Nick Carter

The Black Death

PORTRAIT OF A SPY

Six-foot-plus of whipcord strength, and he has something in his head besides bone. He has an almost phenomenal memory; a knowledge of many places, people, enemy weaponry and techniques. He doesn’t just love sex, he enjoys it enormously. He prefers to like the women he goes to bed with. He has inherited the mantle of the late Ian Fleming’s James Bond. He’s America’s Number One espionage agent and he mixes mystery, mayhem and loving in equal doses. He stands for counter-intelligence of the highest order.

Code-named Killmaster, his real name is Nick Carter.

Chapter 1

It was only the faint, barely discernible tremor of a far-off subway train, — the sound imagined rather than heard, that kept my mind in New York. My guts and my heart were in a dark rain forest somewhere in Haiti where the drums muttered sullenly, the night pressed in and where things that could not be were.

I had drunk from the cup that had been passed about before the ceremony began, as had the girl beside me and the CIA man, Steve Bennett, and all the others in the small audience — and I knew I had been drugged. Only mildly, but drugged. I had expected it. It wasn’t too bad, and when the stuff started to hit me I put it down as either mescaline or peyote. Maybe psilocybin. I hadn’t had much time to figure it out. Things move pretty fast in a voodoo church, even one on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The drum softened into a skein of vibrance in the big dark room. The drummer was in darkness. Someone began to strike a spike against a horse-shoe with a regular little clanging. The air was fetid and hot, and I had been sweating for a long time. The girl’s hand was cool. Cool and long-fingered. She kept stroking her fingers against my palm, over and over, and her hand remained cool — almost cold — while I sweated.

I peered across the girl at Bennett, the CIA man. I could barely make him out, sitting on his pillow on the floor and staring at the altar where the papaloi had just raised a hand. The drum stopped. The clink of nail on horse-shoe died away. The papaloi stood illuminated in a single narrow bar of misty blue light. He raised his hand again and the whispering stopped. The breathing stopped. The guy was good. The whole damned setup was good and, as far as I knew, authentic. I don’t know all that much about voodoo. My fault, of course. I should have been up on voodoo. When Hawk called from Washington and told me to make the CIA contact, I must have had at least an hour and a half to brush up.

The girl squeezed my hand in her cool one. She leaned toward me and her lips brushed my ear.

“This is it,” she whispered. “The big scene. What they’ve been building toward all night. You’ve never seen anything like this in your life!”

I squeezed her hand in my big sweaty one. Her name was Lyda Bonaventure and she was Haitian. I knew something about her that she didn’t know I knew. Among her own people, and the Haitian underground, she was known as the Black Swan. She looked the part. As beautiful and graceful as a swan — and as dangerous if you got too close.

The papaloi spoke: “Dans nom tout Dieux et tout Mystfere.”

Something about in the name of the Gods and the Mysteries. His French was too good, too pure, to be Haitian Creole, so I figured him for a local product. They say you can find everything in the world in New York and they’re right!

The blue light went out and for a moment the darkness was total. The girl stroked my hand with her long cool fingers. Steve Bennett whispered at me in the gloom: “What in hell did they put in that drink, Nick? I’m beginning to believe all this stuff.”

“Relax and enjoy it,” I said softly. “It was free and, in our case, legal. Don’t look a gift trip in the mouth.”

He grunted at me, but before he could answer another light came on. It was a tenuous bar of bloody mist, filtering in from behind and above us, and in it the mamaloi sat cross-legged before the altar. She was alone, halfway between the altar and the intricate vever drawn on the floor in corn meal. She was black and thin and moved like she was made of wire. Her head was wrapped in a red bandanna, she wore a sack-like dress and she had stumpy yellow teeth clamped around a short pipe. She was one real good bit of casting. I could understand how Steve Bennett was starting to believe it.

The mamaloi — she had been introduced as Maman Denise — sucked in her cheeks and her face looked like a black skull.

She made a hissing sound, and I could feel a snake in the room.

From a pocket of her dress she took two small vials and, leaning forward, poured them on the headless chickens that lay within the vever. A red cock and a black cock. Earlier the papaloi had twisted off their heads and spun them about and as a result I had chicken blood on my $300 suit.

A vial of oil and a vial of wine. The mamaloi poured them slowly onto the headless roosters. She shuttled her hands so the oil and wine mixed and formed a pattern in the cornmeal of the vever. When the vials were empty she cast them away and threw back her head to stare upward. Slowly she raised both hands. A single drum began to tremble in the gloom softly… softly…

“Damballa,” said the mamaloi. “Oh, God Damballa! Great and fierce and loving and punishing God, Damballa! Permit and bless this thing we do, for we do it in your name, Damballa, and for you. Damballa — Damballa!”

The drum stepped up its tempo. The light went out again. Darkness. The girl stroked my hand. The CIA man muttered something that I did not catch. The whispering moved about me like a miasmic breeze. I sweated.

Light again. A broader light, this time pale greenish, limned the girl and the black goat. The mamaloi was gone.

The girl was very young. In her teens and nubile. Very black and very beautiful. She wore a single garment, a short white shift that clung to her body and covered but did not conceal. Her feet were bare. Her eyes were long, almond, slitted now as she began to dance slowly around the goat. The drum began to pick up the beat. Faster and a little faster.

The goat was not tethered. It stood in the center of the vever, quietly, watching the girl dance about it. It was a big goat, with shiny curved horns. It had been well combed and brushed and blue and red ribbons tied into its fleece. It watched the circling girl. The goat’s eyes, in the soft, hot, green light, were large and round and lambent gold. It slowly turned its head to watch the girl.

The girl danced back into darkness and when she emerged into light again she had something in her mouth. A sprig of greenery. Leaves. She fell to her knees and crawled slowly toward the goat The animal stood unmoving, watching her with those yellow eyes.

I shifted position just a bit to ease the Luger where it was biting into me. I curled my fingers into my cuff to feel the tip of the chamois sheath housing the stiletto on my right forearm. The feel of both weapons was reassuring. Something had touched my instinct just now, and I was beginning to get a little nervous.

The black girl crawled toward the goat. The animal moved for the first time. It took a step toward the girl and it made a sound. A human sound.

That goat was crying and moaning like a human child.

Steve Bennett muttered. I had a rod of ice along my spine. I knew that I was half drugged and that it was all trickery, but still I was half frightened. And nervous. I get a feeling about these things.

The girl began to bleat like a goat, softly, piteously, imploring something of the animal that was now more human than she. She crawled on all fours until she was face to face with the goat. They stared at each other, the girl’s eyes dark and slitted and the goat’s eyes flaring golden in the gloom. The girl had the sprig of leaves and twigs in her mouth. She leaned close, closer, and her mouth touched that of the goat. The animal took the leaves from her mouth and began to munch slowly, always watching the girl.

Silence now. The girl backed slowly away and got to her knees and flung her body backward. She began to bleat again, softly, little goat sounds. I stared at the dark behind her, trying to make out the forms of the mamaloi and papaloi. This was damned good ventriloquism and I wondered which one of them was doing it.

The girl was rocking back and forth, still making the bleating sounds. The goat cried like a baby. The girl made a swift motion and the white shift fell away from her shoulders and slid down to her waist. Her body was oiled, dark and glistening and her breasts were small and firm and pointed. She rocked back and forth, staring at the goat and bleating softly, and she began to stroke her rigid nipples with her fingers. Sweat was streaming from her now. Me too.

The drum muted again, a barely heard throb in the gloom. The girl moved and the white shift was gone and she was naked. She stood up and raised her arms. She took a step toward the goat and began to undulate her body slowly, twisting and grinding her pelvis, stroking herself, going almost to her knees in a lithe movement and then coming up with a shuddering outward thrust. The goat moved toward her, silent now, the golden eyes gleaming. The goat lowered its head and shook it and pawed at the floor.

The girl danced to one side, around the goat, so that it must turn to follow her, and in the darkness about me there was a long and whispery sigh as we all saw the size and the strength — the brute power symbol — of the goat’s phallus.

The girl went slowly to her knees, legs wide spread and body flexing backward. She was silent now, as was the goat. The girl stared upward, her eyes rolled back in her head. Her fingers flickered over her breasts.

The goat moved toward her. Near me someone groaned softly.

Lyda Bonaventure took her hand from mine. She moved her hand to more private regions.

The lights came on, white and blinding, and then the shooting began.

Chapter 2

There were three of them. They all wore ski masks and they carried machineguns and they had massacre and murder in their hearts. They had come in the single rear door and spread out quietly and now there was one on each side of the big room and one at the back. The machineguns leaped in their hands as they hammered short bursts into the crowd. These bastards weren’t choosy — they were acting on the shotgun principle. Kill everybody in sight and you were bound to get the ones you were after.

It had been well planned, because the guy on the right got the mamaloi and papaloi with the first burst. As the papaloi was blasted down he let out a screaming yell that I heard even over the yammering of the guns.

“Tonton Macoute!” Bogyman! Papa Doc had invaded New York.

Any battle is hectic and confused and this one was no exception. I had Lyda Bonaventure under me, trying to shield her, and I got the gunner on the right with the second shot from the Luger. My first shot was high because Lyda was grabbing my arm and screaming something at me.

This got me the attention of the gunner on the left and he tried for me and got Steve Bennett instead. Bennett was on his knees, leveling a revolver across his forearm and firing, and the blast took most of his head off. I got off three more with the Luger, and the bogyman dropped his machinegun and grabbed at his guts and went to his knees.

That left the man at the rear, and he lost his head and started backing toward the door, firing at random into the screaming, bloody crowd. I tried for him but it was no good because four guys and a woman, in understandable terror and panic, rushed screaming and clawing at him. I couldn’t fire, and he killed two of the men before he turned and ran out the door. I wasn’t about to go after him. He was no longer my business; Lyda Bonaventure was and she was the only contact I had on this job and in about one minute there would be ten thousand cops swarming over the premises. That I could do without. AXE is on the side of the angels, at least in most cases, but we’ve got standing orders never to get mixed up with the local police if it can be avoided. The boys in blue just never seem to grasp the AXE viewpoint.

Lyda was tugging at my arm and yelling at me. She had! beautiful teeth and she showed them all as she pulled at me and screamed: “This way, Nick! Under the altar! There’s a way out.”

She didn’t want the cops any more than I did. Neither of us could do the other any good in the pokey. We ran toward the altar, stepping over the bodies and slipping in blood. Waterloo, I thought, must have looked something like this on the morning after.

There was no time to count the dead and wounded, even if I had wanted to, and no time to help them. There was no sign of the black girl. The damned goat stood quietly off to one side, chewing on the twigs and leaves, and surveying the carnage with calm golden eyes. The drummer was slumped over his drum, still twitching, and both the mamaloi and papaloi were dead in their own blood.

Behind the altar was an open trap door. There was a ladder and far below a faint glimmer of yellow light. Lyda let go of me and swung her slim long legs down onto the ladder. “Come on,” she gasped. “Hurry — Hurry! The police will be here any second.”

She was so right! I slipped the Luger back in my belt holster and went down after her. I was lucky to find a way out and knew it. If there is anything Hawk hates it is to have one of his agents collared and have to answer a lot of questions. Or not answer them, which can lead to complications.

The ladder ended in a long corridor. It was dimly lit and asbestos-wrapped steam pipes ran along the top. Again I felt the tremor of a far-off subway train. That, I thought, would be the Broadway IRT.

Lyda Bonaventure tapped my arm and flashed those marvelous teeth at me in a grim little smile and said, “Come on, Nick! Run!”

She turned right and started to run. her long legs flashing in textured stockings beneath her mini-skirt. I tagged along. As we ran, the rumble of the subway became louder.

They say you can always learn something new, and this night I did. I learned that a great many of the buildings in New York are connected, far below ground, by doors leading from one basement to another, and from one sub-basement to another. If you have the keys to these doors, or can arrange for them to remain unlocked, you can travel a hell of a long way underground. As we did now. I have no desire to see another boiler room as long as I live. There were tunnels and rats and dank deserted spaces and incinerators and laundry rooms and storage rooms with piles of moldering trunks.

We saw one guy. One. A slight dark man who chewed a stub of cigar and watched as we ran past.

Lyda spoke to him. “Lock up after us, Jose! You haven’t seen anything.”

This kid, I thought, gets around. She knows what she is about. Now all I had to do was find out what she was about and take it from there. One thing I couldn’t do — trust her. Not any more than that goat back there.

It was maybe a half hour before we came topside. All this time we had been running, or walking fast, and Lyda hadn’t said more than a couple of words. Like: “Hurry up!”

I knew we weren’t in any great danger of being arrested now, and I began to wonder what she was in such a tearing sweat about. I figured we were safe enough for the time being. She didn’t. She kept running and beckoning me on and she was working up a sweat that glistened on her cafe-au-lait skin. She was wearing some expensive perfume, and it mingled with her sweat. A couple of times, when we slowed and got close together, I remembered how she had touched me back there just before the roof fell in. Something, I thought, just possibly might be done about that But this was not the time for hanky panky. We would see.

Our last basement was that of a large apartment house at 79th and West End Avenue. Not bad when you consider that we had started at 84th and Amsterdam, in what had once been an Irish bar owned by a gentleman by the name of Toolan, and was now the headquarters of HIUS. Haitians in the United States.

The elevator was down and off somewhere I could see lights and hear a swift jumble of Spanish. Lyda led me around the open elevator and up a flight of stairs to a lobby as quiet and dark, and nearly as large, as a cathedral. Her high heels tick-tacked on the black and white tiles as we went through a glass door and came out on West End. It was a balmy night, soft and warm in the middle of April, unusual for the city at that time of year.

We walked toward the corner at 79th. It was only a little after eleven and there was a lot of traffic. Plenty of empty cabs cruising on West End. I moved over between Lyda and the curb and took her arm. She smiled at me and then laughed.

“No need to worry, Nick. I’m not going to run away.”

I nodded. “I know that, Lyda. I’m not going to let you run away. What we are going to do, you and I, is to go someplace and have a nice long talk about a number of things. That’s my job, and anyway I am a very curious man. Especially now, after that shooting match back there. So?”

I gave her my best smile. “Do we do it the easy way or the hard way?”

We stopped on the corner. I kept a light grip on her arm. To our left the blaze and cacophony of upper Broadway overwhelmed the night, kept back the darkness. People swarmed about us. The pavement vibrated as a train thundered to a stop at the 79th Street station. In the hard gaze of street lights, in washed neon, we studied each other. She stared at me, her eyes narrowed a bit, her straight little nose twitched and her brow furrowed, and I could see how hard she was thinking.

I didn’t push it. I gave her plenty of time. We were total strangers, this Lyda Bonaventure and me, and I had met her that evening for the first time. At eight o’clock in the social rooms of the HIUS. Steve Bennett, the CIA man, had set up the meeting. Now Bennett was dead and I had the ball and, at the moment, I was wondering just what the hell to do with it. One thing — I had to hang on to Lyda Bonaventure.

I watched her, alert for trickery, and waited. I wanted her to make the first move, to give me a lead, for so far I was going by guess and God and what little Hawk and Steve Bennett had been able to tell me.

She touched my hand. “Come on, Nick. Let’s walk down toward the river. By the time we get to Riverside Drive I’ll have made up my mind about you. One way or the other. I promise.”

We crossed West End and sauntered toward the Drive. I kept a hand crooked around her elbow. She moved slowly. I matched my stride to hers and said, “What’s the problem, Lyda? As I see it you have to trust me. Who else can you trust? You saw what happened back there just now. Papa Duvalier is on to your people. You’ve just seen how long his arm is. What more do you want? Without help, my help, you and your organization haven’t got a prayer. We want to help. Oh, I’ll admit it is to grind our own axe, but it is still help. The CIA has been helping you. But now they’re in a bind and can’t help you any more and we have been called in. Steve Bennett is dead back there, with his head blown off, because of you and your outfit. I might be dead because of you. So why the stalling, the coy bit? Do you or don’t you want to go into Haiti and bring out this Dr. Romera Valdez?”

She stopped abruptly, huddling against me and peering back the way we had come. There was nobody there but an old couple out for a stroll and a stray cat.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t talk about that! Not here.”

She was very close to me and her eyes were a deep brown and filled now with genuine terror. I felt like a heel. This kid was scared to death and had been trying not to show it. Doing a good job, too. But I was impatient. I gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “All right, then. Let’s get off the street and talk. You want to come up to my place? Or any other place where you can go and feel safe? The thing is — let’s get started.”

It occurred to me that, where she had been in such a tearing rush before, she was doing a lot of stalling now.

She gave me a final long stare and sort of sighed. “Yes. I suppose I will have to trust you. It’s just that so much is at stake — so much money and so many lives and so much planning. I can’t afford to make a mistake. I only wish I didn’t have to make this decision.”

I sort of clued her in then, nudged her along. I was beginning to feel a little naked myself, standing on 79th Street.

I said: “You have to make the decisions, don’t you? Aren’t you the boss lady. The one they call the Black Swan?”

1 gave her another little push. I laughed, not in humor, and said, “One thing we didn’t know was that you’re a female who can’t make up her mind!”

A thought struck me then and I added “But you had better make it up, and fast, or I’m going to wash the whole thing and leave you standing here alone. On your own. If you don’t want my help, I’m not going to force it on you. Goodbye, Black Swan.”

I dropped her arm and turned away. I wouldn’t have gone through with it, of course, but it was worth a try. I had to do something to get her off the razor’s edge and the real trouble was that I had no authority to arrest or hold her. Technically, if I took her into custody and held her I could be rapped for kidnapping. I didn’t want to do that unless I had to.

It worked. She came after me in a little run. “No! Don’t leave me alone. I’ll talk to you.”

“Good girl. Where? I’d rather not go to my place if I can help it.”

“No. I have a place. A boat. Over there in the 79th Street Basin. We can go there right now. Only I don’t want to stay in the Basin, Nick. If the Tonton Macoute could find the voodoo church they might be able to find the boat. If we lose the boat we lose everything! That’s why I–I’ve been hesitant about trusting you, Nick. The Sea Witch is our cause! I, we, have got everything invested in her. Can you handle a boat?”

I took her arm again and started her down toward Riverside Drive. Below the Drive the traffic flowed in a constant to and fro tide along the West Side Highway. Beyond the Highway the Hudson gleamed in light and shadow, broad and quiet and marred only by a string of barges being tugged upstream. Lights decked the Jersey shore and up at 96th Street the Spry sign blinked off and on.

“I can handle a boat,” I told her.

We passed a telephone kiosk and I resisted an urge to call Hawk and tell him what a mess I was in and ask him for orders. I had a feeling that Lyda Bonaventure was right. The sooner we got off the street and on the boat, and moved the boat, the safer I was going to feel.

I was curious, too. Bennett hadn’t said anything about a boat. The CIA hadn’t said anything about a boat. Hawk hadn’t said anything about a boat.

Now suddenly there was a boat and she was acting like it was worth a million dollars. I thought that maybe it was.

Chapter 3

The Sea Witch was a Pembroke, a 57 footer, and she was a living doll. About $150,000 worth of sea-going express cruiser. When the girl said “boat” I hadn’t known what to expect — maybe anything from a skiff to a schooner — but I wasn’t prepared for the sleek glistening beauty that swung at double anchor a hundred feet out from the end of docking.

We went out to her in a metal dinghy that had Sea Witch stenciled on the stern in blue paint. No one paid any attention to us. The Basin was fairly crowded, with a couple of houseboats moored close in to shore, and the usual scatter of small craft bobbing like ducks on the tide. There was a black-painted schooner in, a real beauty, showing no lights, and a steel ketch where they were having a party. The music was very go-go, and by the sound of laughing and shouting they were going to make a night of it.

Lyda Bonaventure sat quietly in the stern as I rowed us out. She didn’t say much until I rounded the bow of the black schooner. Just ahead the Sea Witch tugged gently at her fore and aft moorings:”

“Her real name is Toussaint,” she said. “But of course we couldn’t call her that. It would be a dead giveaway, you see.”

She was calmer now, having cast the die and decided to trust me, and for the first time I noted the soft cultured tones, the absence of drawl, the almost too perfect diction that indicated that English might not be her first language. At this stage I knew little about her, but I did know that she was Haitian mulatto, descended from one of the old and elite families that Papa Doc Duvalier kicked out when he came to power. She would have been a kid then, I reckoned, because she couldn’t be over 25 now. Old enough to hate. Old enough to know what a double or triple cross was. I was going to have to watch her. And work with her. Those were my orders.

We came alongside the big cruiser, and she went swarming up a ladder, showing a lot of textured pantihose. I noted, absently, that she had a very interesting behind. I hitched the dinghy to the ladder and went up after her.

There was a jangle of keys as she went about unlocking things. “Let’s not waste any time,” she said. “Not a minute. Let’s move her, Nick. Do you know any place we can take her that will be safe? For tonight at least?”

She sounded scared again and I decided to play along. Maybe she did know what she was talking about. In any case I knew I wasn’t going to get anyplace, or get her to do any real talking, until the pressure was off and she was at ease. Then, if I could get a few drinks into her, I might start making some sense out of this mess.

“All right,” I said. “We’ll move her. Just give me a few minutes to survey her, huh? You don’t just come aboard a strange craft and take off the next minute.”

We went through the deckhouse and into the owner’s stateroom. She pulled curtains over the portlights and flicked on soft indirect lighting, then turned to give me a luminous brown stare. “You said you knew how to handle a boat, Nick.” Accusatory.

“I do. I’ve been around boats, off and on, most of my life. I still need to look her over before I take her out. You just let me handle it my way, huh? And let’s get one thing straight — I’m captain and you’re crew. I give orders and you obey. Got it?”

She frowned at me, then smiled and said, “Got it, Captain. The truth is that I don’t know anything about boats, and so I have to depend on you.”

“I was wondering about that,” I told her. “If you knew.anything about boats.”

She moved gracefully across the wall-to-wall carpeting to a tiny bar. “I don’t I just admitted it. I was — I was planning on having someone else to run her for me.”

I took off my jacket and my hat and tossed them into a chair. There was a blue yachting cap on a table, atop a pile of charts. The cap was soft topped, easily shaped, and bore two crossed golden anchors. I put it on, and it fitted me perfectly. A playboy’s cap, not a working garment, but it would do. I rolled up my sleeves. I had already had chicken blood on the London suit, and I figured that a little marine paint and engine grease couldn’t hurt any.

Lyda was making clinking sounds at the bar. She stopped and looked at the Luger in the belt holster and at the stiletto in the chamois sheath on my right arm. She opened her mouth and licked her lips with a pink tongue.

“I suppose I have been a fool,” she told me. “Not to trust you, I mean. You did kill two of them tonight! You — you wouldn’t have done that unless you are on my side — unless you are who you say you are.”

I had shown her my credentials. I seldom carry credentials that a layman would recognize, but tonight I had. Bennett had introduced me as Nick Carter. Hawk wanted it that way. This was no undercover job — he was not even sure there was a job — and I was to play it straight all the way. At least until matters developed and the picture was clarified.

Matters were developing, all right, but so far there wasn’t much clarification.

Lyda had mixed martinis. She poured two now and wriggled a finger at me. “With the captain’s permission, sir, can we have one drink before we go to work? Do you know something, Mr. Carter? You look like a pirate in that cap.”

I went to the bar and picked up the cold glass. I sipped. She made a good martini.

“One drink,” I told her. “Then you change into something else and we go to work. And you might keep in mind what — you just said — I am a pirate when I have to be. I hope I don’t have to make you walk the plank, Lyda. For both our sakes.”

She raised her glass to me. There was a hint of mockery in the gesture. Yellow flecks stirred and moved in the brown eyes as she smiled. “Yes, sir!”

She leaned forward suddenly and kissed me lightly on the mouth. I had been waiting for the chance and now I reached swiftly under her mini-skirt, my fingers just brushing her inner thigh, and snatched the little pistol from a garter holster she wore high and near her crotch. I had spotted it when she climbed the ladder.

I cradled the toy in my palm. It was a .25 Beretta with ivory butt plates. I grinned at her. “Now that you have decided to trust me, Lyda, you won’t be needing this. You let me worry about the guns, eh?”

She regarded me calmly over the rim of her glass, but her mouth tautened and the yellow sparks swirled in her eyes.

“Of course, Nick. You’re the captain, darling.”

The captain darling said: “Okay. Now finish that drink and get changed to something you can work in. I’m going to look around. I’ll be back in ten minutes and we’ll move this hulk.”

I went back to look at the engines. Twin V8 diesels, Cummins, and I figured around 380 horsepower. She should cruise at about 22 knots, with a top of 25 or so.

I went on checking, using a flashlight I found on a tackle box near the engines. It had to be a fast job, but I knew what I was looking for and I was pretty thorough. She had a beam of 16 feet as against an overall length of 57 feet. Oak frames under bronze-fastened mahogany. Honduras mahogany and varnished teak trim in the superstructure. She carried 620 gallons of fuel and 150 gallons of water. You can go a long way on that much oil and water.

The deckhouse was full of crates, long and flat, and I wondered what kind of guns they were. I didn’t have time to find out now and I really wasn’t all that interested. Later I might be — if those guns were to be used in an invasion of Haiti. That was just one of the pleasant little jobs Hawk had given me — to stop an invasion of Haiti if, and when, it appeared imminent. The old man hadn’t given me any suggestions as to how I might do this. Just do it. Those were the orders.

I pulled the dinghy around and put it in tow. I had decided to slip the anchors instead of fooling with them, being so short handed, so now I slipped the stern line and let her swing around as she wanted to. I went back to the engines and started them and they began to purr softly in neutral. I found the switches and put on her running lights. She had dual controls, but I decided to take her upstream from the fly-bridge. I could con her better from there and I was still just a trifle nervous; a strange boat is like a strange woman— until you get acquainted anything can happen — and the Hudson traffic and channels are nothing to fool around with.

Lyda Bonaventure came up behind me as I was studying the glowing instrument panel. She had changed to slacks and a thick cable-stitched sweater that muffled her large, soft breasts. She kissed my ear and I remembered the way she had touched me at the voodoo church, and it took some concentration on my part, even though I knew she was playing games and had figured I was a sucker for the sex play, to tell her to go and slip the bow anchor. She did know enough to do that.

A minute later we were making it upstream against the tide, with the big diesels chortling softly and the wake coming up narrow and creamy. I listened to the engines for a moment and knew they were in good shape. I flicked on the white running light ahead of me. Lyda lounged near my chair while I explained about channel buoys and how to spot them and what they meant. She listened and nodded and came to stand behind the chair and stroke my cheek with her long cool fingers. Now and again she would say yes darling this and no darling that, and I wondered just how big a sucker she thought I was. We had gotten to the darling stage pretty damned fast; I wondered what she had in mind beyond that. As long as it didn’t endanger the business at hand old Barkis was willing!

“Where are we going, Nick?”

I was keeping my eye on a tanker coming downstream to port. “About forty miles up the river,” I told her. “There’s a marina there, near a place called Montrose. It’s run by a guy named Tom Mitchell, and we used to be pretty good friends. We can lay in there for a time, and there won’t be any questions asked.”

“I like that,” she agreed. “No questions asked.”

“Except by me, that is.”

She patted my cheek. “Of course, darling. Except by you.”

I spotted a channel buoy and slid to starboard. Just ahead of us the George Washington Bridge was a glittering arc with the white moving shafts of car lights shuttling and weaving a brilliant tapestry of nothing.

I thought I might as well improve the quiet hours, milk the journey for what I could.

“About that voodoo bit tonight, Lyda. How authentic was it? I mean was the goat really going to—”

She was standing with her hands on my shoulders, breathing into my ear. I could smell that expensive perfume and the not unpleasant odor of dried female sweat on tan flesh.

