Secret sea; (7 page)

"Thanks," Pete said.

Out in the sunshine he walked slowly along the graveled path.

What happens to Johnny now? he asked himself. Already there were rumors that the Japanese were asking for peace. Perhaps in only a matter of weeks he would be out of the Navy. And out of a job. Already all his savings had been spent getting Johnny started.

What happens now? Pete asked himself. Then he swung his left arm out, the hand a fist. He looked at it bitterly and put his fist in his pocket.

The Santa Ybel was the only answer. If Mr. Williams could take care of Johnny while he outfitted a sailboat and went searching for treasure, he could pay him back—if he found it. If he didn't . . . Well, Pete thought, that comes later.

Aboard ship he asked Bill to come up and, when he shut the door behind him, Pete told him what had happened.

"I think it's a good thing, Pete," Williams said slowly. "You never really wanted to go Regular and you would never have been happy in the peacetime Navy. Look at you now. This is peacetime duty—this yachting around the Gulf. And

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you've hated every minute of it. So—get your hat, we're going over to Miami to see Dad."

"All right," Pete said. "But before we go, I want to check on that fellow Weber."

He called Security and asked them. Weber had not come to work that morning. He had given as his home address the Regent Hotel.

Pete called the hotel and as he waited Bill said, "What're you going to say if he answers the phone?"

"FU ask him if he would be interested in contributing ten dollars to the Injured Naval Oncers' League."

But there was no Weber registered at the hotel and they could not find any indication that he had been registered there during the past month.

Pete put the phone down. "Fm probably cockeyed. But I can't get rid of the feeling that that man who wrecked my desk safe is the same one who murdered the Cubans. The *tall one,' Bill."

"Sounds like it. But how in blue blazes did he find out? How did he know it was in your safe? How did he get here? What is he, a magician? You know, people can't just go and come from Cuba to Key West the way they could before the war."

"Maybe it was this way, Bill. Narvez and his son tried to escape from him by sailing out into that storm. Weber, if that's his name, found out about it and set out after them. He finds them,

THE PURPLE HEART

but he's just a few minutes late, because we're there. He spots us and stays in sight just long enough to read our number. When we leave the wreck, he comes in and finds both bodies gone.

*'There're only two things now. Either the log sank or it's aboard my ship. If it sank, it's all over. So Weber comes straight to the Keys. It wouldn't be hard to sneak a small boat in to one of those deserted islands. And Weber has no doubt got all the papers a civilian needs these days— draft card, identification, and all the rest. He finds out where our home port is. That isn't too hard to do."

**You make him out to be a pretty sharp operator," Williams said.

**No, just a man with a very logical mind." Pete suddenly stood up. **I think there's an idea loose in my mind," he said, reaching for the ship's service telephone. "Ask the pharmacist's mate to come up to the captain's cabin," he said.

When the pharmacist's mate came in, Pete smiled at him and waved toward a chair. '*This isn't official, and it's off the record, Phillips. I just want to know if you've been on liberty since we made port and, if you have, did you say anything to anyone about the two Cubans we picked up? . . . It's not official and whatever you say is between us."

"Well, sir, I don't think I said anything I shouldn't have said. I met a fellow who said he'd

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heard about it and thought maybe he knew who the Cubans were."

"What'd he look Uke?" Pete asked.

**Tall, thin fellow. Had a GI haircut. Thin face. I didn't talk to him much, Captain."

**Did he ask you about the box the Cuban had?"

"Well, he just asked if the old man had any valuables on him. But since I didn't know him, I just said that any personal effects in a case like that were taken in custody by the commanding oflScer."

"That's all I wanted to know, Phillips. And you handled him exactly right. Thanks very much."

Phillips looked relieved as he got up and went out.

Pete turned slowly toward Williams. "A man with a very logical mind," he said quietly.

"And a good deal more. He's smart, Pete. He thinks fast and straight. I believe we'd better keep remembering that all the time."

"And we'd better get rid of the Santa Ybel log," Pete said. "As long as that thing is anywhere he can find it, the whole scheme can blow up in our faces."

"Where're you going to put it?"

Pete sat studying the toes of his shoes on the shelf of his desk. Then he took his feet down. "Doesn't the Navy itself say that the U.S. Post

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OflSce is a pretty secure institution?" Pete got the log, wrapped it carefully in plain brown paper, tied it securely, sealed it, and addressed it to Mr. Pete Martin, c/o General Delivery, Dadesville, Georgia.

"Everybody in Dadesville knows me by sight and Mr. Barney, the postmaster, wouldn't give this to anyone else on earth."

"Okay. Let's go see Dad."

Before they left, Pete folded up an unmarked chart of the Gulf of Mexico and put it into a big manila envelope. Then, down in the ship's post office, Pete asked when the next mail was going out.

"I'm closing the bag right now. Captain."

"Can I throw this in, Stuart?"

"Yes, sir." The yeoman weighed the package, put stamps on, and then canceled them with a United States Navy stamp. Pete watched him toss the log of the Santa Ybel into the mail pouch, then draw up the strings, click the lock, and put the wire seal on it.

