The Cry of the Halidon (26 page)

That was the third day, marked by the special relief of Alison’s somehow commandeering a fisherman’s flat-bottomed boat and, with her two “escorts,” bringing a picnic lunch of cold chicken out to the reef. It was a comfortable hour on the most uncomfortable picnic grounds imaginable.

The Jamaican revolutionary, Floyd, who had guided the boat into its precarious coral mooring succinctly observed that the beach was flatter and far less wet.

“But then they’d have to crawl all the way out here again,” Alison had replied, holding onto her wide-brimmed cloth sun hat.

“Mon, you have a good woman!” This observation came from Floyd’s companion, the huge, quiet Jamaican named Lawrence.

The five of them perched—there was no other description—on the highest ridges of the coral jetty, the spray cascading up from the base of the reef, creating faint rainbow prisms of color in its mist. Far out on the water two freighters were passing each other, one heading for the open sea, the second aiming for the bauxite docks east of Runaway Bay. A luxurious cabin cruiser rigged for deep-sea
fishing sliced through the swells several hundred yards in front of them, the passengers pointing in astonishment at the strange sight of five humans picnicking on a reef.

McAuliff watched the others respond to the cruiser’s surprised riders. Sam Tucker stood up, gestured at the coral, and yelled, “Diamonds!”

Floyd and Lawrence, their black, muscular bodies bared to the waist, roared at Sam’s antics. Lawrence pried loose a coral stone and held it up, then chucked it to Tucker, who caught it and shouted again, “Twenty carats!”

Alison, her blue jeans and light field blouse drenched with the spray, joined in the foolish game. She elaborately accepted the coral stone, presented by Sam, and held it on top of her outstretched hand as though it were a jeweled ring of great value. A short burst of breeze whipped across the reef; Alison dropped the stone in an effort to hold her hat, whose brim had caught the wind. She was not successful; the hat glided off and disappeared over a small mound of coral. Before Alex could rise and go after it, Lawrence was on his feet, dashing surefootedly over the rocks and down toward the water. Within seconds he had the hat, now soaked, and effortlessly leaped back up from the water’s edge and handed it to Alison.

The incident had taken less than ten seconds.

“You keep the hat on the head, Mis Aleesawn. Them sun very hot; roast skin like cooked chicken, mon.”

“Thank you, Lawrence,” said Alison gratefully, securing the wet hat over her head. “You run across this reef as though it were a golf green!”

“Lawrence is a fine caddy, Mis Alison,” said Floyd smiling, still sitting. “At the Negril Golf Club he is a favorite, is that not so, Lawrence?”

Lawrence grinned and glanced at McAuliff knowingly. “Eh, mon. At Negril they alla time ask for me. I cheat good, mon. Alla time I move them golf balls out of bad places to the smooth grass. I think everybody know. Alla time ask for Lawrence.”

Sam Tucker chuckled as he sat down again. “Alla time big goddamn tips, I’d say.”

“Plenty good tips, mon,” agreed Lawrence.

“And probably something more,” added McAuliff, looking at Floyd and remembering the exclusive reputation of the Negril Golf Club. “Alla time plenty of information.”

“Yes, mon.” Floyd smiled conspiratorially. “It is as they say: the rich Westmorelanders talk a great deal during their games of golf.”

Alex fell silent. It seemed strange, the whole scene. Here they were, the five of them, eating cold chicken on a coral reef three hundred yards from shore, playing children’s games with passing cabin cruisers and joking casually about the surreptitious gathering of information on a golf course.

Two black revolutionaries—recruits from a band of hill country guerrillas. A late-middle-aged “soldier of fortune.” (Sam Tucker would object to the cliché, but if it was ever applicable, he was the applicant.) A strikingly handsome … lovely English divorcée whose background just happened to include undercover work for an international police organization. And one forty-four-year-old ex-infantry man who six weeks ago flew to London thinking he was going to negotiate a geological survey contract.

The five of them. Each knowing that he was not what he appeared to be; each doing what he was doing … she was doing … because there were no alternatives. Not really.

It wasn’t strange; it was insane. And it struck McAuliff once again that he was the least qualified among these people, under these circumstances. Yet because of the circumstances—having nothing to do with qualifications—he was their leader.

