Crackdown (24 page)

Yet still none of us was hit, and after full dark the shooting became much wilder and more sporadic.
Wavebreaker’s
deck-lights came on again, doubtless as a precaution against our trying to recapture the ship, while
Dream Baby,
hitherto moored on the far side of
Wavebreaker,
briefly cruised the lagoon with its searchlight raking the bushes and palms, but whoever was on board did not see us, nor did they try and come ashore, and I realised that Sweetman and Miguel must be scared half to death of us. They, after all, had gone into the fight with an arsenal of weapons, while we had none, yet we had killed both their gunmen and then got clean away; and, so far as they knew, I still had the sub-machine-gun, and their imaginations must have been worried that I still had a bullet or two left in its magazine. In fact the empty Uzi lay on the lagoon bed beneath
Wavebreaker,
but our enemies would not know that we were unarmed. We were also blessedly uninjured except for the shotgun pellets in my back and arm, and the myriad of bites from the mosquitoes that began to plague us as soon as we crawled up on to the beach.

We crossed the tail of Sea Rat Cay, pushing through spiny dark bushes until we reached a small beach on the ocean side of the island where a reassuring lump of limestone lay between us and the weapons still on board
Wavebreaker.
We crouched in the boulder’s comforting protection, catching our breath and listening to the surf’s monotonous grumble. A palm arched above us like a great sheltering arm, and it was there, beneath that tree and staring at the restless and shining sea, that I learned how grievous our injuries truly were; far more grievous than a few mosquito bites or shotgun pellets.

For Thessy was dead.

Ellen half gasped and half screamed when she heard the news. She was suddenly in shock; crying and shivering and I held her very tight while Jackson Chatterton told us what had happened.

Thessy had died in the very first seconds of the fight. He had died quickly, with a Kalashnikov bullet in his skull. I closed my eyes, knowing that it must have been the blood of Thessy’s dying that had sheeted over me like a great red wing in the dusk.

Jackson Chatterton had tried to save him. He had dragged Thessy away from the threat of the gunman at the back of the boat, running forward to join Robin-Anne in the belief that the gunman would not open fire for fear of hitting her, but the gunman had fired all the same, and his bullets had hit Thessy. Chatterton, wiser in the ways of man’s brutality, had twisted down to the scant cover of the scuppers, and had pulled Thessy down with him, but by then the boy was already dead.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“God, man, he was dead. He got two in the spine and one here.” Chatterton spread a huge hand on his own skull to demonstrate the size of Thessy’s wound. Ellen did not see the gesture. She was sobbing, while I, for all my horror and grief, was obstinately dry-eyed. Thessy had been my friend, and still I could not weep. “He felt nothing,” Chatterton said bleakly, and at least we could be grateful for that.

Chatterton blamed himself for Thessy’s death, saying he should have thrown the boy overboard in the very first second of the violence, but Ellen, between sobs, said that it was her responsibility because she had begun the fight, but I told them that if it was anyone’s fault, it was mine, for I had encouraged Ellen’s fight by joining in, and it had been I who had taken the gun from Sweetman and escalated the horror. “I killed the bastard who killed Thessy,” I said softly, as if that was some consolation, but there could be no solace for such a death. Thessy had been so very innocent, and his passing had torn a great hole in my universe; a great damned stupid Godless waste of a hole.

So I sat there, unable to shed a tear, yet unable to imagine Thessy dead. I kept thinking that every rustle of leaves or clatter of palm fronds was the sound of his coming to join us, and so I kept looking round, expecting to see his face or hear his anxious voice, but the movements were just the night shadows being wind-stirred among the leaves and the sounds were only the crash of the sea falling on the reefs and the sigh of the warm uncaring wind.

I told myself that if I had fired the gun quicker, or moved faster, then Thessy would still be alive. And why Thessy, of all of us? Thessy, so earnest and so good, so unworthy of this death, and I closed my eyes and prayed that there truly was a heaven where an honest boy from Straker’s Cay would find eternal happiness.

And I prayed that there was a hell, too, a real hell, worse even than the cocaine addict’s anhedonia; a place of demons for Sweetman and his kind.

