Buzz Cut (48 page)

He drew the binoculars away, glanced around and began to take his bearings. He felt the speed of the ship under his feet, watched the shoreline inflating into view. He conjured up an image of the coastline's shape, recollected from maps he'd studied over the years and from his observation Sunday afternoon as they'd passed out of the mouth of Government Cut.

As near as he could reconstruct it, the tip of Miami Beach angled slightly southeast like a little outturned goatee off the chin of the beach, then came a small gap of water, and then Fisher Island, Virginia Key, Key Biscayne, trickling away to the south and west. He held that map in his mind, stared out at the coastline, did a quick triangulation off the giant condo tower on the point of South Beach and made his second locus the high-rises that he knew were some thirty blocks north. He put the
Eclipse
in her place on the map, then swung around and stared out at the quartering sea, tried to calculate the steering effects of the tide. Drinking this in, as much as he could absorb, its jizz, the interaction of its diverse parts. He approximated the distance to the shore one final time then turned and rushed down the stairs.

The
Eclipse
was certainly no canoe, and this was not the shallow bays of the Everglades, but big as the ship was, she was still merely a boat and had no choice but to obey the same inexorable laws as any craft at sea.

***

Thorn located the others in the media room. Lola was wearing only her bra and panties and a string of pearls and had been lashed to a chair in the media room. All the pieces looking very realistic, the deep rope burns on her wrists, the buzzing video camera stationed next to her. Sampson had grabbed a terry-cloth robe from a nearby cabin and was slipping it over Lola Sampson's shoulders. She was teary-eyed and out of breath.

Thorn took hold of Sampson's shoulder and swung the big man around.

"Where the hell have you been, Mr. Thorn!"

"Did you switch off the fuel valves?"

"Of course not. There wasn't time."

"Well, do it now. We've got about twenty minutes," Thorn said. "Seven miles, maybe less, and we're going to plow into the
Juggernaut.
An oil tanker."

"What!"

"It's already run aground on South Beach. That's where we're headed."

"He was supposed to shut the engines off. We gave him the money." Sampson shot a look at Lola. "He lied. The bastard lied to us."

"Surprise, surprise," Sugarman said.

"We don't have time for this shit. Come on, Sugar."

Sugarman caught up to him at the head of the stairs.

"Rudder room," Thorn said as they ran down the narrow stairwell. "That wheel Sampson had installed. Let's hope it's more than ornamental."

"Twenty minutes, that's all we have?"

"Twenty may be optimistic."

They burst through the hatch door, sprinted down the corridor to the last doorway. Thorn threw open the steel hatch and they entered the tiny sky-blue room.

"You sure about this, man?" Sugar said. "You sure you want to be down here when this goddamn monster crashes?"

"It's not going to crash, we're going to turn it."

Thorn was hunting the wall for an indicator gauge, something that could tell them their angle of turn. Sugar stood beside him heaving for breath. He sat back on a valve wheel and pressed the heel of his hand to his chest. "Heart, don't fail me now."

Thorn was staring at the starboard wall. Someone had hung a simple boy scout compass on a peg. Thorn grabbed it down, held it in the palm of his hand, watched the needle quiver briefly then swing around and settle into place.

"Jesus, a compass," Sugarman said.

"No," Thorn said. "It's a trick."

"What the hell?"

"That's not north." Thorn pointed toward the door they'd entered. "It's that way." He shifted his hand a few degrees to the left.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Let's go," Sugar said. "Let's turn this mother."

***

Butler Jack had to park the Winnebago three blocks off the beach. All the excitement down by water's edge had brought out the gawkers and oglers, the rubberneckers and blood lusters, same goddamn people who caused the miles-long traffic jams around Miami while they slowed to gape at some poor soul changing a flat tire.

The professional gawkers were there too, the newspaper geeks and the TV charmers, the evening tabloid shows, those fucking ghouls, the entire national community of rapacious assholes had assembled on the beach.
Good Morning America
was there.
The Today Show.
CNN had been going out with it for hours. He'd been watching it on his TV in the Winnebago as he drove over from Bayside Marketplace to the beach, flicking between channels, his heart zinging.

