Crackdown (33 page)

The fear was quivering in me. The beer and tuna were acid-sour in my belly, my left leg was shivering, my bowels were like water, my heart was racing; yet I had a gun, and my hands were rock steady, and I reasoned that I was facing the men who had hurt or killed Ellen, and all my consciousness seemed trained on the patch of light that marked the top of the far stairs. I was in shadow, but anyone who attacked me must come through that light and thus make themselves a target. That thought gave me confidence.

Except they threw a grenade instead.

I saw its silhouette and knew I had lost.

Except they threw too hard and the grenade thumped against one of the rafters and dropped sharply down to lodge just behind the solid lump of the Maggot’s fallen aircraft chair, which now protected me like a blast wall. I was counting the seconds since the grenade had appeared. I opened my mouth to equalise the blast and drew up my knees to protect my midriff, but I did not take the gun away from the bright space at the top of the far stairs.

Which bright space was suddenly cracked apart with noise and flame. The canvas roof billowed, ripped and tore away as hot air punched at me with an appalling violence, but no shrapnel came at me. The heavy pilot’s chair slid six feet towards me, and the table was blown on to its side, but I was unhurt. The spilt paraffin had caught fire, its flames flickering across the verandah’s deck. The sound of the explosion still echoed, and it was during that echo that my attackers charged up the far stairs.

I could not see them clearly, for the sunlight was too bright and I was half dazed by the explosion, but a part of my brain had gone back into its training and it was telling my body what to do. My enemies were charging up the steps and one of them was shouting like a fiend either to give himself courage or to intimidate me. I could only hear the one voice, but two pairs of boots. I also knew that my attackers would not see me immediately for I was in shadow, and the verandah was a chaos of fallen furniture, flame and smoke, and that blessed small scrap of my brain that had been programmed in the lethal skills of soldiering told me to hold my fire until I was certain of a kill.

The first man, the one who was shouting, hurled himself on to the verandah. He was a young black man, short-haired, muscular, and carrying a Kalashnikov. I unthinkingly registered the distinctive shape of the curved magazine, and I saw the muzzle’s pale flames pricking the brightness as he began spraying the verandah with bullets, but like most inexperienced men he was firing too high. I knew there was a second man behind him, and I guessed the second man was the marksman. The first man had been committed to draw my attention, while the second was the expert, the executioner who would kill me while I was distracted by his noisy companion, so I shifted the heavy Webley a fraction to the right and waited for the second man, and I did not otherwise move a muscle, because movement attracts fire, and I waited for a full second while the first man hammered the verandah with bullets. I was inwardly gibbering with fear as I waited, but then the second man appeared. He could have been the first man’s twin brother. He panned his rifle round the verandah, saw me, and shouted a warning to the first man who had still not spotted me. I pulled the trigger.

I was terrified, yet still the training held good. I was using both hands to steady the gun and I had taken my time. I had given myself all of a half-second to aim, and at that range a trained soldier could not miss, and I fired, and I saw the bullet shatter the second man’s throat and his shout turned into a wet gulp as he became airborne, flying backwards, his blood filling the open verandah in a sickening spray that was turned to incandescent red by the sunlight. The first man began to turn his gun back towards me, but the hammerlike recoil of the Kalashnikov’s automatic fire had been spinning his body and his aim away from me, while my arms had already soaked the massive blow of the revolver and were steady again and I knew he was going to fall to his right in a desperate attempt to escape me, so I fired that way and saw the dark fleck where the bullet hit his ribs. His whole chest quivered with the seismic shock of the bullet’s strike. The blow thumped him hard against the cement-block wall of the Maggot’s house, and there he stayed, suddenly leaning on the wall with dull eyes staring at me and the now silent gun hanging by his side.

Then he sighed. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and he looked as though he was going to cry. He tried to lift the rifle, but it was as heavy as lead in his nerveless hand. He suddenly looked very young and very sad, like a child deprived of a toy. There were tears in his eyes that brimmed, then poured down his cheeks. He stared reproachfully at me, then made one last supreme effort to lift his assault rifle. I watched the muzzle rise towards me, felt the sudden panic, and so I fired a last time. The Webley’s heavy bullet obliterated the man’s face, wiping away his tears for ever. He slid down the wall, leaving a slime of blood on the concrete.

