Crackdown (37 page)

Nothing moved on the island and no light showed there. If any light had been burning it would have sparked brilliant and cruel in the night-goggles’ screen, but the navigation light on the island’s southern tip, like the red air-warning beacons on its tall radio mast and the green and white airstrip beacon, was switched off.

I put the engine into neutral and let the boat drift a half-mile outside the reefs while I searched for any signs that our arrival had been detected, but no boats patrolled the lagoon and no jeeps moved on the single road. “What’s happening?” the senator asked nervously.

“Just checking,” I said.

“Is it OK?” The senator was more than nervous. He was scared. He fidgeted with the short rubber-sheathed aerial of the battery-powered VHF radio that he carried in a pouch of his bullet-proof vest. The senator had insisted on bringing two such hand-held radios, just in case everything went wrong and we needed to scream to the outside world for help.

“Playtime, children,” the Maggot said with grim facetiousness and in an effort to spur me onwards, but still I let the boat drift on the rising tide. I was giving my instincts time to smell the night’s danger.

It was dark. The moon was a sickle blade low in the south-eastern sky, though in my goggles it looked more like a freshly cut paring of the purest green light. We were in the small hours of Friday morning, the witching hours when the mind is at its most superstitious and fearful, yet so far everything had gone astonishingly smoothly. Coffinhead Porter had slung the loaded rigid-raider from a pair of davits at the stern of his big sports-fishing boat, then had ripped us across a jet-black sea to drop us thirty miles from Murder Cay.

Now, forty minutes later, we drifted a half-mile from the Devil’s Necklace and I stared entranced at an emerald world. “Nick?” The senator, like the Maggot, had no night-goggles, and could see nothing in the darkness.

“It’s OK,” I said at last, then I let in the engine’s clutch so that the big inflatable moved smoothly forward. The Maggot, crouching in the bows, slid the Russian-made machine-gun over the gunwale. On the goggles’ screen the gun’s belt of ammunition looked like linked green bars of glowing gold.

The water crashed and broke and seethed on the coral. I thought how the island’s small radar set must pick up a lot of wave clutter from the coral heads, and how that clutter would hide us; then we were in the channel, moving slowly and almost silently. The channel was supposed to be bare of navigation marks, but I spotted a small buoy, nothing but a plastic bottle on a weighted line, which marked the dog-leg bend, then we were past the buoy and I turned the boat and accelerated slightly as a faint line of paler green showed me where the pebble beach lay at the foot of the radio mast.

The security lights on the island’s houses were suddenly switched on.

The Maggot cursed, while I snatched off the goggles which had suddenly flared blindingly bright. The world reverted to a prosaic darkness slashed by the sudden line of arc-lights which stretched across the island to silhouette the trees and shrubs growing between the houses and the slender golf course. I had instinctively throttled the motor back as the lights came on so that we were scarcely moving as we cleared the landward end of the passage and started across the smooth black water that lay within the protective ring of coral. The lights were reflected on the blackness in long sinuously shivering streams of silver.

The senator was sitting straight up, staring with alarm at the brightly lit island, but, despite the security lights, nothing moved there and no guards were visible. I wondered if the lights were randomly switched on and off automatically. “Do you want to abort?” I asked the senator.

“I think perhaps we should.” Crowninshield was in a plain funk. He was not trained to such escapades, and he had not imagined that the night would be like this. Doubtless he had hoped for a straightforward landing, a fortuitous meeting with his children, and a decorous withdrawal. Instead every moment increased the tension.

“We don’t abort!” the Maggot said. “We go on.”

“Maybe we’d better go on,” the senator said, and I wondered if he always agreed with the last man to express a firm opinion, and I recalled the jibe that he was a politician without a cause. Or was he about to make the war on drugs the cause that would propel him to glory?

Then the island’s lights went out.

