Key West Connection (2 page)

For years, I apologized for these books. I no longer do.

 

—Randy Wayne White
Cartagena, Colombia

We were out at the edge of the Gulf Stream, trolling for the big ones, when I got word that my best friend was dead.

I was up on the fighting deck boning a six-inch silver mullet—an ideal sailfish bait—when my Konel VHF-780 marine radio started squawking at me. It was Nels Chester of the
Southern Cross II,
a fellow charter captain out of Key West. I went below, adjusted the squelch, and took the mike.

“This is the
Sniper
. This is the
Sniper
. What's up, Nels?”

“Oh Christ, Dusky. Jesus. I don't know how to . . . ”

Even over the VHF I could tell that his voice was choked with emotion. The first thing that crossed my mind was that there was something wrong with my wife, Janet, or one of my twin boys, Ernest and Honor.

“Get hold of yourself, goddammit, Nels. Give it to me straight.”

“Dusky, they got him. They got Billy Mack. He was out here 'bout a mile or two from me. Fishin' for dolphin. They hijacked his boat, Dusky. And they killed him. Slit his throat. Oh, Christ. I found him floatin' just now. . . . ”

“Shut up, Nels! Listen to me!” My heart was pounding loud in my ears, the adrenaline roaring through my body like a drug. “What kind of boat were they in? And which way did they take off?”

Nels was starting to regain a little control. “There were four of them, Dusky. Two black guys, two white. In one of those racing boats. Cigarette hull. Dark-blue. Saw them through my binoculars, heading Billy Mack's way. Then I got a call from Billy Mack. Said he was going to the aid of a disabled power vessel. I knew goddam well there was something funny about that. I watched them, Dusky. I watched them climb up on his boat, all thank-yous and appreciation, then the biggest black guy got behind him, and I saw the knife, Dusky, but there was nothing I could do, I swear! I saw it all through the binoculars. Oh, lordy, lordy, he's layin' on my deck now like he's got two mouths; one with this bloody awful smile on it. . . . ”

So they had killed him. Killed my best friend. Billy Mack. We had served three tours together in Nam. The United States Navy. SEALS. The best of the best, the toughest of the tough, and if you know anything at all about the Navy's Underwater Demolition Team—especially the exclusive branch of SEALS—you would know that we are all closer than brothers. The Brotherhood of Hell, that's what our old chief called it. Once, when Billy Mack and I were in the first round of training, out in Coronado, just kids, really, trying to win our fins, they had come to our barracks at three a.m. And they ran us all out into the Pacific seven miles.

“See those lights?” our chief said, pointing to the faint blaze of lights over the California mainland. “You maggots swim to breakfast. And if you're late for chow call, you don't eat.”

We had no lights, no moon, no fins, no nothing. Billy Mack was just a farm boy from a place called Kunkle, Ohio. A tough little guy, but scared to death of swimming at night. Later, in Nam, when we patrolled the harbors every night underwater, we laughed about it. But back then he was scared shitless. He stuck close to me. In fact, everybody stuck close to me. I was their leader; leader without rank, but I knew everyone depended on me. I was the biggest, the fastest, the strongest. I think even the chief was a little afraid of me. One time I overheard him talking with the OIC:

“Jesus Christ, have you had a look at that Henry MacMorgan kid? Looks like he was built out of fourby-sixes. And his shoulders—like some kinda freak or somethin'. Must be four feet wide across the goddamn back. You see that blond hair, that little angel kid's face of his, and you figure he oughtta be in the back seat of a Dodge copping feels off some high school girl. But then you get a look at those eyes—kinda battleship-gray they are—and you know, you just know he ain't gonna balk when it comes his turn to kill.”

“I got the dope on him,” the OIC had said. “Strange case. He was an orphan. Raised in the circus by an Italian family that worked the trapeze. That's where he got those shoulders. Seems they were playin' some small town and some local toughs thought it would be funny to cut a rope here and there and watch the big top tent fall. Happened right in the middle of their act. Everyone was killed but MacMorgan. He caught up with those toughs. I don't know what he did, but it musta been nasty. When he got here the federal boys were hot on his tail. They said, ‘You take him or else.' We pretended like we didn't know that he lied about his age. You know how old he is? Sixteen goddamn years old. I wouldn't get on his bad side, if I were you, Skip. After this training, he's going to be one thoroughly dangerous SOB.”

So they dropped us seven miles off in the Pacific. A hot August night and back on the mainland other kids our age were riding the one-ways in their hopped-up cars and listening to the Beach Boys, planning their surfing parties. We stuck close together, heading toward shore in a tight V. Just when we thought we had it licked, only a mile or two from shore, that's when the shark moved in, throwing up a big green glowing wake of bioluminescence. We knew it was a shark by the way it circled, and we knew it was huge by the force of the wake.

Everyone started to panic. Billy Mack was going wild, screaming at it, kicking at it madly. I grabbed him by the hair and jerked his ear up to my lips. I whispered hoarsely:

“Listen, you stupid farm-boy bastard. If that shark kills us he kills us. But if he doesn't kill us, you can bet these guys are gonna remember how you acted. And they ain't ever gonna respect you. Never. And you'd be
better off
being dead, I can guarantee you that.”

