The Detonators (32 page)

It was, of course, my cue to tell him what I thought of a man who went around kicking people’s ribs in while they were unconscious; but this was not a movie.

I said humbly, “No tricks, sir. I’ll be good.”

I felt Molly Brennerman stir. She was looking at me with sudden scorn. She’d obviously expected a gallant display of Hollywood courage and defiance. Too bad; she’d seemed like a reasonably bright girl.

“Damn right you’ll be good,” Homer Allwyn snapped. “We’ll see to that. Now move, somebody wants you topside…”

“Sir?”

“What is it?” He didn’t like being interrupted, but he loved the sir.

“The boy on the cot. He’s in bad shape, sir. He needs a doctor.”

“If he hadn’t tried to escape, he wouldn’t be in bad shape, would he? Keep it in mind. Anyway, there’s no practicing doctor here… Take him along, Jesperson.”

The dark one, first in, waved his weapon at me. I realized that while he might have fired it a few times in training, he had no idea what it would do for real. He knew nothing of ricochets or disintegrating bullets spraying hot lead fragments around like miniature shrapnel. At most he’d seen himself make some neat little round holes in a hunk of paper shaped roughly like a man. That made him, in here, more dangerous rather than less; he’d actually be dumb enough to open up full-auto if he were startled. His big blond partner was obviously no more experienced; he was also handling his squirt gun in a casual way that would have got him thrown off any shooting range in the country.

I’d assumed that the directors of the PNP had paid Alfred Minister, not only to exercise his specialty in their behalf, but to recruit a bunch of knowledgeable hard cases to do whatever dirty work was required. However, it was becoming obvious that he was involved here only in a technical capacity. This elite nuclear-peace group had its own armed action force, presumably selected from the more gung-ho members. Since money seemed to be a requirement for membership, they were probably successful business and professional people—Homer Allwyn had been careful to say that there was no
practicing
doctor here, which didn’t mean they didn’t have a few affluent medical men around taking time out from their profession. The goon squad had presumably been recruited from those eager atomic pacifists who weren’t really averse to weapons as long as they were non-nuclear.

It was good in a way, of course, since it meant I was dealing with a bunch of characters who didn’t really know the score. On the other hand, I couldn’t help remembering several good men and women I’d known who had died, probably amazed and incredulous, at the hands of inexperienced and frightened jerks who’d cut loose when no reasonable person would have dreamed of pulling a trigger. I reminded myself, also, that these high-class part-time warriors weren’t totally ineffectual; they’d managed to take this island from Constantine Greig’s cheap toughs, although they’d done it by bribery, surprise, and overwhelming force.

Outside our prison chamber, I found a short, narrow hallway that ended, in both directions, in massive steel doors, which were closed. I noted that the heavy clamp-type fastenings on the one forward could be opened from our side; but the one aft could only be secured, and unsecured, from the other side of the watertight bulkhead; if you were caught up here in a collision, and they slammed the door on you, too bad, unless you could fight your way out on deck. A steel ladder led up to a hatch, which was open. We moved that way and the big man went up first to cover me from above; the smaller one had his weapon pointed at my rump from below as I followed. The pain in my side made the climb no fun at all, and I wasn’t altogether rid of my earlier headache; but I forgot all about those pains when I came out of the hatch, because instead of the open night sky there was a roof above us.

Emerging on the deck of a ship to find myself indoors made me feel pretty unreal; and I wondered if I was having some kind of a hallucinatory reaction from the sleepy-stuff I’d been stuck with.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Gina Williston was there on deck, coming forward, to meet me, obviously enjoying my surprise. “You can see that your missile theory wasn’t too hot; we’d have a hard time firing anything through that solid roof.”

I said, “Hell, it probably opens up like an astronomical observatory. What the hell kind of an overgrown barn is this, anyway?”

I realized that the floodlighted building wasn’t as enormous as I’d thought, at first glance. At least it wasn’t as high as I’d thought, assuming that it had to accommodate the whole ship from keel to masthead. On second glance, I saw that the hull floated in a deep basin blasted and dug out of the rock of the cay. The ground was more or less level with the deck, so that the building itself only had to be high enough to accommodate the ship’s modest superstructure. But it was still quite a sizable edifice to find on a desert island.