She laughed softly. “Yes, darling, that goat was really going to. It’s a regular part of the show. It is one of the ways we raise money for our cause. You and Mr. Bennett, poor man, got in free but those tickets usually cost a hundred dollars.”

We were under the bridge now and edging into the relative darkness beyond. “In other words,” I said, “it was just another dirty show? Like the pony and the woman, or the dog and the woman, or a threesome or foursome? The sort of thing you see in the Place Pigalle?”

I felt her shrug. “I suppose you could call it that. But it’s been a big money maker, we screen people very carefully and we never do stags, just mixed couples, and we have been careful not to overdo it. About the voodoo — some of it was authentic enough. It depends on what you mean by authentic.” She laughed again and bent over to nibble on my ear. I realized that she wasn’t just kidding me along, though that might be part of it. She was genuinely excited, sexually aroused, and I could understand that. That voodoo ceremony, phony or not, and the killing and the blood, and the running and the escape to a boat on a dark flowing river with soft April in the air — these were all powerful aphrodisiacs. I was feeling them myself.

Lyda perched on the coaming again, watching me in the dim running light. She squinted at me and ran a finger over her full lips in a way she had.

“There are really three kinds of voodoo,” she said. “The real voodoo, which strangers almost never get to see, and the tourist voodoo which anyone can see — and our kind. The kind you saw tonight. Phony sex voodoo.”

She sighed. “It was good while it lasted. We made a lot of money for the cause out of it.”

I took a pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket and tossed them to her. I have them made in Istanbul — very long and slim, latakia, perique and Virginia, with NC embossed in gold on the filter — and they are one of my very few vanities.

“Light us up,” I told her.

I watched her inspecting the gold NC as she lit them from the instrument panel lighter. She blew smoke through her straight little nose and handed me mine. “I’m impressed,” she said. “Truly impressed. And relieved. I’m beginning to really believe that you are Nick Carter.”

We were past the Harlem River by now. I took her out a little more toward midstream. For now we had had the river to ourselves except for a string of barges over near the Jersey shore, moving like phantoms against the high rearing of the Palisades.

“You’re a hard woman to convince,” I said curtly. “But never mind — what was in that drink tonight?”

“Nothing much. Just a little LSD.”

I nodded. “That’s nice to know. Just a little LSD, huh? Good. I was worried about that — I thought it might, be something powerful or dangerous.”

She pushed her hand into the light from the instrument board. Her nails were long and well kept and the color of blood. She measured off a micro-dot on her thumb nail. “Just that much. A tiny smidgeon — not enough to hurt anyone. We found that it helps the illusion, makes it sexier, gets people more excited. So maybe they come back again and spend another couple of hundred dollars. Just good business, that’s all.”

“Sure. Just good business.”

She blew smoke at me, narrowed her eyes, then put a hand over her mouth and laughed beneath it. “You sound like you don’t approve. What are you, Nick Carter, some kind of a moralist?”

She sort of had me there and I had to grin. She took her cue from the expression on my face.

“You killed two men tonight — or one for sure — and most people would say that makes you a murderer. Or doesn’t it?”

“That was in the line of duty,” I said. “I am an accredited agent of AXE, which is in turn an agency of the United States Government.”

There seemed no point in telling her that I carried rank, with top seniority, and that I had killed more men than she had years. I doubted that she had ever heard of AXE, anymore than she had heard of Nick Carter before eight o’clock tonight.

All laughter fled. She could change moods the way a chameleon changes colors. She cupped her chin in one hand and stared at me with that yellow glitter in her eyes.

“What I do is in the line of duty, too. You were right— I am the Black Swan! I don’t have any official standing, and it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. Sooner or later I am going to lead my people back into Haiti, and we are going to take back what belongs to us. I personally am going to arrange for that stinking black bastard, that Papa Doc Duvalier, to be banged in front of his own palace in Port-au-Prince! What do you think of that, Mr. Carter?”

I laughed at her. “It is going to be later, Miss Bonaventure. Not sooner. Part of my orders are to see that there are no invasions of Haiti. Absolutely none! Uncle Samuel has just had a very bad time in the Dominican Republic and he is not looking to repeat it in Haiti. Uncle has a great longing for peace and quiet in the Caribbean and that is the way it is going to be. And what do you think of that, Miss Bonaventure?”

She threw her cigarette butt overboard. She stood and put her hands on her hips and stared down at me in the conning chair.

“I rather thought that was it,” she said, all soft and sweet and reasonable. “As a matter of fact it isn’t anything new, this attitude. Steve Bennett told me the same thing.”

“He was so right,” I murmured.

“Bennett was my contact with the CIA, as you know. I don’t know what really goes on, any of the inner workings, or why you people — AXE? — are taking over from the CIA, but I do know that Bennett and I made a deal. A bargain. Are you going to honor that bargain, Mr. Carter?”

I was non-committal. “Depends on the bargain. What did you and Bennett agree to?” I knew, because Bennett had filled me in briefly, but I wanted to hear her version.

She was behind me again, rubbing those cool fingers over the back of my neck. “I was to call off any invasion attempt, not to try it, and the CIA was going to go into Haiti and bring out Dr. Romera Valdez. You know that Papa Doc kidnapped him, right out of Columbia University, and has been holding him for five years?

I knew. She was telling it about the way Bennett had told it to me. Yet I had to stall her. I couldn’t make any firm committments until I had talked to Hawk. And Hawk, of course, had to get clearance from The Man.

Still I wanted to keep her happy and keep her from trying any monkey business while I sorted this thing out. Those bogymen had loused up a lot of things when they started shooting.

I said: “I think we are going to honor that bargain, Miss Bonaventure. I say think, because I can’t make you an absolute promise at this time, but the chances are pretty good that we will try and get this Dr. Valdez out for you. But you will have to be patient. A deal like this takes time to set up — otherwise we’ll just get our heads shot off the way so many of your friends have. You have any idea how many invasions of Haiti have been tried in the past ten years?”

I didn’t know the exact number myself, but there had been a lot. All failures. Papa Doc was pretty tough on his own turf.

She massaged my neck. “Bunglers,” she said. “Fools and cowards and half wits. Cretins! It wouldn’t have been that way with my invasion.”

I liked her use of the subjunctive mood. Maybe she was going to play it my way after all.

I said: “So let’s leave it that way for now, huh? You be a good girl, be patient, and leave everything to me. I’ll see what can be worked out and 111 do it fast. Like tonight. But you keep your nose clean, honey. No tricks and no double-crosses. You try anything with me and I’ll have you in jail and this boat, and cargo, confiscated so fast you won’t know what hit you. Deal?”

She nuzzled my ear. She put her tongue in my ear and then she bit it a little. “Deal,” she whispered. “To tell you the whole and entire truth, Mr. Carter, right now I am not very interested in an invasion of Haiti or even in Dr. Valdez. Later I will be again, but I never mix business with pleasure, and that is a thing that works both ways. Just now I am fascinated by the pleasure principle. Your pleasure and my pleasure. Our pleasure. I believe that as soon as possible we should inflict pleasure on each other to the very limit — as much as each can bear. What do you say to that, Mr. Carter?”

The lights of the Croton Yacht Club slid past to starboard. It wasn’t far now to Tom Mitchell’s marina. I craned my head back to stare up at her. Our faces were very close. For an instant I had the impression of a beautiful African mask hanging in midair: hair dark and smooth-glinting back from the high, pale, tan brow; eyes wide-set and long and umber with yellow pin wheels swirling in them: the nose straight and fragile and the mouth a trifle wide and full lipped and moist red with teeth glistening like porcelain mirrors. She moved to press her large tender breasts against me.

“Well, Mr. Carter?”

I nodded up at her. “Deal,” I said. “Within limits Mr. Carter is a yea-sayer beyond compare.”

She made a mock frown. “No limits! I do not like limits. I do everything to you and you do everything to me. Deal?”

We both laughed then, a spontaneous explosion that sounded wild in the April dark. I moved my face against her breast. “Deal, Lyda! I only hope you’re up to it. I can play pretty rough when I get started.

She bent to kiss me. Her mouth was hot and moist and she thrust her tongue into my mouth for just an instant and then took it away.

“So do I,” she told me. “So do I play rough, big man. And now I am going to go mix some more martinis. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She went and I wondered. I thought the sex bit was genuine — she was a passionate girl and she was aroused and she had to do something about it — but you can never be a hundred per cent sure. Women are born knowing how to sucker men, and Lyda Bonaventure was no different. In any case it didn’t really signify — if she did have a genuine case of hot pants she would be just as tricky, as dangerous, after I cooled her down. Maybe more so, because the sex thing would be out of the way for a time and she could concentrate on skullduggery.

Just what skullduggery I didn’t know, but she would probably come up with something. Right now she needed me. She was afraid of the Tonton Macoute—more so than she was letting on — and at the moment I was her best chance of survival. That shoot-out at the voodoo church had been pretty convincing. It sure as hell convinced me and I don’t scare as easily as most.

Another thing was that I knew her secret — I was sitting square in the middle of about a million dollars worth of boat and illegal arms — I hadn’t begun to explore that angle yet but I knew they were there — and I was the only insurance she was likely to get. All in all, I thought, I should be able to trust her for a time. Like the next few hours.

She came back with the drinks and we clinked our glasses and drank. The Sea Witch rounded a point and I saw the dim lights of the Montrose Marina ahead. The yellow dock lights showed a couple of small cabin cruisers and a yawl, nothing else. It was still a little early in the season for the real trade.

I finished my drink and put the glass on the deck. “Just for the record, Lyda, who owns this boat? What about the papers?”

She was lighting cigarettes for us. “Everything is in order there. She’s registered to a Donald Campbell who lives in Stamford and works on the Stock Exchange. He doesn’t exist, of course.”

“Where are the papers, just in case?”

“In a drawer in the stateroom. You want them?”

I shook my head. “No. Not tonight, but maybe later. I know the guy that owns this marina. We won’t have any trouble here.”

She put a cigarette in my mouth. She ran her fingers over my chin and felt the slight stubble.

“Don’t you shave,” she told me. “I like men to have a little beard sometimes.”

I said that shaving had not entered my mind.

“Please do whatever it is you have to do and get it over with,” she said. She patted my cheek. “And hurry back. Lyda is getting a little impatient.”

That made two of us.

Chapter 4

I brought the Sea Witch alongside a floating dock, and Lyda tossed a line to the kid who had come out to greet us. He was a skinny kid with a bad case of acne and hair cut reasonably short. I cut the engines and went forward to handle the bow line. When the cruiser was well snubbed in I told Lyda to stay aboard and keep out of sight.

“Go easy on the booze,” I added. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

“Yes, Captain darling.”

The kid was staring and probably having nasty thoughts, so I took his arm and we crossed the duck-boarding to the main pier and I said, “Is Tom Mitchell around?”

“Yes, sir. In the office. Usually he ain’t here at this hour, but tonight he stayed late. Taxes or something.”

I knew Tom Mitchell when he was a Marine guard at the Consulate in Hong Kong. He was an old gunnery sergeant, transferred to diplomatic duty, and we had shared a few brawls and done each other a few favors. I’d had one letter from him since he opted out and invested his life savings in the marina.

The kid was still with me. I pointed to the little brick building just ahead. “That the office?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks. I know Tom and I won’t be needing you any more. A little private business.” I gave him a five dollar bill. “That’s for your trouble. Good night.”

“Good night, sir. If there is anything else I—”

“There isn’t. Good night.”

The door was half open. Tom Mitchell sat at his desk with his back to me. He was getting bald and there were fat bulges on his neck. He was working on a tax form with a ball point and he didn’t look happy.

I rapped on the door and waited. Tom swung around in his chair and stared at me.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Nope,” I said. “You flatter me, but nope. Nicholas Hunting Carter, in the flesh, come to spend a little money in this poor-looking marina. And ask a few favors.”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch!” Tom pulled himself out of the chair and charged at me and grabbed my hand and tried to tear it off. He was getting fat but he was still as powerful as ever. His plain shanty-Irish face lit up like a beacon as he steered me to a chair and opened a drawer and took out a bottle of Old Pile Driver. He went into a lavatory and came back with two dirty glasses. This was the Tom Mitchell I remembered. No talking until the drinking started.

He poured my glass half full and I shuddered and took a little of it and said: “Good to see you, Tom. And I’m glad that you’re glad to see me, but let’s get one thing straight— this isn’t going to be any booze bout. I’m working. I need a little help, mostly negative help, like I’m not here and you never saw me and can you handle that kid out there? He never saw me either.”

“Wayne? Sure. Be right back.”

I lit a cigarette and took another sip of the cheap booze. I could hear Tom talking to the kid somewhere out on the docks. Tom didn’t know I was AXE, but he did know that I did some very special jobs. I didn’t talk and he didn’t ask and that was the way we both wanted it. I figured that he thought I was CIA and I let it go at that.

He came back into the office and closed the door behind him. “It’s okay now. Wayne won’t talk — he likes this job, and he needs it, and he don’t want his neck broke. Jesus H. Christ, Nick, but it’s good to see you.”

I grinned at him. “Fine. Now cut it out. We’ll have the reunion another time when we can let our hair down and tie one on. Now — who belongs to those other craft out there?”

Tom sank into his chair and picked up his glass. “Local people. I know them. Nothing to worry there, Nick. The yawl belongs to an insurance man and the cruisers, well, just locals like I said.” He stared at me over the glass. “You need any sort of physical help, Nick?” He sounded wistful.

I shook my head. “No. You should have stayed in the Corps, gunner, if you want the physical bit.”

“I know. But I got old, Nick. Too damned old.”

I wasted a tenth of a second in feeling sorry for the old war horse, then I picked up the phone on his desk.

“All I want from you is discretion,” I told him. “Silence. Forget I was here. And keep everybody, but everybody, away from that 57-footer out there as long as I’m here. I can’t say how long that will be.”

Tom Mitchell nodded. He reached into another drawer and came out with a Colt .45 automatic, the 1911 model, so old that the bluing was worn off the barrel so it sparkled like silver in the light.

I dialed Operator. Tom said: “You want me to leave? I can take a little walk, make sure that Wayne isn’t still hanging around.”

It was a good idea. I had trusted Tom Mitchell with my life more than once, but this was no affair of his and it is only routine, SOP, to keep secret matters secret.

I nodded at him. “You do that. See you in a few minutes.”

The girl put me through to the AXE office in Washington. I got the night duty officer, identified myself, and after a code check the night man told me that Hawk was flying to New York to see me.

“He left about nine, sir. He should be there by now. He left word that if you called here he would be at your place.”

I thanked him and hung up. The old man at my penthouse? All the way from Washington just to see his number one boy? All hell must be popping!

My house boy, Pok, answered the phone in the penthouse. When he recognized my voice he said, “Is ancient gentleman here to see you, Missa Nick.”

I liked that. I hoped Hawk was listening in. Ancient gentleman!

“Good,” I told Pok. “Put the venerable gentleman on, Pok.”

“Yes, sir. Is here now.”

Hawk came on like a tiger with a sore throat: “N3? Good — remember no scrambler. This is plaintalk. Clearcode. Got it?”

I said I had it. Hawk can be irritating at times. He thinks everybody but himself is still in kindergarten.

“There is a lot of Hades over the SB thing,” Hawk said. “The spooks are covering and we haven’t surfaced yet. What occurred and where is the tinsel in the crackerjack?”

Hell was being raised over Steve Bennett’s murder and AXE was not connected with it, and where was the girl?

“I’ve got the prize,” I told him. “A toy swan. The SB thing was straight waylay — Papa’s boys trying to make Papa proud. Surprise achieved. I caught two, then track meet seemed advisable.”

I had the girl and I had run like a thief.

I could hear the relief in his voice as he said, “You’ve got the prize?”

“Yes. And a gunboat.”

“Hmmmmm — safe?”

“For now safe. But tempus fugit and things change. Anything from HQ for me?”

I was asking for orders.

I got them. For fifteen minutes I got them. A lot of info had come into the hopper, a lot of cards popped out of the computers, since I last talked to Hawk. I listened with what is commonly known as a sinking sensation in my gut.

At last he let me say something.

“Just me?” I asked. “All alone by my lonesome? Maybe the deal is too big, H. Maybe I can’t swing it.”

“You’ve got to swing it,” Hawk said. “There is no one else. The spooks are dead in subject, and so are we for the moment. You have to do it alone.”

The CIA was well blown in Haiti — I had known that already — and there were no AXE men on the island who could help me. That I hadn’t known. Nick Carter. One-man invasion force.

“It could be complicated,” I said. “The prize is axe grinding. Own ideas about matter at hand. Unreliable.”

“Understood,” the old man said. “Cope.”

Sure. Just like that. Cope.

I sighed and said okay. Then, because I had to know and I had to hear it from Hawk, I asked: “Ultimate on V?”

Final decision on Dr. Romera Valdez, the bone of contention, the guy who was causing all the trouble. The character I was supposed to bring out of Haiti.

Hawk cleared his throat. “Final is kill or cure. Cleared with White.”

If I couldn’t get Valdez out I was to kill him. Decision made by The Man.

“Tempus does fugit,” said Hawk. “No waste. I’ll do the best I can on CG. Make first landfall KW and take on new supplies, if any. Okay?”

Get with it as of right now. Hawk would fix it with the Coast Guard and I was to check in at Key West for new orders. If any.

“Okay,” I said. I sounded like a man going to his own hanging. “I’ll have a voucher here,” I added. “Honor it, eh?”

“Sign it correctly and it will be honored,” Hawk said. Dry. Matter of fact. Like an accountant demanding proof of a swindle sheet.

“Goodbye,” Hawk said. “Put the jig together as you go. No plan. No help. Good luck. Good night.”

“Good night,” I told the dead phone. “And thanks for nothing.”

Put the puzzle together as I went along. By guess and by God and play it by feel and by ear. Get into Haiti and get Valdez out — or kill him. Keep an eye on Lyda Bonaventure. See that she didn’t stage an invasion. See that nobody staged an invasion. Stay alive. Keep Lyda Bonaventure alive, because if I could get our asses out of this in one piece, both Hawk and the CIA wished to have long conversations with the lady.

Sometimes I wonder if my head is pointy. There must be easier ways of making a living than being a senior Killmaster!

I lit a cigarette and had a belt of Tom Mitchell’s bad booze and let out a minor groan and faced it. It looked like old Carter was going to cross the raging main, was going to make it on the high seas. Anchors aweigh.

I stuck my head out the door and whistled softly. Tom came out of the darkness, the .45 tucked into his belt under a fold of flab. He gave me that shanty Irish grin.

“Business all concluded?”

“Yeah,” I said sourly. “Business concluded and maybe me, too.”

He watched me. “A bad one, Nick?”

I nodded. “Bad enough, but nothing to worry you. Give me some sort of paper, form, whatever you got. I’ll make out a voucher for you.”

He shook his head. “No need to do that, Nick. Hell, man! We’re friends, buddies. I—”

I was feeling snappish. “Cut out the crap,” I barked at him. “It’s only the taxpayers’ money, and you’re going to earn it.” Then I grinned and nodded at the tax form he had been filling out. “Anyway you’re really paying for it — I’m only giving you your own money back.”

Tom took a bolt of his skull-popper and wiped his big mouth and grinned back and said, “Well, since you put it like that.”

He gave me one of his billing forms and I scrawled on it: For Services Rendered. $2000.00. I signed it NC and put a special little curlicue in the C so Hawk would know it was genuine.

I handed him the paper. “For that you’re going to stay up all night and do a little patrolling. If anyone, anyone at all, tries to get near the cruiser, by land or sea, you let off a couple of shots to warn me. Just warn me, you understand? Don’t go shooting anybody and getting your ass in a jam over something that doesn’t concern you. You got that?”

Tom smiled and nodded. “I got it. I also wish I had what you got on that cruiser.”

I stared at him. He gave his eyes a comic roll and said. “I walked out to the end of docking. She was singing. I didn’t see her, but the voice ain’t bad. Sounded like she was singing French?”

I patted his arm. “Remember what happened to the curious cat, old buddy. You just do your job and earn that two grand. Nobody gets close to the cruiser. I may hang around here tomorrow, 1 may not, but if I do the same applies. No snoopers. Only in daylight don’t do it with a meat axe, huh, or a gun. Invent something. Say we’ve got plague aboard.”

He was pouring himself another jolt of old pop skull. I declined. “I’ve got a hard night ahead of me.”

“I just bet.”

“Anyway you’re a married man. Didn’t you tell me in that letter that you got married?”

“Yeah. I got married.” He sounded glum. “Her name is Myrtle and she weighs close to 300 pounds by now.”

“Serves you right,” I told him. “You should have stood in the Marines.”

“Yeah. I should have. But I told you, Nick — I got too old.”

I shook his hand. “Thanks for everything, Tom. I may see you again, or I may not. I don’t know just when I’ll cut out. But thanks. And I’ll be depending on you tonight.”

He gave me a half salute. “No sweat, Nick. Not to worry.”

I left him staring after me. He still looked wistful.

The Sea Witch was dark except for a faint glow in the owner’s stateroom. She had the record player going softly, which didn’t surprise me; she was playing Ravel’s Bolero, which did, a little. But as I legged it over the rail and went forward toward light and music I decided that she knew what she was about — the original title of the Bolero was Danse Lascive, until the prudes made him change it.

I went softly through the deckhouse and down a companionway and stood in the door looking at her. This kid was something of a showman, and she knew how to use color.

She was stretched on the divan, a glass in her hand, a cigarette smoking blue between her fingers. She was wearing long white stockings and a white garter belt and that was all. Her large breasts, soft in repose, lay flat and tender along her rib cage. Her head was resting on the arm of the divan, arching back to show all of that long Modigliani throat. Her eyes were closed but she knew I was there.

Without opening her eyes she said: “You were a long time.”

“Just long enough to get things squared away,” I told her. “We’re all right for now, I think. Nobody is going to bother us tonight, anyway. And we won’t be here long.”

She waved her cigarette in the air like a smoky wand. “That’s good. That is nice to know. Now let’s not talk about that any more. We’re safe. Forget it. Have a drink or two and take off your clothes and come here to me.”

I scaled my cap at a chair and went to the little bar and had a Scotch, straight. It had sounded like an order, and I didn’t mind obeying. I agreed with her that it way safe, at least for a few hours. I had tossed her little pea shooter into the Hudson. Not that it mattered. Lyda had only one thing on her mind at the moment. When I had eased her pain— then was the time to watch her again.

I sipped at my Scotch as I undressed. I studied her. White on tan made a pleasing, and exciting, color scheme.

“Very fetching,” I told her. “White garter belt and stockings on dark skin. It is also a whore’s trick. I suppose you know that?”

She had closed her eyes again. She smiled and arched her neck and said, “I know that. Captain darling. I am a little bit of a whore, I suppose. Aren’t all women?”

“Beats me,” 1 said. “I don’t know that much about women.”

She was looking at me now. I was naked and I was ready.

Lyda stared at me for a moment, then she let out a long shuddery sigh and put down her glass. She crushed out her cigarette. “I knew it,” she said. “Somehow I knew it — that you would look like this with your clothes off. Come here, Nick. For God’s sake, come here!”

I went to the divan and stood beside her. She reached for me and stroked me lightly with her finger tips and then she kissed me and pulled me down on top of her. Our mouths met and her tongue was hot and coarse and moist as she probed my mouth and twisted and writhed under me.

She was a talker. “Oh, darling,” she said. “Oh, Captain Nick darling. Oh sweet, oh honey, oh my God, darling. Ahhhhh — ohhhhh — darling, darling, darling, darling—”

Yet she would not let me enter her. Not that way. Things got pretty rough for a time, because by now I was like a long chaste bull who spots a cow. Sex took over and what few brains I am supposed to have were fast being blotted out by the pleasure principle. During these bouts I usually keep a little cold part of my brain on guard, but tonight I didn’t think I needed it. I said to hell with it and let her ignite my rocket and got ready to blast off.

Lyda stopped talking and started biting. She took some pretty good hunks out of me and I didn’t feel a thing. I got a knee between her legs and tried to wedge them apart but she still wasn’t having any of that. She writhed fiercely, humping and arching, and suddenly she twisted from under me and rolled over on top of me.

“Me on top,” she moaned. “Me on top for now. I’m the man darling, I’m the man!”

Doc Freud might have been able to explain it Me, I didn’t give a damn at the moment.

She grabbed for me and got me fixed where she wanted me. Her breasts had come up hard and the nipples were half an inch long. Before long — long before I was ready — she started to screech. Loud and long and tremulous cries and if Tom Mitchell was listening he probably thought I was torturing her. I guess I was, in a way.

Lyda let out a final scream and collapsed on me, her breasts like melting brown butter on my face. By now I was a demon lover for sure and I turned her over — her eyes were staring and she was only half conscious — and I paid no heed to her whimpering little sounds and I took her hard and for a long time. Then, at last, I heard someone groan from a long way off and it seemed funny that it could be me. I let my weight come down on her and she cradled my head in her arms, on the soft pillows of her breasts, and crooned something that made no sense at all. All I wanted to do was float — float and sleep.

That is what I thought. In ten minutes she was back at me again. We were, it seemed, now going to get down to the real business of the evening. She hadn’t been kidding about everybody doing everything to everybody. And I had a technician on my hands. I have been around, God knows, but this gal knew tricks that I had never heard of.

A couple of hours later I woke up on the floor beside the divan. My nose was in the carpeting — the lack of perspective distorting the rose pattern a bit — and I felt like I had been worked over by the KGB in one of the Kremlin dungeons. My lips were swollen and sore, raw on the inside, and I had a clutter of little bites all over me. Exactly as though an enraged swan had been pecking at me. It was a pretty good simile at that.

She was asleep on the divan, on her side, curled into a fetal position with one arm flung over her face. I listened to her breathe for a minute, then I summoned my strength and got up and put on my shorts and my cap — why the cap I don’t know — and found a flashlight and went looking.

I started at the bow and worked back. The Sea Witch was loaded. Man, was she loaded! She had been stripped of every fixture that wasn’t absolutely necessary to make room for cargo. And what a cargo! I was impressed. Whoever had loaded her had done a professional job, too, because she was balanced just right, with no list, and the cargo secured so it couldn’t shift.

I took my time. Lyda would sleep for a few hours and anyway it didn’t really matter — she would expect me to find this stuff sooner or later. I made a rough mental tally:

9 recoilless rifles, 57 mm.

Rifle and hand grenades, 15 crates each, smoke and fragmentation.

Machineguns, some fifty of them, ranging from the old Chicago drum magazine Thompsons down to modern U.S. and Jap and Swedish weapons.

Mortars, 20, with at a guess some 7000 rounds.

200 mines. Mines! Some of them were anti-tank, some the old schu mines, the deballers that came up and burst in your crotch.

Five old Browning machineguns, heavy, water cooled. Shades of World War I.

Rocket grenades.

14 crates full of small arms, everything from Colt .45s to Jap to Italian to one ancient Webley Naval revolver that needed wheels to transport it.

About a thousand rifles of every make and vintage: Mausers, Mis, Krags, Springfields, Enfields, AKs, Ml6s, a few, and even an old Italian Martini. A flintlock wouldn’t have surprised me, or a jebel.

Ammo for all the above. Ammo in plenty. I guessed at nearly a million rounds. Here the amateur showed, because the ammo was jumbled every which way and it would be one hell of a job to unsnarl it and fit ammo to gun.

Radio equipment — some modern, some old, transmitters and receivers and a couple of modern transceivers.

Walkie-talkies, World War II.

Medical supplies in plenty.

Field phones and drums of wire, DR4s from World War II. Batteries, tools, one small generator, dismantled.

Uniforms — old Army surplus fatigues with caps, green.