Silence. The paraffin flames flickered blue. Bile was sour in my throat. Sweat stung my eyes. I noticed that my hands had begun to shake.

I thanked God they had not been waiting in ambush when Julie had dropped me at the gate, for God knows what slaughter they would have made had they fired at her van. But how had these men known where to find me? That was not a difficult question to answer, for I had spent all day telling people that I could be reached at the Maggot’s house, and doubtless my enemies had known ever since early morning that I was on the island. Who else could Bellybutton have telephoned? And who had he phoned? Billingsley? But if the policeman wanted me dead, why had he not killed me when I was in custody? Because too many questions would have been asked as a result of such a death. The conjectures flickered through my consciousness, even as I listened for a sound, any sound, that would betray the next move of my enemies.

If they made any move at all, other than to escape, for they must have realised that their first attack had failed disastrously. If they had any sense they would cut and run now, just as I should cut and run before the police arrived. I expected the police at any moment, for surely someone must have heard the gunfire and called the authorities? I could smell blood. So much blood. Dog blood and man blood. The world stank of blood and burning kerosene; a mingling stench that even overpowered the reek from the channel behind me.

I rolled over, expecting a shotgun blast.

Nothing. The first man I had shot was out of my sight, blown back down the steps, but the second was still lying slumped at the foot of the wall. He was dressed in black fatigues. I edged across to him, skirting the paraffin flames, and took his Kalashnikov, which was the East German version with the pimply black plastic stock. The gun was sticky with the dead man’s blood, which I tried to wipe away. I took the two spare magazines that were jammed into a pouch attached to his webbing belt. The paraffin had set fire to the wicker mats that carpeted the verandah and the flames were suddenly brighter and fiercer.

I changed the assault rifle’s magazine. That gave me thirty rounds. I was crouching low. Puddled in the dead man’s blood were some cartridges ejected from the Kalashnikov. They were made of green-lacquered steel like those I had found on
Hirondelle
so long ago. That coincidence did not mean that these men had also killed
Hirondelle’
s crew because the Eastern bloc, just like the West, was flooding the world with weapons. Talking peace is good for a politician’s image, but selling weapons is good for employment figures and foreign earnings. I was moving towards the side of the verandah which faced the car graveyard, towards the chain-link fence. No police had come yet.

The heat of the burning wicker was increasing and its smoke was thickening, but that smoke was not going to help me because it was rising into the air instead of clinging to the ground like a screen. The burning wicker would drive me off the verandah, but only into the aim of the surviving gunmen. To burn or be shot? I was as indecisive as Hamlet. Be shot, I decided, and so I stood up, keeping my back against the wall of Maggot’s house and pushed the Webley into my trouser pocket. Nothing moved in the yard of scrapped cars. I could just see the far-off open sea above the piles of shimmering crushed metal. My back hurt where the pellets had hit me on board
Wavebreaker;
those shotgun pellets had all been removed and the wounds were almost healed, yet suddenly they felt raw and painful.

I cocked the Kalashnikov. I used to teach marines how to strip and fire a Kalashnikov, the theory being that one day they might have to fight with captured weapons. The Kalashnikov was a good gun. You could stamp on it, burn it, drown it, and still it goes on working. I edged down the stairs, expecting the blast of a shotgun at any second. The stench of dog blood was thick, and the buzz of flies even thicker. Sweat trickled down my face and stung my eyes. I cuffed it away. No one fired. I reached the ground and ran like a hare to the sewage outfall wall where
Bronco-Buster
was moored. The wall’s top was curved, like an arch over a pipe, and the concrete was crumbling. The stink of sewage and oil and smoke and blood was overpowering. I stumbled desperately off the wall’s curvature to land heavily on
Bronco-Buster’s
aft deck. She was thirty-two feet long, had a flying bridge and a tattered fighting chair that did not look strong enough to withstand the tug of a stickleback. I crouched in her open wheelhouse, watching the shore.