“I thought you’d be impressed,” Gina said. “Come on, let me give you the guided tour.” She glanced at me. “Parole for one hour? Otherwise I’ll have to take one of those gun-toting creeps along to protect me.”

“You’ve got your hour.”

“This way.”

She was back in her basic yachting costume, but she’d obviously had a bath since I’d last seen her, and done nice things to her hair, and even applied a bit of makeup although she wasn’t much of an eye shadow girl. Then she’d got into her rough clothes to show me around; but she was really a very handsome woman even in well-worn jeans. There was a hint of perfume or cologne tonight. The works.

“Watch yourself here,” she said, guiding me around some unidentifiable marine equipment. She glanced back and smiled maliciously. “Homer’s glowering after us. He doesn’t trust you, parole or no parole.”

“You’d better watch that guy,” I said. “He thinks dangerous thoughts.”

“Well, so do you.”

“That’s right,” I said. “But I’m not supposed to be playing on your team. He is.”

“Over here,” she said. “Let’s get outside, shall we?”

We made our way across the cluttered deck. Glancing aft, I caught a hint of movement at one of the lower windows of the ship’s superstructure, perhaps the cabin window from which Molly Brennerman had watched Minister taking his cigarette breaks. Now another girl was watching from behind the heavy storm-proof glass; a girl with a sweet, familiar face framed by pale blond hair. So Amy Barnett had made it. And if one Barnett was here, could another be far behind? At least it was nice to think that Doug might be waiting out in the night not too far away. I hoped he’d call in reinforcements and not try to do it all himself; but he undoubtedly would summon help—I was the lone-wolf operator around here. I was assuming, of course, that Amy hadn’t managed to lose him en route and that he was really out there.

Gina led me to a gangway, actually a two-by-eight plank, which bridged the ten-foot gap between the ship’s side and the side of the basin. As we negotiated it, I could see water below. It seemed odd to be standing on bare ground inside the building; but they hadn’t bothered finishing off their overgrown boathouse with a concrete floor. There was just rocks and dirt, still with a few remnants of the island’s grass and brush, enclosed by the walls of the building. The ship, under the floodlights, fit into its crude dock like a loosely fitting inlay in a drilled-out tooth.

Gina let me look for a moment; then she touched me on the shoulder and led me along a dirt path to a small side door. A moment later we were outside. There was enough light from the windows high up in the side of the building behind us for me to read what was painted below them in giant letters that would be visible for miles out at sea: ELYSIUM CAY CLUB—PRIVATE.

Gina said, “In Nassau, Hog Island became Paradise Island when the developers got hold of it. Why shouldn’t Ring Cay—what a dull name!—become Elysium Cay?”

I looked around. “Hell, I thought we were way off in the remote outer islands. Uninhabited. What are all the lights?”

There weren’t so many of them, it was hardly Times Square on New Year’s Eve; but I’d expected to see nothing but a bleak, empty island and a black sea. Instead, I was looking at half a dozen lighted houses nearby. One of them, the nearest, seemed to be fairly substantial and two stories high. There were also several lights off across the water.

“The big house is our clubhouse,” Gina said. “Constantine Greig’s clubhouse, I mean. It’s habitable; most of the other houses you see, like this building, are really just shells. Fakes. Like a movie set. But from the water, or the air, the island looks like a going resort, with a new unit built every few months to accommodate the club’s growing clientele. Supposedly growing clientele. Supposedly very, very exclusive, of course. Wealthy anglers mostly, local rumor goes, but also just rich retired folks who like a change from their Miami Beach or Palm Beach homes; a nice place where they can have their own cottages—we prefer to call them villas, please—but are pampered with good food and pleasantly supervised exercise outdoors and indoors, including swimming. Have you noticed how many people drive clear to the ocean in order to paddle around in a freshwater motel pool?”

“I’ve remarked the phenomenon,” I said.