Insignia — freshly stamped of shiny brass, a circlet with a black swan inset. Stars, bars, eagles and leaves as of U.S. Army. I could just visualize Lyda wearing four stars. That was a little too much so I sat down and had a cigarette. There was a whole case of them. C rations, too, and some aged Australian bully beef.

I smoked and I thought. Even as packed as she was the Sea Witch should be able to carry fifteen to twenty men. That wasn’t much of a force for an invasion of Haiti, though it has been tried with fewer, and that meant she was hoping to pick up her main force after she landed. Had intended to, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to invade now. Unless it was over my dead body. I didn’t like that thought much. I tossed my cigarette out a portlight and went back to the stateroom where all the comforts of life were concentrated.

Lyda was still sleeping. I tossed a light blanket over her and took a shower in the owner’s deluxe tiled bathroom. As I showered I thought and I grinned and I got to laughing. It did have its funny side — There was the Sea Witch, like any harmless rich man’s pleasure craft, lying innocently at anchor in the 79th Street basin. Right in the midst of thousands of cops and FBI and CIA and, as I now knew, an unknown number of Papa Doc’s goons. The Tonton Macoute. Carrying enough powder to blow half of Manhattan out of the water. No wonder she had been in such a sweat to get the cruiser out of there.

I toweled myself dry, still laughing. Then I stopped laughing. I was stuck with all this hardware. There was no way, nor any time, to unload it! 1 would just have to take it with me and hope I could keep her hot little hands away from it. Orders were not to let her use it on Papa Doc.

I didn’t want her using it on me, either.

Chapter 5

I went back into the stateroom to get dressed. Lyda was still sleeping. Just to make sure I put the beam of the flashlight on her face for a couple of minutes and watched her eyes and listened to her breathing. She wasn’t feigning.

Clothes were a minor problem. My Savile Row suit was already ruined — I intended to put it on the expense account if I got out of this mess — but the suit didn’t matter. What mattered was that it would be cold at sea, in April, and my thin dress shirt — already a mess — and the suit jacket just wouldn’t do. I needed some working clothes.

I had noticed some OD sweaters, Army surplus, packed away with the uniforms up forward and I was about to go and outfit myself when I noticed the large built-in wardrobe near the bathroom door. Out of curiosity, and just to check it out, I took a look.

The wardrobe was chock full of her clothes. Suits, dresses, slacks, etc., all neatly arranged on hangers. It came to me then that Lyda must have been living aboard the cruiser for some time. Sort of a floating apartment, and she had been lucky — or the Tonton Macoute had goofed it — because they obviously hadn’t spotted the Sea Witch as her hideout.

There were a dozen pairs of shoes on the floor of the wardrobe. Behind them, back against the wall, were a couple of shiny black hat boxes. When I saw them something buzzed in my brain — long habit and experience, I suppose — and I got the feeling that something, somehow, was a little off key. Lyda was not the type of girl who wore hats.

I pulled the hat boxes out into the light and opened them.

She nodded slowly. “I told you that last night. I have to trust you. I have no choice.”

I nodded back. “You are so right, Lyda. In a lot of ways. For the moment I am the only protection you have against the Tonton Macoute. And if I wanted to double-cross you all I have to do is take this floating arsenal down to the Battery and turn you into Customs and the Coast Guard. You would get at least five years, and Papa Doc’s men would be waiting for you when you came out. They don’t forget.”

She smothered a yawn. “You’ve been all over the boat, I suppose. You found everything?”

I grinned at her. “You knew I would.”

“Yes. I knew you would. So what are you going to do about it?”

I had been thinking about that. I had come to no decision yet, but I said: “One thing I could do is toss all that hardware overboard as soon as we’re at sea.”

Her eyes narrowed again, but she only made a little gesture of annoyance and said, “All that money, Nick! We worked so hard, saved so long, made such terrible sacrifices to get it. I’d like to salvage what I can.”

“We’ll see,” I told her. “No promises. And don’t try to kid me, Lyda. The HIUS raised that money to ransom Dr. Romera Valdez — not to buy guns so you could go after Papa Doc. In a sense you’ve embezzled that money and diverted it to your own purposes. That’s another rap against you if we ever want to use it.”

She snuggled the blanket up over her breasts, soft and slack looking this morning. I remembered how they came up hard and firm when she was excited. Her smile was derisive.

“You could never make it stick,” she said. “I’m the Black Swan, remember! My own people will never prosecute me. And anyway that bastard Duvalier is never going to ransom Dr. Valdez. Never! He has only been taunting us for the past two years. Taunting us and trying to maintain contact so his bogymen can find us and wipe us out one by one. I have known all this for a long time. So have a few others. It was my, our, decision to use the money for this boat and the arms and go in and kill Papa and take over the government.”

I had figured it that way, too. A small hard core, a minority in the HIUS led by this girl, had come up with the crackpot idea of invading Haiti. I doubted that the rank and file of the HIUS knew anything about the plans. All they contributed was money — money that Lyda Bonaventure was using in her own way.

I got out of my chair. “Okay for now. We’ll have plenty of time to talk on the way to Haiti. Why don’t you take a shower and get dressed and fix us some breakfast. I want to be headed downstream in an hour.”

She tossed the blanket aside and bounced out of bed, her large breasts jiggling. She was still wearing the white stockings and garter belt. She came to me and ruffled my hair and kissed my cheek, laughing.

“You’re really going to do it, Nick? You’re going in after Dr. Valdez?”

“We are going in after Dr. Valdez,” I said. “We are going to try to bring him out.” No point in telling her that if I couldn’t get Valdez out I had to kill him.

I gave her a hard look. “AXE is going to try and keep the promise the CIA made to you. I’ll try hard and do my best. But understand one thing — at the first sign of monkey business from you the whole deal is off. You got that?”

Lyda leaned to kiss me lightly. “There will be,” she promised, “no monkey business. I trust you and you trust me.”

She slapped me lightly and stepped back. She did a bump and a grind and rolled her belly at me and then ran for the bathroom. Laughing. She closed the door and a moment later I heard the shower start.

I went through the deckhouse and took a careful peek at the marina. I didn’t want anyone spotting the web belt and the holster. Tom Mitchell was at the far end of docking, leaning against a piling and drooping, a cigarette burning in his mouth. He looked beat.

I yelled at him, “Hey, Tom!”

He snapped erect and waved a hand at me. The morning was soft, nacreous, with layers of dank gray mist floating over the Hudson.

I tapped the holster. “I’ve got it now, Tom. Go home and get some sleep. And thanks. I won’t need you today — I’m casting off in a few minutes.”

He came down the dock to where the floating duck-boarding led out to the cruiser. He looked puffy and fat and old. He stopped and flipped his butt into the water. “You’re taking off, huh?”

“Yeah. Orders. Thanks again, Tom, and take care of yourself. Be sure you cash that voucher.”

He scratched his bald head and gave me a tired grin. “I’ll cash it. Christ, Nick, I wish I was going with you.”

I grinned at him. “No can do, Tom. Anyway you’re too old. You said it yourself. So long, Tom. Maybe I’ll see you again and we’ll tie one on — like we used to.”

“Anytime,” he said. “Anytime, Nick. Goodbye, fella.”

He raised a hand and then turned and walked back up the docking. He didn’t look back. I ducked down into the cockpit and looked the engine over. A minute later I heard a car start and drive away. So long, Tom.

I checked her out pretty good, and when I got back to the stateroom Lyda had breakfast ready. Bacon and eggs and toast and more coffee. She also had a surprise for me: she was wearing green fatigues and a little Castro cap and on the cap, and on each shoulder, she wore a single silver star.

I stared at her. “So now you’re a brigadier, eh? You are also some kind of nut, you know. If Papa Doc’s boys catch you wearing that insignia you won’t even get a trial. They’ll shoot you out of hand.”

She made a face at me. “I know. They will shoot me anyway, stars or no. Anyway, I won’t wear them when we go ashore.”

I nodded at her. “That is for damn sure, honey. Remember it. But if you want to play general on the way down I don’t care. Only don’t get uppity. Remember you’re still crew — and there is going to be plenty of work.”

As we ate I told her that we would cast off as soon as breakfast was over. She looked doubtful.

“In day time? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until after dark?”

I shook my head. “The risk is minimal. The bogyman haven’t spotted the Sea Witch or we wouldn’t be here now. You certainly wouldn’t be.”

She gave me a swift glance. “I know. I would be dead.”

“Yes. So I think it’s safe to take her down river. We’ll hug the Jersey shore and once we get into the harbor traffic nobody will bother us.”

There was one slight risk, which I didn’t mention. If the Tonton Macoute had spotted the cruiser, and had laid off for some reason of their own, and saw us heading out, they would have a pretty good idea where we were going. That might mean a reception committee in Haiti. I had to risk that.

I went into the deckhouse and took off the web belt and holster and stashed them in a locker. I didn’t want a police launch getting interested in me. I opened the radio cabinet in one corner of the deckhouse and checked out the equipment. It was pretty good — a ship to shore phone and a CW transceiver. Lyda came into the deckhouse to stand beside me as I inspected the stuff.

There was a bug and a manual key jacked into the transceiver. I pointed to the keys. “Can you handle a key? You know International Morse?”

She shook her head. “I don’t. We’ve got — had — a radio man. Juan was going to — what does it matter now?”

“Probably doesn’t,” I admitted. “Still you never know. And I can’t do everything.”

I flicked a toggle on the console and a green light came on. I am nothing with a bug, but a manual key I can handle pretty well, and now I tapped the key a couple of times and a thin squealing came out of the loud speaker. I put on the ear phones and tapped myself a CQ and adjusted the vernier and volume until the code was coming in loud and clear and five by five. I laid off the key and twisted the dial and listened to a couple of tugs working each other. Then I got an idea and just for the hell of it I sent a CQ to the AXE station on a remote island off the South Carolina coast. I really didn’t expect to get through, because the traffic was thick and I was Bending from a poor locale, at sea level and bouncing signals off the Palisades.

But in a minute the signal came in, booming and shrill: R — go ahead, N3—R — go ahead — K—

I had no message but somehow I felt better when I heard them come in. A tenuous link to my people, but a link just the same.

I pounded the key. K — testing — K—testing — AR—

The answer came ghosting back. K — AR— Silence.

I flipped the toggle to off and gave the crew some orders and went to start the engines. The crew did pretty well with the lines, and I backed Sea Witch out into a making tide and pointed her downstream on a diagonal slant to get some westing and hug the far shore. The sun came over the horizon and turned the flat lead color of the river into gold and silver. The far reaches were empty, a lot of vacant water, but a couple of tugs were crawling upstream and to the north a fat white tanker was lying at the Con Ed dock.

I was conning her from the cockpit today, not wanting to be any more conspicuous than necessary. The tan general came to stand beside me and kissed my ear, and I told her to go away.

“Getting this scow through harbor traffic is not going to be fun and games,” I told her. “Go find something to do.” I wondered how soon she would miss the money and what her reaction would be.

“Wash the dishes,” I said. “You’re crew and I like a tidy] galley. And it might be a good idea if you stay under cover1 until we’re at sea. No use taking chances.”

That was good, coming from me. Taking chances? This whole crazy mission was a chance — and not much of chance, at that. I was beginning to have a very nasty feeling about this deal.

“See if you can get a marine forecast,” I told her. “And let me know.”

Not that it made any difference. I had to go to sea anyway, because anything less than a hurricane would not impress Hawk. I had my orders.

Lyda gave me a smart salute and a mocking smile. “Aye, aye, sir. It shall be done.”

She was her former lovely self again by now. The morning megrims were over, and she was full of bounce and hope and excitement. I would have given a lot to be able to peer into her brain just then. It would have been a help, for we had a long bull session coming up and I was wondering how many lies she was going to tell me and how I could spot and discount them. And how many lies I would have to tell her? Not many, I thought. I wouldn’t have to lie much. I could just leave out certain things.

Lyda stayed in the deckhouse as I worked Sea Witch through the traffic and under the Narrows Bridge and into the outer harbor. A cruise liner was coming in and a couple of rusty tramps going out, and off Sheepshead I ran into a covey of fishing boats. No real sweat. Pretty soon we began to roll and pitch a little and I could feel the open sea under Sea Witch. She was well laden, and she rode low and steady. I made my southing and she began to roll slightly in the long, flat quartering swell. About five minutes later I heard sounds coming from the deckhouse. Then no more sounds. She was in the bathroom.

Ten minutes later she poked her head out of the deckhouse. She clung to the frame and she was the greenest dark girl I had ever seen.

She said: “I’m sick, Nick. Ohhh — I’m so sick!”

I liked that. A really sick person can’t plot much mischief and I could tell from one look that this kid had a real bad case of mal-de-mer.

I nodded and kept from grinning and gave her some phony sympathy. “Lie down,” I said. “Look in the medicine cabinet. I thought I saw some pills there this morning. If you don’t feel better pretty soon I’ll come and fix you a nice big bowl of thick stew.”

“B — bastard!” She clamped her hand across her mouth and turned and ran.

The Coast Guard cutter picked me up just beyond Ambrose Light. Her name was Excalibur, and she came swirling in, making a big creamy circle, and I saw her officers watching me through glasses. I raised my right hand and made a chopping motion down toward my left wrist. I did it three times. A moment later her blinker answered, a pale eye in the daylight: R — AR—: Received and understood.

Excalibur left me then and ran east until she was just a dot on the horizon. Then she turned south and began to dog me down the coast.

Hawk was on the ball.

Chapter 6

The marine forecasts were right for once, and the good weather held. I fueled at Virginia Beach and headed for Key West with Excalibur still herding me. I worked her once on the CW transceiver, in plaincode, and was told that she would escort me to the eastern end of Cuba and then leave me. From there I presumed she would run up to Guantanamo. Anyway I was going to be on my own in the narrow gut between Cuba and the north coast of Haiti.

Lyda was a pretty sick girl for two days, then she got her sea legs and began to bounce back. A little weak and wan, but showing signs of being the Black Swan again. She evinced no interest in sex for the time being, and that was all right with me. Finally I had to sleep, and trust her, and I did and when I woke up after about 12 hours she had the cruiser on gyro and was sitting there in the chair staring at me. Damned if she didn’t have that big Webley in her hands, both hands, and was pointing it at me and it was shaking a little, up and down and sideways. It was a big heavy gun and she was a nervous girl and I was very, very careful. I spoke softly, gently, and I smiled at her.

“Better think it over,” I said. “You can’t run this cruiser by yourself. And that Coast Guard cutter knows I’m in command and they’ll be checking before they leave us. If I’m not around they’ll take you into custody and you’ll be in real trouble.”

The big revolver wavered as she thrust it at me. “Where’s the money, you bastard?”

“Oh, that!” I tried to sound tres gay, as though the revolver didn’t bother me in the least. “I hid it. Don’t worry about it. It’s safe and you’ll get it back when this is over.”

She looked mean and anxious and doubtful. “You didn’t do anything crazy? Like throwing the money overboard?”

I reached slowly for a pack of cigarettes and she didn’t shoot me and I figured I was over the hump.

“Use your head,” I said. “Do I look like a man who would toss a hundred thousand dollars overboard?”

“More than that,” she said. “Almost a hundred and fifty— and no, I guess you wouldn’t do that. Throw it overboard. But where is it?”

I lit up and blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “I’m not going to tell you that, Lyda. You’ll just have to trust me. I thought that was the whole idea — that we would trust each other. If we don’t, if we can’t, we might as well call this thing off right now. We’ve only got half a prayer now, and if we fight each other we don’t have any chance. Now put down that goddamned cannon and stop being a fool.”

She lowered the revolver but her eyes sparked yellow at me. “That money is all I have in the world. All we have — my people. I’m responsible for it.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I’m responsible for it. It’s invasion money and there is not going to be any invasion, so you don’t need it now. Tell you what I’ll do — just before we go into — Haiti I’ll show you where it is. I won’t give it to you, but I’ll show you where it’s hidden. Okay?”

It wasn’t really okay but she had to accept it. She nodded and dropped the Webley on the carpet beside the chair. “I think I know where it is,” she said sullenly, “but I can’t budge those crates.”

I could understand that. I can lift 300 pounds, and I had I been sweating getting the crates back into the locker in the forepeak.

I picked up the Webley and grinned at her. “Why this blunderbuss, of all the guns we’ve got aboard? You can hardly hold it.”

She shrugged and wouldn’t look at me. “It looked big I enough to kill you and it was already loaded. I–I really don’t know much about guns, Nick.”

I tossed the Webley out a port. Not much loss. “Don’t let your troops find that out,” I said. “A leader is supposed to be able to do anything the troops have to do, and do it better.”

She put her face in her hands and began to cry. I watched the silver tears slide down her light coffee hued cheeks. Nerves. Tension. Seasickness, whatever. I patted her shoulder lightly, offering no sympathy because I knew she didn’t really want it.

“Cry it out,” I said. “And trust me, baby. For both our sakes.”

I went up to the flying bridge and snapped her off gyro and took over the con. To my left, like a black speck on the inside of a blue bowl, the Excalibur was sheep-dogging us.

It was out of my way, but Hawk had said Key West and so Key West it had to be. Anyway I figured to get fuel and water there, taking on enough extra of both to get me to Haiti and back again. Back? I wasn’t counting much on back, but if we did make it I didn’t want to run out of fuel and water somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean. We rounded the tip of Florida and headed for the Key. I was standing a 24-hour radio watch with Excalibur and when I made my westing she was puzzled, some snafu about orders, and she came booming in on the loud speaker to question me.

I explained that I had orders for Key West and after a moment the signal came back to proceed accordingly. Even the signal sounded a little puzzled and disgruntled, and I knew how the commander of the cutter felt — he was working in the dark, on a directive from Washington, and he didn’t know what in hell it was all about.

The Gulf was a mill pond. The weather was holding and it was hot for April. I stripped to the waist, stowing the Luger and the stiletto in a locker, and began to refurbish my tan. Lyda took to wearing very short shorts and a halter. She was in good spirits again and sang as she went about her chores. Just before Key West, while I had the cruiser on gyro, she made a sudden grab for me in the deckhouse and we rolled around on the floor for a time and I got another real working over. It was good and exciting, and I didn’t mind the way she put her teeth into me.

When it was all over and she was satisfied, she was, as always, very cool and all business. By now I had her emotional patterns pretty well figured out and only hoped she didn’t deviate from them when we really got down to business.

I brought Sea Witch in at the foot of Duval Street. Instead of docking I rigged a make-do anchor and took the dinghy in. Not wanting to tempt Lyda more than necessary, I took the keys with me and, just to make doubly sure, a couple of vital doo-dads from the engines. Lyda watched this with a sardonic smile.

“Mutual trust, huh?” Her smile was white and sour. “It doesn’t seem to work both ways, does it?”

I kissed her on the mouth and patted her fanny. “I do trust you,” I lied. “But I have to follow orders or I get my ass in a sling. Orders are to take absolutely no chances.”

“Hah.”

I held her away from me and grinned. “Anyway, if your heart is pure, and you don’t intend any monkey business, what does it matter?”

As I shoved away in the dinghy I said, “Stay off the deck all you can. Keep out of sight. The Key is full of Cuban refugees and God knows who else — maybe some of the Tonton Macoute. We don’t want you spotted.”

She gave me a little wave and headed for the deckhouse, almost running. All I ever had to do was mention the Tonton Macoute and she got scared. There was something more to that than I understood at present.

I didn’t know who I was looking for. The deal was that an AXE agent would contact me when I came ashore from Sea Witch. I snubbed the dinghy and climbed a ladder. I was wearing the green dungarees and a white tee shirt and the yachting cap and I hoped I looked like any other part time, small craft, sailor.

I was not prepared for the old man, but there he was in person. Hawk. He had on a wrinkled seersucker suit and a white shirt with a sweaty collar and a horrible tie. He had a new Panama cocked on his gray head at what he probably considered a rakish angle.

He came up to me and extended his hand and growled at me: “Hello, son. Nice to see you. You look like a pirate.”

I grinned at him. He was dry smoking one of his cheap cigars and he looked like a farmer come to town to see the sights.

I said: “Everybody tells me that, sir.”

He dropped my hand and squinted at me in the hot hard sun. “Yeah. I suppose. Come on. We haven’t got much time. I have to get back to Washington right away, and we have a lot of ground to cover. Things have come up — a lot of things.”

I fell into step with him. “Must be,” I said. “For you to come down here in person.”

The old man nodded grimly. “It’s hot and getting hotter all the time. Just to clue you in I’ll say that this could be as rough as the Cuban missile crisis.”

I whistled softly. “Devious. Very devious. I thought all I had to do was go in and snatch this Valdez out of Papa Doc’s teeth.”

“That too,” Hawk said. “That too — but a lot more.”

He led me to a Chevy hardtop and handed me the keys. ““You drive. And you can relax — I’ve got three men covering us just in case. Probably a waste, because I think the Tonton Macoute have lost you and the girl for now.”

“Leave us pray,” I said.

He glanced out over the Gulf to where the Excalibur was just visible, then flashed his false teeth at me in a grim little smile. “How are you and your escort getting along?”

“Just fine. Only the skipper doesn’t seem to know what it’s all about.”

Hawk laughed curtly. “He doesn’t. This was a hurry-up job — I had to jump channels and go direct to The Man.”

I started the Chevy. “Where to?”

“Just drive. I’ll tell you.”

I watched the mirror as I pulled out into traffic. A Ford with two men in it pulled out from the curb and followed us. As I approached a stop light a red MG gunned out of a parking lot and cut in front of me.

I glanced at Hawk. “I feel so safe, boss. You’ll spoil me with all this security, you know. I might get used to it.”

He made a sour grimace. “Don’t. You’ll be on your own soon enough. Take that next side street.”

We did a little futzing around while Hawk watched the mirror. Following his directions I drove the Chevy past the Ernest Hemingway museum and across Truman Avenue to skirt Garrison Bight. A lot of the charter boats were in. We circled and cut back past the old turtle kraals and eventually ended up in front of a private house on Greene Street. Hawk told me to pull into the drive. The red MG turned a corner ahead of us and stopped. The Ford stopped half a block behind us.

Hawk was grumbling. “A lot of goddamned nonsense but I have to do it. I don’t think there’s a goon within seven hundred miles of here. Come on, Nick.”

It was a little over seven hundred miles to Haiti.

Just to put the spurs in him a little I said, “That’s what the skipper of the Pueblo thought about the North Koreans.”

He just grunted and didn’t answer me.

Hawk unlocked the door and we went into a big, cool, dusty-smelling livingroom. All the shades were down and the draperies drawn. Hawk took a sheaf of onion skin paper from his inside pocket and tossed it to me. It was closely typed, single space, and there were maybe twenty pages.

“Read it,” he said. “Not now. At your leisure on the way to Haiti. Then destroy it. How is the subject doing?”

I said she was doing okay and gave him a fast and succinct rundown on events since the shoot out at the voodoo church. He kept nodding and gumming his cigar and didn’t interrupt.

When I finished he said: “Watch her every minute. I think she and the HIUS are on the level about wanting this Dr. Valdez out, but on the other hand they may want him in. We know they want him as the next President of Haiti. The mulattos, that is. The elite. They want their land back, their cane and coffee plantations, and to do that they have to kill Papa Doc and replace him with this Valdez. He’s a mulatto too, you know.”

I hadn’t known and said so. Hawk waved a hand.

“No matter. What does it matter that Dr. Valdez is also a physicist. Theoretical, but still a physicist. At least he was at Columbia, before Papa Doc snatched him, and I don’t suppose he has forgotten much in five years. That mean anything to you, Nick?”

It did. “It begins to sound a little familiar and ugly,” I said.

“It is. You remember those Sidewinder rockets that were stolen recently in Bonn? That were supposed to have been shipped to Moscow?”

I said I remembered.

Hawk stuck a new cigar in his mouth. “They never got to Moscow. They were stolen again, enroute, and ended up in Haiti. The CIA lucked into that bit of information. The Coast Guard picked up a Cuban refugee not long ago. He was a member of Cuban Intelligence and he was pretty well shot up when they took him aboard a cutter. Before he died he convinced the CIA boys that Papa Doc has got missiles, modeled after the Sidewinder, and that he is trying to develop atomic warheads for them. Castro knows this and is about to go nuts. You see it?”

I saw it. If Papa Doc had missiles, and if he could arm them with nuclear warheads he was going to dominate the Caribbean. Every little banana republic was going to dance to his tune.

And Dr. Romera Valdez was a physicist. No wonder that Papa Doc refused to ransom him for the million the HIUS had raised. Lyda was right about that.

“Valdez was a Commie when he was at Columbia,” Hawk said. “The FBI and CIA have a file on him from here to there. He was never an activist, only a parlor pink, but he was a Commie. We don’t really want him back in the States.”

I watched him carefully “You really want him dead?”

Hawk shook his head. “Only in extremis, son. That’s what The Man says. You’re not to kill him unless there is absolutely no hope of getting him out.” He frowned and spat a piece of cigar on the floor. “I wouldn’t do it that way but that is the way The Man wants it, and I have to take orders the same as anybody. But we can’t let Papa Doc keep him.”

I lit a cigarette. “How much of this, of what we know, do you think Lyda Bonaventure knows?”

The old man shook his head. “I can only guess. In all her dealings with the CIA she played it very close to the vest. They were trying to mulct each other, she and the CIA contacts, and I’m damned if I know who came out ahead. You’ll have to find out from her the best way you can.”

“She’s all for getting Valdez out,” I said. “Or so she tells me. And she must know he’s a physicist and a Commie.”

Hawk nodded. “Yes. She will know that. She also knows just where in Haiti Valdez is being kept prisoner. Don’t let her con you that she doesn’t. She can take you straight to him. You know she is the Black Swan?”

“I know.” I had told him about the arms and the uniforms and how I had a BG on my hands.

“She’s probably got a pretty good underground organization in Haiti,” Hawk said. “She was planning on using the blacks for the rank and file of her invasion Army. She only has a small hardcore of mulattos.”

“Why would the blacks go for that? Once the mulattos are back in power the blacks will be worse off than they are under Duvalier.”

“They don’t know that yet,” Hawk said. “Things are so bad under Papa Doc that the blacks are ready to try anything. By the time they wake up it will be too late. If she can bring off an invasion.”

“She’s not going to bring off any invasion,” I promised [him. “She’s cute and clever, all right, but she isn’t that good. I’ve got her in control. Forget the invasion.”

Hawk sighed and leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “All right, son. I trust you on that. But you still have to get to Valdez, get him out of Haiti or kill him, and let us know the stage of progress Papa Doc has achieved with his missiles and atomic warheads. The last thing in the world that The Man wants to do is to have to occupy Haiti again. They hate us enough as it is, we’ve still got the stink of the Dominican thing hanging over us, and right now is a poor time for trouble in the Caribbean. Any time is a poor time, but right now it would be murder. We’ve got enough on our plate with the Mid-East and Vietnam. You’ve got to do us a job in there, boy, and you won’t have any help. The CIA is blown to hell and I’ve got one agent left in Port-au-Prince. One man! I would like to keep him. But if things go badly and you’re running for your life, and can get to Port-au-Prince, he might be able to help.”

He told me how to contact the man in Port-au-Prince. He went on to talk for another quarter of an hour, really socking it to me, and I listened and felt worse by the minute. What I really needed was a regiment of Marines — real tough Marines like those who had occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. I didn’t have any Marines. I had only me. As I drove the Chevy back to Duval Street Hawk told me about the New York thing.

“The CIA is plenty teed off about losing Steve Bennett, but they’re covering. The New York cops don’t know what’s going on, but they smell a rat and their Homicide people aren’t trying too hard. That third goon got away clean and the other two are dead.”

“I knew I got one for sure,” I said. “I couldn’t be sure about the other one.”

“DOA,” said Hawk. “He didn’t talk in the ambulance.”

