Aground (5 page)

He slid the handles of the oars through the tabs that served as oarlocks and began rowing. As soon as they were out from behind the plane, he looked over his shoulder and saw that Avery had approached nearer than he had expected; the
Dragoon
was not more than four hundred yards away. The sun was just coming up out of the sea beyond her, throwing her into silhouette. Beautiful, he thought—if she weren’t so obviously aground. Boats in trouble always left you with an uncomfortable feeling.

It was still dead calm, and the water lay as flat as steel except for an occasional and almost imperceptible lift and fall from some vestigial remnant of surge running in from the Santaren Channel, attenuated by five miles of shoal water between here and the edge of the Bank. He dug in the oars. As soon as they were clear of the plane, Avery started the starboard engine, swung, and taxied toward the deeper water to the west. Ingram studied the water around and under them as he rowed. Judging from the color and from what he could see of the bottom straight down, it was sand and at least two fathoms deep all the way up to where the
Dragoon
was lying, and the channel was a good hundred yards wide. The schooner drew seven feet; if they could get her off into it, she could probably make it back to deep water without trouble, provided they made the attempt in good light.

But—he shot another glance over his shoulder—getting her off didn’t look too promising as they came nearer. The blue water of the channel was half a ship’s length away from her stern. The deepest part of her keel would be still another thirty feet forward of that, so she might have to move back some sixty or seventy feet before she found enough water to float her unless the tide came a lot higher than it was now, and he was afraid it was very near to slack high at the moment.

The sound of the plane’s engine died abruptly as Avery cut it off and let the plane come to rest about a mile away. They were now less than fifty yards from the port side of the schooner. He changed course to come around under her stern.

“Can’t we go aboard on this side?” Mrs. Osborne asked.

“There’s something I want to see first,” he replied.

“Oh,” she said. “The name.”

Not exactly, he thought, but made no reply. She was leaning to the right, trying to get a glimpse of it.
“Lorna,”
she called out suddenly. “And look—you can still see a little of the old lettering under that blue paint.”

He glanced around as they came in under the counter. She was right. The new name had been lettered in black over the light blue with which they’d painted the topsides, but at either end the
D
and the
n
of
Dragoon
still showed. It was a sloppy job of painting. He shipped the oars and caught hold of the rudder post; they stopped, and hung, suspended in utter silence. The tide was almost at a standstill. He waited for the ripples to die away, and then leaned over, peering straight down through water as transparent as gin. His eyes narrowed.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Look,” he replied. “See that long gouge the keel made, leading backward toward the channel?”

“Yes. What does that mean?”

“She didn’t drift in here. She was under way when she hit.”

She looked up. “Then they were still aboard.”

“Somebody was.”

He noted that unconsciously they had lowered their voices. Well, there was something ghostly about it. Maybe it was the silence.

Why hadn’t they at least tried to kedge her off? From the looks of the bottom they’d backed the engine down, throwing sand forward, but there was no sign of an anchor cable, even a broken one. It was possible, of course, that the dinghy was already gone, but they could have floated the anchor astern, using one of the booms for a raft, or carried it across the bottom a few steps at a time by diving. He’d better keep Mrs. Osborne on deck until he’d had a look below; there could be a body, or bodies.

He shoved away from the rudder post and took up the oars again. They went slowly up the starboard side. She was low in the water, all right. Several inches. This was the high side, the way she was listing, and the line of the old boot-topping was almost in the water. If you had her up to her proper water line, she’d be within a foot of floating right now. She must be holed. He peered down but couldn’t see past the turn of the bilge. They continued forward, passed under the bowsprit, and came aft along the port side.

When they came abreast of the main he shipped the oars again and reached up to catch the shrouds just above the chainplates. With the port list, the deck was not too high above them. Gathering up the painter, he climbed on deck. He made the painter fast and reached down a hand for her. She scrambled up, ducked under the lifeline, and stood beside him.

The deckhouses were long and low, rising not over two feet above the deck, with small portholes along their sides. Two or three of the portholes were open, but he could see nothing beyond them because of the dimness inside the cabins. The sun was above the horizon now and warm on the side of his face as it gilded the masts and rigging. Everything was wet with dew. He stood for a moment looking along the sloping, deserted deck. There was an air of desolation about it as though the schooner had been abandoned for weeks, but he realized it was probably nothing more than a general untidiness that offended his seaman’s sense of order. The sails were gathered in sloppy and dribbling bundles along the booms rather than properly furled, and at the bases of the fore- and mainmasts the falls of halyards and topping lifts lay helter-skelter in a confused jumble of rope. Neither of them had said a word. It was almost as though they were reluctant to break the hush.