She went on: “Well, like in the brochures, here’s the Olympic indoor pool for those who can’t stand that nasty outdoors salt water. Naturally, its construction involved a lot of blasting and bulldozing—or should I say that it explained a lot of blasting and bulldozing? And of course it required a big building, not only to cover it and the associated freshwater evaporators and filters and pumps, but also to house the indoor handball courts and saunas and stuff that are supposed to be available here. Grieg’s Folly, I’m sure it was called; but the big man was foolish like a fox. His little ships slipped in here in the middle of the night, and the club’s fleet of innocent-looking, expensive-looking, and very speedy sportfishermen hauled the cargoes over to Florida piecemeal, while the authorities were looking all over the Islands for the vanished smuggling vessel that was actually parked in the Elysium Cay Club’s supposed Olympic swimming pool.”

“Cute,” I said. I was looking out to sea at the more distant lights. “But where the hell are we, anyway?”

“That cluster of three lights off to the left is Grouper Cay. There’s a small settlement there, but they go to bed early. And Arabella Cay to the right; that’s private, owned by a Miami millionaire. You can see the house, where the single light is, from this side but not from the other. Beyond it is Lostman’s Rock; where we anchored. I had to pick a spot from which you couldn’t get a clear view of Ring Cay—Elysium Cay—with those islands in the way. I mean, this building is pretty conspicuous, and you might have wondered. The deepwater channel runs from a mile this side of Arabella, past the end of this cay, and around into the lagoon. Eighteen feet of water all the way. There’s camouflage, of course, to conceal the entrance below this supposed recreation center. It looks just like the rocky shore of the lagoon until it’s opened to let the ship be warped inside.”

“Sounds like one of those camouflaged sub pens the Germans built during World War Two.” I drew a long breath. “Connie Grieg really had himself an installation here, before you took it away from him. He must have spent a mint on it. No wonder he was mad.”

“He made out all right,” Gina said. “The first couple of shiploads, several years ago, paid all the bills; since then it’s been pure gravy. And he knew the authorities were closing in on him. The place had served its purpose and made him rich, but it was time to pull out. We just rushed his schedule a bit; but he got paid for that, too, thanks to you. It was only his macho pride that was hurt, not his bank account.”

I said, “You still haven’t told me where we are.”

“Come over here.”

She led me around the corner of the building. From there we had a good view of the lagoon. It was, as she’d told me once, rather long and narrow. The entrance was a break in the shore to the left. Beyond, at the far end where it wouldn’t interfere with the tricky maneuvering involved in getting a ship under cover at the near end, was a lighted dock that held three sizable sportfishing boats complete with tuna towers and outriggers, and
Spindrift
, which looked small and out of place among the thousand-horsepower angling machines. There were also some smaller powerboats, presumably so the nonexistent clients of the resort could indulge in close-in fishing. There was a big sign on the dock. I couldn’t read it at the distance, but it probably said something like: PRIVATE—KEEP OFF! There were similar signs on both sides of the lagoon entrance, which was narrow enough that I’d have been nervous bringing in a small sailboat, let alone a hundred-and-fifty-foot ship.

“Well, we had us a nice cruise, aside from a few ropes and bullets and hypos,” I said. “Are you going to break down and tell me where it got us?”

“See that faint glow on the horizon over there?… No, farther to the left.”

“I’ve got it.” She was obviously waiting for me to guess, so I squinted across the sea at the vague smudge of light and said, “Hell, that could be a good-sized city, a long distance away.”

“About thirty miles away. Yes, it is.”

I said, “I don’t think we could have made it as far as San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the time we were at it. How about Havana, Cuba?”

She laughed. “You’re being silly.”

“Always.”

She said, “That’s Nassau, my dear.”

I stared at the glow on the horizon. I’d wondered a bit at Grieg’s reluctance to retake his lost harbor by force, since he felt so strongly about it. After all, it was supposed to be down among the uninhabited outer islands where a little shooting wasn’t likely to be noticed. But here, so close to the big city, his resigned attitude made more sense. As he’d said, a noisy amphibious assault would have been bound to attract attention, leaving Ring Cay, even if he recaptured it, of no use to him.

Glancing at Gina, I could see that she was looking very smug, very pleased with herself. She’d pulled another fast one on me, an even better trick than the anchorage. For a grown woman, she got her satisfactions in odd, childish ways. Well, sometimes. I found myself rubbing the Band-Aid that covered the gouge caused by a bullet that could hardly be called childish.