Hawk didn’t go out on the pier with me. We shook hands and he said, “Study the precis carefully, son. There is a lot more to this than I had time for. Be sure you destroy it.”

“Will do. Goodbye, sir.”

He flipped his gnarled old hand at me. “Goodbye, Nick. Luck. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

As I rowed the dinghy back to Sea Witch I could only hope that his waiting would not be in vain. That he would hear from me.

Chapter 7

I ran through the old Bahama Channel, keeping well clear of Cuban waters. In fact I made so much northing that as I turned south to enter the Windward Passage I could make out the dim smudge of Matthew Town astern.

The Excalibur, like a faithful dog taught to heel, was running to port of me and a couple of miles back. As soon as I got into the Passage she came boiling up to circle in front of me and signal:

Leaving you now — rendezvous per instructions on call— goodbye and good luck—

I had a lonely and chilly feeling in my gut as I watched her churn away. Her officers and men were watching us through glasses and, feeling as alone as I did, I couldn’t help but chuckle. A day out of Key West Lyda had taken to going topless. She wanted sun on her breasts, she said, and to hell with a bunch of peeping Toms.

“You’re an exhibitionist,” I told her, “and you are driving a lot of nice clean American boys off their rockers. Onanism is frowned on in the Coast Guard and you are encouraging it. In this case going without a bra is probably treason.”

She couldn’t have cared less and said so. I didn’t give a damn myself and I had to laugh every time I thought of what the officers and men of the cutter must be thinking. Especially the skipper. He knew, without knowing the details, that I was on a serious mission, and it must have shocked his staunch old soul to watch us playboying around on Sea Witch. I wondered if he would put it in the log, or include it in his report to Washington, and what the expression on j Hawk’s face would be like when he read the report.

Lyda came to stand beside me now and we watched the I cutter disappear over the horizon. She stood behind me, her breasts just touching my bare flesh and nuzzling my ear with her moist lips. We had become quite fond of each other by J this time.

The Excalibur was out of sight.

“She’ll run into Guantanamo,” I said. “Give the crew a little leave, take on some supplies, then come back here to cruise on station. I just hope to Christ we see her again.”

“Amen,” said Lyda. She gave me a sharp, excited look of conspiracy and I could almost hear her boiling inside. We were about to get down to the nitty gritty, and she was happy and ready.

In the west the sun was falling fast and lavishing color on the Passage. Lavender and gold and crimson and blue purple. An occasional flying fish skittered in a sparkle of silver. The sea was calm, running in long, shallow, green troughs crested with lace, and the tradewind from Africa was sweeping steadily and moistly cool in our faces. No other craft was in sight and, with night about to come, that suited me fine. From here on it was going to be very tricky.

I smacked her taut behind and told her to go fix dinner. Then I throttled the engines, keeping bare way on her, and snapped on the gyro. I now had a number of problems.

I had read and memorized the precis Hawk gave me, then destroyed it. It was a headache, nothing but more work and more trouble and more danger, but that couldn’t be helped. It also added considerably to the cast of characters— something I could have done without — for this soup already had too many cooks fooling around with it. I had read about Paul Penton Trevelyn, and seen an occasional rare and outdated picture of him, but now I might have to meet this weird character in the flesh. I might even have to kill him.

P.P. Trevelyn, as he was usually called, was an eccentric billionaire who made his permanent home in Haiti. Hawk admitted, in the precis, that AXE didn’t have a hell of a lot on P.P., and what they did have was out of date and not very reliable. P.P. was a mystery man, a recluse and a rabid Fascist, and he and Papa Doc were as thick as the thieves they undoubtedly were. P.P. made Howard Hughes look like a raving extrovert and had more money then Getty. The most recent picture of him was twenty years old.

P.P. was also the head of Papa Doc’s intelligence service, and put up the money for it. It was P.P. who was holding Dr. Romera Valdez on his huge estate near the ruins of Sans Souci palace and not far from The Citadel. It was my guess, and that of the CIA and AXE, that Mr. Trevelyn was calling a lot of Papa Doc’s tunes.

Lyda thought so, too, and she admitted that it was going to be tough to get Valdez out of P.P.’s clutches. The man had a private army! That made two armies I would be up against — Papa Doc’s and P.P’s.

I was still brooding over this when she called me to come and eat. I tossed my cigarette overboard and took a last look around. The sun was gone, and the colors faded, but in the quiet immensity of the sea gloaming there was a quality of peace and serenity that gripped and held me, the more because I knew it might be a long time before I had the feeling again. If ever. This was going to be a rough one and I felt distinctly uneasy.

After dinner I told Lyda to get out all our charts and notes and make them ready for a last council of war. I went topside and cut the engines and put an already rigged sea anchor on Sea Witch. It was fully dark now, with just a sliver of moon in the east. We had this stretch of the Passage to ourselves and I didn’t turn on any running lights. After a last check around I made my way through a clutter of lashed oil and water jerricans and back down to the deckhouse. Lyda had slipped into her halter and a light sweater, against the slight chill, and was poring over the charts and a clipped sheaf of notes.

I lit cigarettes for both of us and squinted through smoke at the charts. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get on with this. I want to run into Tortuga tonight and hide before it gets light. You got anybody on that island?”

She nodded and frowned down at the chart, wetting her lips with a long pink tongue. “A few people, yes. If nothing has happened.”

“You can get in touch with them without danger to us?"

I watched her closely. We had been together long enough for me to know when she was lying, or even thinking about lying. Now I frowned at her. “You would have heard, wouldn’t you, if anything had happened? You are the Black Swan, the boss lady.”

She nodded, but gave me a tart look. “I mean recently, Nick. In New York I would have heard, yes, but we’ve been a little out of touch the past few days, yes?”

She had a point there. Except for working Excalibur a couple of times I had maintained strict radio silence, and there hadn’t been any broadcasts from Port-au-Prince to indicate trouble. We had been monitoring Radio Haiti constantly. That didn’t mean a damned thing, of course. Papa Doc is a very secretive man.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll have to chance it. Are there many people on Tortuga?” It was an island off the northern coast of Haiti, about 20 miles from Port de Paix on the mainland, and an old private hangout.

“Not many. Some fishermen and a few blacks. There isn’t much there.”

“A place we can hide the boat and camouflage her?”

She nodded. “No trouble there. A lot of coves and inlets. You’re worried about air patrols?”

I was sure as hell worried about air patrols and I said so. Papa Doc didn’t have much of an air force, but I didn’t have any, and it only takes one plane to spot a boat that shouldn’t be there.

Then she brought up an old, and sore, subject. We had argued about it all the way from Key West.

“If you would only let me use the radio, Nick! I could call my people on the mainland and it would be so much easier than doing it the way you want to. I—”

“No, goddamn it!” I slapped the table hard with my palm. Amateurs get on my nerves at times.

“It would make it easier,” I went on. “Easier for Papa Doc and this P.P. Trevelyn. How do I know how many DF sets and monitoring stations they’ve got? Transmitting to the mainland is asking for it, Lyda. They’d get a fix on us and that would be it. End of story. End of us. And don’t bring that up again!”

“Yes, Captain. I won’t.” Her smile had the familiar mockery in it.

“We stick to my original plan,” I said. “We lie in Tortuga while you make a contact and send him to your people on the mainland. Verbal only. No notes. Your messenger will set up the rendezvous on the mainland for tonight. That is the way it is going to be.”

“Of course, Nick.”

“Another thing,” I went on, “I don’t want any of your friends coming aboard Sea Witch. If they try it I’ll have to shoot them. Get that straight, Lyda. Because I’ll do it, and if the gunfire starts too soon we’re cooked. We might as well send Papa Doc a telegram.”

She saw the sense in that and agreed, unsmiling. “I know. I don’t especially want the blacks to know what we’ve got aboard — since there is to be no invasion. They — they might get ideas of their own.”

I couldn’t resist sneering a little. During the last few days of sharing boat and bed we had reached that free and easy, comfortable, stage where we did not mind sharp tongues or fear to hurt each other’s feelings.

I said: “The blacks bug you a little, don’t they? You’ve got to use them, because there aren’t enough of you brown people, but you don’t trust them. I see your point — you mulattos make the revolution, then the blacks step in and take over and hang you along with Papa Doc.”

Lyda shrugged. “If I were invading I would worry about that, but since there is to be no invasion it doesn’t signify. Forget the invasion, Nick. You have my promise not to try any tricks.”

I figured that the promise was worth about a half a Haitian gourde. A dime.

She put her finger on the chart, then picked up a pencil and made a mark. “Just here, on the northwest coast of Tortuga, there is an inlet and a little river. Only a creek, really, but it should be deep enough for Sea Witch.”

“No problem. We’ve got a depth finder. We can nose her in slowly, as far as she will go. A little risky, but we’ll have to take that chance.”

I was worried about getting hung up on a bar.

She pushed the pencil into her thick hair and smiled at me. “It should be all right. The last time I was here I was on a boat that draws more than we do, and we didn’t have any trouble. Once we’re into the creek mouth we can lie against the side and the palm trees will hide us.”

I watched her eyes. “When was that? The last time you were here?”

“About three months ago. I told you that once. I come and go in Haiti whenever I please.”

She had told me, come to think of it.

I said: “You were setting up an invasion even then?”

Her dark eyes were candid and cool. “I was. I knew even then that Duvalier wasn’t going to ransom Dr. Valdez, that he was only playing us along.”

I nodded. “Good. Then we do it the way we planned. We use your invasion people, and the invasion route, but without the invasion. What are you going to tell your people? We have to use them without them knowing they are being used.”

Lyda frowned at me and wet her lips. “I know. That could be a little tricky, even dangerous. I might have to lie a little.”

I grinned at her. “No problem for you, kid.”

She ignored that and said, “I can handle it, Nick. I’ll tell, them that this is a last reconnaissance before the actual invasion. But I’ll have to make up a story to explain you.”

I put on a tee shirt and the fatigue jacket and checked the Luger and the stiletto. I strapped on the web belt with the .45 Colt snug in its old worn holster.

“Tell them anything you like,” I said. “Just be sure that I know what you tell them. Okay. That’s it for now. I’ll get her underway. I want to be in that creek and hidden before the sun comes up.”

At the companionway leading up to the deckhouse I glanced back at her. “Wear your fatigues and the cap, if you want, but leave off your star. And find yourself a weapon — a hand gun that you can handle. A light gun. If you can’t handle it I’ll give you a couple of lessons.”

I went back to the engines and started them in neutral. I hauled in the sea anchor that was holding Sea Witch into the wind. As I got under way again, running without lights, I wondered if I was being smart — using her invasion setup for my own purposes. I shrugged. It was better than going ashore and floundering around in the jungle with no contacts at all. I just had to watch her every second, even closer than I had been doing. See that she didn’t kill me, or have me killed, and then stage her invasion anyway.

When the sun came up and gilded the one low mountain on Tortuga — the chart said 1240 altitude—Sea Witch lay snug in the creek under a thick canopy of coco palms with plenty of water under her. Lyda, so excited that she was jittery, got ready to go ashore and find her people. She was wearing the green fatigues and cap, without the brigadier’s star, and she carried a little Smith and Wesson .32 and some spare cartridges in a belt pouch. I would have bet she had a knife on her somewhere. I couldn’t see it and I didn’t ask her.

Just before she went ashore I told her, “Stay out of trouble. If I hear gunfire I’ll wait ten minutes, no more, then m run for it. You got that? Ten minutes.”

She laughed and pressed herself against me and gave me a wet kiss, sticking her tongue in my mouth. She writhed against me, and she was so excited and hotted up that she wouldn’t have minded taking a quickie right there on the deck. I pushed her away, tempted as I was.

“Get going. Come back as soon as you can. Make a little noise when you come back and whistle before you get too close. I’d hate to kill you by accident And don’t bring anyone back with you.”

She gave me a smile and a snappy little salute and dropped over the side. The creek ran so deep here that I had been able to snub the boat right into the bank. A moment later she vanished into a thicket of wild cane. I listened and I couldn’t hear a thing. I marked that. She moved in the thick growth like a ghost.

The funny thing was that I missed her. I had grown accustomed to this lovely, slim wench. I made a pot of coffee, spiked it with a shot of booze, and then went forward. I selected three of the most modern machine guns from our arsenal, pawed through a crate until I found the right ammo, then took the guns back and laid them out on the deck close to hand. There are always a million things to do on a boat and now I kept busy so the time would go faster and I wouldn’t get nervous.

After an hour or so it began to rain, big bullet-sized drops spattering silver on the deck. I took my guns and went in the deckhouse.

Noon came and no sign of her. The rain stopped and the sun came back and the jungle began to steam. I monkeyed around with the engines. From the stern I could see down the creek and across the cove to open sea, and once a coastal sloop boat beat across the inlet under full sail. A snatch of Creole song reached me, and then the sloop was gone.

I sat with my legs dangling over the side, a machine gun in my lap, and watched parrots flutter in a tangle of wild orchids. A big lizard came to the bank and eyed me, decided he didn’t think much of me, and went slithering off.

The drums started. Somewhere to the south and east, a deep vibrating basso, a nervous and irregular dum-dum-dum? dum. After five minutes or so the first drum stopped and another one picked up the beat. They talked for half an hour, back and forth, then hushed abruptly.

A long green snake with yellow markings came sliding past the boat. I eyed him and made a little sound and he stopped and arched his head to peer at me.

“The natives are restless today,” I told the snake. “Beat it.”

It began to rain again. By three o’clock it was still raining, and I was as nervous as a whore in church. Where in hell was she?

At ten after three I heard the pistol shot. It sounded like the .32, a light whip of sound from not far off. I snapped the safety off the machine gun and ran for the shelter of the deckhouse. I crouched out of sight and laid the muzzle of the gun across a port ledge and waited.

Dead silence. That one shot had hushed everything in the underbrush. Not even a bird moved. I peered into the scrub growth and the wild cane and I couldn’t see a damned thing.

She whistled in Morse as we had arranged. Two shorts, two longs, two shorts. Ditty-dum-dum-ditty. Question mark. Everything okay?

I whistled back a K. Long, short, long. Dah-de-dah. Come on in.

She came out of the cane and walked toward the boat. There was an odd, tight look about her and she was carrying the .32 in her right hand. I went to meet her with the machine gun cradled across my left forearm and my finger on the trigger.

She made a little sign and said, “It’s all right now. I killed him.”

I gave her a hand and swung her aboard. “You killed who?”

She was sweating a little, silver beads popping out of her tan skin. Her stare was grim. “One of my own people. Or so I thought until a few minutes ago. He disobeyed orders and followed me when I started back here. Strictly against my orders, Nick! I wasn’t sure at first, but he was clumsy and I kept hearing him behind me and I set a trap and he walked into it.”

I nodded. “What did he say when you jumped him?”

Lyda gave me a very odd look. “Say? He didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask him anything. I just shot him. His name was Tomaso — one of the blacks.”

“You’re sure he’s dead?”

She nodded. “I’m sure. I checked that.” She let out a deep shuddering breath and sat down abruptly on the deck. “Now that it’s over I’m not so sure. Maybe he was just curious. Nosey. He would know that I wasn’t alone.”

“And maybe he was working for Papa Doc,” I said. “Forget it. You did the right thing. Just so you’re absolutely sure that he’s dead.”

“Right between the eyes at ten feet,” she said coldly. “I told you. He’s dead.”

I accepted that. I was a little worried about the shot but there was nothing I could do about it. We had to stay where we were until dark.

“Give me a cigarette,” Lyda said, “and get me a drink. I need it.”

I did and also brought the maps out on the deck. When she got the drink down and had a couple of puffs I said, “All right. What’s the score?”

The drink had helped her. Her hands stopped trembling and she smiled at me and said, “Everything is all right so far. A man, one of the fishermen, is on his way to the mainland to set it up for tonight. Here, I’ll show you on the map.”

She took my pencil, studied the map for a moment, then made a small black X halfway between Port de Paix and Cap Haitien.

“We go ashore here. Somebody will be waiting for us. The coast is desolate, rain forest and jungle — there’s not a road for miles — and it’s only about 25 miles inland to Sans Souci and P.P. Trevelyn’s estates. There are a few villages, but the only town of any size is Limbe and we can swing around that and come in from the west. There is another town, Milot, to the east of Sans Souci, and Papa Doc has a lot of troops in there.”

I studied the light pencil tracings on the map. “There’s a main highway just beyond this town? Milot.”

“Yes. My people tell me it is heavily patrolled just now. Troops and Tonton Macoute all over the place.”

When she said Tonton Macoute she stopped and looked at me and I saw the terror in her eyes as I had seen it before. It was as good a time as any.

I said: “What is it with you and the Tonton Macoute, Lyda? I know they’re rough and miserable bastards, but why do they scare you so? You don’t seem to be frightened of much else, but the Tonton have got the sign on you. How come?”

For maybe thirty seconds she didn’t answer. She didn’t look at me. Then, in a whisper that I could barely hear, she K said, “They raped me when I was a little girl. I was fifteen. It was just after Papa Doc came to power — the Tonton Macoute came to arrest us one night. We were brown, mulattos, and we owned a lot of land and we lived well and they hated us. They wanted our land and our house.

“That night they beat my father up and hauled him off to prison. He died a week later. They made my mother watch while six of them raped me on the floor of the living room. Later, a whole lot later, I got away from them and left Haiti for the States. I had some American friends and they managed it for me. I took my mother with me and she died insane in Bellevue. I–I hadn’t any money for a private hospital. I hadn’t any money at all.”

She was crying softly, remembering. I kept silent. This was the first time she had ever really let her hair down about her personal life and I wanted to hear it. How I wanted to hear it! The more I knew about what made her tick the better chance I had of staying alive and bringing the mission off.

Lyda wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket and kept talking. For once I felt that she was telling the absolute and I exact truth.

“There were quite a few Haitians in the States. Mulattos and blacks, all running from Papa Doc. Most of them were poor and they weren’t organized. There were two little ghettos — might as well call them that — one in Brooklyn and one on the west side up close to Columbia. We were in the States on sufferance and we were poor and we did menial jobs and got by the best we could. I was lucky. I was working as a waitress in a bar at 113th Street, and one night Dr. Valdez came in with some friends. He heard me speaking to another waitress and knew at once that I was Haitian. He didn’t say much that night, but a few days later he came back to the bar, alone, and we got to be friends.”

“Did you know that Valdez was a Communist?”

She was doodling on the edge of the chart with a pencil. She bared her teeth at me and gave a snorting laugh. “Communist? Hah I Romera Valdez was an innocent, a political innocent! My Christ, he was naive. He could even see some good things about Papa Doc. Romera was a parlor Commie, a fellow traveler that didn’t know what it was all about, a gentle man that hated to swat a fly. He used to make me so furious that I wanted to kill him, the way he always wanted to turn the other cheek.”

I had her talking and I didn’t want to break the spell, but I had to ask the question. “Were you in love with Valdez?”

She nodded quickly, and for a moment quicksilver glinted in her eyes again. She found a handkerchief and dabbed.

“I was mad about him. We went to bed for the first time on my 17th birthday and I lived with him for three years. I kissed the ground he walked on. He was a father and a brother and a lover all in one. A husband, too, though we couldn’t get married. His wife is still alive, somewhere in France, and he’s a Catholic.”

I lit another cigarette and kept quiet. She hadn’t finished. There was more and I wanted to hear it.

“Romera got a little apartment for me, on 115th Street near the Drive, and I entered Columbia. I had been to school in Paris and Switzerland — I was home on vacation when the Tonton Macoute came that night — and I passed a special examination and Columbia admitted me. Romera was a full professor by then and whenever we met on the campus we had to pretend to be strangers. I didn’t have him for any classes, of course — he was far too advanced for me and he only taught graduate students.”

Lyda finished her drink and held out the glass. “A little more, Nick darling. Then I think I’ll sleep for a while.”

When I came back with the drink she was stretched on the deck with her eyes closed and the sun on her face, her big soft breasts moving rhythmically up and down. For a moment I thought she was asleep, but she held out her hand for the drink and gulped it eagerly. Then she began to talk again.

“It was fun for a time, sneaking around like that I was only a kid, and it was mysterious and intriguing to pass Romera on the campus, me with an arm full of books, and just give him a cold little nod and keep going. All the time laughing inside and thinking of what we had done in bed the night before. We saw each other nearly every night and on weekends, though we had to be very careful. Then five years ago it happened. Five years this June. The week before my graduation.”

She was silent for a long time. I didn’t push her. I picked up one of the machine guns and went forward. The creek ran silent and deep and deserted and birds flashed brightly in the wild cane and my friend the lizard had brought a buddy with him to see the strangers. Things looked and sounded right in the jungle and after a minute I went back to the girl and squatted with the machine gun across my knees. The sun was lowering to the west and the palm trees were reflected in tall dark shadows striping the boat.

“I hadn’t seen Romera for a week,” Lyda said. “He hadn’t come to the apartment, or called, and whenever I called at his place or his office he was out. Or no one answered. I was worried sick and I was afraid — afraid that it was all over, that he was tired of me. But I had too much pride to go to his apartment, or his office on the campus, and confront him. I just suffered for a week.

“Then one afternoon I saw him on the campus. I had just come back from renting my cap and gown for graduation and I was on Broadway and he was coming out of a bookstore on the corner of 116th and Broadway. I waved at him and shouted — making a perfect fool of myself — and started to run toward him. I suppose I was a hundred feet or so from him. He turned to look at me and he seemed startled— then he swung away from me and crossed 116th and went down to the subway. Walking very fast. I still remember that, how fast he walked, as though he didn’t want to see me or talk to me. I stopped on the corner and watched him disappear and my knees were trembling and I thought my heart would stop beating.”

Lyda smiled faintly and looked at me with half-narrowed eyes. “That’s how young I was, Nick. Romera was my first love, the first man I had ever taken with consent. I thought the world had ended.

“It had ended, the world I had known until then, but that I didn’t grasp until later. I went back to my little apartment and locked myself in and cried. I suffered. I didn’t eat anything for two days, and I drank rum and got drunk and sick, and I played all the records we had enjoyed together, and I was really miserable. On the third day I had courage enough to call him at his office. This time he answered.”

She turned away from me and stretched her lithe brown body and buried her face in her arms. “Jesus God — when I think of it now! I must have terrified the poor man and made him sick, too. I cried and I begged and I even think I threatened him — said I would tell the whole campus, the newspapers, the world, about our affair. Anyway he promised to come and see me that evening. I can remember his exact words — he didn’t sound at all like himself, tense and hoarse and nervous — and he said that he had been ill with a virus.”

Something flickered in my brain, a microsecond of intuition that flared out before I could grasp it, a shadow with no substance to account for it, a pinprick without pain or blood that vanishes as it begins. A fourth generation computer would have caught and pinned it. I couldn’t.

Yet I asked, “Exactly what did he say?”

“He said, ‘You’re acting like a child, Lyda, and you mustn’t. Everything is all right. I have been ill and working hard, and I’ve been worried about something. Something you don’t know about. Nothing to do with you. But I’ll come tonight and we’ll talk it all out and get matters straightened around. I’ll be there at nine sharp. Be sure you’re alone. I don’t feel like seeing anyone else but you.’ ”

I flipped my butt overboard. I said I was a bit skeptical.

“You remember all that? Exactly? Verbatim? After five years?”

She nodded without looking at me. “I do. Just as he said it. Every word. He never arrived at my place, because they took him that night, and I think that fixed the words in my mind. Later I understood what he was worried about, and why he had been staying away from me. Romera had been writing a series of articles against Papa Doc, for the New York Times, and he didn’t want to involve me. I think he had a premonition that the Tonton Macoute would get him. But he must have expected them to murder him, not kidnap him and smuggle him back to Haiti.”

I kicked it around in my mind for a couple of minutes. On the surface it appeared logical enough, to make sense, yet something was missing. But there was nothing to come to grips with and I brushed it off.

Lyda said: “I waited and waited. He never came. Somewhere between his apartment — he had a place near Barnard— and my place they got him. It must have been easy. Romera was such an innocent. He didn’t even know how to protect himself.”

Yes, I thought. It would have been easy. A man walking down busy, crowded upper Broadway on a limpid June night. A car pulling over to the curb and a couple of goons leaping out and grabbing him and shoving him into the car. It would have been smoothly and efficiently done. Once he was in the car it was all over. They had probably taken him straight to some banana tramp at a pier in Brooklyn or Staten Island.

The sun had gone and the short purple twilight of the sub-tropics fell like a gauzy net over Sea Witch. Lyda Bonaventure lay with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, half between sleep and waking, and I knew she was through talking. No matter. I knew the rest of the story. Most of it was in the AXE files and some I had picked up from Steve Bennett, the CIA man who had been killed in the voodoo church.

I picked her up and carried her into the deckhouse and put her on the divan. I patted her cheek. “Catch a little nap, kid Not for long, because we’re taking off as soon as it’s dark.”

I stowed the two extra machine guns in the deckhouse and took the third with me when I went forward to make up our packs. I didn’t want to show a light and I had to hurry. The dusky light seeping in the ports was already clotting into darkness.

I rigged two surplus Army packs, and two musette bags, and prepared two web belts with canteens and mess kits and a couple of Swiss tool-knives and compasses. All this junk was helter-skelter in one big crate and as I sorted it out I picked up the story of Dr. Romera Valdez where Lyda had dropped it.

There had been one hell of a stink about it in the papers. The Times especially, for which Valdez had been doing the articles, had played it big. Both in the news columns and on the editorial page. Net result — a big zero. Papa Doc sat tight and denied everything, or ignored it, and after two or three weeks the story petered out. Nobody came forward. Nobody had seen Valdez abducted. Nobody had seen anything. He had stepped into a manhole and disappeared down a bottomless canyon.

Not quite. The FBI went to work on it — we had their stuff in our files — and found that a small tramp steamer, a vintage rustpot, had left Staten Island the morning after Valdez’ disappearance. She was La Paloma, registered in Panama. The CIA, when they took over, traced her ownership to Haiti and that was where the trail stopped. Ostensibly La Paloma was owned by the Bank of Haiti. Papa Doc.

There wasn’t a damned thing the United States could do about it. Valdez had never become an American citizen. It took the CIA a year to find out that he was being held in the dungeons under the palace. That was all they could find out — that Valdez was alive and apparently well treated. Now, according to AXE files, this P.P. Trevelyn had him somewhere on his estates near Sans Souci. That figured, if Valdez was working on atomic warheads for the missiles Papa Doc was supposed to have. They would need space and privacy, something you couldn’t get in Port-au-Prince.

I filled another musette bag with ammo and carried the lot back to the deckhouse. I had enough ammo for a small war, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. I also had a dozen each of gas, smoke, and fragmentation grenades. I was tempted to take one of the recoilless rifles and a mortar, then I laughed at myself and forgot it. We would be laden enough as it was and we had to travel fast and far.

I wakened Lyda, and we ran out of the cove without lights and turned into the channel between Tortuga and the mainland. She squatted in the cockpit and read the chart by the light of the instrument board. We were into it now, in Haitian waters and past the point of no return, and if one of Papa Doc’s patrols spotted us it was all over.

As we ran past the eastern point of Tortuga Lyda watched the compass. “Another ten miles and we turn south. That will put us about 15 miles off the coast and our rendezvous point.”

I had Sea Witch throttled down, purring along, and I translated miles into knots and when the time came I arced her into a long turn to the south and then cut her speed to a creeping five knots. There was no moon and it was clouding up to rain. The night was cool, even chilly, but I was sweating a little. When Lyda wanted to smoke I forbade it. I had hooded the instrument board.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I said. “You’re sure this old dock isn’t watched? Seems to me that Papa Doc would keep a special guard on a place like that — he isn’t stupid, you know.”

