Aground

  “God no, you figure it out.”

  “Around eight thousand square miles. That’s not somebody’s front yard.”

  “But—”

  “Furthermore, that Bank is nothing to fool with—especially at night or in poor light conditions. It’s several thousand square miles of shoals, reefs, coral heads, and sand bars, and it’s poorly charted, especially down there where you want to go. But disregarding all that for the moment, what good would it do if you did get lucky and find her? Assuming, I mean, that the people who stole her are still aboard? There’s no way you can regain possession or have ‘em arrested until she goes into port somewhere; out on the open sea’s a poor place to try to call a cop.”

  “Well, you’re sure not much help, are you?” she asked. “Or maybe you just don’t want the job? Can’t you use the money?”

  He stifled the slow burn of anger. “I’m trying to keep you from throwing yours away. I’m just as interested in finding the Dragoon as you are, but you’ll never do it that way.”

  “Well, what about a plane?”

  “You’d have a better chance of finding her, if she’s still in that area. But you couldn’t get aboard, if you did.”

  “At least I’d know where she is—and whether she’s in trouble. What kind of plane would it take?”

  “An expensive one.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Where can we get one?”

  “Why do you keep saying we?” he asked. “If you charter a plane, what do you need me for?”

  “As I said, for several reasons. You’re an experienced yachtsman. You’ve been sailing boats all your life. So you’d be able to tell if she was in trouble of some kind. But the main reason is I’m not sure I’d recognize the Dragoon if I saw her. They must have repainted her and changed the name.”

  He remembered then what Schmidt had said about her not being very familiar with the schooner. It also occurred to him that he knew nothing about her whatever except that presumably she was a widow; the ad in Yachting had listed the schooner under her own name. Alarm bells began to go off in his head. He glanced at her left hand. She wore engagement and wedding rings, but that didn’t prove much.

  “Why don’t you think you’d recognize her?” he asked.

  “I’ve been aboard her only once.”

  “How’s that?”

  “My husband took her in on some property he sold about a year ago, just before he died. Since the estate was settled, I’ve been trying to sell her. But to get back to the subject, you’d recognize her, wouldn’t you?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Good. Now, about the plane?”

  “Not so fast. Maybe Hollister made me a little gun-shy, but this time I’d like some proof. How do I know you’re Mrs. Osborne?”

  “Well!” He thought for a moment she was going to tell him that anybody knew who Mrs. C. R. Osborne was, but she fooled him. “You’re pretty hard-boiled, aren’t you?”

  “Not particularly,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve made my quota of bonehead plays for this week. But you don’t have to bother digging up identification. Just tell me what I said in that letter.”

  She repeated it almost exactly as he had written it. “Are you satisfied now?”

  “Yes.” Then it occurred to him that his manners were almost as bad as hers. “And, incidentally, I want to thank you for going to all that trouble to call back to Houston to verify it.”

  She shrugged. “No trouble. Now what about the plane?”

  “You’re sure you want to go to all that expense, just to see if she’s out there? She’s insured, isn’t she?”

  She nodded. “Against marine risk, as I get the picture. But I don’t think the policy covers theft, and if something happens to her out there and I’ve got no witnesses or actual proof of loss, it might be years before I could collect.”

  That was possible, he thought. But the feeling persisted that she wasn’t telling the truth—or at least not all of it. Well, it was none of his business. He bent over the chart, studying the position she had marked and estimating the distances. “I think Nassau would be the best bet. It’s a little nearer, and McAllister Air Service used to have some big twin-engine amphibians that should be able to do it. Want me to call them now?”

  “Sure.”

  He reached for the telephone on one of the small end-tables. While the operator put through the call he sat frowning thoughtfully at the chart. What could they have been doing out there? He was connected then with the office at Windsor Field in Nassau. McAllister had left for the night, but one of the pilots was still around, a man named Avery. He said they were still flying the amphibians.

  “What’s their range?” he asked.

  “It depends on the load. What do you want to carry?”

  “Just a couple of passengers. Here’s the deal. . . .” He explained briefly, and asked, “Do you have a chart handy, any general chart that takes in the area west of Andros?”

  “Yes, sir. There’s one right in front of me.”

  “Good. Take a look at the outer edge of the Bank, opposite Cay Sal. Got it? They picked up the dinghy at about 23.30 north, just off the hundred-fathom curve in the Santaren Channel. If we wanted to fly a search pattern around that point, how much of the area could we cover and still not have to walk home?”

  “Hmmm . . . Just a minute . . . We could stay down there close to two hours and still get back all right.”

  “What’s the rate?”

  “A hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour.”

  “Just a minute.” He placed a hand over the transmitter and relayed the figure to Mrs. Osborne.

  She nodded. “Tell him we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  He spoke into the instrument. “Okay. I think there’s a Pan American flight out of here early in the morning—”

  “Yes. Flight 401. Arrives Nassau at nine a.m.”

  “Check. And if we can’t get space on it, I’ll cable you what flight we will be on. That okay?”

  “Yes, sir. So unless we hear from you, we’ll have her fueled and ready for nine a.m.”