“Someone there is awake,” I forgot my doubts about the senator’s motives, suggesting instead an explanation for the dousing of the security lamps, “but they’re not suspicious. They probably have orders to switch the lights on for a few minutes every hour, but now that they’ve seen nothing they’ll be going back to watching their dirty video.” I hoped the video was very dirty indeed, dirty enough to keep the guards’ eyes riveted on the screen as we negotiated the entrance channel. I pulled the night-goggles back over my eyes again. A bright strip of emerald light glowed in the tower of the house where the guards were posted. That strip of light had not been there a moment before, and I guessed that it marked where the guard had left the shutters or curtains cracked open after he had peered into the glow of the security lights. I looked northwards, to my right, and saw that the northernmost house, the one I was convinced was Sweetman’s, lay in utter darkness.

“Let’s go, Nick!” The senator was being tormented by the boat’s sluggish speed.

I eased the throttle forward. The Maggot had discarded the machine-gun and picked up his rifle and I heard the clatter of its bolt as he worked a round into the chamber.

“Put the gun on safe!” I said warningly. I did not want an accidental shot disturbing our enemies.

“You put a hole in both ends of the egg, then suck? Is that right, Nick?” The Maggot grinned at me. His face, like the senator’s and mine, had been smeared raggedly black with a foul-smelling camouflage cream that was supposed to double as an insect repellent. We were all wearing flak-jackets over camouflage shirts and trousers. I superstitiously wished I had my old beret.

It seemed unreal to be back in a rigid-raider. Sometimes, in the Marines, we had been encouraged to make a silent, creeping approach, while at other times we would simply point the rubber boats towards the enemy shore and let the things tear the sea into white shreds. This night’s adventure still seemed like one of those long-ago training exercises, an illusion helped by the smell of the gun oil and the rank camouflage cream. I aimed the inflatable straight for the base of the towering radio mast, then we all lurched forward as the rigid hull of the inflatable struck a rock or shoal. I twisted the wheel and gunned the throttle so that the boat slithered and scraped over the obstacle into deeper water.

“Get ready!” I called softly.

We were travelling faster now, and showing a white wake at our stern. I wanted to drive the boat’s bows well up the beach. I snatched off the goggles at the last moment, then cut the engine as the small wave that was pushed ahead of our bows broke white and loud on the shelving pebbles. “Hold tight!”

We struck the beach. There was another and fiercer lurch, a scraping noise that seemed hugely loud in the dark night, then we shuddered to a halt. The sound of the boat’s rigid fibreglass baseplate sliding on loose stone echoed in my ears. “Go! Go!” I hissed the command.

The Maggot led the way. His feet crunched briefly on stone, then he was running awkwardly towards the black shadow of the radio mast’s enormous concrete foundation. He was carrying the rifle and two sub-machine-guns that seemed tiny in his huge hands. He was also lugging a kit bag which held extra ammunition and a supply of smoke-flares. I heard the thump as he dropped the bag in the shadow of the concrete. “Ready!” he called softly.

“Go, senator,” I ordered. “Good luck.”

The senator stepped rather fastidiously out of the boat, then clambered up the shallow lip of limestone and turf that edged the small beach. There was just enough moonlight to show the soft swells of the nearest fairway on the golf course. A wind stirred one of the flags marking a green.

I lugged the machine-gun and as much ammunition as I could carry on to dry land. I made the boat fast, then picked up the Kalashnikov and two boxes of its ammunition. The Maggot and the senator were already crossing the golf course, going to find the twins. Somehow, in this darkness, that seemed a rather forlorn mission.

It also seemed much warmer on land, and I was sweating beneath my heavy bullet-proof vest. I mounted the gun at the corner of the radio mast’s foundation, which was a concrete block four feet high and ten feet square. The huge lump gave me almost perfect protection from any gunfire that might come from the houses beyond the fairway. I lay down behind the gun, opened its feed tray and pushed in a new belt of ammunition, then cocked the mechanism. I raised the rear sight and aimed the gun towards the streak of light in the tower. I suddenly felt ridiculous; I was blacked up and armed, like an actor playing at war. I also felt dog tired. It seemed impossible that just twenty-four hours ago I had been on a ferry, and since then I had searched Grand Bahamas for Ellen, fought off an attempt on my life, then agreed to this nighttime madness.