We were headed for a lonely spot on the coast where the U.S. Fruit Company had once maintained a dock and a cluster of buildings. The place was long disused and falling into ruins, and Lyda swore that she had used it several times to enter Haiti and had never encountered trouble.

She laughed softly, with a hint of the old mockery. “What’s the matter, darling? You sound like you’re nervous in the service.”

“Being nervous has kept me alive a long time,” I said. This kid was ready to go to war. This slim brown girl who had been crying not long before.

“That’s the beauty of it,” she went on. “The place is so damned obvious that Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute overlook it. It never occurs to them that anybody would dare to use it. So we use it. Clever, yes?”

“Luck. I hope it holds.”

We were running slowly for the coast, rolling a little in the current setting through the gut. I glanced at my watch and said, “Better get your flashlight now and go forward. If everything is okay we should be seeing their signal within half an hour.”

She leaned to kiss me. Her breath was hot and sweet and smelled of booze. She patted my arm. “I’ve got a good feeling about this. Everything is going to be all right, Nick. Just be sure you remember your new name and don’t goof it I sold them a real bill of goods on you and it wasn’t easy. Duppy is as smart as they come, and he is going to be very unhappy that I’ve postponed the invasion again. But I can handle him as long as you don’t cross me up.”

No use telling her how many roles I had played in my years with AXE.

“I won’t cross you up,” I said. “Get forward. Be sure their signal is right. Exactly right!”

She laughed again and went off humming to herself.

My new name was Sam Fletcher. I was using it because I knew the real Sam Fletcher was in Africa fighting for the Biafrans. If he was still alive. Fletcher was one of the last of the old style soldiers of fortune. Though at times he fought for money he was not strictly a mercenary; when he believed in something he would fight gratis and even spend his own money. He did odd jobs for AXE from time to time, which made it easy to keep tabs on him. I didn’t think Sam would mind me using his name.

Lyda had told me a little about this Duppy we were going to meet. In Haitian dialect, in voodoo jargon, duppy means spirit or ghost. A man may die, but sometimes his duppy has the power to come back from the grave. Sometimes the duppy does not even go, but remains on earth and actually; takes the dead man’s place.

Duppy was a nom de guerre, of course. Lyda would not tell me his right name, even if she knew it. “The blacks call i him Duppy,” she had explained, “because of the way he moves in the jungles and mountains. Like a ghost. They say that you never hear him, or know he’s coming — you just look up and suddenly there he is. They’re all afraid of him, the blacks.”

Then she laughed and added, “That’s odd, in a way. Duppy is one of the blackest blacks I’ve ever seen.”

I throttled down still more until Sea Witch was creeping. I barely had way on her. My bearing was due south and somewhere off in that gloom was the coast of Haiti. I snapped her over on gyro and went to the rail and peered forward. I had put a “box” on the flashlight so it couldn’t be seen from the sides, only from dead ahead, and as I leaned over the rail and strained into the darkness I wondered if Lyda was signaling yet. That was one of the hazards. We had to signal first. Our engines were well muffled and, when throttled down, gave off a bare whisper of sound. We couldn’t count on the shore party hearing us.

There it was. A pin prick of white light from the shore. It flitted brilliant in the night, swift and questioning… — . Question mark. Who?

The light vanished and though I couldn’t see Lyda’s signal I knew she was sending:….—.-.- SWAN. I hoped she was getting it right. I had made her practice it enough.

She must have because in a couple of seconds the shore light came back with a — .-. K, okay, come in. Then blackness I again.

Lyda came running back from the bow, tense and choked with excitement. “It’s all right, Nick! They’re waiting for us.”

I switched off the gyro and motioned her to the wheel. “I know. I saw. Here, you take the con until I get up on the fly bridge. I can’t take her in to that dock from down here. Just hold her steady for a minute.”

Lyda had given me an exact description of the dock I was making for. It had been built for ocean going vessels, and it rammed a long, now decaying, finger out from a deep scallop of cove. It had the usual piles and stringers, but for some reason it had been covered on the sides, like an old-fashioned covered bridge. Lyda insisted that we could run Sea Witch in under the dock and it would be like hiding in a long wooden tunnel. We could forget camouflage.

I wasn’t so sure. And I was worried about ripping off the fly bridge as we went in.

I called softly down to her. “Okay. I’ve got her. Go forward and con me in. Keep your voice down.”

I notched her down almost to stop and listened to the soft burble of the engines as she inched along. Ahead of me it was like the inside of a tar barrel. Good in a way, because if I couldn’t see neither could Papa Doc’s coast patrols.

I was wearing the Luger in the belt holster and the stiletto in the sheath on my right forearm. My sweater and jacket covered both. Outside I had the Colt .45 strapped on, and I cozened a machine gun in my lap as I peered and waited for the guide lights.

They flicked into life, dim, sallow, barely seen. One on each side of the open end of the dock. All I had to do was put Sea Witch squarely between them.

It wasn’t easy. I had almost no way on her and the rudder was slow to answer. The current ran fast in so close to shore and the trade breeze, pushing me from the east, didn’t help much. Sea Witch kept falling off to starboard.

Lyda’s voice came whispering back to me. “To the left, Nick. Left. LEFT!”

I had to goose the engines a little to get her back to port. When I throttled down again she was shoving her bow squarely between the lights. They went off. I shoved her into reverse for a second, then cut the engines and ducked and reached up with a hand to feel for clearance, if any. My fingers brushed the splintery underside of the dock boarding. I had six inches of clearance.

A trap door opened in the dock just over my head and a white shaft of light blazed down at me. A deep voice, speaking in Haitian Creole, said, “Bon jou, Blanc.”

Hello, white man.

I shifted the machine gun so he couldn’t miss seeing it, but kept my finger away from the trigger assembly. “Who are you?”

Deep rumble of laughter. He thrust his head into the hole, so the light was masked, and turned the flashlight on his face.

“I’m Duppy, blanc. You the man Swan tell us about? The Sam Fletcher man?”

I nodded. “I’m Fletcher.”

I didn’t give myself away. I’ve had too much practice for that. But the moment I saw that broad, shining black face, that expanse of white gap-toothed smile, I knew who Duppy was. We had his picture in the AXE files. Every AXE man spends a lot of time going through those files and memorizing and I do my homework as well as any.

The picture showed him as a younger man, and with hair — his head was shaven now — but it was the same man.

His real name was Diaz Ortega and he was a Cuban. He had once held a high rank in Cuban Intelligence, when he and Che Guevara had been buddy-buddy. Now Che was dead and Ortega would have been dead too if he hadn’t run for it in time. Castro had found out that Ortega was really KGB, working for the Kremlin, keeping an eye on the Cubans.

The black man extended a massive hand down to me. “Come on, blanc. Fletcher. We got no time to lose, man.”

I ignored the hand and said that I had things to do first. I had to make Sea Witch fast, string fenders so she wouldn’t rub a hole in her planking, and get our gear ashore. I would be along presently.

We were whispering in the dark. “I got men to do all that, Fletcher. We got no time for it.”

“I’ll take time,” I said. “And I’ll do it. I don’t want anybody coming aboard. Swan doesn’t either. She must have told you that?”

“Where Swan?”

“Right here, Duppy! How are you, you big monster?”

Lyda squeezed past me, reaching for my hand and pressing it as she did so. Her lips brushed my ear as she breathed: “Let me handle him.”

I gave her an assist up through the trapdoor in the dock. They whispered and I heard the sound of a kiss. Duppy growled deep in his throat, like an animal, and I caught some of it.

“This Fletcher man… boss already… who he think… I…”

Discord already. Not a happy omen. I shook it away and made Sea Witch fast. I hung out the fenders. Then I remembered and cursed myself and went back to rig the lines again because I hadn’t allowed for the fall of the tide. We had come in at high tide, purposely, and I damned near goofed it I told myself to get with it, Carter, and take things as they came. One at a time. Don’t rush matters. Sooner or later I would find out what Diaz Ortega, a Kremlin man, was doing in Haiti trying to promote the Black Swan’s invasion.

Until then I had to keep my mouth shut and play my cards close to my vest and stay alive. I had to get Romera Valdez out or kill him. I had to check on the missiles and atomic warheads Papa Doc was supposed to have. I had to watch Lyda Bonaventure and see that she didn’t stage an invasion. I had to — oh, the hell with it, I thought as I collected all the gear and lugged it up to the fly bridge. One of Hawk’s coarse jokes, when he is overwhelmed with work, is that he is “as busy as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking!”

One thing I decided as I crawled up through the trap door. When, and if, I got back I was sure as hell going to ask for a raise. I don’t mind work, and I don’t mind danger, but of late it had been getting a little much.

I pulled the gear up through the trapdoor and flung it on the deck. I made out the moving shadows of men around me and there was a lot of whispering. No sign of Lyda and Duppy.

One of the shadows spoke to me. “Swan and Duppy go to shore, blanc. Say you come now.”

It had begun to rain, the wind blowing a fine mist into my face. The shadows around me were silent and I heard drums working far inland. One of the shadows was fitting the trap door into place. Two other figures, dimly seen, picked up the packs and musette bags and walked off down the old dock. I for owed them.

Beside me a voice said, “Watch for holes, blanc. Dock very old and rotten. This for sure a break leg place.”

I was lugging Lyda’s machine gun as well as my own. I slogged along, silent, dogged by the shadow. I tried to repress thoughts about Diaz Ortega. In time. First things first.

The man beside me said, low voiced, “Swan say no invasion this time, blanc. How is this come? We ready for invade for long time now, hang Papa Doc to tall tree. How come this, blanc?”

I said that I didn’t know either. I worked for Swan and I took orders the same as anyone else. Ask Swan, not me.

I heard him spit. Then he made a sucking, sighing sound and said, “I think we wait too long. Something big going on now for sure, blanc. Lots of troops and Tonton Macoute around now. They shoot a lot of people, hang some, and burn many huts and villages. I hear tell all people got to get off land for many miles. You know why that, blanc?”

I said I didn’t know. I didn’t either, but I could make an educated guess. If Papa Doc was clearing the land for miles around then he had a good use for that land. He wanted it for something. Something urgent.

Like a missile range?

Chapter 8

The thin drizzle petered out with the dawn and the sun came up huge and red over the Bishop’s Cap, a blunt peak scarred by the ruins of The Citadel. I was propped on my elbows in dense scrub, studying the scene with powerful binoculars. I didn’t waste much time on the Citadel, that massive eyrie built by King H&nri Christophe, the black Napoleon, against the real Napoleon who never came. That was old history. Right now we were sitting in a hotbox where new history was being made.

We were halfway up a mountain on a scrubby ledge. At the foot of the slope, up which we had come so recently with frantic, panting haste, a narrow stone and dirt road skirted the base of the mountains. We had barely made our cover before daylight, and then only because Duppy had set a blistering and merciless pace.

“We get caught in the open,” he said, “we dead men. That bastard P.P. got his own helicopter patrol.”

Now, in conaealment, I watched one of the helicopters fluttering low over a patrol jeep on the narrow road. Talking by radio. The ‘copter was German, one of the new 105s, with five seats and a cargo compartment. As I studied it I thought that maybe P.P. himself was in it. Hawk’s notes had indicated that Trevelyn was a man who trusted no one, and liked to oversee things himself.

There was plenty to oversee. A mile down the road a small village was burning. Except for a French-looking church built of stone, the shacks and huts were all of crude timber and palm thatch, natural tinder, and flames and smoke drifted upward in a thick column to be caught and — twisted westward by the wind.

Tonton Macoute, dressed in civilian clothes and all heavily armed, were escorting a straggling column of people away from the village. They looked like refugees in a war movie, except that they were all blacks and they were not laden with many possessions. The bogymen hadn’t given them much time to get moving.

I swept my glasses back to the village square and adjusted the focus. There was a well in the square and, near it, a single great tree. From one long thick limb of the tree dangled four bodies — three men and a woman. They hung inert, limp, heads twisted cruelly to one side. Objectors. They must have argued with the Tonton Macoute.

I caught the odor and feel of Lyda as she wriggled up beside me. She took the binoculars from me and adjusted them, then stared at the village for a long time. I watched her ripe mouth go taut and lines form on her smooth face as she scowled.

“That dirty son of a bitch,” she said. “That bastard! He’ll pay for this. Oh, he’ll pay!”

The helicopter left the jeep and tilted away, beating for altitude. I snuggled deeper into the thick brush and watched Lyda.

“Which son of a bitch? Papa Doc or P.P.?”

“Both!”

She handed me the glasses and rolled over on her back, sighing a deep breath that pushed her soft breasts up beneath the green jacket. She closed her eyes.

“Both,” she repeated. “When the time is right. Soon, I hope.”

The whipping crack of the gun came up the slope to us. I put the glasses on the column and saw a man in the ditch beside the road. His bare black feet were threshing about and as I got the picture in sharp focus the goon standing over him leveled his revolver and emptied it. So slowly and deliberately that I could count each shot. The black feet stopped moving.

Lyda didn’t move. “Those Tonton Macoute don’t fool around,” I said.

Her eyelids crinkled. “Murderers and perverts, all of them. Their time will come.”

I chewed on a flat disc of cassava bread. It tasted sour and moldy, and I hoped they had washed all the hydrocyanic out, but it was better than ancient C ration. Duppy and his party hadn’t brought along much food. Just the cassava bread and some cooked goat meat and a couple of bottles of Barbancourt rum. I couldn’t fault the rum. Barbancourt is the best in the world.

The girl puffed her lips out and said, “Give me a cigarette, darling. My Christ, what a march! I thought I was going to die a dozen times.”

“Not now. Turn over, slowly, and hide your face. The helicopter is coming this way.”

I glanced at Duppy, who was sleeping near us. He was lying on his stomach with his face cushioned on his arms and his ragged bush hat tilted to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was all right.

The helicopter clattered over us, very low from the sound, and we lay unmoving with our faces pushed into the rank grass. From a corner of one eye I watched it go swooping away to the east, toward Sans Souci and P.P. Trevelyn’s estates.

Lyda sat up cautiously. You think they spotted us?”

“No.” I gave her a hard grin. “Not a chance. We would know if they had. They must have machine guns aboard that egg beater.”

She held out a slim brown hand. “Cigarette me, then. 11 suppose it is safe to smoke?”

I lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. “As long as you don’t stand up and blow smoke rings.”

I glanced at Duppy again, wondering if the helicopter had awakened him. He didn’t move. His matte black face looked younger in repose, though I figured him to be in his early forties. One thing — he didn’t look any smaller when he was asleep. I made him about 6–5 and at least 260 pounds. He was wearing faded khaki shorts and a dirty torn tee shirt that was too small for his barrel chest. Weather, I knew, would never bother this man. On his huge feet were a pair of old Army boondockers with no socks. Around his thick waist was an ammo belt and he wore a Colt .45 like the one I carried. One of his outflung hands, looking as big as a tennis racket, rested on a clip type Thompson gun. Nearby was a musette bag full of spare clips and a big hunk of cassava bread.

I relaxed and stretched out beside the girl. It was going to be a long day.

“Whisper,” I said. “How did you square it? No invasion?” It was the first opportunity I had had to speak to her alone.

She was on her belly, smoking slowly and brushing at the smoke as she exhaled.

“No real problem. Yet. I told Duppy that I had changed my mind — that I didn’t want to risk the invasion until after we had Valdez. That I was afraid that they would kill Valdez the moment the invasion started, because they know we want to make him President, and I couldn’t risk that. I think he believed me.”

Her whisper was sibilant, caught up in Ssss, yet no louder than an insect chirping near me.

“You might be right at that,” I said. “The thought had occurred to me. If they can’t keep Valdez, they’re not going to let anybody else have him — alive.”

It was AXE policy exactly, Hawk’s theme, but with a reverse twist.

She crushed out her cigarette and curled into the womboid position she favored. “I’m going to sleep now, Nick. I’m dead. Don’t get into anything with Duppy — and wake me if anything happens.”

A minute later she was asleep, breathing softly with now and then a tiny snore. I turned on my back and looked at the pellucid blue sky. I took a drink of warm, tinny-tasting water from my canteen. I had been pretty well bushed when we reached the ledge, but now I was neither sleepy nor tired. After a few minutes I took the binoculars and crawled to the east as far as the brush offered protection.

Bishop’s Cap and the Citadel was off to my left now. The mountain fell away to a valley, where I could see a few thatched huts, and then there was another green clad mountain. At the foot of this mountain the fence began. I trained the binoculars and focused them and after a time I could pick up one corner of the fence glinting silver in the sunlight. I was impressed. The fence was ten feet high and topped with rolls of barbed wire. Closely knit steel mesh set into a concrete foundation. I had to chuckle sourly. When you are a billionaire you can afford to do things properly.

Both Lyda and Duppy said the fence enclosed some five thousand acres. There was one gate. Just one, and it was heavily guarded around the clock.

Inside the fence, not far from the crumbling and tropic ruined palace of Sans Souci — which Henri Christophe had cooled by diverting a stream to run under the floors — there was another modern palace built by P.P. Trevelyn. The bastard has his own little kingdom! His own army and his own air force. And he had Dr. Romera Valdez.

As I watched the corner of the glinting fence a guard passed leading a police dog on a leash. The guard had a belt holster and a rifle slung over his shoulder and wore a black peaked cap and a black uniform and high black shiny boots. I doubted that his cap insigne was a skull and bones — the distance was too great to make it out — but that black uniform reminded me of one word.

Gestapo! I already had an antipathy for Mr. P.P. Trevelyn and now I found myself actively disliking him. I am a professional and I seldom hate, but I knew it wasn’t going to bother me much if I had to kill Trevelyn.

Duppy settled down beside me, and I knew the blacks had named him right. He did move like a ghost. Nobody ever comes up behind me that way — but he had. This huge man called Duppy who was really Diaz Ortega of KGB.

There was a rank sweaty smell about him. He stared at me with muddy brown eyes, the whites tinged a faint saffron and streaked with red veins. After a moment he gave me a white gap-toothed grin.

“What you think, blanc? We gonna make it in there and get Valdez out?”

I shrugged and fell into the character of Sam Fletcher. “Why not? It don’t look so tough from here. The fence might be a little trouble, but we can whip that.”

Duppy gave me a cast iron stare. “Yeah, blanc. And the guards and the dogs and the zombies.”

I had been going to say something, but I forgot what, it was and my mouth hung open. Then I managed to say, “Zombies?”

He grinned enormously. “Yeah, blanc. Zombies. Old P.P. got ‘em, man. He works them hard, ever sort of work, and he their master and they do anything P.P. say do. You don’t believe in zombies, blanc?”

If he wanted to play games it was all right with me. I grinned back and said, “No, Duppy. I don’t believe in zombies. What’s the gimmick?”

He took his eyes off me at last and fumbled in his pocket for a crumpled pack of Splendids, the local cigarette. The harsh fumes reminded me of Chinese cigarettes. Duppy blew smoke through his wide nostrils and reached for the binoculars.

“I ain’t say I believe in zombies, blanc. I ain’t say I don’t believe in zombies, either. All I say is that P.P. got zombies working for him. Mean bastards, too.”

That was all he would say about the zombies. For a long time he was silent, carefully studying the terrain to the east. with the glasses. At last, without taking the glasses from his eyes, he began to talk again.

“Come dark, blanc, we three go down to that valley yonder and find a houmfort in the jungle. Ain’t no real building, nothing but a clearing, but it a voodoo church just the same. One that Papa Doc and P.P. don’t know about, i Then maybe you see something else you don’t understand.”

“We got no time for that voodoo junk,” I said. “If we’re going to do this we have to do it fast. Real fast. Luck doesn’t last forever.”

He adjusted the focusing dial on the binoculars. “Where you meet Swan, blanc?”

“New York.” No lie.

“How much she paying you?”

“A thousand a month. A bonus if I get Valdez out alive.” Not bad for off the top of my head thinking.

He peered intently through the glasses. “Hmmm — a thousand bucks a month. Maybe I making a mistake, blanc. Maybe I oughta go mercenary, too, you think?”

“That’s your business,” I said curtly. “I fight for money. I give honest measure.”

“I ain’t quarrelling, blanc. Ain’t quarrelling at all. But fair is fair — you getting all that money you should take the most risks, do the dangerous jobs, eh?”

I agreed to that. I was curious to see where all this was leading.

“You never been in Haiti before, blanc?”

I had, several years before, but I couldn’t admit it. I said no.

Duppy put down the binoculars and leveled his red veined eyes at me. “So you don’t know nothing about Haiti, blanc. Me, I been here a long time. Swan, she born here. So we do the planning, blanc, and you be the stud, huh? You the professional fighting man, me and Swan the thinkers, eh? That the way we do it, blanc.”

He was trying to provoke me for some reason of his own.

I didn’t think he had really bought the Sam Fletcher story, but even so he couldn’t know who I was. Unless Lyda told him. I didn’t think she had, or would. I doubted that she knew who Duppy really was.

I also doubted that Duppy knew that I had spotted him. If he had, or if he knew that I was AXE, he would have moved in on me before now. Forced a showdown. He hadn’t, so I figured that I still retained a small edge. This being so, I didn’t want to force matters either. Not yet. I smoked and played at being relaxed and confident and studied his shoulders and biceps and torso and knew that if I had to go against him in a fair fight it was going to be one hell of a brawl. I knew a lot of tricks, and with this oversize character I would need every one of them.

When Duppy spoke again there was a faint sneer in his voice. He knew I wasn’t going to call him and so he put me down as chicken. I liked that. It gave me a little more advantage when the showdown came.

“So we do it like I say, and like Swan say, blanc. Tonight we go to the valley, into the jungle, and pick up the other blanc. Man name of Hank Willard. I guess Swan tell you all about him? She say how the houngan and the mambo been hiding this white man for a long time now? How he want out bad, and he willing to help us? She say all that to you?”

“She told me.” After we were ashore and half way up the mountain she had told me.

Duppy gave me another blunt stare. “This other blanc, this Hank Willard, he a mercenary like you. Good thing you help save him — all you money blancs should stick together.”

He crawled away and I watched him munch on some cassava bread and then go back to sleep. He didn’t look at me, or speak, again.

Lyda was still sleeping. I wanted to sleep, but couldn’t, so I went back to using the binoculars again.

The village still smouldered. Only the little French church remained, its white stones drenched in sunlight. The straggle of refugees had vanished, as had the jeep and the Tonton Macoute. No sign or sound of the helicopter. At the moment the scene was peaceful, serene, a becalmed patina of old France superimposed on dark Africa. Wild coffee and banana trees grew on the lush slopes and valleys, and breadfruit and orchids entwined in clusters. Beyond the valley at the foot of; our mountain the steep rises were heavily forested and jungled and I could see how Hank Willard could have been concealed all these months.

The thing was — AXE had Hank Willard in the files. Freelance flyer, soldier of fortune, part-time drunk and full-time mercenary. In his late thirties and from a small town in Indiana. One of the footloose and fancy free boys that had flown fighters in the Korean war, had been a double ace, and had never been able to fit back into civilian life. Couldn’t take discipline either, so after the war the Air Force had separated him fast. Since then he had knocked around over the world, flying anything that would get off the ground, and working for whoever would pay him. During the last attempted invasion of Haiti, Willard had flown an old B25 and tried to bomb Papa Doc’s palace in Port-au-Prince.

I couldn’t help grinning as I thought of it now. Hank Willard hadn’t been very successful. He dropped two bombs, missed the palace by a half mile, and both bombs had been duds. A few minutes later the B25, a crate held together with spit and scotch tape, had given up the ghost and Willard had to crash land it in the jungle. Nothing had been heard of him since.

Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute rounded up the other invaders and gave them a fast trial and hanged them in various parts of the country as a warning. Their bodies had been gibbetted, enclosed in an iron cage and hung in chains and, or so Lyda told me, were still rotting around the country. Papa Doc had put a ten thousand dollar bounty on Hank Willard.

I puzzled about that as I put down the glasses and rubbed my eyes and admitted that at last I was going to be able to sleep. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of temptation! Yet nobody had sold Willard. Went to show how much they must hate Papa Doc. And P.P.

As I was falling into sleep the drums started to tattoo again. A soft tapping and rumble that I couldn’t locate because of the diffuse mountain acoustics. On and on the drums talked, louder and louder, a sullen and endless percussion that finally lulled me into sleep.

A scream startled me awake. Not a human sound. A long drawn-out screaming of air friction on sleek overheated metal. I rolled over and came to my knees, the .45 in my hand. Lyda and Duppy were awake, crouching and staring around.

Duppy motioned me down. He had his Tom gun ready across his left arm.

The girl, brought out of sleep into sudden terror, stared at me with her mouth open. “What in Christ’s name?”

I breathed again. She had come very damned near to! calling me Nick.

Duppy had the glasses and was peering down the slope! behind us, the slope up which we had toiled the night before,! After a moment he beckoned to us and laughed harshly.

“Nothing to do with us, blanc. Swan. Come take a look! Ain’t nothing but junk.”

We crawled to him and took turns with the binoculars. The spent missile had smashed itself to bits in a clump of hibiscus and the immortelle of poinsettias. The white metal, jagged hard garbage now, lay tossed about in sinister contrast to the peace of slow falling dusk.

I was tense inside. I watched Lyda and Duppy. Especially I watched Duppy.

Lyda could be an actress and a poseur, but I didn’t think she was faking amazement now. She gaped at us, her mouth open, her brown eyes wide with question.

“What in hell was it? Is it? Are they shooting at us?”

I let Duppy pick it up. Watching him.

He gave me a sidelong glance as he patted her shoulder. “Papa Doc, and old P.P. they got missiles, Swan. Shoot ‘em off the Citadel over yonder. The zombies built ‘em ramps. A week now they been shooting, practicing, and I don’t tell you before ‘cause I don’t want worry you none. You got too much worry now, I think.”

Lyda looked at me, then back at Duppy. Her eyes narrowed and I could see her starting to put it all together. She knew, of course, that Dr. Romera Valdez was a physicist But I gave her a clean slate — she hadn’t known about the missiles until this moment.

She said: “That’s why they’re killing people and clearing them off the land. A missile range.”

Duppy nodded. “That why, Swan. But nothing to worry us, like I say. Papa Doc and P.P. out of their minds, I think. Missiles ain’t no damned good, no good at all. They go all which way, them missiles, and smash themselves up all the time.”

He pointed to the village, smoking in the approaching twilight. “I think maybe they try hit that with missiles — don’t even come close. No mind to us, Swan. We get Valdez away from them they not even be able gonna shoot the missiles no more.”

Lyda sank to the ground, a stunned look in her eyes “Missiles! Oh, my God, Missiles!”

Duppy wouldn’t look at me. He set about getting his gear together. He had been carrying her pack and musette bag and now he began to shrug into the pack harness.

“Be dark soon,” he said. “Better we get ready to move. They be waiting for us in the forest. After we got a lot of miles to cover so we be in position come morning.”

At last he looked squarely at me. “That right, blanc?”

I smiled falsely and nodded. “That’s right, Duppy.”

I was beginning to get it. To understand at least part of what was going on. It was pretty weird, but that is the name of the game.

The drums, silenced for minutes by the screaming missile, took up their muted throbbing again.

Chapter 9

The one thing I hadn’t counted on was that Hank Willard would know Sam Fletcher by sight. Maybe I should have thought of it, because the soldier of fortune types get together at times in bars and clubs all over the world, but I didn’t.

Willard, a skinny guy wearing ruined officer’s pinks and a tattered but clean OD shirt, was quick enough on the uptake. He didn’t give me away. What he did give me was one look from washed out gray eyes that said it all — I wasn’t Sam Fletcher and he knew it. And he wanted me to know that he knew it. I figured that his shut mouth was going to cost me something and I was right.