They walked back to the break of the after deckhouse, and stepped down into the cockpit. It was a long one, and fairly wide, and at the after end of it were the binnacle, wheel, and the controls for the auxiliary engine. Ingram turned and looked back at the tracks they had left in the dew collected in millions of tiny droplets over the decks. There were no others.

“I’ll have a look below,” he said. “You wait here a minute.”

“All right,” she replied.

The companion hatch was open. He went down the ladder. After the sunlight on deck, the interior of the large after cabin was somewhat dim, but as his eyes came below the level of the hatch he saw several things almost at once. What appeared to be scores of long wooden cases were piled high on both sides of the cabin and in two of the four bunks, held in place by a criss-cross network of rope lashings. But it was one of the other bunks, the one on the port side forward, that riveted his attention and caused him to mutter a startled oath as he hurried down the last two steps. In it was the body of a slender, dark-haired man in khaki trousers, lying face down with one arm dangling over the side. He crossed to the bunk with three long strides and reached down to touch his arm, expecting to find it rigid. It was warm, and yielded to his hand, and in the brief fraction of a second in which this registered in his mind and the man began to turn on his side he heard Mrs. Osborne scream,
“Look out!”
and he turned himself. In back of him, leaning against the companion ladder behind which he’d apparently been hiding, was a hairy and half-naked giant cradling a Browning Automatic Rifle in the crook of his arm. He looked like a wartime atrocity poster. “Welcome aboard, Herman,” he said. “We’re glad to see you.

5

The immobility of shock was gone then. “Get off!” Ingram shouted. He could see nothing of Mrs. Osborne except one slender hand grasping the top of the ladder railing, but knew she was looking down right on top of the man. The latter swung the muzzle of the BAR up through the hatch, and said, “Come on down, baby. That plane’s a mile away. He can’t hear you.”

Ingram was already pushing off the bunk to lunge at him when he realized what he was doing and caught himself. Crashing into him with that BAR pointed up at her could cut her in two. At the same moment something pressed into his back just below his shoulder blades, and the man behind him said, “Relax.”

Rae Osborne came down the ladder. The big man jerked his head toward the other bunk, opposite Ingram. “Sit down,” he ordered. “You too, Herman.”

Ingram stepped across and sat down beside her, silently cursing himself for an idiot. But how could he have known? There’d been no footprints in the dew up there. Apparently the big man guessed his thoughts, for he grinned. “We had a hunch you might be back early if you came by plane, so we stayed off the deck.”

“All right, all right! What do you want?”

“Just a little help.” He turned to Rae Osborne. “You’d be the owner, right?”

“I was under that impression,” she said.

“And you brought Herman out here to see about getting this scow off the mud?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Just checking, baby. I think we can use him.”

She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Experts. We’re fresh out.” He cradled the BAR in one mammoth arm, and reached over to the shelf on the port bulkhead where the radiotelephone was installed. He switched on the receiver. He picked up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out, popped a large kitchen match with his thumbnail, and inhaled. He was one of the biggest men Ingram had ever seen, and he seemed to radiate an almost tangible aura of violence. Not evil, particularly—just violence. He had, in fact, an almost likable face, rugged and not unpleasantly ugly, spattered with the brown freckles and peeling sunburn of the heliophobe, and stamped with the casual recklessness of the utterly self-confident. His pale red hair was largely gone on top, showing a freckled expanse of scalp, though he was obviously not much over thirty. He wore nothing except unlaced shoes and a pair of khaki trousers hacked off at the knees.

The other man had rolled off the bunk and was standing near the foot of it with his back against the wall of boxes. He appeared to be in his early forties, and had a slender Latin face and grave brown eyes. He had shoved the Colt .45 automatic into the waistband of his trousers as if he were only a spectator. It was the big one who completely dominated the scene.

Rae Osborne looked around. “Where is the other man?”

“What other man?”

“Patrick Ives.”

“Never heard of him,” the big man said. He grinned at the Latin. “Carlos, you got the passenger list?”

“He was on here,” Rae Osborne snapped. “Why lie about it? The dinghy was picked up, with his clothes and watch—”

“Oh, you mean Hollister.”

“His name wasn’t Hollister.”

He gestured impatiently. “So who cares what his name was? He’s dead. That’s why we need Herman.”

Ingram was thinking he’d been betrayed by his own narrow professional outlook as much as anything. Nobody had made an effort to get her off, hence there was nobody aboard. This possibility hadn’t even occurred to him. He looked at the boxes, aware that at least they knew now why the
Dragoon
had been stolen. He should have guessed it before. “Where were you bound?” he asked. “Cuba?”

The big man shook his head. “Central America.”

“You’d never make it, even if you got her off.”

“We’ll make it, don’t worry.”