It settled him better than a slap in the face. The shark's circles were getting tighter and tighter. I knew our only chance was to try to scare it off. I pulled my knife from the scabbard belted to my calf; the good Randall attack-survival model 18; the one with the seven-and-a-half-inch blade of the finest stainless made, the one with the threaded brass butt cap and waterproof O-ring, and flared holes in the hilt for converting it to a spear. That knife had cost me a month's pay, and now I was going to see if it was worth it. I moved out away from the V, thrashing my arms, trying to set myself up as bait. Strangely, I wasn't surprised to see Billy Mack right beside me. If I was going to be bait then, dammit, he was going to be bait too. A tough little guy. On the shark's first pass, I expected to be bumped. That's the way it happens in the survival books they had pounded into our heads. A shark first bumps,
then
circles back to attack. But this was the deep-water Pacific. At night. And this shark wasn't a member of any literary guild. I felt no pain, only impact. It was like being dragged behind a ski boat without skis. Water was being forced up my nose, my face contorted by our speed through the water. Somehow, I got around behind the shark, holding onto his back for dear life. Only I knew I was already a dead man. He was too big for me to get my arms clear around him, and I thought: This is one magnificent son of a bitch. Again and again I stabbed that fish, probing for its heart with that good Randall knife. I tried to remember my shark anatomy: over 250 species; single circulation system, phylum Vertebrata, no true bone cells, skeletal support from cartilage, tiny cordlike brain—none of that information was worth a damn. What I did know was this: sharks, like some people, die very very hard. The shark began to sound, swimming toward the bottom. I didn't care. In that black underwater world, all I knew was that I was going to kill that shark or die trying. My air was gone. Funny colors, red and green and yellow, exploded in my brain. With one last great effort, I buried the knife in the shark's underbelly and pulled with all my strength, trying to slice clear to the anal cavity. I felt the huge shudder, felt that great fish list sideways in its final, convulsive, circular death dance.

I don't know how I made it back to the surface. But I did. Billy Mack was still there. The rest of the guys were a couple hundred yards away, trying to make it to land. I didn't blame them. Later, each and every one of them would risk their lives—and some would, in the end, lose their lives—for me.

“Jesus Christ,” Billy Mack had said, amazed that I was still among the breathing. “You were down there
forever
. For goddam
forever
. I thought . . . I thought . . . ”

There was an odd, burning sensation around my left pelvic area. “Billy Mack,” I told him, gasping, beginning to cramp with pain, “as long as I'm around, you ain't ever gonna die. And as long as you're around, I ain't gonna die. Remember that, buddy. I'm hurt, Billy. Maybe bad. You gotta get me back. Promise me that. You won't let me die, I won't let you die.”

It took 148 stitches. It was a huge dusky shark—they knew from a ragged tooth imbedded in my pelvis. Forever afterward, I was known as “Dusky.”

“Very rare,” the Navy marine biologist told me later. “A dusky almost never attacks man and certainly not in the Pacific. It's an Atlantic shark. Until you came along, that is. It's almost a kind of strange privilege. You ought to feel proud, MacMorgan.”

And for all these years, I
had
felt a strange pride in it. I had beaten nature's own perfect rogue warrior and gone back for more. When Billy and I got sick and tired of Nam—the politics, the pointless battles governed by pointless little men who never wanted you to win, not really—we retired, went to Key West, started chartering. I met Janet, who was then an actress on location in the Keys. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen, before or since. She told me she was tired of the glamour grind, the parties and premieres, the newspaper clowns always sniffing around. She said all she really wanted out of life was a home, kids, and something else; something that she had discovered was very rare indeed—a real man.

Billy Mack handled the wedding details singlehandedly. I hated that sort of crap, and Janet was on location in Ireland: her final film. And when Ernest and Honor came along he was official godfather and legal guardian if anything happened. They never tired of listening to his stories. Especially the story about the big dusky.

“Tell us again how Daddy got his name, Uncle Billy,” they would beg him.

Billy Mack and I wanted to get old and slack and slow together. He had his stories and I had that wide indentation of scar on my pelvis: the symbol of a promise we had made each other a long, long time ago one night in the black Pacific.

But now, four strangers had made a liar out of me. Two black guys, two white, in a ritzy racing boat. I had been around, and I had let Billy Mack die. And now someone was going to pay.

“Dusky! Dusky! Are you listenin'?”

The reality of Nels Chester screaming at me over the Konel VHF jolted me out of my nostalgic reverie.

“Yeah, I'm here, Nels.”

“Christ, I thought for a second they'd gotten you too.”

“Not hardly. Tell me again: which way were they headed?”

“Well, east-nor'east, tryin' to pick up the main shippin' markers into Key West, I suppose. But if you're figurin' on interceptin' that cigarette hull, Dusky, there's just no way, 'cause it's clear outta sight already.”

“Shut up, Nels. What about Billy Mack's boat? How many guys are in it?”

“Two. The big colored guy that cut Billy, and one of the white guys.”

“That course, Nels—that course will bring them right by the shoals at Sand Key and Eastern Dry Rocks, won't it?”

“Yeah, but hell, they won't even know those shoals are there. They ain't gonna slow up. I been around boats all my life, and these guys don't know what in the hell they're doin'.”