Crackdown (38 page)

The bullet stream jerked towards me and I dropped flat. The second enemy machine-gun fired wildly above my head, then I heard the thud of boots running to my left. “Maggot!”

“I’m here, Nick!”

I clambered to my feet and ran towards the safety of the radio mast’s huge concrete base. The Maggot was already there, his rifle levelled above the concrete. The senator was hunched low, breathing hard and looking as though he wished he had brought a rifle. Or stayed in Washington. The sky was a cacophony of bullets. “What happened?” I shouted at the Maggot.

“Guard dog!” he shouted back. “I had to shoot the bloody thing when it attacked us! Then I dropped a flare into their generator fuel tank.”

“Well done!”

The senator half stood beside me and cupped his hands to shout over the sound of the gunfire. He was shaking and his voice had risen an octave in his fear. “I lost the radio! Where’s the spare?”

“In the boat!” I shouted.

He turned and looked towards the beach, but the space between us and our boat was laced with enemy tracer and bullets. “Jesus!” I saw him mouth the profanity. He was quivering with terror and I could not blame him. The senator had never before experienced the concentrated fire of automatic weapons. The hammer blows of the machine-guns’ noise was enough to unsettle the brain, let alone the genuine threat of death in the more sibilant passage of their bullets. The senator was just lucky that the bastards weren’t slinging artillery at us.

“We don’t need a radio!” I yelled the reassurance to him. “As soon as things calm down we’ll get the hell off the island! It won’t be long! They can’t keep using ammunition at this rate!”

“It was the dog!” the senator shouted, as though it would be useful if he explained precisely how he had lost the radio. “It came for me and I panicked. I dropped the set, you see, and ran.”

“It doesn’t matter!” I still needed to shout, for the night was cracking with bullets.

“But we need the radio!” The senator was veering towards hysteria again. “Don’t you understand, Nick, we’ve got to have the radio!”

“We don’t need a radio! We just need to get the hell out of here!”

Our chance to get the hell out of Murder Cay came just seconds later when, one by one, the various guns opposing us died away. The Colombians, or whoever it was that fired at us, must have ripped through a ton of ammunition, and now they were calming down. Or perhaps they believed us all to be dead. I waited a few seconds to make certain that the firing really had subsided, then I gestured for the senator to run back to the boat. “Keep low! Wait for us!”

I lay down behind the machine-gun, ready to offer covering fire if it was needed. The thinning orange smoke still provided protection enough to hide the senator’s lumbering run, for the enemy did not open fire again. Once I saw that the senator had safely reached the boat I tapped the Maggot’s shoulder. “Now you,” I said, “go!”

But my voice seemed to unleash a new torrent of enemy gunfire that screamed and whiplashed over our heads. The fire clanged on the mast and ricocheted off the concrete. A tracer bullet whined off one of the mast’s wire guy ropes to soar high and scarlet into the night sky. The Maggot had sensibly stayed under cover, and I crouched low beside him, and hoped to God that the senator was also flat on his belly. One of the enemy’s machine-guns had a very harsh, deep and menacing sound, and I guessed it was the half-inch Browning. I knew no flak-jacket could stop one of those rounds, and the best thing we could do was to lie still and pray that our enemies would soon become bored with playing at soldiers.

“Nick!” The senator was suddenly shouting at me from the beach. “Nick!” He had to scream to be heard over the sound of the gunfire.

I turned and swore helplessly.

Out in the lagoon was the white bone of a bow wave and the plume of a high-speed wake. A powerboat had circled the southern part of the island and was now speeding to cut off our retreat. “Stay still!” I shouted to the Maggot and the senator, hoping that immobility would hide our exact position, but I could have saved my breath for suddenly a trail of sparks twisted and climbed into the night from the approaching boat. The trail was the wake of a parachute flare that cracked open to illuminate the whole sky with its brilliant white light. The flare also served as a signal for the guns in the houses to cease their fire. The white light illuminated the whole western coast of Murder Cay, sharply revealing our beached and stranded boat in a pitiless white glare.

