The Revengers (43 page)

“Elly, what?. . ."

She sniffed and drew the back of her hand across her nose, streaking her face even worse. “Don’t get excited, it’s just a dumb nosebleed,” she said. “That stupid gun jumped so much I couldn’t hold it tight, and the recoil slammed my thumb right into my nose.” She looked down and said softly, “I never killed anybody before. It feels so strange.”

I said, “I know. But remember what I told you once.

There are people and there are enemies. That one wasn’t people. The way you could tell, he was shooting at us.”

“That’s . . . just words, isn’t it?” After a moment, still not looking at me, she asked, “Did we
have
to do it?”

“No, not really,” I said. “Not if we were willing to let Serena sink another ship. Not if we were willing to let them kill us.”

She licked her lips. “It’s so very ugly, isn’t it?” She looked up at last, and drew a long breath. “And I think I’m being so very silly. Matt?”

“What?”

She was looking down at her knees again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it doesn’t help much, but I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“For what, for God’s sake?”

“Don’t be nice. You know what. I just did everything all wrong.... Oh, God, you’re hurt!”

“Just a flesh wound, as we say in the trade.”

“Please don’t try to pretend,” she said breathlessly. “I know what you’re thinking; what you’ve got to be thinking. First, I. . . I couldn’t hit her again, even though you’d given me explicit instructions. Then I went into hysterics so you had to slap some sense into me—my God, you’d think I was a silly kid instead of a grownup professional woman. It took me forever to get up and get that big gun lined up, so long that he had time to shoot you; and I couldn’t even hold it right and got a bloody nose and it served me right and . . . and . . . oh, yes, that ghastly business at the start.”

“What ghastly business at the start?”

“You know, that perfectly awful conversation. I’d been lying there all night just thinking what it would be like to die, be killed. I guess I was really pretty scared. Suddenly, I heard myself talking all that horrible, tasteless nonsense about. . . about how you mess yourself when you. . . . I’m sorry, Matt. I did try, I did my best, but I wasn’t very good, was I?”

I stared at her helplessly. I knew there was absolutely nothing to be gained by telling her how very good she’d been—well, by the standards of the world in which I operated. There was, of course, another world that disapproved of young ladies who spiked people with high heels, clubbed them with winch handles, and blasted them with shotguns. I’d met young ladies from that world and I’d almost died for their fine humanitarian impulses. It was a revelation to encounter a female person bright enough to accept the face of violence, and brave enough to cope with it. But I couldn’t tell her that. There was only one thing about herself she liked: she was rather proud of her professional attainments. As for the rest, she was that crummy little Elly Brand, ugly and spoiled and useless; and nobody was going to persuade her otherwise.

“Elly—”

“It’s all right,” she said calmly, “I said you didn’t have to pretend. Now I think we’d better take a look at that hole in your leg, don’t you? And see about that . . . that girl downstairs, only you say below on a boat, don’t you?”

“Elly,” I said, and looked at her streaked, small, stubborn face, and gave up. “Oh, hell,” I said irritably. “No, let’s get the sails down first, before a storm comes up or something. Anyway, I’m getting tired of listening to them flapping. But you’d better take a quick look at Serena and wrap some tape around her if she looks about to come to, while I’m trying to figure out all these ropes and cleats. . . .

What is it?”

She was staring at something beyond me. “Look, it’s coming back! It’s going to run us down!”

I turned quickly. There was the sportfisherman, still in reverse gear, diesels still cranking out somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand horsepower. She’d made a wide circle and now, as Eleanor had said, she was rushing straight at us, backward, rolling up a great wall of water with her blunt stem. I glanced around hastily. The sheet that controlled the big genoa jib had been blown away by buckshot, but the mainsail was still operative if things hadn’t gotten too tangled; and there was a possibility of starting the auxiliary motor if I could figure out the controls. . . .

“Matt, look!”

I turned back to
Ser-Jan
and realized belatedly that there was something wrong with her attitude. The bow seemed higher than I remembered; the stem lower. Suddenly, I realized that the big yacht was sinking. There may be high-sterned powerboats that can survive backing at full throttle in the open ocean, but sportfishermen have low cockpits aft for fighting the fish and reaching over with the gaff. There were scuppers back there to drain the water out, of course, but even if they functioned with the boat crashing backward—and they might even operate in reverse at this speed, to let the water in—they could not possibly cope with the whole sea pouring over the transom, filling the cockpit and rushing forward into the deckhouse and cabin.

