Diamondhead (30 page)
Authors: Patrick Robinson
Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Political, #Thrillers, #Weapons industry, #War & Military, #Assassination, #Iraq War; 2003-
“Harry,” he said, “I feel like a racehorse trainer who has just been told his owner is considering a gigantic bet on his horse for Saturday’s big race. The trainer doesn’t want to say, ‘Great idea—we can’t get beat,’ in case the horse finishes seventh. Neither does he want to say, ‘Don’t do that, for Christ’s sake,’ in case it wins. The first instance would be bad, the second about fifty times worse.”
“You mean you’re kinda loath to hand over Raul’s number for me to go right ahead, by myself. Because if it works, you end up looking like a wimp!”
Harry was laughing. Mack was not. “Something like that,” he said. “But I guess my real problem is that if this bastard steals your million bucks and vanishes, then I look like a real fool. There would be some people who’d think Raul and I somehow shared it.”
“I would not be one of them,” said Harry, no longer laughing. “Because I trust you completely. And I do see the problem. But if we can’t find anyone else, my back will be hard against the wall. And I may have to ask you for that number. Then the problem would be entirely mine.”
Mack poured the Remson boss a cup of coffee, but he could not stay for long. Just before he left, he asked, “You read that magazine I gave you yet? The one about Foche?”
“Not yet. I’ll read it tonight.”
“You’ll find it interesting,” said Harry. “Talk to you later.”
Anne and Tommy returned from the hospital just before noon. Tommy was cheerful and wanted to play some ball. Anne looked stricken. “Dr. Ryan gave us some new medicine, some kind of an oil that has been effective in other cases, just at arresting the process. It’s not a cure.” Tommy was well out of range when she said this. Mack held her in his arms, neither of them with one word to say to the other.
When Tommy came back out to the porch he had already pulled on his glove. Mack took a couple of baseballs from the basket, grabbed his own glove, and took Tommy out into the front yard. Anne could see them throwing the ball to and fro, catching it in the gloves, finding different angles. It had always been a total mystery to her why men found such fascination in this pointless activity, but today she had no room for empty thoughts.
While Joyce had taken Tommy to the playroom, she had a very serious consultation with Dr. Ryan and two surgeons. All three men pointed out the dangers of drastic surgery on such a young boy. One of the surgeons was very attuned to the activities of the Swiss clinic and told her they had enjoyed one success in the past two weeks, but another operation had been a disaster and the child did not survive the week. All three men told her that Switzerland was the only hope, though not that good a hope. The success rate was, in their opinion, unimpressive, perhaps three victories in five attempts. They all thought this was a very good reason to wait for the U.S. medical profession to make the breakthrough that could happen at any time and eliminate most of the risk.
As far as Anne was concerned, three in five sounded fantastic since she and Mack currently faced zero in five, with no apparent possibility of a reprieve. Before she and Tommy left, Dr. Ryan had taken her aside and said flatly, “Anne, Tommy is in very bad shape. This thing is spreading. Never mind the odds—that Swiss clinic is the only game in town. If you can get him in there, take my advice and go. And remember, the toughness and good health that make him so vulnerable to this virulent disease are still the qualities to get him through the operation.”
Quietly, she prepared the sandwiches for lunch and a small salad for each of the three plates. She poured three glasses of fruit juice and summoned her ballplayers to the table on the porch. Tommy charged into his tuna fish on rye and wondered if he could get some potato chips with it. Anne told him certainly not, especially if he and his father hoped to have bluefish and french fries this evening.
“Mom,” said Tommy, grinning, “I think the chief fisherman ought to have a few chips if he needs ’em. When you think, supper is up to me.”
“The chief fisherman can have an apple after his sandwich.”
“But the chief fisherman doesn’t want an apple. He wants potato chips.”
Tommy Bedford was an endearing boy, but he’d met his match in his cholesterol-concerned mother. “Perhaps he does,” replied Anne. “But the chief cook has rules about how much fat the chief fisherman is allowed to eat in one day. You may have some potato chips, but then there will be no fries with the bluefish.”
This was too much for Mack. “Don’t you bargain away our french fries, Tom,” he said. “We might need ’em for strength after we fight the blues.”
“Don’t worry about that, Dad. Chips are okay, but fries are awesome. I’ll take the apple.”
Anne changed the subject and, absently, asked Mack who had been visiting that morning. “I saw the second coffee cup,” she added.
“Oh, just Harry. He didn’t stay long. He’s always in a hurry.”
“No news about the yard?”
“Not really. He’s still trying to have one last go at the French, maybe get in under the wire with a new frigate before the new government gets in. But he’s not hopeful. I’m telling you, laying off the steelworkers really got to him. I never saw him so despondent.”
“It’s caused a lot of fuss in town,” said Anne. “So many people are affected. I was talking to one of the young guys in the store, and he thinks his grandparents will have to move away, somewhere south. They’ve been here for five generations.”
“It’s awful,” replied Mack. “And in some ways it’s as bad for Harry as for any of them. He thinks he’s somehow let everyone down—in a way neither his father nor his grandfather ever did.”
“Do you think he has?”