Fire and smoke still showed on the verandah, but much more feebly now, for the wicker mats had burned out and the rest of the structure was built of timbers so massive that it would need a blowtorch to set them on fire. The charred remnants of the canvas awning, blown ragged by the grenade, lifted in the warm and idle wind. I doubted that the flames would spread to the Maggot’s house, for the old cold-store was built of materials that would not ignite easily.

Still no police had come. Nothing living moved except three turkey vultures that circled overhead. I was slowly concluding that I was safe, that no gunmen were left to fire at me, but that did not mean I could relax. The police must surely come, and to avoid their questions I decided to take
Bronco-Buster
to sea, though that notion depended on the boat’s engine starting. I decided I would run for Straker’s Cay. I could think of nowhere else to go. It was not safe to stay here, for my enemies would be sure to return, and if not my enemies than it would be the police. All that was left was to salvage
Masquerade
and go. There was nothing else. No Ellen.

I thought I heard a car accelerate away, but was not certain. I waited ten more minutes, then straightened up in the wheelhouse. No one fired at me.
Bronco-Buster’s
engine and fuel tanks were all under padlocked hatches and her ignition needed a key, which meant I would have to hot-wire the boat, but first I had to make sure she was fuelled. I used the Kalashnikov’s flash suppressor as a jemmy, ripping a hasp and padlock out of the spongy wood to lift a locker lid and reveal the boat’s main fuel tank.

She was almost empty. A sight glass ran down beside the big fifty-gallon fuel tank, and it showed hardly a quarter inch of fuel remaining. That was just enough to reach McIllvanney’s yard where I would beg, borrow or steal
Starkisser.

I began levering at the engine hatch, needing to turn on the seacocks that fed the motor’s cooling system, when I heard the creak of the Maggot’s gate. I looked up.

The Maggot had come home at last. I felt an avalanche of relief crash through me as I watched him climb out of his red Firebird to open the gates, then I shouted to warn him that gunmen might still be lurking in ambush, but he was too far away to hear me over the sound of his car’s engine so I fired the Kalashnikov into the air, and that alerted him. He dived back into the Firebird and I saw him leaning towards the glove compartment, presumably to find a gun.

I clambered off the boat on to the awkward slope of the wall. The Maggot accelerated into his yard, his tyres spinning a smokescreen of dust into the humid air. No one fired at him. He skidded the car to a stop beside the body of his dead Rottweiler. Flies buzzed. The Maggot did not spare the dog a glance, but just ran up the verandah steps with a fire extinguisher he had snatched from his car. “What the hell happened?” he shouted at me.

“Where the hell’s Ellen?” I shouted back. Fire hissed as the Maggot released the chemical extinguisher. A noxious mist, foul as the stench of the creek, reeked away from the verandah. “Where’s Ellen?” I shouted again as I reached the foot of the verandah steps.

“Ellen?” The Maggot turned and frowned at me as though he did not really understand the basis of my question. “She’s with you, isn’t she? That’s where she said she was going!”

And with those words all hope went.

“We went to her apartment, OK? She fetched her things, went on to the Literacy Project, then she reckoned that she didn’t want to sail that heap of junk to the Keys, but wanted to go back to you, so I dropped her off at the ferry terminal.”

“You just left her there?”

“Sure! She insisted she was OK.” The Maggot, kicking the last sparks of the fire dead, sensed my unspoken criticism that he should have been more protective, and that he should even have flown Ellen back to Straker’s Cay. “I had a booking to fly three Venezuelans to Rodentworld.” Rodentworld was the Maggot’s nickname for Disney-world; so called because it was the place where people dressed as mice to welcome the tourists. “The charter had been booked for weeks, Nick,” he went on defensively, “and I couldn’t let them down.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” It was unfair to blame the Maggot for what had happened. He had done his best.

“And frankly—” he forced a very unconvincing laugh, “Ellen wasn’t really happy in my company. You know how she reacts to me? Like I was something thrown up by a hog?”

He backed down off the verandah that was still wreathed in smoke and fumes, though the last of the flames had been extinguished.