Along Ocean Drive satellite trucks were parked four deep. No traffic moving. Butler Jack found a table on the porch of the Delano Hotel. Surrounded by muscle jocks and rollerbladers in bikinis. Lots of binoculars. He ordered coffee, a Danish, and watched the crowds milling around.

The
Eclipse
was out there, ten miles maybe, a small white dot on the horizon at the moment. Nobody had noticed it yet. Nobody had any idea.

***

Thorn and Sugar worked on opposite sides of the wheel. Thorn crouched beneath the starboard side, pushing up, Sugar on the other side thrusting down, hanging, kicking his legs for more pull. The giant bicycle chain inched around, movement so fractional Sugar thought he might be imagining it. Wishful thinking. They had been unable to locate the shutoff valve for the hydraulics, so they were not only forcing the rudder by hand against the resisting pressure of the water, but also against the electronic messages being sent down from the autopilot, which pressurized the oil lines and rotated the gears, nudging the vast ship in the direction it had chosen.

Sugar found himself wishing he had eaten more fatty foods in the last few weeks. He wished he'd bulked up, had more weight to throw against this frozen wheel. But it did seem to be yielding slightly, at least he thought so. Common brutish strength working against the force of science, against a hundred small devices and motors and gizmos and oil-filled lines. And the brutes were getting it around.

Thorn groaned. His muscles trembling as if he were trying to lift the weight of the earth above his head. Sweat poured down Sugar's face, his heart was wild inside his shirt. They reset their feet, found better handholds, budged the chain around on its track, turned the sprocket, angled the rudder, feeling the ship resist. Inch by inch, moving it round.

They were blind. No way to know their angle of turn. No way to know when they'd cleared land. No way to know when they should stop turning and head on out to sea, run out their fuel, wait for help. If they turned too short they'd crash ashore on one of the islands farther south; if they turned too far, they'd circle back and could easily run aground farther north. If they turned too hard, they'd tip the behemoth onto her side, sink her in a minute.

There was a fairly good degree of error, a wide sea to steer back into, but down there in that small room, every link of chain a major victory, there was no way to tell, no way to count. Sugarman had lost touch with their relative position. Lost all touch with anything beyond the strain in his arms, the wriggling weight as he hauled down on the wheel. Hauled down and around. Thorn's eyes were unfocused as if he were conferring with his God.

Sugarman put his mind somewhere else. He thought of Jeannie. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. It had been days since he'd thought of her, but now, as he strained every sinew against the pressure of the wheel, he imagined her white sleek body. He roamed it in his mind. The woman he had once loved so much. The woman who was trying to bear his child. Starting at her toes, running his finger in the damp seams between each one. They were small toes, curled downward. They fit together in the perfect mesh that toes often had. As if the foot had been molded from one piece of clay and the toes slit apart carefully by a paper-thin blade. He moved up her arch to her narrow ankles. He was massaging the ankle bones with his imagination when Thorn barked for him to stop.

"What?"

"Let go. Let go now."

Sugar's heart was leaping. "You're sure?"

Thorn looked him in the eye. Sugar uncurled his fingers from the wheel. They stood for a moment and listened to what sounded like the crunch of seabed beneath them. Then the jarring lurch that knocked them sideways into one another as the keel must have cut deeply through sand and shoal. And then sudden free movement across the surface of the water. Steaming clear.

"How the hell did you do that?"

"You got me," Thorn said. "But let's don't think about it. It might go away."

"Man, I'm dead."

"This is just the rest period," Thorn said.

"What?"

"The autopilot is going to swing us around, take us right back to where it wants us to go."

"No. Tell me it isn't true."

Thorn nodded.

"We have to keep doing this?"

Thorn nodded again.

"Man, I'm out of gas already. I don't think I can heave this sucker around again."

"We need to get Sampson to shut down the fuel lines," Thorn said. "It's either that, or wait till help comes. And who knows how long that might take."