“What does he mean?” Rae Osborne broke in. “And what’s in all those boxes?”

“Guns,” Ingram said.

“Knock it off,” the big man ordered. “We can’t stand here all day flapping our gums. We’ve got that plane to take care of. Take a squint, Carlos, and see where it is now.”

The Latin turned and looked out one of the small portholes. “The same. About a mile.”

“Facing this way?”

“More or less.”

“All right, here’s the schedule, as the Limeys say—”

“Listen,” Ingram interrupted. “Whatever your name is—”

The big man laughed. “Did we forget to introduce ourselves? Wait’ll the yacht club hears about that. I’m Al Morrison. And this is Carlos Ruiz.”

“All right,” Ingram said, “just what do you think you’re going to do?”

Morrison shook his head. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you, if you’d shut up and listen. You’re going up on top, you and the cupcake. That pilot’ll be able to see you, but he couldn’t hear you if you yelled your lungs out. You look everything over, give it the old expert routine, and then you come back down and get on the horn and tell the pilot to go home. You’ve decided you can get her loose from the mud, and you’re going to stay aboard and sail her back to Key West.”

“And then what?” Ingram asked.

“As soon as he gets out of sight, we go to work. You’ve just been elected vice president in charge of transportation.”

He couldn’t mean it, Ingram thought. He couldn’t be that crazy. “Look, Morrison—use your head, will you? Running guns is one thing—”

Morrison cut him off. “Save it. I need legal advice, I’ll send for a lawyer.”

“We can’t call the plane with this phone. They use different frequencies.”

“Snow me not, Herman. I may not know my foot from a bale of hay about boats, but I do know something about radios and planes. Most of these crates in the Islands carry the intership frequencies. Carlos, you hold ‘em till I get set.”

“Okay,” Ruiz said. He removed the automatic from the waistband of his khakis. Morrison went by them and disappeared into the passageway going forward. Even in the sloppy, unlaced shoes, he moved as though he were on pads.

“How about it, Ruiz?” Ingram demanded. “You want to spend the rest of your life in prison for a few lousy guns?”

Ruiz shrugged. “No spik Inglish.”

Morrison called out forward. Ruiz motioned with the automatic. They went up the companion ladder and stood in the cockpit in brilliant sunlight. Ruiz was covering them from the ladder, his head still below the cockpit coaming. The forward hatch, just beyond the foremast, was slightly open, and he could see the muzzle of the BAR watching them like an unwinking eye. Smart, he thought. If they’d stayed below, Avery might conceivably have suspected something, but now it would appear from the plane they’d found nothing in the cabin and had returned to the deck to complete the inspection before calling.

“Stay over to the right,” Morrison ordered. “Don’t get behind those masts. Try to jump over the side, and I’ll cut Dreamboat off at the knees.”

“Well,” Rae Osborne demanded, “does he think we’re going to stand still for this?”

“He seems to,” Ingram said.

“Aren’t you going to do anything at all?”

He turned and looked at her. “Can you suggest something?”

Morrison called orders. They walked up the starboard side. He looked out at the plane, lying placidly on the water a mile away like a child’s toy on a mirror. It could just as well be in another universe. They crossed to the port side abaft the foremast and stared down in the water. “What happened to Hollister?” he asked.

“He drowned,” Morrison replied from the hatch.

“How?”

“Trying to swim back to the boat.”

From the dinghy, he thought. “What was he doing? And where did it happen?”

“Right here. We ran aground during the night, and the next morning Hollister said we’d have to unload the guns to get her off. He took the skiff and went over to that little island to see if it was dry enough to stack ‘em on. On the way back the motor quit on him. The tide was running pretty fast, and he started to drift away. He took off his clothes and jumped in and tried to kick it along with his feet. He kept losing ground, though, and finally left it and started to swim. He didn’t make it.”

“What day was this?”

“Sunday, I think. What difference does it make? Now go back and start the engine.”

They went aft. Ingram stepped down into the cockpit.

The engine controls were beside the helmsman’s station. He switched on the ignition, set the choke, and pressed the starter switch. On the third attempt, the engine fired with a puff of exhaust smoke under the stern and settled down to a steady rumble that could easily be heard by Avery aboard the plane. Morrison might be crazy, but he wasn’t missing a bet.

“Turn it off. Go back down.”

They went down the ladder. Ruiz backed up to the forward end of the cabin. Morrison emerged from the passageway between the two staterooms with the BAR slung in his arm. He nodded toward the radiotelephone. “Get on the blower. Tell him just what I said.”

Ingram shook his head. “No.”

“Don’t try to play tough, Herman. It could get real hairy.”

“You won’t shoot.”