I yawned. For two pins I would have rested my head on the Kalashnikov’s butt and closed my eyes. The night insects were loud among the sea-grape that grew to the north, and the foam was incessant where it broke loud on the coral behind me, but otherwise the only sound to disturb the night was the muffled grumble of the island’s generator. The senator and the Maggot were lost in the darkness, and again it struck me as perversely odd that the two should have made their unlikely alliance. How had the senator known that the big bearded man had such a fierce hatred of drugs? That question startled me into full wakefulness. And why was the Maggot equipped with ammunition from Cuba? Had it been part of the vast cache captured by the American forces on Grenada? Or had it come from the Panamanian arsenals captured when Noriega was arrested? But if so, why was it in the Maggot’s hands? I began to realise that there were some very good questions that I should have been asking hours ago. Perhaps the most important question was why a man like Crowninshield would risk this adventure and thus hazard his tenancy of the White House. For his children? Would Crowninshield really sacrifice the White House for Rickie? My father would not have sacrificed a walk-on part in a beer commercial for the health of one of his children, and I suddenly realised what I had never realised before; that a politician must have an ego and an ambition every bit as massive as any great actor.

A dog began barking somewhere beyond the golf course.

My head jerked up as I slipped the gun’s safety catch to automatic. The dog had begun to howl now, spreading its warning up and down the thin shank of Murder Cay.

The floodlights were switched on again. Their sudden blaze was blinding and terrifying, but I could just see the dark shape of the tower window beyond the floodlights’ glare, and so I aimed the gun at that dark rectangle. I waited.

Then, seemingly all at once, I heard a truncated shout of terror, the belch of a sub-machine-gun firing, and the dog’s howl turning to a scream that was chopped brutally short. A heavy machine-gun opened fire from the tower. I saw the gun’s muzzle flash as a stunted dark red flame in the window, then I lost sight of that flame for I had pulled the Kalashnikov’s trigger and my own muzzle was pulsing an almost invisible but intrusive light from which the green tracer rounds were spitting lazily away.

I had aimed high and left. I dropped the barrel, edged it right, and it seemed to me that my green fire was being swallowed in the dark shadowy hole of the tower window. The far machine-gun stopped abruptly.

I too stopped firing. I could smell the gun’s propellant in the air; sour and thin. Adrenalin coursed warm through my blood. My heart was thumping.

I heard shouts. The sub-machine-gun fired again and I saw a floodlight explode. Sparks crackled from the broken light fixture. A second light went dark as the Maggot shattered it, but enough lights remained to turn the island into a deathtrap. I aimed at a light and extinguished it with a short burst, then heard the first whipcrack of return fire slash terrifyingly over my head. The enemy was firing at the source of my green tracer. A bullet struck the radio mast to ring the structure like a bell. I fired to kill another light, but still more lamps were being lit as people woke in the houses and turned on their garden floodlights. I hoped the senator and Maggot were already retreating because we had only one course of action now, and that was to pile into the rigid-raider and light out through the reefs at top speed.

Another machine-gun opened fire from my right, but the new gunner was disoriented and fired wildly across the golf course.

Then an explosion split the night with white fire and a noise like concentrated thunder. A brilliant streak of flame lanced skywards and I realised it had to be the fuel tank of the generator blowing up because a second or two after the explosion all the remaining lights on the island flickered and died. All that was left was the churning flames of the burning gasoline that lit the underside of a thick billow of dark smoke.

Smoke! When in doubt, use smoke! I took a handful of the flares from the Maggot’s kit bag, scraped the cap off one to ignite it and hurled it as far as I could towards the golf course. Orange smoke plumed and thickened and was carried on the east wind towards me. I waited till the smoke was all around me, then, abandoning the machine-gun for a moment, I sprinted forward till I was close to the smoking flare. A machine-gun fired ahead of me and a stream of bullets whined and flickered somewhere to my left. I took another flare and hurled it forward again, thickening the smoke and trying to make a corridor down which Maggot and the senator could escape. I had reached the coarse grass of the fairway now. I hurled a third flare, then turned back towards the radio mast. A stream of tracer bullets sawed through the smoke. I heard the bullets crashing and whining in the metal lattice of the radio mast to sound like a mad orchestra of steel percussion.