Lyda, Duppy and I had come down the side of the mountain into the valley as soon as it was dark enough. Duppy found a trail and led us up the next mountain for a way, then we turned into a narrow ravine that led into another ravine and then another. Beyond the last ravine there was a large clearing with one hut and a scattering of palm-thatched lean-tos. A small fire smoldered in a circle of stones. Around the fire were a dozen blacks and Hank Willard.

Duppy and the girl conversed in soft Creole with the blacks, in a dialect not familiar to me, though I caught a word now and then. The blacks were getting ready for a voodoo ceremony, or so I guessed, because there was a vever drawn in ashes and cornmeal near the fire. On each side of the vever a stake had been driven into the ground. On one stake was a skull, on the other was tied a silver crucifix. There is a lot of Christianity in voodoo, though not of the sort approved by the Church.

I stayed in the background and watched. I thought it was all a lot of crap anyway, a waste of time, and said so, but Lyda agreed with Duppy that it was worthwhile. Later we might need help from these blacks.

There was one other woman, a slim black girl in a red calico dress and a blue bandanna on her oiled hair, and red handkerchiefs knotted about both her arms. The local houngan, an old man with hair like gray steel wool, made a mark on the girl’s forehead with oil and ashes and handed her something. The drummer, not far from me, began to tap his F goatskin stretched over a hollow stump. Not so much tapping at first as rubbing it. A muted, sullen, slithering sound that pricked at my nerves.

There was a goblin moon, round and yellow and showing a blue skull in it, shining directly into the clearing. The girl held up the thing the houngan had given her and I saw that it was a doll figure. Very crude. Just a swatch of rags on a stick, with a face drawn on an egg, and a few strands of hair stuck to the egg. Nobody had to tell me who the figurine represented, but someone told me anyway. Hank Willard.

He sidled up to me, limping badly. He had broken a leg when he crashed the B25 and whoever set it for him had bungled it. He cadged a cigarette and puffed and looked at me sideways, speaking softly.

“They’re going to put an obeah on P.P. Trevelyn.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, “that that is going to worry old P.P. a hell of a lot.”

“Skeptic, eh?”

I said nothing. He smoked for a moment and then said, “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not as skeptical as I was, I know that. I’ve seen some damned queer things since I’ve been hiding in this screwing jungle. But that ain’t what I want to talk to you about.”

Here it came. I watched the girl, who I figured was a canzo, an apprentice voodoo priest, as she crooned over the little ragged doll, then spat on it and raised it over her head and shook it furiously. The drumming stepped up.

Hank Willard was whispering. “You’re not Sam Fletcher. I know Sam. I had a letter from him just before I flew that wreck in here — Sam was heading for Umuohiagu in Biafra and he wanted me to join him. Said the pay was damned good. But I had already signed a contract with some crazy bastards to invade this stinking place, and I keep my word I’m not very bright at times. No brains.”

They were passing the doll around among the blacks. Each one spat on it and passed it to the next. Lyda and Duppy were off to one side, watching and whispering.

“My guess is that you’re CIA,” Willard said. “Here to look into those missiles that P.P. and Papa Doc are trying to perfect. Am I right?”

It was a way out and I took it. I already knew that I was stuck with Willard, so I might as well use him as best I could. Maybe it wasn’t so bad at that. Another Indian on my side might come in handy.

So I nodded, playing the mysterious bit, and said, “Okay. So you guessed it. How come you didn’t give me away?”

“You wanta sit down? This leg kills me if I stand on it too long.”

He sank to the ground and I squatted beside him. The doll had almost reached Lyda and Duppy.

“I got to get out of this screwing country,” Willard said. “I been lucky, but it can’t last forever. All the rest of the invasion party are dead, hanged, and Papa Doc has got a hell of a price on my head. I want out of this place and to get back to Hong Kong where Mai Ling is spending all my dough. Mai Ling is my permanent girl. Eurasian and one hell of a dish. All I do here is think about Mai Ling.”

I said I wasn’t much interested in his love life, or lack of it. “What do you want from me, Willard?”

He cadged another cigarette and whispered between cupped hands as he lit it. “I want out of this hole. You help me and I’ll help you. I know that you CIA guys always have ways of getting out. You take me with you, and I’m your man. Anything. I don’t give a damn what it is. I’m a pretty good man with a gun.”

I stared at him. “What makes you think there is going to be any gun play?”

Willard’s pale gray eyes held mine for a moment and he chuckled. “Hell, man! You come in here loaded for bear, with Duppy who I know is a killer, and the Black Swan — I know about her too — and you ask me that! But I could be wrong, I guess. Maybe you come to build a dam for the blacks, huh?”

I made up my mind. “Okay, Willard. You’ve got a deal. But understand one thing — you take orders from me!”

“Sure — sure. But there is one other thing.”

“There always is. What?”

“Even if I get out of this I’m going to be in a little trouble with the State Department.”

That was an understatement.

“You CIA people pack a lot of powder, I hear tell. You think you can fix it for me with State? So they won’t lift my passport?”

I was really surprised and showed it. “You mean they haven’t already?”

He grinned at me and suddenly I found myself liking the guy. He had a tooth out in front, and a scraggly ginger beard, and he looked like a not too smart all-American boy who had somehow gone wrong. An innocent. Something of a lout, but basically sound. None of this was true, of course.

“I’ve been lucky,” he said. “But this time State is going to nail me to the cross for sure. Unless you help me.”

Hawk can work miracles when he sets his mind to it. I i said: “All right. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”

That was all we had time for. The black girl brought the doll to us and we both spat on it and handed it back to her. Her sleek dark face was shiny with sweat and she showed a lot of white eyeball as she looked at me without, I think, seeing me at all.

She took the doll back to the houngan and handed it to him. Lyda caught my eye and beckoned me into the group. I joined them, with Willard hobbling at my side.

The houngan took a silver spoon out of his pocket and began to dig a hole near the circle of stones. It took me a I moment to realize that he was digging a tiny grave.

A crucifix made of twigs was planted at the head of the j little grave. Upside down. The houngan made a pass over the ragged doll and muttered something. I made out the word— Rutibel.

Lyda had moved away from Duppy and stood at my elbow I now and she was whispering in my ear.

“Rutibel is a demon. One of Satan’s helpers. This is real powerful obeah.”

I was a little impressed myself, but I said out of the corner of my mouth: “Sophisticated lady. Columbia grad. Worldly wench. Impressed by voodoo gimmicks.”

She squeezed my arm. “Don’t! Don’t talk like that. Not now. Not here.”

Hank Willard said, “I’m just happy that I’m not old P.P. tonight. Even if the son of a bitch is a billionaire. That’s his real hair on that egg, you know. One of his servants smuggled it out.”

They were all some kind of nuts and at the moment maybe I wasn’t much better. I looked up to catch Duppy’s stare on me. They were cold and searching, those red-stained eyes, and his thick lips moved in a half sneer. Duppy, I thought, isn’t much impressed by all this voodoo crap. Duppy is thinking about me, wondering if he is going to have to kill me. I knew the look. But why? That I didn’t know.

The houngan put the doll in the tiny grave and covered it over. More passes and incantations. Rutibel this and Rutibel that.

The girl came back with a crock of excrement. A big gourd cut to bowl shape and filled with human excrement. The houngan dumped the stuff on the little grave and muttered more of the curse, the obeah. Nobody said a word. I felt a sudden insane desire to laugh, but I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t have anyway. It would have been most impolitic.

The drum rolled a vibrant tattoo, and the girl leaped over the grave and then began to dance around it I nudged Lyda. “Isn’t that drum dangerous? So loud?”

She shook her head without looking at me. She seemed fascinated by the dancing black girl.

“No. P.P.’s guards won’t come in here at night. Neither will the Tonton Macoute—they’re Haitians too, you know. They’re all afraid of obeah. Especially Rutibel obeah. We’re safe here.”

I was a little on edge and it showed in my voice. “All right,” I gritted. “Let’s get Duppy and be on our way. I want to be outside P.P.’s gate when the sun comes up. Enough of this is enough.”

Lyda reached for my hand. She began to stroke it. The way she had stroked it that night in the voodoo church in New York. Her cool fingers brushed my palm.

“Not just yet,” she said. “Wait a little. Just watch — watch the girl dance and see what happens.” There was a breathless quality about the words, as though she were forcing them. I felt her tremble suddenly.

What the hell! Another orgy? With time getting away from us.

The black girl had somehow gotten naked. She danced around and around the grave, sweat gleaming on her satiny flesh, her head thrown back, eyes half closed, her sharp breasts bouncing up and down. The rest of the people closed in to make a tight little circle. They began to clap their hands softly in time to the drum.

The girl made a sound, half moan and half shriek, and fell shuddering to the ground near the grave. She lay spreadeagled and writhing, humping her pelvis.

There was a sound like the sound a stallion makes as he approaches a mare. Duppy leaped into the circle, shoving the blacks aside with his massive arms, and dropped on top of the girl. He slammed into the writhing black girl and she screamed and then came up to meet him and grabbed at him with her long thin legs and the watching people sighed like a small wind and kept on clapping as they watched. The drum began to match Duppy’s thrusts.

Lyda bit my ear. Her breath was on fire. She tugged at me. “Come on,” she said. “Just come on! You. Oh, you man! Come on.”

She led me back into the brush and fell down and pulled me down on her and it couldn’t have lasted two minutes. But what a two minutes!

When it was over and she stopped heaving and sighing and moaning and talking she lay for a minute or two with her eyes closed. Then she gave me a sort of cold look and said, in a sort of cold little voice, “You’re right. We can’t waste any more time here. We better get started.”

That was my girl. Do it and forget it. Put on a dry pair of panties and get on with business.

I thought that if I did get out of this, and did make a report to Hawk, I would leave this bit out. The Old Man would never believe it anyway.

Chapter 10

Dawn was still three hours away when we came down the far side of the mountain. The bloody moon, paling as the night grew old, sank into the valleys and we did the last two hours in total darkness. Duppy took us along a narrow caliche trail that twisted and turned like a crazy snake, and did it with the aplomb of a native New Yorker crossing Times Square. Lyda walked behind him, while I lagged back to give Hank Willard a hand now and then. I had seen his leg, with the newly healed bone grotesquely malformed. It cost him a lot to keep up, but he did pretty well. He didn’t have much gear to lug — just the clothes he stood in and an old British Sten machine carbine. He had a shopping bag full of 9mm ammo for the gun. The shopping bag was from Macy’s Herald Square. I asked him about that. During one of the few breaks that Duppy gave us Willard explained. If you could call it an explanation.

He shrugged and gave me his broken toothed grin. “A screwing laugh, ain’t it. Those crackpots that invaded with me must have handled their supply and logistics through Mad Magazine. I know for a fact they bought some bazookas from a junk dealer in New Jersey. None of them worked. I never did know where they got the relic I was flying, but just before I take off they hand me this Sten and half a shopping bag full of ammo. In case, they tell me, I get shot down and have to fight my way out. Any chance of me getting a shot of that rum, Sam. This damned leg is killing me.”

I said no to the rum, mindful of his file. He was a drunk when he had the chance. Just the same I could have used a shot of the Barbancourt.

“Duppy’s got the booze,” I told him. “And Duppy is going to keep it until this is over. Time enough for drinking when that happens, and when you’re out of Haiti. Then you can drink yourself to death, for all I care.”

We couldn’t see each other in the dark, but I roughened my voice. “I mean that, Willard. You foul me up and I’ll let you rot here!”

“All right, Sam. Okay! No use getting steamed about it. I just thought a little drink wouldn’t hurt any.”

He dropped it and went on telling me how the B25 hadn’t had a bomb sight — his employers not being able to afford one — and he had dropped his bombs by dead reckoning. Missing the Palace, and Papa Doc, and hitting the Iron Market and a garbage dump.

He snickered. “Goddamn bombs were duds anyway. Probably weren’t even armed. Christ only knows where they bought them.”

I wanted to keep Hank Willard happy, and loyal to me. A Sten gun will throw 550 rounds a minute and the time might come when I would need that. I pretended an interest in his misfortunes.

“Wasn’t that part of your job, Hank? To inspect the bombs before you took off on that wild ass flight?”

He laughed. “I don’t know anything about bombs. I was a fighter pilot, for Christ’s sake. I never flew a bomber before. I told them I had, when they recruited me, because I was broke and needed the dough. I got it, too. Five thousand bucks, less what I had to give the blacks for hiding and feeding me. Right here in a money belt.”

“That should get you to Hong Kong,” I said.

“Your screwing A, it will. And Mai Ling. Jesus — I dream about that broad every night.”

I sighed and shook my head. Hank was a case of arrested development. A kid still fighting the Korean war. Still using the outdated slang of that time. All in all, I admitted, we were a pretty sad little army. A nut like Willard, Lyda with her dreams of grandeur and revenge, me trying to do the impossible because Hawk said do it.

Duppy was another matter. Duppy — Diaz Ortega — knew exactly what he was doing.

Just then he said, “Okay, back there. You blancs. Let us move it, huh. Got to get there and hide before the sun coma up, for sure. Or we dead mens.”

We made it. We stopped in a tangle of damp jungle, thick and vine-grown. Even Duppy sighed with relief as he dropped his gear and Lyda’s pack. Hank flopped down, moaning about his leg, and went to sleep. Lyda, too. I eased off my pack and the musette bag, but kept the machine gun cradled in my arm. Duppy did the same.

He came and squatted beside me and said it was all right to smoke. “We all right for now, blanc. We on the end of a shoulder that push out from the mountain into the valley. We got a tree house, I show you when it light enough, and we see all up and down the valley. See inside the fence and a lot of P.P.’s land. Even see his house and his swimming pool, see the zombie quarters, see a lot from that old tree.”

The acrid fumes of his Splendid drifted in my eyes. I brushed smoke away and said, “Back to the zombies, eh? What is it, Duppy? What’s the real pitch? If we’re going to work together, going to snatch this Valdez, I think I should know everything you know. How about it?”

I waited. As alert as I have ever been. I had taken pains to see that his Thompson was on safety and now I waited for a snick and it didn’t come. He didn’t speak for a minute. I watched his cigarette glow in the dark.

Then he laughed, a deep basso rumble. “Lemme tell you something, blanc. Just for hell of it. Something happen to me. One time I a wise alec, like you, and I say to a voodoo man that it all a lot of nothing. Like you.

“He just look at me, this man, and he say go and find an egg. Any egg. Take it from under the hen, you want. Then you bring it me here.” I laugh but I do it. I find egg okay from a friend of mine, and I know that egg just hatched. So I give it to the voodoo man and he say that I get a glass of cold water. Cold water.

“I do it. Then he tell me put the egg in the glass of water. He not touch the egg. Never. Then he pass his hand over the glass and he say some voodoo stuff and look at me and he say — now break egg.” So I laugh and I break egg.

“That egg hard boiled, blanc!”

Duppy paused, waiting for my reaction. The story had been well told, his deep voice coloring the nuances just right I wondered what he sounded like when he wasn’t affecting the uneducated half Creole, half black pidgin, that he used I with me. Diaz Ortega had been educated in Moscow.

“A good story,” I said. “And if it’s true I’m impressed. But I don’t see what it has to do with P.P.’s zombies, if any.”

He laughed again. “You a hard man convince, blanc. I not try no more. Wait till light and let you see for self. Now old Duppy gonna sleep a little. This place safe enough, but don’t go moving around. Fall off a cliff maybe, and break your neck.”

He sounded hopeful. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I that I had no intention of falling off a cliff.

I heard him settling down, rustling and thrashing about for a spell, then begin to snore lightly. He hadn’t snored the night before. It was only a crazy hunch but I decided to play it. I got on my hands and knees, moving lightly and without sound, and then I faked a couple of snores and a little heavy breathing.

Duppy played the game for ten minutes. Then he stopped snoring and I could feel him listening. I gasped and snorted and sawed a small log. I convinced him, because after a minute I heard him moving away, his big boondockers scraping on the rock. I went after him on my hands and knees, with extreme caution, moving only when he did. Twice he stopped dead, listening, and I froze. I was back on the caliche now and the pebbles and shards slashed at me.

He made more noise on the caliche and it was easier to follow him. Then he vanished. No sound. No anything. I crouched, breathing shallowly through my mouth, and wondered if he had used voodoo to sprout wings?

I heard him again. Over me. Up in the air. The bastard was in a tree!

I remembered what he had said about a tree house and I began to feel around in the dark, just off the path. I got lucky and found it in less than a minute. A thick trunked, smooth boled tree that had wooden cross-pieces nailed to it for climbing. I stood up, counted four of the cross-pieces, then dropped to all fours again and crawled ahead on the path so I could get a good look at the tree from in front.

I was just in time to see the flickering eye of his small flashlight from high above. It blinked white and fast, stuttering out the Morse, and then it went out and that was it. O.K.

O.K. Beamed in the direction of P.P.’s estate. What in the hell was okay?

I had no time to think about it then. I heard him coming down the tree and I scuttled back down the trail, still on my hands and knees. I was back in my place, gurgling and snoring again, when he came back and stood listening, then flopped down and really went to sleep. He didn’t snore.

I didn’t sleep a wink. I made tapes of all recent events, from the first phone call from Hawk right down to the present, and let them spin through my mind. I cut and edited and patched and extrapolated and in the end I came up with a pretty weird montage. I did a lot of guessing, some of the educated variety, some of the way out type, and when dawn came seeping through a copse of ackee trees I knew just about what I had known before. Duppy was playing some devious game of his own. On his own. Lyda didn’t know about it. Hank Willard didn’t figure in it; he was happen-1 stance, extraneous to the situation. That meant it was between Duppy and me. He had known that from the first. I had only suspected, but now I knew it, too.

Who had he been signalling to inside P.P. Trevelyn’s 5000-acre compound? Why?

How in hell did you make a rational picture out of such disparate pieces? Duppy — Diaz Ortega — was KGB. Commie.; P.P. and Papa Doc were Fascists and Commie haters. In the end it was like the old joke — who was doing what to whom, and who was paying for it? I fell asleep as the dawn crept in, and I didn’t have any answers.

One thing I knew — Duppy had been doing the leading so far. That had to stop. I had to take over and lead, push him a little, see if he would make a mistake.

I slept until noon. When I got up, stiff and cold and in my usual foul waking mood, there was no sign of Duppy and Lyda. Hank Willard was heating a canteen cup of instant coffee over a can of Sterno. I joined him and fixed myself some coffee.

When I got the first gulp of hot bitter stuff down I looked at Willard. “Where are they?”

He nodded upward, then pointed with a skinny dirty finger. “In the tree house. Spying out the lay of the land, I suppose. I was invited, but I ain’t climbing any trees with this leg.”

Last night, in the dark, it had seemed like a mile to that tree. Now I saw that it was about thirty yards. The tree was a soaring, slanting coco palm nestled in a thicket of ackee and conifers and ironwood. Wild cotton grew around the trunks. I looked for the tree house and at first I couldn’t see it.

Hank scratched and grinned through his ginger beard. “Speaking of the lay of the land, I remember one time—”

“Shut up,” I told him. “Too early for that crap.” I scalded my mouth with the lousy coffee and went on searching for the tree house and at last I spotted it.

Cute. Very clever. Someone had used steel cables and turnbuckles to pull the surrounding trees in around the coco palm and make a sort of lacy green cage. And it wasn’t really a tree house at all, but a flat platform, about 10 x 10, fixed two thirds of the way up the palm tree. The cables and turnbuckles were painted green. It was a good professional job and I wondered how long it had been there. And why? Somehow I didn’t think the local blacks were responsible. Work like this, and the planning that went with it, was a little beyond them.

I went back in the scrub to relieve myself and while I was at it I checked the Luger and the stiletto and the Colt .45. When I got back I picked up my Tommy gun and went to the palm tree. Hank Willard, looking bored, was playing mumbelty peg with a broken-bladed Scout knife. He gave me a cautious grin and kept silent. I shook my head as I passed. But for the Sten gun by his side the illusion might have been complete: aging Eagle Scout playing at camping. Again I flirted with the notion that this was all fantasy, that this snafued and fubared mission wasn’t really happening. The phone would ring any moment and I would wake up and answer it and Hawk would have a real mission for me.

Lyda was coming down the tree like a lovely monkey as I approached. Her long legs just matched the cross-pieces.

I grabbed her by the waist and lifted her down. She beamed and kissed me. She was excited.

“I saw him. I really saw him, Sam. Romera Valdez. He was in a jeep, under heavy guard.” She pointed to the east. “They were taking him up to the Citadel, I think. There is a new road, just built. Goes all the way to the peak. He must work at the Citadel every day and come back here, to P.P.’s place, at night.”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “You sure it was Valdez?”

Lyda looked up at me. “What makes you ask that? It’s almost as if you were—”

She broke off and frowned, her nether lip caught in small white teeth.

I tightened my hold on her shoulder. “As if I what?”

Her smooth brown face crinkled in puzzlement. “I, oh, I don’t really know. I’m confused right now. After all I haven’t see Romera in five years. But — it’s like you were reading my mind.”

I held her away from me and pushed up her chin with my fist and made her look into my eyes. “You aren’t sure that the man you saw really is Romera Valdez? Isn’t that it, Lyda? Come on. Spill it.”

She nodded, a bare inclination of her head on that long swan’s throat. “Maybe. I just don’t know. Duppy says it is Valdez. And he should know — he’s been spying from this place for a long time. H — he says that five years make a big difference and that maybe Valdez has been sick, or been mis-treated, even tortured, and that would account for it.”

“Meaning?” I knew it wasn’t Dr. Romera Valdez. They were using a decoy for some reason.

She leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder. “He looked so much older. And somehow different. And the way he sat in the jeep, so stiff and not looking around at anything. His face was right, though, what I could see through the glasses. It’s just that something seems to be wrong and I don’t know what it is. Duppy says I am being a fool.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. You go think about it for a while. How is our friend Duppy this morning?”

He answered that by calling down from the tree platform in a hoarse whisper. “Come on up, blanc. I show you some zombies.”

I looked a question at Lyda. She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know about that, either. They do look like zombies. I mean they look the way I’ve read that zombies look. You go look and then tell me.”

I climbed the tree. Duppy’s thick black bulk was stretched on the planked platform. He had the binoculars screwed into his eyes. At his elbows was an empty Cration can with a plastic spoon in it, and a canteen cup still half full of coffee.

He extended the binoculars back without looking at me. “You have a good sleep, blanc?”

I growled an affirmative and made a careful study of my surroundings. A cunningly contrived piece of work: we were on the tip of a high narrow peninsula, an extension of the mountain shoulder, a heavily overgrown salient pushing into the wide valley. A net of cables held a sheltering screen of trees around the palm tree and the platform, but a skillful clipping and pruning job allowed a wide and unobstructed view of the valley below and to the east. It was like a trick mirror — we could see out but they couldn’t see in. Unless they were hanging 300 feet in the air and looking directly down our throats.

I adjusted the focus on the binoculars. I said, and meant it, “Very clever. Sweet. Until the day that helicopter spots it.”

He grunted. “We here, ain’t we? Worry about that when the time come. Now, blanc, you look down by gate and tell me what you see.”

The binoculars were excellent and the scene leaped into being with the depth and clarity of a diorama. There was a large, brick gatehouse and a steel and wire gate and black-uniformed guards, all of the latter heavily armed and some with dogs. Two of the black uniforms stood near the gatehouse, talking and consulting papers on a clipboard and paying no attention to the others. The others were half a dozen guards and three separate knots of workmen. Two guards to a group. The workmen wore blue denim uniforms, pants and jacket, and on the back of each jacket were stencilled white letters: P.P.

I cursed softly and Duppy misunderstood and chuckled. “Matter, blanc? Some of your notions get upset?”

I had been cursing P.P. Trevelyn. The arrogance of the bastard! His own prisoner-of-war camp, even to the stenciled letters. They did look that way, like PWs. I’d seen thousands of them all over the world.

But I had never seen PWs move like these men. Slow, stiff, foot-dragging motions. They never turned their heads. They turned their whole body with agonizing slowness, with their heads craned forward and their shoulders sagging. Zombies? I didn’t buy it for a minute, but something damned queer was going on.

I didn’t say anything and this brought a note of irritation into Duppy’s tone. “Well, blanc? What you say to that? They zombies or ain’t they?”

I was puzzled, and uneasy, and when I’m like that I can be mean. I put the spurs to him a little. “Maybe they’re all catatonics, Duppy. Or P.P. is running a spa and they’re arthritic patients. Anyway I can’t see their eyes at this distance. Isn’t that the way you tell zombies — by their eyes?”

“I seen their eyes, blanc. Up close. Bad as obeah, those eyes on them. No color. No nothing. Just white stare at you. Dead eyes. I know. I seen.”

I knew he was telling the truth. “How did you get close enough to see their eyes, Duppy?”

Silence. I listened for the movement, for the swing of his hand toward the Tommy gun at his side. I gambled with the odds on my side. Gunfire would louse up the deal, and I didn’t think he was ready for that yet.

He said: “Nem mind how I knows, blanc. I does, is all. But you ain’t gonna believe, so forget. You see what they doing down there?”

I saw. “They’re planting mines along the inside of the fence. Staggered at intervals of ten feet. That fence electrified, Duppy?”

“I disrecollects.” Sullen now. Then: “Seems to me it ain’t, though. Reckon P.P. don’t think he need juice, with them guards and dogs and mines. And zombies!”

I began studying the terrain beyond the fence. A wide graveled road led upward through heavily flowered and wooded slopes to a large flattened mesa. I could make out one wing of the house, three stories of glittering white stone fronted by a wide terrace and a balustrade of the same stone. Huge urns, amphorae, flaunted long tendrils of lush tropic flowers. Trevelyn loved flowers more than he liked people.

Off to the left, separated from the house by neatly hedged gardens and clipped topiaries, was the biggest goddamned swimming pool I had ever seen. An acre of pellucid blue water surrounded by tile. One side was sheltered by a glass canopy. There was a float and high and low diving boards and various inflated plastic birds and animals. There was sparkling white sand at each end of the pool, hauled all those miles from the coast, and on the sand near the high board a man was lying. A dark-haired white girl was rubbing suntan lotion on him. I twiddled the focusing screw for a better look.

Even with the inevitable foreshortening I had, for a few moments, a good look at the billionaire bastard. I never doubted that it was P.P. Trevelyn. He looked the part. It was type casting, but perfect type casting.

He was on his back with his hands interlaced beneath his head. He wore huge black sunglasses. A long brown cigar drooped from a mouth like a loose anus, his nose was a blobby button, and his skull was a tanned cue ball with & swatch of dirty gray over each ear.

P.P. didn’t have much chest but his paunch was a miniature mountain. The girl was anointing it. She poured oil and rubbed and the paunch swayed and quivered like a mound of jelly. I turned the binoculars on the girl’s face for a moment. Expecting, even hoping for some nutty reason, to find distaste written there. Even disgust.

She was a beautiful girl, supple and long limbed with, I I thought, the developed legs of a dancer. She wore a tiny bikini that let her breasts spill over and she must have shaven her pubic area or I could have seen hair. Maybe P.P. liked it that way.

The girl was the real zombie. Her eyes were half closed and her lips moved as she talked and there was absolutely no expression on her lovely face as she rubbed oil into that mountain of old guts. I felt a flash of pity for her, and knew it undeserved. She knew what she was about. Billionaires don’t grow on trees.

I crooked a finger at Duppy. “Here. Take a look. Is that P.P.?” It had to be, but I wanted confirmation.

I came as close to liking Duppy then as I ever would. He took a look and his thick lips moved in what could only be disgust and hatred. “That the man,” he muttered. “That the son of a bitch for sure. He just come out since I look last. Jesus God—1 wonder how that blanc girl stand to touch him. I bet he smell like a trench.”

I took back the glasses. “When you got a billion, Duppy, it. doesn’t matter how you smell.”