I was turning the machine-gun, settling its bipod and rearranging its heavy tail of bullets. I was slow, but the Kalashnikov really needed a two-man crew. “Fire at it, Maggot!” I shouted, but the men on the boat fired first and I saw their tracer, green like mine, flick low across the water. The senator was running towards us, his face a rictus of terror, but the gunner in the powerboat was not aiming for the senator, rather for our inflatable, and his aim was all too good for I could hear his bullets pounding and tearing at the stiff fabric tubes of the big rigid-raider. More and more of the bullets beat and thrashed at the dying boat.

I opened fire and my green tracer crossed theirs, and I dipped my line of green fire just as the men in the boat saw the danger and rammed their throttles forward. They were too late. My Kalashnikov’s jacketed bullets sliced into the powerboat like a chainsaw, and I saw the craft shuddering and twisting under the impact, then the boat accelerated crazily ahead so that its own machine-gun was thrown off balance and spewed its stream of tracer fire high into the air.

I paused to thread a new belt into the Kalashnikov. The powerboat turned away from us. It was running at full speed now and I guessed that the frightened helmsman was trying to find the channel through the Devil’s Necklace, but instead he hit a submerged coral head and the boat reared up into the air, aiming for the moon, and I saw the transom come clear of the water and in the dying light of the white flare I could see the whole open cockpit displayed towards us. A man was falling clear. The Maggot whooped at our victory, which was really no victory for we had lost our own boat. The enemy’s boat was also lost. The water spraying from its twin jet drives looked exactly like two rocket exhausts trying to hurl the sharp-nosed hull up to the stars, but then gravity won and the whole sleek craft turned on its back and crashed sickeningly down into the sea. White water splayed outwards, then the parachute flare died and we could see nothing more.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The senator seemed to be hyperventilating.

The smoke was clearing ahead of us, thinning and shredding above the golf course’s narrow fairway. The generator’s fuel tank still burned, but less fiercely now so that it cast a much smaller light.

I walked back to the water’s edge. Our enemies beyond the golf course had been blinded by the parachute flare, so for a few seconds it was safe to risk the open ground. I jumped down to the beach to see that our boat had been effectively destroyed. The inflatable had been equipped with seven separate air chambers, and any three were sufficient to keep the hull afloat, but only one of the compartments had survived the flail of bullets. Most of our ammunition seemed intact, and I hurled those boxes ashore. The big Thermos of coffee was shattered, and the sandwiches I had made on board Coffinhead’s boat had been soaked by salt water.

The senator joined me in the tangled sodden mess and, with a cry of triumph, produced the spare VHF radio, which had been protected from the sea by a waterproof case. He extended the radio’s stubby aerial, then crouched under the tiny bluff that edged the beach. “Stingray, Stingray,” I heard him gabble, and I guessed that the adrenalin and fear had curdled his memory.

“The word you want is Mayday!” I called to him.

“Mayday, Stingray. Acknowledge please.” He spoke with frantic urgency, so much so that it seemed to me that he must have lost his marbles, but then he offered me a curiously reassuring smile. “It’s OK, Nick, help will come.”

“Sure,” I said. “God will send a flight of killer-angels.” I cupped my hands and shouted at the Maggot to join us. “Bring the machine-gun!”

“What do we do now?” The Maggot asked when he reached us. The senator was fumbling with the transmit button, still desperately filling the airwaves with his message.

“We’ll work our way south.” I nodded towards the scrub-land that edged the airstrip. “We’ll carry as much ammunition as we can, and dump the rest. We’ll cross the island and steal one of the boats from the anchorage.” I grinned, pretending a confidence I did not feel.

“Nick! Nick!” The senator interrupted me. “It’s the radio! It’s not working!”

“You want Channel Sixteen,” I said patiently, “and just shout Mayday into it, then tell whoever answers that we’re under attack on Murder Cay.”

“But it’s broken!” the senator insisted, and I could see he was close to panicking again. I took the radio from him and found that a neat hole had indeed been punched clean through its casing. The radio must have been hit by one of the rounds fired from the powerboat, and it was now useless. “But we need it!” The senator stared at me, appalled.

“Forget it!”

“We’ll be stuck here!” The senator was shaking again.