“No. Although I think the writing’s been on the wall for a lot longer than he believes. The trouble is, Remsons has become a specialized yard, warship experts, with an expensive staff who are good at electronics, radar, sonar, weapons guidance. The Dartford guys really know what they’re doing. And once the French Navy even suggested they would not be coming back as clients, that left Remsons high and dry. Harry should probably have begun drastic changes, offering designs for oceangoing freighters, maybe even cruise liners, because aside from the U.S. government, there are hardly any customers for an American shipyard trying to build warships.”
“I suppose not,” replied Anne distractedly. “Who knows what will happen now.”
Mack smiled and said, “I’ll say one thing. Harry does have a plan, and I think it has a chance. I can’t tell you about it, or anyone else. But he has confided in me, and I’m optimistic for him.”
“Will you end up working for him—in some capacity?”
“It’s not impossible, and he keeps telling me that the closure of a medium-size shipyard takes years to clear up. He says he wants to work with a lifelong friend whom he trusts. Someone who has held positions of trust. Guess it would solve our problems.”
“Some of them,” replied Anne.
After lunch, Tommy became very sick. Anne looked after him for more than an hour and then put him to bed. “He may sleep for three or four hours,” she said. “But this is all part of it. I don’t think he should go fishing, because it will just exhaust him more.”
“Okay,” said Mack. “I’ll go off by myself now and see if I can find us some supper. He might be upset if we’re not going, though. I don’t want to tell him.”
“You may find he won’t remember,” she said. “Then maybe twenty minutes of throwing the baseball would be all he wants. He can watch the Red Sox with you for a little while, at eight o’clock.”
Mack took his fishing gear to the car and drove down toward the water. This was not some cheerful outing with Tommy. This was a mission. This required watchfulness and split-second decisions. He chose a road running east, where the water would become silvery as the afternoon wore on, and the sun slipped lower in the sky. As ever, he was watching for the arctic terns, those Ted Williams of the deep, those rock-steady little fishermen who never swung at a bad pitch and came in hard when the porgies betrayed their presence. They knew what they were after, tiny silver flashes swarming to and from the surface. Mack knew what he wanted, the big fellas, swimming right below the porgies, the bass and the blues.
Slowly he cruised along the shore of the long Kennebec bay below the shipyard. He stared out of his side window all the way. There was no traffic, and no arctic terns. He swung the car down the estuary to a spot five miles south of Dartford, where granite rocks jutted from the water at low tide.
There was a bell buoy out there, but the tide was flowing in and had already covered the rocks. The bell clanged in the light summer breeze, and all around, settling on the red structure of the bell supports, were the outriders for a flock of arctic terns.
They were diving, about eight of them, diving the way terns do when they hit porgy pay dirt. Deep below them, circling, Mack knew, were the big fellas, cutting through the cold depths of the estuary, scattering the porgies, grabbing, snapping, in a nightly feeding frenzy, like little sharks, and just as vicious.
Mack stopped the car and lovingly selected a silver lure, triple hooked, the same popper Tommy had used a couple of nights ago. He tied it to the line, leaned back like a javelin thrower, and hurled it clean across the channel and out toward the bell buoy. It was by any standards one heck of a cast. At this game, Mack had the arms of a longshoreman and the hands of a violinist. He began to wind in his reel, just past the limit of the eight terns, who were by now dipping and plunging into the choppy little patch of water. At least it looked little from where Mack stood but in truth was probably twenty yards across.
The lure came skittering along the surface, bumping and plunging, hardly ever out of sight, but it came all the way, with no sudden jolt when a big fish took it.
Mack cast again. Nothing. And then again. Nothing. But now he noticed the silvery splashes in the disturbed water were just a little closer. And with his fourth supreme cast he dropped the lure bang in the middle of the shoal of porgies. Wham! A big thirty-six-inch bass took it the first time, and Mack’s reel screamed as the striped devil swerved away and dived. The trouble here was that the line might snap. Mack whipped his right arm back at a forty-five-degree angle behind his shoulder to set the hook. This was a big fish, and Mack felt him dive to the base of the rocks. Immediately, Mack loosened the spool, giving the bass more line because the fish could break it by sheer force, with its own weight and the power of its struggle to get free.
Mack let him run, for around thirty yards, and then carefully raised his rod to eleven o’clock, then lowered it. He quickly reeled in the slack. With a fish this big, he could not let it become a straight test of strength because the line might not take it.
This was shaping up to be a serious battle, not of muscle, but of guile. Again and again he lifted the rod high, then dipped it, and carefully reeled in the slack. The trick was to fool the fish, not letting him understand he was being drag-hauled into the shallows. Mack kept it up, and the contest was going his way, until the bass finally cottoned on to the fact he was in foreign territory, away from his buddies, near rocks that were strange to him. And looming above was the gigantic shape of Mack Bedford.
The former SEAL commander waited for the last titanic effort of his opponent. And when the fish was a mere twenty yards out, it happened: the fabled second wind of a fighting bass. The fish turned. And dived away once more, heading back out toward the rocks. Mack’s reel screamed again, but he was ready. He loosened the spool a fraction, gave the bass some line, and only then began to reel him in.
Mack could feel the strength of the big fish fading away. He guessed it was a bass, because of the ebb and flow of the contest. His fish was fighting like a bass—diving deep, steady and powerful; totally unlike the erratic, aggressive, surface-breaking efforts of the innately vicious bluefish trying to spit out the lure.
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