistle buoys off Barnegat showed him more precisely the effect of the wind. The seas were on the port bow, moderating now, and only a little spray blew back as the boat sliced through them. Somewhere out there beyond the horizon, the freighter was waiting, riding the winter sea.
They paused at midafternoon while Lander made a fix of their position with the radio direction finder. He did it early to avoid the distortion that would be present at sundown and he did it very carefully, taking three bearings and plotting them on his chart, noting times and distances in meticulous little figures.
As they roared on eastward toward the X on the chart, Dahlia made coffee in the galley to go with the sandwiches she had brought, then cleared away the counter. With small strips of adhesive tape, she fastened to the countertop a pair of surgical scissors, compress bandages, three small disposable syringes of morphine, and a single syringe of Ritalin. She laid a set of splints along the fiddle rail at the counter edge and fastened them in place with a strip of tape.
They reached the approximate rendezvous point, well beyond the northbound Barnegat-to-Ambrose sealane, an hour before sunset. Lander checked his position with the RDF and corrected it slightly northward.
They saw the smoke first, a smudge on the horizon to the east. Then two dots under the smoke as the freighter’s superstructure showed. Soon she was hull up, steaming slowly. The sun was low in the southwest, behind Lander as he ran toward the ship. It was as he had planned. He would come out of the sun to look her over, and any gunman on the ship with a telescopic sight would be dazzled by the light.
Throttled back, the sportfisherman eased toward the scabby freighter, Lander studying her through his binoculars. As he watched, two signal flags shot up the outboard halyards on the port side. He could make out a white X on a blue field and, below it, a red diamond on a white field.
“M.F.,” Lander read.
“That’s it. Muhammad Fasil.”
Forty minutes of sunlight remained. Lander decided to take advantage of it. With no other vessels in sight, it was better to risk the transfer in daylight than to take a chance on mischief from the freighter in the dark. While there was light, he and Dahlia could keep the rail of the freighter covered.
Dahlia broke out the Delta pennant. Closer and closer the boat crept, its exhaust burbling. Dahlia and Lander pulled on stocking masks.
“Big shotgun,” Lander said.
She put it in his hand. He opened the windshield in front of him and laid the shotgun on the instrument panel, muzzle out on the foredeck. It was a Remington 12-gauge automatic with a long barrel and full choke, and it was loaded with double-aught buckshot. Lander knew it would be impossible to fire a rifle accurately from the moving boat. He and Dahlia had gone over it many times. If Fasil had lost control of the ship and they were fired on, Lander would shoot back, blast the stern around, and run into the sun while Dahlia emptied the other long shotgun at the freighter. She would switch to the rifle when the range increased.
“Don’t worry about trying to hit somebody with the boat pitching,” he had told her. “Rattle enough lead around their ears and you’ll suppress their fire.” Then he remembered that she had more experience of small arms than he.
The freighter turned slowly and hove to with the seas nearly abeam. From three hundred yards, Lander could see only three men on her deck and a single lookout high on the bridge. One of the men ran to the signal halyard and dipped the flags once, acknowledging the Delta Lander was flying. It would have been easier to use radio, but Fasil could not be on deck and in
the radio shack at the same time.
“That’s him, that’s Fasil in the blue cap,” Dahlia said, lowering her binoculars.
When Lander was within one hundred yards, Fasil spoke to the two men beside him. They swung a lifeboat davit out over the side, then stood with their hands in sight on the rail.
Lander idled his engines and scrambled aft to rig a fender board on the starboard side, then mounted to the flying bridge carrying the short shotgun.
Fasil appeared to be in control of the ship. Lander could see a revolver in his belt. He must have ordered the deck cleared except for the mate and one crewman. The rust streaks on the freighter’s side glowed orange in the lowering sun as Lander brought the boat under her lee and Dahlia threw a line to the crewman. The sailor started to make it fast to a deck cleat, but Dahlia shook her head and beckoned. Then he understood and passed the line around the cleat and threw the end back.
She and Lander had rehearsed this carefully, and she quickly rigged a doubled after bowspring—a connection that could be cast off instantly from the smaller craft. With the rudder hard over, the engines held the boat’s stern against the ship.
Fasil had repacked the plastic explosive in twenty-five-pound bags. Forty-eight of them were piled on the deck beside him. The fender board scraped against the side of the freighter as the boat rose and fell on the muted seas in the lee of the ship. A ladder was flung over the Leticia’s side.
Fasil called down to Lander, “The mate is coming down. He is not armed. He can help stow the bags.”
Lander nodded and the man scrambled down the side. He obviously was trying not to look at Dahlia or Lander, sinister in their masks. Using the lifeboat davit as a miniature cargo crane, Fasil and the sailor lowered a cargo net containing the first six bags and the automatic weapons in a canvas-wrapped bundle. It was a tricky business in the lively boat to time exactly the moment to release the load from the hook, and once Lander and the mate went sprawling.