I felt Eleanor find my hand and grip it tightly. It was obvious now that we were in no danger;
Ser-Jan
was not going to reach us. Even as we watched, the stem sank lower and became totally submerged. Then the weight of the flying bridge and tuna tower took charge of the now unstable, half-filled hull, and the big yacht rolled over on her side and sank.

We saw Arturo’s body float free of the bridge momentarily, before the suction pulled it down. We never did see what happened to Robert.

I hadn’t really let myself think beyond the actual break. I guess I’d vaguely imagined that once everything was under control, if it worked out that way, I’d simply push some kind of
Mission-Completed
button and watch the cleanup troops arrive within the hour to patch up the wounded, bury the dead, and take over all decisions and responsibilities; but, of course, it didn’t work that way. For one thing, there wasn’t any button. The only radio on board was the short-range VHF that Serena had used for ship-to-ship communication, good for about thirty miles. The last marked position on her chart showed the Bahamas, the nearest land, to be almost two hundred miles to the west.

For another thing, when the troops arrived—if they did arrive—I wanted to be sure they’d been briefed to keep their mouths shut about what they found; not an easy thing to arrange over the air, even if I could make contact with the U.S. It occurred to me that we weren’t sinking, or even seriously incapacitated. Hell, Columbus had found America. Leif Ericson had found America. An Irish monk named Brendan was supposed to have found America. Why couldn’t I? Once ashore I could drop the whole tricky problem in Mac’s lap and wash my hands of it.

“What about the EPIRB?” Eleanor asked.

“What’s an EPIRB?”

“That rescue beacon mounted next to the life raft, topside,” she said. “I told you about it, remember? Giulio said it was called an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, EPIRB for short. It’s kind of like those little homers they were using, only bigger and more powerful. When your boat sinks, you just turn it on and it makes a noise on a couple of aircraft emergency frequencies and a jet flying over reports you to the Coast Guard.”

I said, “First you need a jet flying over.”

“It’s good for a couple of hundred miles, Giulio said. The plane doesn’t have to be right overhead. A lot of planes fly across the ocean.”

“And then you’ve got to want the Coast Guard,” I said. “I’m not sure I do. At least, not until I’ve alerted somebody at home to lean on them a little first. Otherwise, we’re going to have too much publicity about the blood-stained murder yacht they picked up at sea loaded with corpses and explosives.”

Eleanor hesitated. She spoke without looking at me. “You’re not going to be able to keep it quiet, Matt. Not now. Not as long as
she’s
alive.” I didn’t say anything, and Eleanor went on, speaking carefully, “You wanted me to kill her, didn’t you?”

I said, “It did occur to me that it would be convenient. And to be cold-blooded about it, no real hurt to her— considering how she feels and what’s in store for her ashore.”

“And what it would do to me, having that on my conscience, too; that didn’t matter a bit?”

I looked at her for a moment. “I said it occurred to me it would be convenient, if it happened that way. Am I supposed to close my eyes to the possibilities, Miss Brand? I did not say that I arranged it that way deliberately.”

“But you—”

“I aimed you at the only opponent against whom you had a ghost of a chance,” I said. “And I psyched you up to make the most of that chance. Hell, you weigh what, a hundred and ten, a hundred and fifteen? And you get your exercise doing what, punching the keys of a typewriter? And do you think you’d have lasted five seconds against a girl twenty pounds heavier, in practically Olympic condition, if you hadn’t gone straight in for the kill like I told you? Look what you actually accomplished. You hurt her foot rather badly, you put a little crease in her scalp, and then you got lucky and she fell down a hatch and knocked herself out. Considering the weight you were giving away, that was a hell of a performance, but it was a pretty close decision, wasn’t it? How do you think you’d have made out if you’d been hampered by a lot of sentimental reservations? Hell, that young Amazon lady would have wrung you out and hung you up to dry.”