“He hadn’t even reached the Gospels,” I said suddenly, and somehow the thought of Thessy’s serious face frowning over his ancient Bible broke the dam of my tears and I began to sob like a child. I was also shaking with the delayed terror of the fight, and Ellen reached for my hand and pulled my head down to her shoulder.

Above us were a million stars, stretching for all eternity, their light coming from the time before history and perhaps, I told myself, beneath those stars, Thessy’s soul was arrowing towards the happiness his faith had promised him. There could be no such happiness for us. We snatched a few moments’ sleep, but not much, for the guns on
Wavebreaker
fired intermittently throughout the darkness, and we were galled, not just by the threat of Sweetman and his crew, but by our responsibility for Thessy’s death. In the rare minutes of sleep I dreamed of guns, of snatching up the sub-machine gun and finding it empty in the face of the Kalashnikovs, and I woke shaking and sweating and with Ellen scratching and cursing at the sand flies.

I dozed again just before dawn, but was startled into full wakefulness by the cacophonous din of
Wavebreaker’s
sound system. Rickie was playing one of his ‘English music’ tapes at full blast and Sea Rat Cay’s birds screamed in protest from the trees. Nature’s storm had passed, leaving the world calm. Beyond the reefs the sea was a gun-metal grey, hammered flat and waiting for the sun’s annealing light.

“I’m going to kill them,” I greeted the new day.

“Amen,” Jackson Chatterton growled, “amen.”

And the sun came up on an empty sea.

Wavebreaker
looked very pretty that morning as she lay in the encircling arms of Sea Rat Cay. The three of us crept across the island to keep a watch on our enemies, and we lay hidden under the palms and stared at the glory of a tropical lagoon in which the schooner’s long white hull and slender masts were reflected as cleanly as though the water was a sheet of polished glass.

Rickie came on deck, carrying the Kalashnikov. He unfolded its stock and began firing randomly, sending bullet after bullet into the palm trees. He fired a whole magazine at a lumbering pelican, and missed. Robin-Anne brought him a mug of tea or coffee and flinched away from the gun’s noise before taking her own mug to the bows where she sat looking hunched and miserable. Rickie obsessively fired on, exhausting magazine after magazine. The noise was obscene. “I hate guns,” Ellen said beside me, “I do so hate guns.”

An hour after dawn Miguel fired up
Dream Baby’s
motors. The powerboat was still tethered to the schooner. The blue smoke of her twin exhausts drifted across the water. It was evident that they were leaving, for Rickie and Sweetman dragged plunder from
Wavebreaker
and lowered it to Miguel on
Dream Baby.
Some of what they stole was practical, like the outboard motor from the skiff, but mostly they just collected whatever glittered or took their fancy; the television, lamps, pictures, and even the rugs from the stateroom. Robin-Anne ignored them.

Rickie climbed down on to the powerboat’s deck as Sweet-man dragged the body of the gunman across to
Wavebreaker’s
gunwale. The body was that of the man whose shoes had beaten a dying tattoo in the scuppers, and now his corpse was unceremoniously tipped down into
Dream Baby.
Rickie leaped away from the dead man, but I saw Miguel apparently push the corpse into a locker. It seemed they were taking their own dead away, but I saw nothing of Thessy’s corpse and I felt again the idiot, wonderful, helpless hope that he might yet be alive.

Sweetman took the Kalashnikov from Rickie, then went and stirred Robin-Anne by nudging the small of her back with the gun’s flash-suppressor. She looked round and he pointed her towards the waiting
Dream Baby,
clearly indicating that it was time for her to leave. For an instant I hoped Robin-Anne would show some reluctance, and that she might even call my name to let us know that she left
Wavebreaker
against her will, but she jumped to her feet and strolled back down the deck with Sweetman, and she even held the Kalashnikov for a moment while he lowered the last of McIllvanney’s scuba sets over
Wavebreaker’s
gunwale and on to
Dream Baby’s
after-deck. Robin-Anne returned Sweetman the gun, then climbed gingerly down into the sports-fisherman. I saw Miguel turn and speak to her, then heard her laughter come clean and clear across the water. Overnight, it seemed, Robin-Anne’s resolve to say no had been melted in the fierce heat of cocaine’s euphoria.