As Pete and Bill left the ship, Pete said, "If Weber can get the log now, he can have it. I don't want to compete with a man smart enough to figure that one out."

"I believe it's safe, Pete. The only chance of his getting it will be between the time it leaves the ship on the truck and when it reaches the main post office."

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"I'll write to Mr. Barney and ask him to let me know if it gets there."

They showed their passes at the gate and walked on toward the town of Key West. It was almost sunset and the old town with its narrow, gloomy streets and Spanish-looking buildings seemed even older than it really was.

On the corner just before they reached the bus station, a gang of kids—about a dozen of them —came down the street led by one who looked to be about twelve years old. They stopped Bill and

.4?^^

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Pete and tried to sell them some picture post cards of Key West.

Pete and Bill turned them down, but the kids kept yelling at them and clustering around their legs.

"Listen, shove off, sailors," Pete said.

Then, with no warning, and very swiftly, the biggest of the kids shoved in close to Pete, grabbed the envelope containing the chart, and ran. As he grabbed it, he said in a low voice, "Okay, block 'em."

As Pete lunged after him, he found a solid wall of kids around his legs. He stopped and so did Bill as the kid with the chart disappeared down a narrow alleyway.

"All right, he got away," Pete said to the boys around his legs. "You can let go now. And tell him for me that it was a very nice operation all around."

The kids all ran in a different direction and Pete and Bill walked slowly on.

At last Bill said, "Weber isn't going to like it when he opens that up and finds nothing but an H.O. chart."

"I hope he spends all night going over it with a microscope," Pete said. "Because there isn't a mark on it."

"We learn a little every day, don't we, Skipper? Our little lesson for today is, 'Don't ever mark down the fix you got on the Santa YbeL'

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Just keep those little numbers up under your skull. . . . And now here is a minion of the law."

Bill went over to the policeman. He seemed unusually angry and upset as he told the cop what had happened. Pete joined in by saying that the stuff the kid had swiped was official Navy papers. The cop said he would do something about it right away and went off toward the alley.

"Weber is probably watching us out of one of these windows. Oh well, on to Miami. . . . You know, Pete, my dad is going to get a whale of a kick out of this whole thing. He doesn't have much fun sitting in that wheel chair year after year."

"Neither will Johnny, if he can get as far as a wheel chair," Pete said.

Book Two

ESCAPE

Mik

In the spring of 1946 a curious craft lay berthed at the yacht club in Miami. In the other berths the sleek yachts, the Sunday sailboats, the cruisers and fast runabouts made the old schooner look even older and more curious than she really was.

Her name was Indra and she was exactly forty-six years old. Unlike the other yachts, her standing rigging was thick, heavy stainless steel, the deadeyes tarred, and there were balls of bally-wrinkle on the shrouds to keep the sails from chafing through. Her new canvas was stiff and heavy, her running gear was all stout stuff. Unlike the smart boats around her in the yacht club, she was rigged for the open sea.

From a room in a Miami apartment house Pete Martin, civilian, and a frail, broken man sat

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looking down at the old schooner. Pete had changed a good deal since he had been released to inactive duty. All the fat which easy living had put on him was gone and he was nothing now but rawhide muscles and bone. His skin, after steady months under the sun, was burned brown, his face was lean with little wrinkles of fatigue showing around his eyes, and his teeth looked very white. His brown hair had been bleached by the sun and he never seemed to have time to get it cut regularly. His hands were rough and calloused; the dungarees he wore almost all the time were threadbare at the knees and elbows and across the back of his shoulders.

The man with him, looking down at the Indra, was Wild Bill Williams's father. Mr. Williams had once been a huge man but, after a derrick had collapsed on him during a salvage job in Valparaiso and broken nearly every bone in his body, there was nothing left of him but the broken frame of bones, the skin flabby on it. Only his face, cruelly lined by the permanent pain, seemed to be really alive.

During the months Pete had worked with him, he had found that Mr. Williams was one of the finest people he had ever known, and one of the smartest. Sitting forever in the wheel chair before the window, he seemed able to accomplish almost as much as Pete, who was free to walk the streets and swing a calking hammer.

MIKE

"She's ready to go," Pete said.

"Looks good. Do you think the hoist on the stern is heavy enough, Pete?" Mr. WiUiams asked. "After all, the heavy diving suit with you in it will weigh better than three hundred."

"I got some ironwood out of the Everglades. That thing hauled up a dead weight of six hundred pounds," Pete said.

"Good. When do you plan to sail?"

"That's what grinds me," Pete said. "I could sail tonight only I can't get anyone to go along. I've offered as much as a hundred a week but nobody wants it. All the young guys coming out of the service want something permanent. They won't listen to a couple-of-months proposition. And all the old ones are either lousy with dough or they are too lazy to heave on a gaff halyard. And you'd be surprised how many men there are in the world who don't know a lazy jack from a ratline."