Eleanor was silent for a moment; then she nodded reluctantly. “All right. I’m sorry; I was wrong.” She wasn’t looking at me. She continued not to look at me as she said, still speaking very carefully, “But, of course, you can still fix it. Her. Repair the lousy job I goofed.”

We were relaxing with a couple of stiff drinks in the main saloon, which had been cleaned up after serving as a field hospital—even Eleanor had a couple of Band-Aids on her wrists where I’d nicked her, freeing her. Serena was lying on the leeward settee, literally bandaged head and foot. She still had not regained consciousness, but my amateur examination had indicated that the pupils of her eyes were of equal size and that there were no significant dents in her skull. We’d snipped away the matted hair and covered the scalp laceration as well as we could, considering the limitations of
Jamboree's
first-aid kit. We’d gotten the thing out of her foot—a pair of pliers had been needed, and she’d been lucky to be unconscious—and packed and wrapped the foot, using up most of what was left of our one small roll of two-inch sterile gauze. This, after cleaning and bandaging the holes in my leg, which Eleanor had insisted on doing first. Now we sat side by side, regarding the girl across the cabin, aware of the dead men still on deck, of the sails we’d lowered that should be lashed down more securely, and of the other untidy gear and rigging that should be attended to up there. Without sails up,
Jamboree
was rolling heavily in the long Atlantic swells.

“That’s right,” I said agreeably. “Why didn’t you think of it before we went to all the trouble of patching her up? But, gee, you’re perfectly right, she’s got to be eliminated. I guess I’d better get at it. What method do you suggest? Cutting her throat would be kind of messy after we’ve just mopped the place up, and she seems to have a pretty hard head. . . . Hey, I know, I’ll just use a pillow like they did with that young guy in the hospital. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just put one over her face and sit on her for a few minutes.”

“Matt, stop it.”

I glanced at her. “It was your suggestion. What’s the matter, are you chickening out?”

She licked her lips. “Don’t make fun of me. I never know. . . . I mean, you
do
kill people.”

“So do you, now,” I said, and saw her wince. Then I said, “To save the world from total annihilation, yes, I might consider it. Even just to preserve the United States of America from an overwhelming sneak attack, yes, I might consider it. But for a small intramural matter involving Mr. Pompous Jackass Bennett, forget it. If he wants any helpless ladies murdered—any more helpless ladies murdered—he can murder them himself. Up to a point, I’ll do my best to keep his antics quiet for the sake of the government of which I’m a part. I’ll even make fine patriotic speeches on the subject, but what you suggest is getting a long way past that point. My real job here is to bring you back alive; the rest is strictly incidental.” I grimaced. “Now I think I need one more drink before tackling the burial detail. Then we’ll figure out how to start that auxiliary motor. I don’t know much about sailing, but I have run a powerboat from time to time. If you don’t mind, I think we’ll just make a stab at finding our way back to civilization by ourselves.”

“Civilization, and people who’ll help you hush it all up.” But she was smiling a little as she said it.

“And people who’ll help me hush it all up as much as it can be hushed with the girl alive,” I agreed, holding out my glass to be refilled.

On deck, we were careful and methodical as befitted a pair of landlubbers stuck in the middle of the ocean on a boat they didn’t know how to handle. The sun was well up now and it was a bright clear day. We cleaned up the decks, and the less said about that the better. We got the shot-torn genoa off and bagged and put away in the sail locker under the cockpit seat. We furled the mainsail, lashed it to the boom and secured the boom. We did the same for the smaller forestaysail, forward, which had a little boom of its own. Eleanor, smaller and unwounded, got up in the narrow bow again and tied the working jib—over which the genoa had been set—to the protective stainless railing up there, so it wouldn’t be blown overboard. Then we found the motor manual and read it carefully. We started the motor and, after it had warmed up for a little, with water spitting out of the exhaust as it was supposed to, and all instruments registering properly, we put it in gear. It ran for about a minute and came to a groaning, shuddering halt.

I tried it again, and it ran well in neutral, but stalled the instant it was put into gear. Finally Eleanor, who’d glanced down the side, beckoned me to the port rail and pointed down. I limped over there and saw a bar-taut rope leading down and aft, disappearing under the boat: the trailing genoa sheet I’d shot off, now neatly and tightly wrapped around our propeller. . . .