Insanity
.

By the seventh day, working long hours with few breaks, Alex and Sam had charted the coastline as far as Burwood, five miles from the mouth of the Martha Brae, their western perimeter. The Jensens and James Ferguson kept a leisurely parallel pace, setting up tables with microscopes, burners, vials, scales, and chemicals as they went about their work. None found anything exceptional, nor did they expect to in the coastal regions. The areas had been studied fairly extensively for industrial and resort purposes; there was nothing
of consequence not previously recorded. And since Ferguson’s botanical analyses were closely allied with Sam Tucker’s soil evaluations, Ferguson volunteered to make the soil tests, freeing Tucker to finish the topographies with Alex.

These were the geophysical concerns. There was something else, and none could explain it. It was first reported by the Jensens.

A sound. Only a sound. A low wail or cry that seemed to follow them throughout an entire afternoon.

When they first heard it, it came from the underbrush beyond the dunes. They thought that perhaps it was an animal in pain. Or a small child in some horrible anguish, an agony that went beyond a child’s tears. In a very real sense, it was terrifying.

So the Jensens raced beyond the dunes into the underbrush, thrashing at the tangled foliage to find the source of the dreadful, frightening cry.

They had found nothing.

The animal, or the child, or whatever it was, had fled.

Shortly thereafter—late in the same afternoon—James Ferguson came running down to the beach, his face an expression of bewildered panic. He had been tracing a giant mollusk fern to its root source; the trek had taken him up into a rocky precipice above the shore. He had been in the center of the overhanging vines and macca-fats when a vibration—at first a vibration—caused his whole body to tremble. There followed a wild, piercing screech, both high-pitched and full, that pained his ears beyond—he said—endurance.

He had gripped the vines to keep from plummeting off the precipice.

Terrified, he had scrambled down hysterically to firmer ground and raced back to the others.

James had not been more than a few hundred yards away.

Yet none but he had heard the terrible thing.

Whitehall had another version of the madness. The black scholar had been walking along the shoreline, half sand,
half forest, of Bengal Bay. It was an aimless morning constitutional; he had no destination other than the point, perhaps.

About a mile east of the motel’s beach, he rested briefly on a large rock overlooking the water. He heard a noise from behind, and so he turned, expecting to see a bird or a mongoose fluttering or scampering in the woods.

There was nothing.

He turned back to the lapping water beneath him, when suddenly there was an explosion of sound—sustained, hollowlike, a dissonant cacophony of wind. And then it stopped.

Whitehall had gripped the rock and stared into the forest. At nothing, aware only that he was afflicted with a terrible pain in his temples.

But Charles was a scholar, and a scholar was a skeptic. He had concluded that, somewhere in the forest, an enormous unseen tree had collapsed from the natural weight of ages. In its death fall, the tons of ripping, scraping wood against wood within the huge trunk had caused the phenomenon.

And none was convinced.

As Whitehall told his story, McAuliff watched him. He did not think Charles believed it himself. Things not explicable had occurred, and they were all—if nothing else—scientists of the physical. The explainable. Perhaps they all took comfort in Whitehall’s theory of sonics. Alexander thought so; they could not dwell on it. There was work to do.

Divided objectives
.

Alison thought she had found something, and with Floyd’s and Lawrence’s help she made a series of deep bores arcing the beaches and coral jetties. Her samplings showed that there were strata of soft lignite interspersed throughout the limestone beds on the ocean floor. Geologically it was easily explained: hundreds of thousands of years ago, volcanic disturbances swallowed whole landmasses of wood and pulp. Regardless of explanations,
however, if there were plans to sink pilings for piers or even extended docks, the construction firms were going to have to add to their base supports.

Alison’s concentrations were a relief to McAuliff. She was absorbed, and so complained less about his restrictions, and, more important, he was able to observe Floyd and Lawrence as they went about the business of watching over her. The two guerrillas were extremely thorough. And gracefully subtle. Whenever Alison wandered along the beach or up into the shore grass, one or both had her flanked or preceded or followed. They were like stalking panthers prepared to spring, yet they did not in their tracking call attention to themselves. They seemed to become natural appendages, always carrying something—binoculars, sampling boxes, clipboards, whatever was handy—to divert any zeroing in on their real function.

