Age of Voodoo (23 page)

“Stop it. You’ll make me blush.”

“I’m rarely tempted to put my gun in my mouth these days. Most mornings I wake up and I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the day ahead. I’m in a good place, by my standards. I’m as happy as I think I can reasonably ever be. A long, hard road, but I made it. You will, too.”

“And you’re not worried that all this”—Wilberforce waved to indicate Team Thirteen, bloodied
Puddle Jumper
, the boatyard, the mission—“is going to ruin things? Set you back to where you don’t want to be again?”

Lex weighed it up. “None of this has been my choice.
Force majeure
. That’s French for ‘tough shit,’ more or less. It’s a hand that’s been dealt me, not one I asked for, but one I’m having to play nonetheless. And it’s going to be worth it, in the long run. I suppose now’s as good a time as any to tell you that I’m in this for the money.”

“Me too. Buckler’s named a fee. It’s enough to pay off the Garfish and more.”

“Yeah, but in my case we’re talking enough for me to buy us a Sealine F-series.”

Wilberforce gaped. “No, man. Don’t do this. Don’t be bullshitting me. Don’t you dare.”

“I’m not kidding. Second-hand, not brand new, but still. We can do it, set up that fishing business. You won’t need to be in hock to anyone. We’ll own a boat, free and clear, and all the gear we need.”

Wilberforce’s eyes sparkled. His dream, suddenly, tantalisingly achievable. “I don’t believe it. For real?”

“A couple of weeks from now you could be captaining a sports cruiser out to sea, with First Mate Dove on deck setting up the rods and handing out the cold beers.”

Before Wilberforce could say anything else, Buckler’s voice rang out across the boatyard. “Yo, ladies! I appreciate you’re having a lovely time gossiping, but we’re on the clock and high tide waits for no one. Allen, you should be running pre-flight checks, and Dove, you should be getting your ass out of the way and letting him do that.”

“Yes, sir, lieutenant,” Lex shouted back, firing off a snappy salute. “Getting my arse out of the way, sir.”

Buckler’s glare, even over a distance of a hundred yards, could have melted a hole through plate steel.

“Eyes on the prize,” Lex confided to Wilberforce. “Mine are. Let yours be, too.”

M
OST OF TEAM
Thirteen’s bags went into the Turbo Beaver’s freight hold, although two were stowed in the extra cargo space in the floats. The Zodiacs were laid lengthways along the aisle of the cabin, dismantled into their component parts: wooden transoms and thrustboards, aluminium deckplates, deflated neoprene sacs squashed as flat as they could go. Their outboard motors were lodged in the rearmost two seats, belted in place.

“We all set?” said Wilberforce.

Buckler untied the mooring ropes, kick-shoved the plane away from the dock, clambered inside and yanked the door shut. He slid into the seat at the front beside Wilberforce’s. Lex and Albertine occupied the two seats immediately behind. The Team Thirteen shooters filled the remaining four rows.

Lex looked across the aisle at Albertine. She was staring out of the window, gripping the armrests.

“Not a good flyer?” he asked.

“Jumbo jets, no problem,” she replied. “My cousin’s rust-bucket of a seaplane, on the other hand...”

“You think this is bad, you should try taking an internal commercial flight in Russia,” Tartaglione said, leaning forward to talk over her seat headrest. “Those planes are so shit, not even the pilots are sure they’re going to make it to their destination.”

“It would help if they didn’t drink so much vodka while at the controls,” Sampson chipped in. “That’d bring the crash rate right down.”

“Yeah, but it’s a catch-twenty-two. If they didn’t drink, they’d never have the courage to fly.”

“Is this supposed to be helping me?” Albertine asked curtly.

“Just saying things could be a whole lot worse,” said Tartaglione. “Trying to put your mind at ease.”

“Well, thank you, but don’t.”

The engine started up, filling the cabin with noise and vibration.

“Welcome aboard, everyone,” Wilberforce called out. “This is your pilot, wishing you a pleasant trip. Our journey time is approximately one and a half hours, and we’ll be cruising at an altitude of—”

“Cut the crap,” Buckler interrupted. “Just fly.”

Wilberforce glanced round at Lex, who simply gave a nod that said:
Eyes on the prize
.

“Whatever you say,” said Wilberforce to Buckler. “You’re the boss.”

He let
Puddle Jumper
continue to drift away from the dock with the propeller turning at a low rate. The river current caught and turned the plane. When its nose was facing downstream, Wilberforce upped the revs and began taxiing along the inlet.

As the inlet widened into an estuary, the going got rougher. The clash between waves surging in from the ocean and the river’s outward flow created a field of spiky whitecaps. Wilberforce eased the throttle forwards, and soon
Puddle Jumper
was bounding and juddering along, past the inlet’s mouth and out onto the open sea. Everyone in the cabin rocked in their seats. The airframe creaked loudly with every impact of the surf chop, and the wings wobbled disconcertingly. Sea spray spattered the windows. Albertine was intoning words under her breath, and if it wasn’t a prayer to the loa, Lex had no idea what else it could be.

Wilberforce poured on more speed, and the buffeting started to lessen.
Puddle Jumper
was beginning to skim the waves rather than butting headlong through them. He nudged the yoke back, and all at once the plane was aloft, released from the water’s grasp and up into its proper element.

TWENTY-ONE

CALL SIGNS

O
NCE
P
UDDLE
J
UMPER
had gained cruising altitude and levelled out, Team Thirteen changed out of their civvies into black jumpsuits and Kevlar vests. Small, lightweight VHF comms headsets were distributed and donned. Both Lex and Albertine were given one.