The
Eclipse
headed three miles out to sea before it began to circle back to shore. Twice more Thorn ran five flights up to take a sighting on the beach, then ran back. Twice more they wrestled the rudder, steering the ship away from the beach. While the two of them struggled with the wheel, Sampson shut off the fuel lines, bled them dry. It was ten-thirty on Tuesday morning before the big engines sputtered and died and the
Eclipse
fell silent, coming to rest just two miles off Miami Beach.

***

Butler watched it with growing horror. Those bastards. They'd sailed right up to the beach, two hundred, three hundred yards, sending the onlookers running, the Coast Guard ships blowing their horns, blowing them and blowing. Then roaring off, out of the path of the enormous ship.

The
Eclipse
curved in toward the beach and did a slow turn back out. It made two more passes before its engines gave out.

Butler trudged back to the Winnebago. He pushed by a woman on the sidewalk and she snarled at him, and he pressed the stunning voltage to her neck. Put her to sleep for an hour or so.

He walked back to the Winnebago in a gray haze. He might have zapped a few more people. He wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of much of anything at the moment. He didn't know when he would ever be sure again.

The lawyers' twelve-year-old son warned Thorn if he touched either him or his sister, both of them would damn well litigate his ass off. The girl said she was one quarter away from the all-time record score on her machine and her brother was maybe three quarters away. Thorn watched them work their joysticks for a half minute then he stooped down and yanked the plugs on both machines. They all watched the numbers fade from the scoreboard like stars against a dawn sky.

He hooked each of them under an arm, scooped them up, and carried them, squirming and cursing, down the gangplank onto the Port of Miami docks. Handling the kids with that miraculous restraint he'd acquired in his months of passive arts training.

Sugar and Thorn spent most of Tuesday afternoon in an interrogation room in the Coast Guard's central office along the Miami River. Thorn giving the young lady who questioned them Butler's name, which she already knew from the reports of dozens of passengers who'd disembarked in Nassau. Beyond that he played dumb. Sugar did as well. The Coast Guard woman was replaced by an FBI woman in a dark suit. She went through the same list of questions but didn't seem terribly interested in prying more from them. Her eyes kept straying to the door as if the good stuff was happening in the next room and she was irritated to be stuck with these minor players.

Afterward Sugar drove them to a limousine rental service on Biscayne Boulevard where they secured a 1969 Rolls Silver Cloud with deeply tinted windows for twelve hundred a week. Sugar took a deep breath and wrote a check, and while they stood in the limo office waiting for the car to be brought around, Sugar flipped a quarter to see who got to wear the chauffeur's uniform. Thorn won.

"You sure we need this thing?"

"You ever been to Star Island?"

Thorn said no, he hadn't.

"Well, people out there, their gardeners wear tuxedos."

Sugar sat in back and directed Thorn across the causeway to one of the luxury islands on the way over to Miami Beach. He called Thorn Jeeves and said "Home, James," several times, but it wasn't funny. Nothing was.

Thorn drew up to the guard house and Sugarman climbed out and spoke for a while to the young security man. For the last forty-eight hours Sugar had been wearing the same pair of khaki slacks and teal shirt and he smelled like he'd been marinating in ammonia. Even in the freshly laundered chauffeur's uniform Thorn wasn't much better, although after one experimental whiff of his shoulder, he seemed to have deadened his olfactory nerves sufficiently to survive. Sugar's odor didn't seem to offend the uniformed guard. All smiles, the young man accompanied Sugarman back to the car, opened the door for him, and gave him a salute as they drove onto the island.

"What the hell did you tell him?"

"We're government agents. NOSA. Guarding Sampson's property till this Middle East terrorist scare blows over. Nobody's supposed to know we're out here, not even Sampson. National security."

"NOSA?"

"It just popped out."

"He didn't want to see some ID?"

"Hey, Thorn. Not everybody is as untrusting as you."

There were two red Jaguar XJ-6s parked out front in the Sampsons' circular drive, both convertibles. Their estate was a Mediterranean affair, fountains and walkways, red tile and thick stucco. An acre of tightly pruned fruit trees. The Sampsons had two or three hundred feet on the bay and a view east toward Miami Beach. There was a dock out back but no yacht.