“We won’t be stuck here! Trust me!” I pushed the Maggot’s bag of spare ammunition at the senator. “Carry that. We’re going to be all right, I promise! Let’s go!”

We hurried south, leaving the shattered boat behind. Our enemies, their night vision still not recovered from the flare’s brilliance, did not see us leave for, after a moment or two, they resumed firing at the base of the radio mast. I heard their bullets ring clear in the night, then a more muffled sound made me turn and curse.

“What?” the senator asked worriedly.

But before I could explain a sudden explosion cracked huge and violent in the lagoon. The plume of smoke and water shot fifty feet into the air. “The bastards have got a mortar!” I said in astonishment. The muffled sound I had first heard had been the mortar firing.

“Not bad for a bunch of
narcotraficantes,”
the Maggot said in wry admiration. “So where did they get that baby? Do you think they stole it from the Colombian army?”

“Who the hell cares?” The senator flinched as another bomb exploded far away. “I need a radio! I need a radio!”

“We’re going to find a radio!” I snapped. “We’re going to find a boat, and boats have radios. So come on!”

Our enemy had lost us for the moment, but I feared for our survival all the same. The mortar fired another bomb towards the base of the radio mast, but sooner or later the drug-runners would realise we had abandoned that shelter and then they would turn the lethal bombs towards the rest of the small island which offered precious little cover from the explosions. Which meant our best hope lay in finding a boat and then, ignominiously, running away.

We walked across the island, hidden from our enemies by the scrub that grew thickly to the north of the airstrip. The Maggot seemed excited by the gunfire, while the senator was merely desperate to find a radio. He had a moment’s wild hope when he noticed a twin-engined plane sitting under a crude palm-thatch shelter, but when the Maggot climbed on to the aircraft’s wing and opened its door, he saw that all the aircraft’s instruments and controls had been ripped out. “It looks like my plane,” he announced cheerfully.

“I need a-” The senator began his demand, but I was bored with his whining insistence and cut him off too sharply.

“I told you! We are going to find a fucking radio on board a fucking boat!”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” the senator complained.

“Don’t squabble, girls,” the Maggot said, “not when we’re having such fun.”

Our enemies were having less fun than before. They still fired some sporadic shots across the golf course, and their mortar thumped another half-dozen bombs towards the beach where we had landed, but their firing was tentative, almost as though they were puzzled by our lack of response. Or perhaps they were merely distracted by their other problems, the chief of which was that the fire, which the Maggot had started by shoving a flare into the generator’s petrol tank, was burning much more fiercely now. I saw a palm tree flash into sudden bright flame and spew sparks that whirled away across the island’s narrow waist. The light of the fire was bright on the big house with the tower and the small radar aerial.

We were far beyond the light thrown by the crackling flames. Instead we were hidden deep in a cloaking darkness as we walked past one of the big black trucks that still blocked the island’s runway. Off to our right we heard an engine start up, then a pair of headlights flared bright across the golf course and I suspected that the jeep with its rear-mounted machine-gun had been sent to find us, but the vehicle drove north, away from us, so for the moment we could safely ignore it.

We hurried on while, to our north, the jeep enfiladed the concrete foundation block of the mast and the heavy machine-gun pumped a stream of futile bullets into the shadowed space which we had long vacated. I knew it would only be seconds now before they discovered our absence, after which our enemies would begin searching the island in earnest.

But then, at last, the lagoon’s anchorage stretched open and serene in front of us. A dozen boats floated on the water’s sheer black surface that was glossed red by the flames. Closer at hand was the ruined beach house which offered a shadowed hiding place where the three of us crouched just a few paces from the water’s edge. “What we have to do now,” I said, “is swim to the nearest boat, turn on its electrics and call for help.”

“I’ll go,” the Maggot said.

“No!” The senator insisted. “I will.”

“You both go,” I made the decision, “and I’ll give you covering fire from here.” One of us had to stay behind to offer protective fire. “Swim slowly.” I took the Kalashnikov from the Maggot. “And don’t splash. Once you’re on board, stay there! If I can’t reach you, then try and get yourselves the hell out of here.”

The Maggot frowned at the note of resigned pessimism in my voice. “I’ll stay with you, Nick.”