His mouth twitched and he gave me a cold dark stare. His eyeballs were jaundiced and inflamed by red spider webs. He ignored me and rolled back to his Tommy gun and began to clean and field-strip it.

I put the glasses back on the swimming pool in time to see P.P. saying something to the girl. She nodded, without expression, and tugged at his swim trunks. Then she bent over him, her red mouth agape, and in a moment his paunch began to quiver.

I felt a little sick and I didn’t want to see anymore, there was a lesson in it, and I let it register. The absolute ultimate in confidence. His house, his pool, his guards, his privacy and his own girl. P.P. Trevelyn didn’t give a good tinker’s damn who saw him doing what! He owned the joint He owned the world. He thought.

I studied the new road that twisted up slopes and through cuts and around bluffs to the Citadel some ten miles away. The road was narrow, only jeep wide, of gravel and crushed stone and it was one hell of an accomplishment and must have cost a million to build. Several parties of the denim-clad “zombies” were still working on it, tamping and rolling, and watering truck was crawling along, spraying water to bind the foundation.

There was no sign of the black uniforms on the road. The guards here were Tonton Macoute, and they rode the truck and watched from jeeps with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on them. The denim-clad laborers worked with the same stiff and awkward motions of the men around the gate. Zombies? But why? Why go to all the trouble to stage this farce?

Then I knew. I was a little stupid or I would have caught it before. The “zombies” were just another precaution, another way of keeping curious, or angry blacks away from this place. It was good psychology. No simple peasant will get within a hundred miles of a zombie if he can help it.

The missile made a thin searing streak as it left a launching ramp on the Citadel and arched over the valley. Duppy grunted and rolled to my side. We followed the blur of burnished metal as the missile slowed, faltered, went off course and smashed into a hill in a welter of wracked metal Duppy chuckled.

“Ain’t worth a gourde, them things. I been spying long time now and ain’t never seen ‘em hit anything they shoot at. Don’t see why Swan so worry. Nothing to be afraid of there! Take ‘em hundred years to make them missile work.”

I had the binoculars on the Citadel ten miles away. The Citadel took a giant leap toward me and I could see tiny dots moving about on the ramparts and I thought I saw steel ramps gleaming in the sun. I could make out long rows of rusty cannon and triangular mounds of cannon balls. Cannon that had never fired a shot.

Another missile left the Citadel and swooshed into the sparkling air. It broke up in midair, exploding in a cloud of black smoke and metal rain.

I said: “Did it ever occur to you, Duppy, that maybe Valdez isn’t really trying? Maybe he’s stalling, sabotaging, hoping that something will happen — like us coming in for him.—”

“No, blanc. I think Dr. Valdez do his best. Papa Doc and P.P. see to that — they ain’t fools. Dr. Valdez try to stall and they torture him to death real fast, I think. Take long time die. Trouble is Haiti, Papa Doc, ain’t ready for missiles yet. Still in the jungle, blanc. The Doctor he only one man and can’t do it all — and even bastard P.P. can’t buy brains come to this place.” Duppy laughed in basso.

I kept the glasses on the Citadel. It had been rotting since 1830 and was still an impressive sight. It thrust out from Cape Bishop like the prow of a ship, battered by time and still immutable. Twenty thousand men died in the thirteen years it took to build it. Walls 12 feet thick, three hundred cannon, quarters for fifteen thousand” soldiers. Never used. Never had to withstand an attack. In the end Henri Christophe killed himself with a silver bullet, and the cannon rusted, and the wind and rain and rats took over. The Citadel brooded through the years, neglected and yet indomitable, thrusting its blunt prow into seas of tropical greenery, damped by clouds fluttering from its turrets like sails. Waiting.

Its time had come again. In all Haiti there was no better site for missile launching.

No more missiles were fired. My eyes ached and watered and I put the binoculars down and looked at Duppy. He was back at work on his machine gun, fitting it together with practiced hands.

I lit a cigarette. “Valdez goes to the Citadel every morning, comes back here every night. Under heavy guard. That right, Duppy?”

He rubbed his piece down with an oily rag, not looking at me. “That right, blanc. Heavy guard. One jeep in front, one jeep behind, and Dr. Valdez in middle. Guards is Tonton Macoute. Bogymen. Mean bastards. When they gets here to gate they turns him over to P.P.’s men.”

I smoked in silence for a moment.

Duppy said: “I know what you think, blanc, and it don’t work. Not try it No chance. We just get our tails shot off and let the whole world know we here.” His laugh was cynical. “Not that make much difference to us then. We dead mens.”

He had been reading me correctly. Or very nearly. I wasn’t about to let Duppy know what I was really thinking.

I watched the ebony matte features closely and said, “You don’t think we could do it? Snatch Valdez somewhere on the road between the gate and the Citadel?”

Duppy hawked, spat, and glowered at me from his red-yellow eyes. “No, blanc. I told you! Can’t be done that way.”

“We’ve got grenades. I’ve got some plastique. All four of us have automatic weapons.” I was baiting him a little, and enjoying it, and I made myself sound a little superior and pompous.

“I think that it would be perfectly feasible to set up an ambush on that road. We would have the advantage of surprise. There are only four of us, I know, but if we plan it carefully we could—”

Without haste he turned the Thompson gun so it covered me. One hand, like a bunch of black bananas, curled near the trigger assembly. He made no effort to conceal this, but his gap-toothed smile was white and amiable for a change and it put ice down my spine. I had a hunch that when Duppy smiled and looked friendly he was prepared to kill you.

He wasn’t, quite yet, ready for that. You can’t silence a Tommy gun.

Duppy, still smiling, narrowed his eyes at me and said: “You got a lot to learn, blanc. One thing is that you isn’t boss here. Swan boss. If Swan say make the ambush I do it — but Swan ain’t gonna say that. She not so dumb like you.”

I nodded and matched his smile and his amiability. “All right. I’m a man who will listen. What’s wrong with my plan?”

He sighed and shook his massive black head. “Noise! That the worse thing wrong with it. Even we pet Valdez we still got to make it to the coast and you boat. Never do it, blanc. Papa Doc have his air force out, his coast patrol looking, his army combing the jungle. Be Tonton Macoute ever where. P.P. have his black uniforms after us. No chance, blanc, no chance at all.”

I pretended to study his words. He was right, of course. It was a lousy scheme and I had just been trying it on for size.

“ ‘Nother thing, blanc. There ain’t four of us. Swan stay out of all gun fighting. We need Swan for uprising, for invasion.

Swan dead, everything dead. No. We don’t put Swan in no danger.”

“There is still Hank Willard.” I wanted to keep Duppy talking.

He spat and laughed, a genuine and full-throated laugh of contempt. “That skinny ant! What good he? Anyway he crippled. He also scared and just want out of Haiti and this ain’t his fight no how. Hank be no good at all, blanc.”

I didn’t agree with him, but I kept my mouth shut.

Duppy held up his hand and began counting on those black banana fingers. “So that really only make two of us. Me and you. Now in front jeep is five Macoute, in back jeep is five Macoute, in middle jeep wid the Doctor is four Macoute. All jeeps got 50s on them. Macoute got submachine guns same as we. P.P. got tracking dogs. You still want try it that way, blanc?”

He was one hell of an actor. So am I when I have to be. I fidgeted and hemmed and hawed a bit and allowed that maybe I was wrong. My idea stank.

There was a long silence. He lit one of his Splendids and stared at the sky. Then, as if it were an after thought, he said: “Anyway you forgetting, blanc. You the stud! We decided that, I recollect. You getting paid all money. You the one got to go over that fence and into P.P.’s compound and bring Dr. Valdez out. We help you plan it, and we cover you, but you the one do it.”

He was so right. I had known that from the beginning. I was the one who had to go in and get killed. Because Duppy wanted it that way. Duppy was going to plan and arrange it that way when the time came. For reasons of his own. Reasons that stemmed from KGB orders. Straight from the Kremlin.

The sun was warm melted butter on my face. I closed my eyes and let myself hover on the edge of sleep. I was not too discontented. I had part of the puzzle worked — but there were gaps, big gaps, and only time and events would fill them. The time was very near.

Lyda came up to the platform with lunch. Crations and instant chocolate in cold water. She had found a spring-fed pool and taken a bath and her hair was still damp. She nestled down between the two of us and took the binoculars and studied the valley for a long time. We talked and made tentative plans. I went along with them on everything, only demurring now and then to make it look better and avoid Duppy’s suspicion. I had my own plan. All I had to do was wait until precisely the right moment to put it into effect.

It came before I was quite ready for it. The sun was still an hour high when there was a bustle around the gate and we saw them gathering the “zombies” and marching them in and counting them. Lyda pointed to a dust cloud that was drifting down the road from the Citadel. Three jeeps.

She grabbed the binoculars from me. “They’re bringing Valdez back now. I want another good look at him. Maybe I was wrong this morning.”

“You wrong,” Duppy growled. “That Valdez all right. Certain. You just don’t know what five years being prisoner do to a man, Swan.”

I thought he was lying, and I wondered why he bothered. I was sure that the man Lyda had seen was a decoy, a fake Valdez. The real Valdez was too precious to risk on a long open drive twice a day. That was an open temptation, an invitation to—

The hidden gunner accepted the invitation. The crack of a high-powered rifle drifted to us across the valley.

Lyda, with the glasses trained on the middle jeep, flinched as though the bullet had struck her. She gasped, “Oh Christ! Oh, MY GOD! He’s been shot. They’ve shot Valdez!”

Duppy cursed and grabbed for the glasses. I moved softly toward the back of the platform and then stood up. My eyes are a little better than perfect and I could see well enough.

All three jeeps had jammed to a halt. Tonton Macoute were running all over the place, angry and confused and staring and pointing up at the mountain side. That gunner had better be well on his way.

A little knot of Tonton Macoute gathered around the middle jeep. They were looking at something on the ground. A couple of them were kneeling and working on the man. I saw a white Panama hat lying in the dirt off to one side. My guess was a telescopic sight and a head shot. An expert marksman. I moved a little closer to the wooden stairs leading down the palm tree.

I had to crane to see now. One of the Tonton Macoute, obviously an officer, straightened up and made a gesture of disgust. Shook his head and flung his arms wide and I could almost hear the word: “Mort!”

Duppy said, “They kill him, Swan. Some dirty bastard kill your Dr. Valdez.”

Lyda was in shock. She had forgotten me. She clung to Duppy’s massive bicep and stared and said over and over again, “Why? But why? Why would they want to kill him?”

Time to go. I started down the tree, making no sound. As I went I heard Duppy saying: “Depend who they is, Swan. Not P.P. or Papa Doc — they never kill valuable man like Valdez. But I know who do want him dead, Swan. CIA want him dead. Them miserable American bastards want Valdez good and dead, you bet. They do it, Swan. CIA do it!”

I smiled as I reached the ground. Another piece of the puzzle in place.

I heard Lyda give a muted little scream of rage and anguish. I picked up my musette bag, already packed, and kicked the dozing Hank Willard in the ribs. He came up swearing, and I clamped a hand over his mouth and whispered for thirty seconds.

Willard’s eyes widened and his mouth opened, and he began to spit out protests.

“What the screwing hell, Sam? You’re looking to get me killed. I’m an airplane driver, not a screwing—”

Time was precious. Every second was uranium. I put my hand in his ginger beard and twisted. “You do it,” I hissed. “You do it right. You ever expect to see the States again, or your girl in Hong Kong, you do it! Fail me and I’ll kill you.”

He gasped and nodded and clawed at my hand. “Okay— okay. But Jesus — I—”

I shoved him away. “Do it! Right! I’ll see you. Whether you get dead or rewarded is up to you.”

Time to go. I dove into the thick brush and started working my way down the slope. It would be dark soon, and I didn’t think Duppy would come after me. He would have his hands full with Lyda for a time.

Duppy’s dream world was beginning to come apart, and I was the demolition expert.

Chapter 11

Time, like the man said, was of the essence. And silence was golden. I thought of a few more cliches as I crawled down the 45-degree slant of the spur to the talus slope that footed it. The brush was thick and made the going hard; on the other hand it covered me from above and below and kept me from sliding and making noise. When the time came for noise I would make plenty of it. But not yet.

Where the brush faded away and the talus started I stopped and blended myself into a last thick growth of bush Below me the terrain began to flatten out, about two hundred yards of loose rock and pebbles and sandy clay. No cover. I wondered briefly if the area was mined, then forgot it. Mined or not I had to cross it.

In ten minutes it would be dark enough to try it. 1 spent the time in making the grenades ready. I had twine and tape and all the makings and it took me five minutes I didn’t have any H.E. grenades, only fragmentation, and I had to trust them to do the job. I checked the Tommy gun and the .45 and the Luger and the stiletto in the chamois spring sheath Then it was dark and I had not an excuse left for lingering. 1 started worming my way down the talus slope to the fence beyond. I was halfway over when the lights went on I had been afraid of that. There was already a blaze of light at the gate, but now powerful searchlights — hidden in trees where 1 hadn’t spotted them — began to play up and down the fence. 1 froze and cursed and made like an ostrich. Duppy must have known about the hidden lights. Duppy hadn’t mentioned them. It figured.

They were just horsing around with the lights, feeling secure and not expecting any trouble, and they missed me and after a couple of minutes the lights flicked off. I crawled to the fence, alert now for walking guards and dogs, and started planting my grenades.

I had pulled the pins and taped the spring levers down, with an end of twine knotted under and around each strip of tape. I taped a grenade to a fence post, near the base, then a grenade in the middle of the wire between two posts, then another grenade at the base of the second post. The three twine leads came back to tie into a single line of heavy cord that I payed out cautiously as I crawled backward from the fence.

A guard passed, walking the inside of the fence. He had a dog on a leash and he was using a flashlight now and then, throwing the beam around carelessly. I shoved my face into rock shards and waited. If he spotted the grenades, I would have to go off half-cocked and risk killing myself as well as him.

He didn’t spot the grenades. I waited until his steps faded away, then I back-tracked some more. When I had seventy-five yards of margin I stopped and got my head behind a foot-high boulder and got ready to go for broke.

I took a minute to wonder what was happening back up on the spur, between Duppy and Lyda and Hank Willard. It was chancy and anybody’s guess. I had given Hank instructions to be passed to the girl and Duppy. Duppy was bound to be in a rage because I had tricked him and jumped the gun and might even have loused up his plans for my death. It was bound to worry him. So was the fact that I was forcing his hand — he had to march to my tune now, instead of his — and that I had tossed the crap into the fan before he was ready for it.

I yanked hard on the cord. The idea was that the cord jerked the three twine leads, and the twine ripped off the tape binding the spring levers on the grenades.

The cord went limp in my hand, all tension gone. I waited, counting, trying to squeeze myself into the good earth of Haiti. Five… six… seven… e—

They were all short fused. The grenades slammed the night open with a great dull roar and a spreading blossom of red and yellow and shivering concussion. Shrapnel hissed off the talus near me. I was up and running.

Both fence posts were bent and sagging like over-cooked spaghetti. The segment of wire between them drooped. The middle grenade had opened a six-foot rent in the steel mesh. I wormed through it, got caught in a porcupine of barbed wire, kicked and ripped my way out of that and took off like a big-assed bird for tree cover. That was fifty yards away and I knew I was running through mines and I was cold and sweating at the same time. I tried to run without touching the ground, knowing it couldn’t be done.

The Carter luck held and I was still O.K. when I broke into the trees and flopped down just in time for the first searchlight to miss me. I lay and panted and checked rapidly to see if I still had all my gear. I did. I waited ten seconds, all I could afford, to see if the three back on the spur were going to come through. That depended on Duppy, who by this time would be gnashing his big white teeth in rage.

They began firing down at the gate and I let out a deep sigh of relief. Lyda must have talked him around. I listened to” the light stutter of the Sten gun and the deeper roar of the .45 Tommy guns as they cut in and out in nasty spastic bursts. It sounded like an army on that ridge, and that was the way I wanted it, just as I wanted a diversion, wanted the black uniforms and the Tonton Macoute to think it was all coming from outside. While I was inside.

There was confusion at the gate house and the lights went out. Someone screamed in pain. The concealed searchlights kept swiveling around, and kept missing me and the hole in the wire. I prayed that this state of affairs would continue and began making my way up the hill toward P.P. Trevelyn’s modern palace. A prong of yellow moon lifted over the Citadel to the east. Two men were working down the hill toward me.

I crouched at the base of an ancient mahogany and snicked the haft of the stiletto down into my right hand. The threesome on the ridge were keeping up a steady fire. By the red flashes and the sounds I knew they had separated and were triangulating the gate.

Slowly, without sound, I put the Tommy gun and the musette bag on the ground beside me. The two men were close now, talking in hoarse whispers. I moved a little way around the thick tree bole, so it was between me and the approaching guards. Sounds fool you at night, but I thought they were about ten feet apart. They should pass on either side of the tree. I was counting on that. I made myself small. Not an easy thing, because I am not small. I wasn’t looking for trouble at the moment. I just wanted them to pass me by.

It was not to be. His luck was bad and he chose that particular moment in space and time to answer nature. By now the moon was bright enough for him to see the big mahogany tree and he just had to come to it. A real son of a bitch.

I was in a fold of shadow cast by enormous roots that broke ground. I gave him a chance but he didn’t want it. He was within six inches of me and then he looked down and saw the musette bag and the Tommy gun. He caught his breath, his last one, because I had an arm around his neck and the stiletto in his heart from the rear. I squeezed back all sound and let him down gently and dived back into the shadow of the tree. Fifteen seconds at most.

I waited. The other man stopped moving and called softly: “Carlos? Where are you, man? What the hell you doing?” Soft, slurring Creole.

I waited.

He began to move slowly toward the tree. When he spoke again he sounded nervous. “Carlos? You big fool, man. You play games with me? Carlos — you cut it out and answer me, man.”

He stepped into a shaft of moonlight and I raised the stiletto to ear level and a little back of my shoulder. When I saw what it was I hesitated for a split instant and in that time he sensed my presence and tried to bring up his rifle. He wore a denim uniform and his eyes, in the pale wash of moonlight, were a blank staring white. A zombie.

There was nothing zombie-like in the way he moved. My stiletto was just a whisper faster. It took him in the throat below his Adam’s apple. I leaped at him and slammed a fist at the rifle. It spun away. I clobbered him on the temple with my right fist and reached for the stiletto haft with my left hand. He made agony sounds, trying to scream and couldn’t, and I ripped the stiletto around and his throat opened and the hot blood gushed over my hand. He went to his knees. I snapped out the stiletto and stepped back and kicked him the rest of the way down.

I faded back into shadow and listened for a moment. They were firing back from the gate now. Soon they would get organized, and then Duppy and Lyda and Hank Willard would have to cut out and run for it. I hoped they ran fast and far and long enough, but I didn’t count on it. Duppy would have his wits about him by this time, and I didn’t know what he would do. Only God and Duppy knew that, and I didn’t have time to worry about it now.

It had been, like all good executions, silent. I went to the zombie and turned him over with my foot. I knelt and took a good look. Those eyes?

Contact lens. Milky white contact lens. That was the trick that made instant zombies to scare away timid natives. I had an idea then and I thumbed the staring bits of glass out of his eyes. I held one up to the moon. From the user’s side it was transparent enough. Some bit of scientific flummery gave a clear view. I wiped the stiletto on his denim jacket and dragged him back into the shadows.

I worked fast. The gunfire on the ledge was thinning now, and growing in volume near the gate. Moving away from the gate. P.P.’s men had been reinforced and had guessed at the paucity of the attackers and were starting to move out. Later, when they fitted all the bits and pieces together and made sense out of the hole in the fence, they would come looking for me. But that was later.

I stripped us both and put on his bloody denims. I had used contacts many times for disguise and that was no sweat, though I could have done with a vacuum cup. I smeared his blood on my face until I was an abstract horror in scarlet, something of a bogyman myself.

I dragged both bodies into the root maze of the big tree and started up the slope again. Behind me the gunfire was beginning to taper away. I heard a whoosh and a hollow pop and a hot white magnesium flare hung for a moment over the ridge and began floating down, a penetrating balloon of luminous flame. I went to ground again.

The three stopped firing. I hoped they were running for it and that at least Lyda was obeying my instructions.

I had the terrain fixed in my mind. I bore left, going as swiftly as I could without sound and skirted the wing of the house I had seen that afternoon through the binoculars. It was blazing with lights and I could hear men talking on the terrace. P.P. and his stooges should be a little upset about now. I kept going into the hedged gardens and came to the vast swimming pool. It was dark and calm and a mirror for the rising moon. I circled it and came to the strip of sand at the far end.

I thrust my arm into the loose sand, still warm from the sun, and it was deep enough. I buried the submachine gun and the musette bag and the Colt .45, keeping the Luger and the stiletto. The Luger, and the ammo for it, were waterproofed. I had smoothed sand over my cache and crawled to the pool and slipped into it with nary a ripple, as silent as a crocodile going after a meal. Now the waiting began. I had to be patient until the worst of the uproar was over and I had to hope that Lyda and the others were leading P.P.’s men and the Tonton Macoute on a wild goose chase.

I paddled over to a low board and clung to the ladder. The water was limpid, soft, warm with sun and had a therapeutic effect. It was crazy, but I found myself wanting to sleep!

Only two patrols passed in all the hours I spent in that pool. They never did turn on the pool lights. I heard the patrols coming, well in advance, and went in under the diving board and, at the last moment, went under and flattened against the side of the pool. Buoyancy was a problem — I didn’t dare exhale and make bubbles — but I clung to rough unfinished concrete at the bottom and managed okay. I counted seconds and stayed under three minutes. Each time, when I stuck my nose above water, I was alone.

About midnight the lights began to go off in the big house. The swiveling searchlights gave up. There hadn’t been any shooting for a long time and I figured that the three had either gotten away or were dead by now. I came out of the pool. I wasn’t cold, but the flesh of my hands and feet was soft and puckered into ridges. I stripped off the denims and wrung them out and put them back on, because it is hard to move quietly when you are dribbling gallons of water. I would have traded my next pay raise for a smoke and shot of Barbancourt.

I dug up my gear and the machine gun and checked through the musette bag a last time to make sure I had all my nasty little trinkets. Then I cradled the Tommy gun in my elbows and started working toward the terrace on my belly.

There was a light on the terrace, over an enormous door studded with nails. A black-uniformed guard with a rifle was pacing a beat alongside the balustrade. There was no dog and that made me happy. A dog would have spotted me immediately.

I settled in between two almond trees and tried to puzzle it out. I had to get through that door, and I had to do it without raising an alarm. I watched the guard.

He stuck close to the balustrade, coming as far toward me as the corner where the railing made an L angle. There he turned and paced back up the terrace for the length of the wing, slipping out of sight for a moment where the wing joined the main house. He was never out of view more than a few seconds before he started back. Once I heard him speak to someone in a low complaining tone. That meant another guard on another part of the terrace. I didn’t like that, but I had expected it and there was nothing I could do about it. If I could get to P.P. fast enough it didn’t matter; if I didn’t get to P.P. fast enough it wouldn’t matter either. I would be dead.

I studied the L angle where the balustrade bent to run its short segment back to the wall of the wing. Right in the angle was one of the big stone jars, an amphora with its pointed base cemented to a plinth. A tangled cascade of flowers and tendrils dangled from the jar out over the balustrade like a miniature green waterfall. I thought about it for a couple of seconds and sighed and decided to try for it. The only game in town. And my timing had better be right!

When the guard passed out of sight the next tune I ran in. a crouching stoop for the L angle. I made it and was in under the thin drape of vines and flowers when the guard started back. I took a deep breath and held it.

This time he lingered for a moment in the corner, leaning to spit and muttering to himself, and the shine of his high black boots was inches from my face.

When he started back along the balustrade I got ready to go. I dumped the musette bag and the Tommy gun and pressured the sheath spring. The stiletto slipped down into my hand. I waited until he vanished around the wing, then leaped the balustrade and slipped behind the stone jar and under the canopy of flowers. I was one second in the doing, but it was a nervous second.

I didn’t dare look now. I had to go by ear. I heard the solid tread of his boots coming closer and closer. I made myself relax and take a deep breath. This had to be done quickly and silently and I didn’t want to kill him. Yet.

He stopped in exactly the same place. Still talking to himself about not being able to smoke on duty. I watched his boots. I was so close I could smell him, hear him belch, catch an odor of sour spice on his breath. When he turned I went for him.

I slapped my left forearm against his throat like an iron bar and tapped him lightly behind the ear with the haft of the stiletto and bore him back to the balustrade and over it and down into the drape of greenery. His boots scraped on stone as I hauled him over the balustrade, but that was the only sound. I straddled him, put the point of the stiletto against his jugular, and waited. I hadn’t hit him too hard.

He was a white man with a riffraff face and a stubble of beard. The black peaked cap hadn’t fallen off, and I saw the gold shield with blue letters — P.P. On the left arm of his tunic were three stripes. I had gotten myself a sergeant!

Just enough light reflected from the stone jar through the tiny falling jungle of bloom and vine; enough for me to see his face and for him to see mine. He opened his eyes and stared up at me and I pushed the stiletto an eighth of an inch into his throat.

I whispered: “You want to live?”

He nodded, his eyes frantic, his flesh trying to creep away from the blade.

“Answer my questions,” I said. “It’s your only chance. Don’t speak — nod yes or no. Understand?”

He nodded, his eyes rolling down, straining to see the shiny thing that was hurting him.

“Has P.P. gone to bed?”

He nodded.

I jerked my head back at the wing. “Does he sleep here?”

He nodded again and I felt a lot better. I wouldn’t have to go through a hundred rooms looking for the bastard.

“What floor does he sleep on? First?”

He shook his head.

“Second?”

Another negative.

“Third, then?”

A nod.

“Front of the wing?”

Shake.

“Rear of the wing?”

Nod.

I had all I wanted and all I had time for. I clamped my hand over his mouth and pushed the stiletto into his heart.

He bucked and heaved under me, his legs thrashing a bit, and I moved my weight back to stop that. I put the stiletto into him once more, then wiped it on the black uniform and put his cap over his face so it wouldn’t shine. I slung the Tommy gun and the musette bag and got ready to go.

There was no sign of another guard as I ran tippy toe across the terrace. For some screwy reason I thought of Tiny Tim and damned near laughed out loud. Hawk has, on many occasions, accused me of being a little nuts. My stock reply is that to be in this profession you have to be a little nuts.

The big studded door opened with a whisper of sound and an out-draft of cool air. Air conditioning, natch. Nothing but the best for old P.P. Probably hadn’t cost him more than a million to cool this palace.

I was in a big mosaic-floored foyer dimly lit by golden candle bulbs. The mosaic design was a figure of a lush black woman. At the rear of the foyer was a wide carpeted stairway leading up to a narrow landing and swinging right. On the landing was a small polished console with a Tiffany lamp on it. The lamp was dark.

I did not linger to admire the decor. I legged it up the stairs, making no sound on the thick carpet, and peered into a corridor that crossed the stair like a T. The Carter luck was good tonight. There was a black uniform walking the corridor, but his back was to me and he was heading the other way. I nipped around the bend and up to the second landing.

But this was not good. I couldn’t count on the luck to hold. I could count on there being a guard on every floor. I couldn’t linger on the landing because I was in double jeopardy. One of the two patrolling guards was sure to see me on the landing. It would be natural for them to glance at the stairs every time they passed.

It was getting down to the nitty-gritty now, but I did have a choice. I chose the second guard, the man above me. I crawled up the stairs and flattened my nose in the expensive carpet and waited. This was going to be a rough one. One out of the way noise and I’d had it. I—

I called myself a stupid bastard, which I was, and changed plans in a microsecond. I looked like a horror movie, with my bloody face and the white staring eyes, and I had been about to waste my advantage. I unslung the Tommy gun and the musette bag, unsnapped the web belt and dropped the .45 on the stairs. I straightened up and hugged the wall and waited on the top step just out of view of anyone in the corridor. I could hear him coming toward me, his boots making a swush-swush sound in the deep pile. Timing would tell the story.