Sweetman alone stayed on board
Wavebreaker.
He went below decks and stayed out of sight for about five minutes, then he reappeared and swung his long legs over the rail. He lit a cigarette, then unslung the Kalashnikov and began firing burst after burst into the island’s shoreline.

“Jesus!” Jackson Chatterton swore. This firing was far more purposeful and far more dangerous than Rickie’s earlier random shooting. Sweetman was methodically raking the shadowed edge of the beach, guessing that we would be hidden somewhere just above the high water line, and his bullets ripped like saws through the leaves as, burst by burst, the rounds came nearer to us. I heard Sweetman change the magazine, then I put my arm over Ellen’s shoulder and held her down low as the next burst cracked wickedly above our heads. Scraps of brittle palm rained down on us. Bullets smacked and whined off a limestone outcrop while a thousand birds were screeching their objection to the sky.

The firing suddenly stopped. I hardly dared lift my head for fear Sweetman would see the movement, but then I heard
Dream Baby’s
engines thud into gear and I looked up to see the gaudily camouflaged powerboat accelerating away from
Wavebreaker.

Which was sinking.

For a second or two I thought I must be dreaming, then I realised Sweetman must have opened
Wavebreaker
’s seacocks while he was below decks. The schooner was delicately heeling towards us, and I could see she was already settling at the stern, and I knew that within a very few minutes she would lurch down to the lagoon’s sandy bed. The big sea-water inlets that fed the engine’s cooling pipes must have been wrenched away and the water would be gulping up into the bilges and over the engine-room gratings.

“Oh, the bastards,” I breathed.

Dream Baby,
the 666 of the Anti-Christ dark on her bows, slowly circled the lagoon; Miguel was at her wheel, while Sweetman had climbed to her flybridge from where he was peering into the green shadows on shore. Chatterton wriggled backwards as I forced Ellen’s head down again. I think we all stopped breathing. I heard the throb of the powerboat’s motors come very close to us, and I waited for the ripsaw sound of the assault rifle’s automatic fire, but we must have been too well hidden for there were no shots. Instead, Miguel took the boat very slowly and very gingerly towards the rocky beach sixty yards to our left. I was certain that Sweetman planned to come ashore, and I was wondering how the three of us were to escape his execution when I saw that Sweetman had exchanged the Kalashnikov for a boathook and, standing now at
Dream Baby
’s bows, he was fishing in the water for the body of the second gunman; the one I had blasted off the swimming platform.

It took all Miguel and Sweetman’s strength to haul the body on board. Rickie refused to help, and Robin-Anne must have stayed below in
Dream Baby’s
cabin. I still half expected Sweetman to land and try to hunt us down, but he must have feared what could happen to him in the dark tangle of steamy vegetation that covered Sea Rat Cay for, once the second corpse was securely aboard, Sweetman ordered Miguel to reverse
Dream Baby
away from the shore. Jackson Chatterton breathed a sigh, while Ellen was crying softly with relief at our escape.

Miguel steered
Dream Baby
under the schooner’s canting stern and Sweetman, a cigarette in his mouth, raised the rifle and fired a long burst into the belly of the power skiff that was still hanging from its davits, then he raised the barrel and fired another derisive burst to riddle the red ensign with bullet holes.

“The bastard,” I said.

“Don’t be so ridiculous,” Ellen said, “it’s only a flag.”

Then, with one last derisive burst of bullets that were sprayed indiscriminately into the trees,
Dream Baby’s
engines were given full power and she seemed to stand on her stern as she accelerated into the lagoon’s narrow entrance. The motors screamed as her stern drives churned the sea to spray, then she was gone.

Wavebreaker
creaked as she settled further over, while the waves of
Dream Baby
’s wash foamed and broke in the lagoon entrance. I stood and walked to the water’s edge.

“Mind those turkeys don’t come back, Nick,” Chatterton sensibly warned me. If
Dream Baby
had suddenly reappeared at the lagoon entrance then I would have made an easy target, but I could hear the receding beat of the boat’s engines going further and further away from Sea Rat Cay. I stood at the water’s edge and watched
Wavebreaker
sink.

She took twenty minutes, but then, with one last graceful fall, her masts canted over until they were pointing towards the tops of the island’s tallest palm trees. A wave of blue water pulsed away from the hull to break on the lagoon’s shore.