And during the nights, McAuliff found a protective bonus he had neither asked for nor expected: Floyd and Lawrence alternated patrols around the lawns and in the corridors of the Bengal Court motel. Alex discovered this on the night of the eighth day, when he got up at four in the morning to get himself a plastic bucket of ice from the machine down the hall. He wanted ice water.

As he turned the corner into the outside alcove where the machine was situated, he was suddenly aware of a figure behind the latticework that fronted the lawn. The figure had moved quickly; there had been no sound of footsteps.

McAuliff rapidly scooped the cubes into the small bucket, closed the metal door, and walked back around the corner into the hallway. The instant he was out of sight, he silently placed the ice at his feet and pressed his back against the wall’s edge.

There was movement.

McAuliff whipped around the corner, with every intention of hurling himself at whoever came into view. His fists were clenched, his spring accurate; he lunged into the figure of Lawrence. It was too late to regain his footing.

“Eh,
mon
!” cried the Jamaican softly as he recoiled and
fell back under Alex’s weight. Both men rolled out of the alcove onto the lawn.

“Christ!” whispered McAuliff, next to Lawrence on the ground. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Lawrence smiled in the darkness; he shook his hand, which had been pinned by Alex under his back. “You’re a big fella, mon! You pretty quick, too.”

“I was pretty damn excited. What
are
you doing out here?”

Lawrence explained briefly, apologetically. He and Floyd had made an arrangement with the night watchman, an old fisherman who prowled around at night with a shotgun neither guerrilla believed he knew how to use. Barak Moore had ordered them to stand evening patrols; they would have done so whether commanded to or not, said Lawrence.

“When do you sleep?”

“Sleep
good
, mon,” replied Lawrence. “We take turns alla time.”

Alex returned to his room. Alison sat up in bed when he closed the door.

“Is everything all right?” she asked apprehensively.

“Better than I expected. We’ve got our own miniature army. We’re fine.”

On the afternoon of the ninth day, McAuliff and Tucker reached the Martha Brae River. The geodometer charts and transit photographs were sealed hermetically and stored in the cool vaults of the equipment truck. Peter Jensen gave his summary of the coastal ore and mineral deposits; his wife, Ruth, had found traces of plant fossils embedded in the coral, but her findings were of little value, and James Ferguson, covering double duty in soil and flora, presented his unstartling analyses. Only Alison’s discovery of the lignite strata was unexpected.

All reports were to be driven into Ocho Rios for duplication. McAuliff said he would do this himself; it had been a difficult nine days, and the tenth was a day off. Those who wanted to go into Ochee could come with him; the others
could go to Montego or laze around the Bengal Court beach, as they preferred. The survey would resume on the morning of the eleventh day.

They made their respective plans on the riverbank, with the inevitable picnic lunches put up by the motel. Only Charles Whitehall, who had done little but lie around the beach, knew precisely what he wanted to do, and he could not state it publicly. He spoke to Alex alone.

“I really
must
see Piersall’s papers. Quite honestly, McAuliff, it’s been driving me crazy.”

“We wait for Moore. We agreed to that.”

“When? For heaven’s sake, when will he show up? It will be ten days tomorrow; he said ten days.”

“There were no guarantees. I’m as anxious as you. There’s an oilcloth packet buried somewhere on his property, remember?”

“I haven’t forgotten for an instant.”

Separation of concentrations; divided objectives
.

Hammond.

Charles Whitehall was as concerned academically as he was conspiratorially. Perhaps more so, thought Alex. The black scholar’s curiosity was rooted in a lifetime of research.

The Jensens remained at Bengal Court. Ferguson requested an advance from McAuliff and hired a taxi to drive him into Montego Bay. McAuliff, Sam Tucker, and Alison Booth drove the truck to Ocho Rios. Charles Whitehall followed in an old station wagon with Floyd and Lawrence; the guerrillas insisted that the arrangements be thus.

Barak Moore lay in the tall grass, binoculars to his eyes. It was sundown; rays of orange and yellow lights filtered through the green trees above him and bounced off the white stone of Walter Piersall’s house, four hundred yards away. Through the grass he saw the figures of the Trelawny Parish police circling the house, checking the windows and the doors; they would leave at least one man on watch. As usual.