  He broke the connection, got the hotel operator again, and asked for Pan American Airways. They were in luck; space was available on flight 401. He made the reservations and hung up.

  “It’s all set,” he said. “Ill meet you at the Pan Am counter at the airport about three-quarters of an hour before flight time.”

  “Good. Now about your pay—”

  “There’s no charge,” he said.

  She frowned. “What?”

  “I helped them steal the boat, didn’t I? The least I can do is help you find it.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  He stood up to leave. “Whether or not I did it with intent, as the police call it, doesn’t change the facts. I’m at least partly responsible for their getting away with it.”

  “Well, you’re an odd one, I must say.” She regarded him for the first time with something approaching interest. “How old are you?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “Thanks,” he said. She didn’t bother to rise. He walked to the door, fighting the stiffness in his leg, but paused with his hand on the knob. “That dinghy—when they found it, were there any oars in it?”

  “No,” she said. “Just the motor.”

  “Was there any gasoline in it? Or did they look?”

  She stared down at the glass in her hand. “They looked,” she said. “It was empty.”

  He nodded. The silence lengthened. “See you in the morning,” he said, and went out.

  3

  It was a long time before he got to sleep. On the evidence, the theft of the Dragoon was no hare-brained, spur-of-the-moment stunt; it had been carefully thought out by men who knew what they were doing. Then by the same token they must have known they couldn’t enter any port in the western hemisphere without the necessary documentation—which they couldn’t possibly steal. So what had they p
lanned to do? Stay at sea, or put her into orbit?

  And how had they lost the dinghy? The police seemed to accept this as merely a routine incident—they’d been towing it, it came adrift, so what? But it wasn’t that simple. They wouldn’t have been towing it at sea; and certainly not with the motor and somebody’s clothes in it. It would have been aboard, lashed down on the deckhouse. So they had put it over the side for something. But for what? The watch and the clothes were easier to understand, at least up to a point. The man—whoever he was—had taken them off to go in the water for some reason. But what reason? You were stumped again.

  And what about Mrs. Osborne—aside from the obvious things like the good looks and bad manners? Something didn’t quite ring true. The theft would have been reported to her as soon as the police learned of it themselves—last Friday, at the latest. That was four days ago. But she apparently hadn’t thought it necessary to come to Miami until this morning; and then presumably she’d grabbed the first available plane after the police called to tell her about the dinghy. Why? It wasn’t to identify the dinghy. She’d admitted over the phone she wasn’t familiar enough with the Dragoon’s gear to be sure. And it wasn’t necessary, anyway, because Tango identified it. So could it have been that watch that brought her flying in from Houston? Maybe she had an idea whose it was. But if so, why hadn’t she told the police?

  Forget it, he thought. All you have to do is find the schooner. He closed his eyes, and in back of them was the deadly flower of explosion. He had seen it nearly every night for the past two months, the same unvarying and frozen scene like a nightmare captured intact and imbedded in plastic. It was too late to stop him. Barney leaned forward to strike the torch. . . .

  * * *

  She was waiting near the Pan American counters when he arrived at the airport the next morning, and had already picked up the tickets and checked her bag. He tried to pay for his, but she brushed the money aside impatiently. “Don’t be silly, I’ll pay the expenses.”

  She was as attractive in the light of early morning as she had been under the softer illumination of the night, but her face showed signs of weariness, as though she hadn’t slept well. She wore a crisp white linen skirt and short-sleeved blouse, and carried a heavy binocular case slung over her shoulder. When their flight was announced they went out and boarded the plane, and she slept all the way across to Nassau. They landed at Windsor Field at nine a.m. and filed through Immigration and Customs. He was gathering up their suitcases at the Customs counter when they were approached by a tall and sun-reddened man in tropical whites. “Captain Ingram?” he asked.

  He nodded. “You’re from McAllister?”

  “Yes. I’m Robin Avery.”

  They shook hands, and he introduced Mrs. Osborne. Avery had a spiky red mustache and very cool blue eyes and spoke with a clipped economy of words that was suggestively British, though with no discernible accent. He motioned for a porter to collect the bags. “Leave those in the office until we get back, if you like,” he said.

  They followed him over to the office next to the McAllister hangar. Mrs. Osborne produced a sheaf of traveler’s checks and made a deposit on the charter. Avery unrolled a chart on the counter and brought out a pair of parallel rulers. “Any particular preference as to a starting point?”

  “Yes,” Ingram said. “Why not hit the southern end of the area first?” He lined up the parallel rulers and walked them across the chart to the compass rose. “A course of two hundred True will put us over the hundred-fathom curve about forty miles south of where the dinghy was found. From there we could fly an east-west pattern out over the Channel and back in over the Bank with about ten-mile spacing.”

  “Right,” Avery agreed. He rolled up the chart and they went out to where the big amphibian squatted on the apron in white sunlight. There were three seats on each side of the narrow aisle in the after compartment. “Who’d like the co-pilot’s seat?” Avery asked, with a hopeful glance at Mrs. Osborne. “Visibility’s much better up there.”

  She nodded to Ingram. “Your eyesight’s probably better than mine at this sort of thing. I’d rather you took it.”