“No. But I’ll break Dreamboat’s arm. We don’t need her.”

Silence fell, and tightened its grip on the scene. Ingram stared from one to the other. “I don’t think you would.”

Morrison regarded him with bitter humor. “That’d be kind of a tough one to second-guess, wouldn’t it, Herman? This far from a doctor?”

He held it for another second. Once that plane was gone, it wouldn’t be back. Morrison jerked his head at Rae Osborne. “Come here, baby.”

Ruiz spoke then, in Spanish. “This I don’t like, Alberto.”

“Shut your mouth, you fool,” Morrison snapped, also in perfect colloquial Spanish. “He may understand.”

The suddenness of it caught Ingram by surprise. He fought to keep his face expressionless, hoping he’d recovered in time.

“He doesn’t understand,” Ruiz said. “And this thing is very bad.”

He would break the arm, Morrison replied. Likewise the other arm. And he would commit other acts, which he detailed at some length. Spanish is a language of great beauty, but it also has potentialities for brutal and graphic obscenity probably surpassing even the Anglo-Saxon. Faint revulsion showed in Ruiz’ eyes. Ingram believed he was being given an examination in the language, and managed to keep his face blank. He hoped Mrs. Osborne didn’t speak it, or if she did, that she had learned it in school.

“See,” Ruiz said. “It is as I have said. He does not understand. Must we do this?”

“We have no choice,” Morrison snapped. “Would you like to go back?”

“It is unfortunate.” Ruiz spread his hands. “Well, if we must—”

“What are you jabbering about?” Ingram demanded.

“Which one to break first, Herman,” Morrison replied in English. “It’s not a very pretty sound when it goes, but maybe she’ll yell loud enough to cover it. Let’s get on with it, Dreamboat.” He stepped across, caught her wrist, and began to bring it up behind her back.

“All right,” Ingram said bleakly. “I’ll call him.”

Morrison smiled, and let go the wrist. “Now you’re with it. Just pick up the mike.”

He lifted the handset from its cradle on the front of the instrument. This actuated the switch starting the transmitter; the converter whirred. Morrison had already set the band switch to 2638 Kc. He pressed the button. “This is the
Dragoon,
calling McAllister plane.” He didn’t know the plane’s call letters.
“Dragoon
to Avery, come in, please.”

There was a moment’s tense silence. Then Avery’s voice boomed in the loudspeaker. “Avery back to Captain Ingram. How does it look on there? Everything all right? Over.”

Morrison nodded. Ingram spoke into the handset. “Everything seems to be in good shape. I think we’ll be able to kedge her off. We’ve decided to stay aboard and see if we can get her back to Key West. Over.”

“You mean both of you?”

“Yes. Over.”

Avery’s voice came in. “I see. Well, if you run into any trouble and want us to come back or send a boat, call us through the Miami Marine Operator. Can you get her with your set?”

“Yes. We’ve got that channel.”

“Good. Any sign of what happened to the thieves?”

Morrison shook his head, and made a rowing motion with his left arm. Ingram looked bitterly around the cabin. “No. Apparently they just abandoned her.”

“Right. Well, if that’s all, I’ll take off. Good luck to you.”

“Thanks. This is the
Dragoon,
off and clear.”

He replaced the handset; the sound of the converter stopped. What now? Apparently Avery had accepted Mrs. Osborne’s sudden change of mind without question. There’d been no mention of the money she still owed McAllister for the charter, but they would merely take it for granted she intended to pay as soon as they reached Key West. It could be as long as a week before anybody even began to wonder about it.

“What are you going to do with us?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Morrison replied. “You’ll get your boat back when we’re through with it.”

“And when will that be?”

“As soon as we deliver the cargo.”

“This is kidnap. You can get life for it. I don’t think you’re that dumb—”

“Shut up,” Morrison ordered. “Go on top. I want you up there when he takes off.”

They went up the ladder and stood on the after deck beside the cockpit with just the muzzle of the gun showing in the hatch behind them. “Don’t look around this way,” Morrison warned. They stared out at the plane. One of the propellers turned, shattering the sunlight, and then the cough and roar of the engine came to them across the mile of water. The other engine caught. The plane began to taxi toward the south. Ruiz is afraid of it, he thought. But that was no help; Morrison was in command, and he was the dangerous one. Well, he still had one small edge; they didn’t know he spoke Spanish.

The plane had stopped now; it swung about, facing north. The engines roared and it began to gather speed. It went past them over a mile to the westward, lifted from the water, and began to dwindle away in the void. He felt sick. Morrison came up the ladder behind them, followed by Ruiz.

Morrison sat down on the corner of the deckhouse with the BAR across his legs, and said, “All right, let’s get this scow off the mud. What do we do first?”