“Piece of cake to use,” Buckler told Albertine. “Channel’s pre-selected. Tap the earpiece to speak. Think of it as glorified Bluetooth.”

“Testing,” said Albertine.

“There you go. Coming through loud and clear. Team Thirteen, sound off.”

“Penetrator,” said Sampson.

“Warmone,” said Morgenstern.

“Jersey Shore,” said Tartaglione.

“Whisper,” said Pearce.

“Big Chief Dirty,” said Buckler. “You, Miz Montase, are Guardian Angel. You’ll be known by no other name when we’re on comms. As for you, Dove, you get White Feather.”

“Don’t I get to choose my own call sign?”

“You get what you’re given.”

“But White Feather? It’s kind of insulting.”

“Don’t read too much into it. It’s purely surname-related.”

“So you say.”

“Take it or leave it, ace.”

“White Feather,” Lex muttered into the headset mike.

Buckler gave a thumbs-up. All comms were functioning.

Puddle Jumper
flew on. A trade wind was nudging in from the side, and Wilberforce worked the rudder pedals repeatedly to counteract it and maintain course. Quarter of an hour after takeoff he was contacted by ground control at Manzanilla International, requesting confirmation of aircraft registration and purpose of journey. He responded by saying that he was on a pleasure trip and hadn’t filed a flight plan beforehand since he was flying VFR in low-altitude airways and not intending to cross any national borders.

He listened over his headphones as Manzanilla ground control spoke again. Then he covered the mike with one hand and said to Buckler, “They’re demanding a destination. What should I tell them?”

“Tell them there isn’t one. You’re on a loop, taking sightseers around the coasts of Cuba and Great Inagua then coming home.”

Wilberforce relayed this, got an answer, and shook his head at Buckler. “No dice. They’re getting very pushy; we’re over water, harder to locate if we go down. Which,” he added loudly, for Albertine’s benefit, “we’re not going to.”

“All right,” said Buckler. “Tell them to call this number.” He reeled off a phone number with a US international dialling code and a 202 Washington DC prefix. “When someone picks up, they should quote the following: ‘Priority Delta Seven One Niner.’”

A few minutes later, Manzanilla International was back in touch. Wilberforce could only grin.

“They say thank you for that, not a problem, have a nice flight.”

Puddle Jumper
threaded the strait between Cuba and Hispaniola, the Windward Passage, at 5,000 feet. Turbulence was almost constant at this height. The plane sagged and seesawed in the air. Albertine’s knuckles showed grey through her skin as she clung to the armrests, and her mouth was a tight lipless line. Pearce, by contrast, was dozing, and Morgenstern was doing Sudoku puzzles on a Nintendo DS. As for Sampson and Tartaglione, they were busy swapping combat reminiscences. They switched back and forth between tales of conventional ops from their days as regular SEALs and their more recent exploits as Thirteeners, so that one moment they would be discussing a hostage rescue or a night-time antiterrorist raid, the next recalling how they had helped roust a devil-worshipping apocalypse cult who were attempting to summon some nameless nether-being from beyond with a view to unleashing it upon the world. They didn’t appear to discriminate between the two types of mission, as if a band of Mujahideen armed with AK-47s was little different from a winged snake-woman lurking in an abandoned casbah in a southern province of Morocco, as if nobbling a Nicaraguan cocaine baron was on a par with investigating the site of a reported UFO crash in the Peruvian jungle.

Even the strangest things, it seemed, could become mundane if you were exposed to them often enough.

The flow of anecdotes was broken by Wilberforce announcing that GPS now put them within twenty kilometres of Anger Reef. The island should be visible on the horizon shortly.

Everyone craned their necks to look. Buckler spotted it first.

“Objective at one o’clock,” he said, and there, amid the jewelled glitter of the ocean, it sat—green and yellow, tiny and lonely, a fleck of dry land in a wilderness of water, like a desert oasis in reverse.

“It’s like God hawked up a loogie and spat,” was Tartaglione’s view.

“Seen bigger pimples,” was Sampson’s.

Wilberforce banked to starboard and commenced descent.

As the island loomed, the reefs surrounding it showed as a ragged pale halo. Clear sea turned milky where it washed over the coral banks.

Lower still, it became possible to distinguish the crescents of beach between the island’s promontories and the scrubby greenery encrusting the shoreline and the lusher, taller greenery growing inland. The remains of manmade structures were visible: a couple of half-collapsed jetties and several huge blocks of concrete which at one time had been the bases for radio masts and radar arrays. The latter put Lex in mind of lost temples to forgotten gods, relics of some ancient civilisation.

Wilberforce turned into the wind to facilitate a smoother landing.
Puddle Jumper
swooped towards the ocean, flaps lowered. The floats touched down once, and again, and then the Turbo Beaver was rumbling and bucking across the water. It eventually levelled, then sank slightly forwards as it came to a dead stop.

The plane had set down a few hundred metres from the coral barrier, and at this angle it became apparent just how low-lying Anger Reef was. The island was a thin green line above the water, even its loftiest palm trees no higher than a two-storey building. If, as climatologists predicted, sea levels were set to rise, they would only have to go up by a metre or so for Anger Reef to be swamped from end to end, its scant acreage completely inundated.

Wilberforce was first out of the door. He had rigged up an anchor from a length of rope and a piece of iron rebar hammered into a hook shape; he tossed it overboard into the crystalline water and watched it snag on the seabed some twenty feet below.
Puddle Jumper
was already drifting, a victim of current and wind, but once the anchor line went taut the plane stayed put, penduluming gently from side to side on the end of its tether.