  “Okay.” He followed Avery through the narrow doorway. They strapped themselves in. Avery started the engines, taxied out to the end of the runway, and called the tower for clearance. The engines roared, and they began to gather speed. Then they were airborne and climbing in a long turn toward Andros.

  * * *

  The blue chasm of the Tongue of the Ocean passed beneath them, and then the coral-toothed white surf of the barrier reef along Andros’ eastern shore. The interior of the largest island of the Bahamas chain was a green mat of vegetation broken only by meandering creeks and great marshy lakes dotted with mangroves. The plane came out at last over the desolate west coast where the land shelved almost imperceptibly into the vast shallow seas of the Bahama Bank and the patterns of sand bars were like riffled dunes beneath the surface. Ahead and on both sides the horizon faded into illimitable distance, merging finally with the sky with no line of demarcation and seeming to move forward with their progress so that they remained always in the center. It was only by looking down at the varying terrain of the bottom and the shifting patterns of color that it was possible to tell the plane was moving at all. The colors themselves were indescribable, Ingram thought; you had to see them to realize they could be that way, and he didn’t believe that anybody ever entirely forgot them afterward. He wondered if Mrs. Osborne was enjoying them. He glanced aft, and she was leaning back in the seat with her eyes closed, smoking a cigarette. Well, maybe nobody’d ever told her it was an expensive ocean.

  Andros faded away astern and they were alone above the immensity of the sea. Another thirty minutes went by. Then, a little over an hour after their take-off from Windsor Field, Avery said, “We should be coming up on the area now.”

  Ingram nodded. Ahead, just emerging from the haze of distance, was the long line sweeping across the horizon where the delicate shades of turquoise and powder blue and aqua changed abruptly to indigo as the western edge of the Bank plunged into the depths of the Santaren Channel. He stepped into the after compartment. Mrs. Osborne opened her eyes, and he pointed out the small window next to her seat.

  She nodded, removed the binoculars from their case, and slung them about her neck. He bent down so as not to have to shout above the noise of the engines, and said, “I wouldn’t try to use those too much. With this vibration, they’ll pull your eyes out.”

  “All right,” she said. She turned back to the window. Ingram returned to the co-pilot’s seat. He unrolled the chart, penciled a mark on it where their course intersected the hundred-fathom curve, and set a clip-board in his lap.

  As they came over the drop-off, Avery banked in a gentle right turn, steadied up on the new course, and checked the time. “Two-seven-oh,” he said. “Ten twenty-six.”

  “Right.” Ingram wrote the figures on the pad attached to the clip-board without looking down as his eyes continued their search of the surrounding sea—ahead, starboard, out to the horizon, and below. The wind was out of the southeast with a light sea running, dotting the surface with random whitecaps that winked and were gone, but as far as the eye could see there was only emptiness. Fifteen minutes went by. They banked to the right and headed due north. Ingram noted the time and course. At the end of seven minutes they turned right again. “Ninety degrees,” Avery called out as they steadied up. They were now flying back parallel to their first course and approximately ten miles north of it. Between changes of course, no one spoke. Avery flew mechanically while he searched the sector to port along with Mrs. Osborne. They came in over the Bank, turned north again, and then west once more. There was no sign of life, no craft of any kind, anywhere in the emptiness below them.

  An hour dragged by. An hour and a half. They came up to and passed the area where the dinghy had been found. His leg began to bother him, and his eyes ached from staring. Once they sighted a small dot far to the westward and cha
nged course with sudden hope. It was a commercial fishing boat over the Cay Sal Bank on the opposite side of the Channel. They picked up the pattern again, and went on, twenty-five miles west, ten miles north, twenty-five east, and then north again, squinting against the sunlit water below them and straining to pierce the haze of distance far out on the horizon. At 12:15 p.m., Avery made a last check of the fuel gauges, and said, “That’s it for now.” They flew back to Nassau and re-fueled.

  They took off again, made the long run down across Andros and the Bank once more, and were back in the search pattern shortly after three. It was almost hopeless now, Ingram thought. They were already north of where the dinghy had been picked up, and working farther away from the area all the time. They went on, not speaking, eyes glued to the emptiness below and on all sides of them.

  At 4:35 p.m. they were on an eastward leg. As they came in over the edge of the Bank, Avery checked the time and the remaining fuel, and said, “Best make the next leg a short one. Only about thirty minutes before we have to start back.”

  Ingram nodded. They started to turn to the left, while his eyes searched the blurred distance in over the Bank. “Hold it!” he called out suddenly. “I think I see something.”

  It was only an indistinct speck, far ahead and below them. He pointed. Avery saw it, and nodded. They continued on course, heading straight toward it. In another ninety seconds he could make out that there were two separate objects. One was a narrow rock or sand spit showing just above the surface; the other, however, was a boat, and he felt a tingle of excitement along his nerves. He started to call out to Mrs. Osborne, and then was aware she had come forward and was crouched behind him, peering over his shoulder. Avery changed course slightly to put the boat on the starboard side, and nosed down to lose altitude. He could see the masts now. There were two of them, the taller aft. The boat was a schooner, and a large one. He saw the large cockpit aft, the long, low deckhouses, the rakish bowsprit.