Very few people can hear a dog whistle. I can. I waited until he was four strides short of the stair head, then I stepped around the corner and confronted him with my best zombie stare. I dragged my feet and lurched into the corridor.

Another white man. P.P.’s elite. Bald under the black cap and with a belly swelling the black tunic. Mean eyes narrowed at me. But not afraid of me. Exactly as I wanted it.

He stopped short and brought up the machine pistol. “What the hell you doing up here, zombie?” He knew all about the fake zombies, of course.

I took a step toward him and halted when I saw his finger go white on the trigger. I pointed up. “Message for Mr. Trevelyn, sir. Important. The sarge said I should bring it in person.”

The light was bad, but in about ten seconds he was going to see a white man, a strange white man, under the smeared blood. He took a step toward me and that helped. And he relaxed his finger on the trigger of the machine pistol. He scowled at me.

“You know you ain’t allowed up here!”

I nodded and scratched my head. “I know, sir, but the sarge sent me. Important, he said. About the shooting, I think.”

He wasn’t buying any. He glanced past me at the stairs and I knew he was going to summon the guard down there and check me out. I wanted to use the stiletto and didn’t dare.

He opened his mouth. I kicked the machine pistol out of his hands, praying the deep pile carpet would absorb the sound, and got my hands about his throat just in time. He managed one squeak, like a mouse when he feels the cat’s claws, and that was all. I wrapped his throat in my hands and put my thumbs into his flab and turned on the pressure. His voice box cracked like an egg, and he lost his head and grabbed at my hands, trying to pull them away, instead of going for his holstered pistol. By the time he thought of it, it was too late.

His eyes bugged at me and began to turn red as they hemorrhaged. They pleaded. His knees went lax. I held him up, at arm’s length in front of me, and carried him a few paces down the corridor. I squeezed his throat. I turned so I could watch the head of the stairs.

I checked him for breath and he was fresh out. I let him down gently, ran back to the stairs and got the Tommy gun and musette bag and the .45 Colt. I began to wish that I had killed the guard under me, but it was too late now. I wasn’t going to do any back-tracking.

I opened a door near the stairs and found a bathroom. Fine. I pulled the body in and stashed it in the tub with the machine pistol on his chest like a bouquet. I looked at myself in the mirror and damned near screamed, then went out and started worming my way up the last flight of stairs. I was riding a rip tide of luck, like a red hot crap shooter, and I was going to listen to the Bard’s advice and take fortune on the flood.

The trouble was that I was getting deeper into the forest. 1 hadn’t even started out yet.

There was no guard on the third floor. I didn’t believe it and I lay on the stairs and peered up and down the corridor. Something was wrong. After the security I’d seen up to now it just wasn’t kosher that P.P. would leave his bedroom floor unguarded. So where was the son of a bitch?

I couldn’t wait. Time was blipping past like nanoseconds on a computer. I had to go, man. Go!

I spotted the big double doors at the far end of the corridor and they said — master bedroom and private suite! Trevelyn’s lair. I ran lightly down the corridor, the Tommy gun at port and the stiletto in my teeth. Deliberate terror tactics. I meant to scare hell out old P.P. and so gain a second or two of advantage. But no guard? I didn’t like it.

I halted outside the double doors and listened. Then stared. I couldn’t believe it at first, but by God there it was. One of the doors was open a couple of inches’!

I thought of a trap and dismissed it. P.P. didn’t know I was within a thousand miles. And if it were a trap they would have made it easy for me, whereas I had killed two men to get here. Four if you counted the guards on the slope.

The words came to me then, from within the doors, and I heard them plainly and without doubt and did not know what to think. I did know that it was P.P. Trevelyn who was speaking. Had to be. A hoarse whispering voice, as worn out and desiccated as the man himself. Yet there was authority in the voice, and breathy malignant laughter, as it gave a command.

“Give it to her again, nigger. Come on! Another thousand dollars if you can keep it up.”

Chapter 12

I pushed quietly into the darkened anteroom and locked the doors behind me. The locks were well oiled. P.P. and his playmates were too engrossed in getting their jollies to pay attention to anything else. As I moved silently down a short corridor I heard Trevelyn’s gravelly, worn-out voice raised again in sly and contemptuous exhortation.

“Come on, kid. You can do it for another thousand dollars! Sock it to her again. Make it five times in a row.”

A woman’s voice said: “You’re an old monster, darling. Please can’t I rest now? I’m a bushed bunny for sure.”

I am no phonics expert, but the voice said Brooklyn, Hoboken, maybe East Orange. Consonants chewed. Vowels slurred. Dropout.

A male voice, rich with Haiti and Creole, bearing overtones of education, said, “You’re breaking your promise again, Mr. Trevelyn. You said you wouldn’t use that word nigger!”

This I had to see for myself. Before the White Rabbit came out of the wall and led me away.

A cream-colored door, slightly open, was all that stood between me and the yo-yo academy beyond. Gently, so slowly, I nudged it open a couple of inches. A blaze of reflected light slashed at me. A hall of mirrors! Three figures endlessly reflected from ceiling and walls and floor. Through eye slits I peered, retinae paining and washed, at a dirty old man and his willing helots.

P.P. sat in a chair facing the foot of a huge circular bed. Purple sheets. On the bed, naked, was the girl I had seen by the swimming pool. She who, at command, had attempted to get the bid bastard some heat. Nubile and gold tanned with narrow strips of ivory. Breasts taut and swollen and, as I had suspected, a shaven mons veneris.

The man on the bed with her was young and tall and lithe-limbed. Black. Shining. Sullen.

The old man, P.P. Trevelyn — sole owner and proprietor of this lush Pool and Pornography Club — aimed a movie camera at the bed and pressed a trigger in the revolver shaped handle. The camera whirred.

He said: “Come on now, Betty. You can do it. Show some interest. This is the last one, I promise. Then you can rest.”

The girl pouted, lovely red mouth all crimped, and said, “All right, then. Let’s get it over with.”

The joys of sex.

I felt a surge of genuine admiration for old P.P. Fascist he might be, but he was a man of single-minded dedication. A small war was raging outside, he had every reason to be concerned for his own safety, yet blithely he leveled his camera and whirred away.

Romeo was having trouble. He was sullen. Not in the mood. Plainly hating what he was doing for money; hating the old man and the white girl. I could use that hate.

That ruined voice was rumbling again. “Come on, Betty! Get him excited. You know what to do.”

The mirrors glittered and flashed and a hundred girls bent over the dark figure and—

I had seen enough. I stepped into the room and waved the Tommy gun at them. I spoke in a calm, matter-of-fact, restrained voice.

“No need for panic,” I said. “Don’t make any sudden moves. Remain calm and quiet and maybe nothing will happen to you. Maybe.”

The girl’s red mouth, wide for another purpose, decided to scream. I waggled the muzzle of the Tommy gun at her. “One sound and I’ll kill you.”

She believed me. The young black man lay still and gave me a sullen stare. He wasn’t much afraid. I liked him.

P.P. sat very still, the camera extended before him. He still wore the dark glasses and there was ferret movement behind them as he fought surprise and outrage. He did not seem much afraid, either, and that I did not like.

He rasped at me. “Who in hell are you and what do you want?”

It seemed a fair question and I had the answer ready. I took a dead man’s name. Not, I hoped, in vain.

“Steve Bennett. CIA agent. You are P.P. Trevelyn? Paul Penton Trevelyn?”

The girl laughed nervously. “Is he ever, mister! And you must be some kind of nut. Boy, are you in trouble!”

The old man and I spoke at the “same time. To the girl We both said, “Shut up.”

P.P. said: “I suppose you’re after Dr. Valdez?”

I nodded. “You suppose right. Shall we go find him?”

His mouth did look like an anus, and now it curled in blanched pink contempt. “You’re a little late. Dr. Valdez was killed this afternoon. Murdered. I thought you people did it.”

I shook my head. “No. And let’s not kid around. That wasn’t Valdez who was shot. That was a ringer. A decoy used for that very purpose — so someone would kill him! So you could spread the word that Valdez was dead and take off the heat.”

Trevelyn nodded. “So you know that, eh? I thought you might. I never did have much faith in the plan. Or in Valdez for that matter.”

That caught me a little off balance, but there was no time for puzzles. I made a nasty little movement with the Tommy gun. “So the real Valdez is alive and well and working for you under duress? So come on — let’s go find him. It’s the last time I’ll tell you.” I loaded my voice with menace and let my finger tighten on the trigger.

He was a stick-legged and paunched old sphinx in a dark blue dressing gown. He didn’t move. His eyes taunted me behind the dark glasses. When he spoke his voice was casual and unafraid and I began to sweat a little. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so easy.

“You don’t make a very good zombie,” he said “Too intelligent. But still not intelligent enough. Or your information is faulty. You haven’t got me, son. I’ve got you! I’m the spider and you’re in my web. What do you say to that?”

I had memorized the precis Hawk gave me in Key West Every word flashed through my mind now.

The croaking old voice went on. “You can’t very well intimidate a dying man, Mr. Bennett. I am dying. Of throat cancer. I have had three operations already and there isn’t anything left to cut out. I might live another two months, they say. They are the best specialists in the world and I believe them.”

I accepted that as truth. Accepted it and began trying to find a way around it.

Before I could say anything the girl got into the act. This time I placed the voice tone and inflection. Under stress she reverted back to Hell’s Kitchen.

“Why don’t you take off, Junior, and go back where you belong. You do that, and don’t cause no more trouble, and maybe my sweet old P.P. will let you live.”

The black man chuckled. Laughed. Turned over and buried his face in the pillow, his well muscled shoulders shaking.

Still trying to figure a way around this block, I gave the girl a sad smile. “You disappoint me, honey. I thought I was saving you from a life of shame and degradation. I intended to take you back to your mother, and rehabilitate you. You know — back to school, serving milk and cookies at the local Sunday school, the whole wholesome bit. You would turn that down?”

She stared at me and bit her lip with white perfect teeth. As lovely a moron as I had ever seen. I knew what I had to do and I regretted it some. Not too much.

“You’re a crazy son of a bitch,” the girl said. “Coming in here like this and trying to spoil everything for me.” Her voice raised in pitch as she glared. “P.P. is gonna make me a movie star. He promised and my P.P. keeps his word. Now why don’t you just do what I said and take off!”

The White Rabbit was already with us. I expected the Mad Hatter any moment.

The black man was laughing. He couldn’t stop. He grabbed a corner of a pillow case and stuffed it in his mouth and he still couldn’t stop. He kept his head buried in the pillow and went— "huhhhh — huh — ahhhh — huhhhh—”

P.P., the kind ole uncle, spoke in reproof to the girl. Avuncular tones dipped in slime. “Now, Betty, honey. That’s no way to talk to the CIA. Try to be calm. Everything is going to be all right. I promise that—”

I clicked the stiletto down into my hand. The weapon glittered in the mirrors as I raised and threw it in the time of a heart beat. “You’re so goddamned right about that, Dad. Everything is going to be all right.”

The stiletto clung to her like a scarlet decoration for bravery. The cruel needle loved tanned skin beneath her left breast. Worms of blood writhed down to her navel. She stared down, poor girl, and did not believe and when at last she did believe she made a move to pluck out the steel and it was too late and she died with her red mouth open and still doubting.

Silence in the mirror room. I moved the muzzle of the Tommy gun back and forth between the black and the old man.

“Shock of recognition,” I said. “Nature of reality, P.P. Not so gentle hint. Shall we get on with it now? Or don’t you really care about those two months you’ve got left? Think of all the dirty pictures you can take in two months, P.P.”

The black man rolled away from the lovely corpse. His eyes wide, he stared and his throat was a dry well without sound. He did not yet believe it.

P.P. did. The dark glasses flashed at me. He folded his hands over his paunch and his whisper was a husk of conviction and slowly rising fear.

“You murdered her, Mr. Bennett. By God, sir, you murdered her in the presence of two witnesses! I, ah, I saw it. With my own eyes I saw it I had heard that you people were ruthless, but this — this is beyond belief.”

“You had better believe it,” I said curtly. “Now get out of that chair and take me to Valdez. Quickly and quietly with no fuss. You’re my hostage and I’ll have this Tommy gun up yours every step of the way.”

“Crude,” he said. “So crude and vulgar, you people.”

“It’s a little different,” I admitted, “when you do your own killing. Not the same as paying to have it done. Now move, you old bastard. I’m fresh out of patience.”

He shook his head. “No. I think not. I think you will just have to kill me, Mr. Bennett.”

If he wanted to play bluff it was all right with me. I could see the sweat on his bald dome. He was cracking.

I wiggled the Tommy gun at the black, who was still staring in fascination at dead Betty girl. “Pull out that stiletto,” I commanded. “Wipe it on the sheet.”

He hesitated. I cracked my voice at him. “Do it!”

He did it. He lay there with the stiletto in his hand, glancing from it to me.

I nodded to P.P. and said mildly, “You love this old bag of guts?”

The black man stared at me, his mouth working. P.P. shifted nervously in his chair. He pulled his dressing gown tighter over his ridiculous legs. He had an inkling of what was coming.

I snapped at the black man. “Do you? Love him? Lie and I’ll kill you.”

“N — no, sir. I don’t love him.”

I grinned at the black man. “Does he love you?”

Wide eyes. Lots of white showing. “I–I don’t know what you mean, sir. I don’t think—”

“That’s it,” I said. “Don’t think. Feel. Just feel. You know P.P. doesn’t love you. You know he doesn’t respect you. You know he despises you, considers you an inferior black animal. Calls you nigger, doesn’t he?”

He took a deep breath and looked at P.P. Something flickered in his eyes and I knew I had him.

“Yes, sir. He calls me nigger.”

“Okay,” I said blandly. “I know how you must feel about that. No real man would take it. And you’re a real man. I can see that. You’re a handsome and educated man and you’ve been doing dirty shows for this old pervert. You must feel dirty. I know you do. So 111 give you a chance to wash yourself — in his blood. Take that stiletto and go to work on him. Easy at first, though. Save his balls for last.” I watched P.P. from a corner of my eye. He sat unmoving. Sweat ran off his smooth skull and trickled down behind his ears.

The black man looked at the stiletto. He looked at P.P. and his mouth curved in a smile that was not pleasant. What a door into dreams I had opened for him.

Yet he was a sensible man. He hesitated. “I don’t want to die.”

I smiled at him. “We all have to die sometime. Think of what you can do to him before you die. And at least you’ll die like a man. Not like an animal, bought and paid for, screwing in public for money and for the pleasure of this horrible stinking old money bag!”

Still he hesitated. I went on: “Maybe you won’t die. I’ll take you out with me, if you want to go. I can’t promise that you will live, but I will promise that if you die I’ll die with you. I won’t leave you to face it alone.”

That was the convincer. The black man slipped off the bed and padded toward P.P., the stiletto gleaming in his hand. “All right,” he said. “All right. Let’s tie him up.”

P.P. Trevelyn raised a hand. “No. That won’t be necessary. I know when I’m beaten. I know you will do it. And you are quite right, Mr. Bennett. I was bluffing. I do want that two months of life. I will take you to Dr. Valdez.”

I halted the black man. He stopped, reluctant, and I told him to toss the stiletto on the bed. He did.

P.P. said, his voice ice-encrusted, “I do not really blame you, Thomas. But you know what to expect if you are taken alive — I do not forgive such treachery!”

The black man looked scared.

“Forget that,” I told him. “He’s just & dying old nothing talking through his head. Get dressed.”

While he dressed hurriedly I poked the Tommy gun in P.P.’s skinny neck. “Get over to that phone and call your people, your guard house or whatever, and explain the facts of life to them. One wrong move from them and you’re dead. Be sure they understand.”

His slippers scuffed on the carpet as he walked to the phone. He started to pick it up, then hesitated. “Some of my people, the rank and file, aren’t too bright. I wouldn’t like for there to be a mistake made.”

I grinned. “That’s good thinking, P.P. You just make sure there isn’t a mistake.”

He did not pick up the phone. “If I can show you something?”

I nodded. “Do that. Carefully.”

He opened a closet and showed me a long rank of handsome uniforms on hangers. “I am a Lieutenant General in the Haitian Army, you see. Also a Colonel in Duvalier’s Elite Guard. I have many ranks and titles.”

“I’ll bet.”

“The point is that if we wore uniforms, the three of us, it would look better, more natural, and there is less chance of an, er, accident. I would not want to die because of some trigger-happy fool.”

The man had a point. But a thought struck me — I didn’t have any burnt cork with me and there was no time for the makeup bit anyway.

I pointed this out. “I’m Whitey, remember? This is the Haitian Army!”

His expression was sour. “I know. It doesn’t matter too much. We hire white mercenaries from time to time, though Papa Doc hates to admit it. You can pass as one. You’ll be working fast — and the uniform is the important thing.”

He was right. It had to go fast or not at all. By the time anyone questioned the color of my skin it would be too late — for them. I weighed the deal very briefly.

It meant that I would have to ditch the machine gun. It would look a lot better. And it would carry a certain logic— because of the attack, the firefight, we were staging an inspection. I couldn’t very well carry off that illusion if I had a Tommy gun jammed in his ass. I nodded.

“Okay. Get with it. I’ll tell you what to say. Every word. You say anything else, just one extra word, and I’ll kill you.”

Trevelyn reached for the phone. He looked at me, eyes hooded behind the big dark glasss, and there was fear and resignation in his words.“You lied to me, Mr. Bennett. You are not CIA. You’re AXE!”

Chapter 13

Half an hour later, dressed as high rankers in the Haitian Army — decked in plumage finer than even Sutton Place doormen — we entered an elevator and started downward. No sweat. No interference. P.P., at my urging, had dispatched every available guard and officer to the gate, to patrol the fence and organize pursuit of the invasion forces. I had an inward chuckle about that. Some invasion force! Lyda, Hank Willard and Duppy.

I washed my face and took out the contact lenses. The uniform was a miserable fit — I had to slash a lot of seams with the stiletto — but I was the very model of a modern major general. In Papa Doc’s army. P.P. outranked me, the old bastard.

I was walking a very thin plank and knew it. Killing the girl had cowed them both, which was my intention, and I had to act before the shock wore off. And before Thomas, the black, began having second thoughts. I thought I could trust Thomas, to a point, but I did not give him a weapon. I left the Tommy gun in the suite and herded them into the elevator with the Luger.

As we descended Trevelyn took off his glasses to clean them and for the first time I saw his eyes. Small, set too close to his nose, with a sly bird-like dark twinkle, they told me nothing that I didn’t already know. P.P. was an amoral man, not immoral. A constitutional psychopath who inherited a fortune in millions and built it into billions, and became the slave of those billions. He was a sincere man. He really believed that his billions gave him the right, the burden and the duty, to call tunes for the world. A sort of reverse noblesse oblige.

I herded them through corridors and sub-basements, P.P. shuffling in the lead on arthritic legs, to a large room where there was a turntable for narrow gauge tracks emerging from a tunnel. On the table was a small electric car with three padded leather cross seats.

I indicated the car with the Luger. “Goes to the Citadel?”

“Yes.” P.P. lurched painfully into the car and sank back; with a sigh. He wasn’t faking his pain or his decrepitude. The old boy had just about had it. I wondered how it felt to leave all those billions behind.

Thomas, now a full Colonel — and looking smart and handsome in the uniform — took over the controls Thomas was having second thoughts. Not about his own plight so much as about me. Thomas was just beginning to realize to fully and actually know, that I had killed the girl in cold blood. He had to think that, since he couldn’t know my real reasons for the killing. And he knew I was AXE and he knew what that mean!. Thomas was wondering what I would do to him when I no longer needed him.

“Take her away,” I said. Thomas touched a lever and the car glided into the tunnel, running smoothly with a near silent whir of electric motor. I sat in the rear, covering them the Luger on my knee and out of sight below the side of the Cap P put on his dark glasses and peered at me. He appeared to have recovered some of his cool, but I sensed that it was superficial. The knowledge that I was AXE had put a deep gut fear into him.

He surprised me when he said, “It has come to my attention that some of the natives, from time to time, put a voodoo curse on me. Do you believe in the efficacy of such charms, Mr. Bennett?”

I thought it time to give him another shock. Things were going smoothly, greased by fear, and I wanted them to continue that way.

“My real name is Carter,” I said. “Nick Carter. Thomas made a sound in his throat and gaped at me. P.P. stared at me and his claw-like hands twitched and he shriveled a bit into the garish uniform. There was a quaver m his cancer-ruined voice when he spoke.

“The Nick Carter! Of course. I should have guessed that.”

I grinned at him. “Now you know. As to the efficacy of voodoo curses — until recently I didn’t believe in them. Now I do.”

“You do?”

“Of course. Simple. I’m here, P.P. I am the obeah!”

P.P. fell silent. He folded his hands in his lap and stared down at them. Thomas, dumb struck, stared at me with eyes that grew larger by the second.

We whined along the narrow rails. The tunnel was tall and broad and well lighted by overhead bulbs caged in wire. There was a dank smell of recently finished concrete.

I brought the Luger into view. “How long till we get to the Citadel?”

“Half an hour’s ride.” P.P. shrugged his puny shoulders. “The cars are slow. I have been meaning to get new ones, faster ones, but there has been so much that needs doing. A new power plant, for instance. Mine is no longer adequate now that this tunnel has been completed. But when a man is dying he tends to postpone matters. Now, of course, it is not really important.”

“Valdez stays in the Citadel all the time? He never comes to your place? You used the decoy to create the illusion that he commuted? And to give anyone who wanted it a good shot at him?”

Silence but for the small whine of the car. P.P. twined his yellowed fingers. Then: “Yes to all your questions. I have not seen Valdez, face to face, for weeks. He has insisted that it be that way, that he be allowed to work in peace. But you are laboring under a delusion, Mr. Carter. Valdez does not want to be rescued. He will not leave this place. I have already paid him ten million dollars, deposited in a Swiss bank, with another ten million to come when he successfully completes his work. You can see the odds against you.”

I smiled at him. “Valdez will come with me. Or—”

I did not have to finish it. P.P. nodded and shrugged. “Or you will murder him, too. Of course. I thought those might be your instructions.”

The car rounded and approached a well-lighted platform. A guard in a black uniform was pacing back and forth, a rifle on his shoulder. I lowered the Luger out of sight.

“Not a word or a move out of you two,” I said. “I’ll handle him. Thomas, you take the musette bag. Careful of it. Drop it or bump it and we all go sky high.”

Thomas nodded and worked his lever. The car glided to a stop by the platform. The guard approached us. I smiled at him and nodded to P.P.

“Help Mr. Trevelyn,” I said. “He isn’t feeling very well.”

He made no move to obey. He was big and black, wearing the same dark uniform, but there was something different about him. He was grim and uneasy, confused by our sudden appearance, yet it was more than that. Then I got it. This wasn’t P.P.’s man! Whose, then?

I did the only thing I could. I lashed at him, “Come on, man. Move! We’re in a hurry to see Dr. Valdez.”

Reluctantly he bent over the car and extended a hand to P.P. I laced him over the ear with the butt of the Luger. He fell into the car. I looked at Thomas. “Tie him with his belt and gun sling and gag him. Hurry.”

I prodded old P.P. with the Luger. “Let’s go, pops.” I gave him a hand up. Even with his paunch he didn’t weigh over a hundred.

P.P. looked down at the unconscious guard. “I don’t understand you, Mr. Carter. Why not simply kill him?”

“I decide who I kill and who I don’t.”

“But the girl? Poor Betty? Surely—”

“Poor Betty was KGB,” I told him. “A dumb American commie who did what she was told to do.” I watched his face. “She suckered you, P.P. Betty was Kremlin all the way.” Some of it had been in Hawk’s precis. The rest — guesswork to a certain extent. But Duppy’s file, Diaz Ortega’s file, read: almost invariably works with a female partner. Usually an American or European. Usually white. Never uses black or Russian females. See file Bettina Smid, born NYC, 1939… The cross reference meant they had worked together before. Duppy had signaled someone in P.P.’s mansion. It couldn’t be a coincidence. If it was, and I was wrong, I would burn a candle for her.

Trevelyn’s mouth hung open. His teeth must have cost him thousands. He gaped at me. “You mean that all this while I have been—?”

I wagged the Luger at him. “Yes. Think about it on the move. Where is Valdez?”

“Down this tunnel.”

We were under the Citadel. The tunnel was new, and some of the storerooms were new, but a lot of it was old dungeons and caves. Some were well lit, some dark. In some of the lighted rooms I saw stacks of crates and boxes and several long shiny missiles mounted on steel horses.

P.P. slogged ahead, dragging his feet. Thomas walked level with me, where I could keep an eye on him, lugging the musette bag like it contained eggs. In a way it did.

“How much farther to Valdez?”

P.P. stumbled to a wall and gasped for breath, holding on to a light bracket for support. “Not too far. Around the next bend. But I don’t think I–I can’t—”

I grinned at him. “Yes you can, P.P. Think positive. Be like the little engine.”

Before we rounded the bend we passed a brilliantly lit cave cut into the solid stone of the mountain. There was no guard on the entrance. I halted our little party and peered in, hiding the Luger behind my leg.

The cave was long and deep. Six long narrow tables stretched from end to end of the cave. On each table was a missile. Longer, thicker, fatter, than any missiles I had seen up to now. They were all painted black. Men were working around the missiles, polishing and making deft adjustments — with small shiny wrenches.

I watched P.P. He was staring with a very odd expression on his ravaged face. He began to shake. I saw him clasp his hands and squeeze them to keep his fingers still.

I jeered at him. “What’s wrong, P.P.? Something new been added — something else you didn’t know about?”

I was fishing. I didn’t know anything. Yet there was no question that the black missiles had somehow shaken the old man.

He shook his head and muttered, more to himself than to me. “There is something wrong here. Something I don’t understand at all.”

I gave him a little push. “Right. Let’s go find Valdez. Maybe he can explain.”

We trekked on down the tunnel. It took a right angle turn and ended in a large scooped-out cavern. The cavern was full of desks and filing cabinets and drawing boards. Maps and sheafs of blue prints hung from the walls. At the very end of the cavern a man sat at a desk, his face limned in the drop light. He watched us approach.

I herded Thomas a little forward so that both he and P.P. were in front of me. I whispered. “Do just as I tell you. Keep quiet. I’ll handle everything.” I screwed the Luger into P.P.’s spine a bit. “That is Dr. Romera Valdez?”

“Yes. That is Dr. Valdez.”

There were only the four of us in the cavern. A clock I showed a little’ after four. Dawn soon. From behind us, far down the corridor, came the faint tinkle of metal on metal. [For some reason my scalp began to crawl.

The man at the desk turned easily to face us. He did not rise, but crossed one long leg over the other and lounged * against the desk, one arm resting on a half-open drawer. He wore a gray lightweight suit, white shirt and blue tie in a I meticulous knot, blue socks and well-polished black shoes. His thick hair was tinged with gray and heavily pomaded. A pencil thin bristle of moustache covered a long upper lip. His nose was long and straight, jib sharp, and heavy sallow lids I hooded dark eyes as he watched us. He wore a gold wrist I watch and the fingers of his right hand bore several gold rings. He looked exactly as Lyda Bonaventure had described I him.

We came down an aisle flanked by desks and drawing! boards. A dozen feet from Valdez I said, “Okay. Stop right here.”

I peered between Thomas and P.P. at the man seated at the desk. He made no move to rise. Made no move at all. Just watched me with those hooded eyes. He had a certain type of Latin male beauty, aging a bit now, and I saw how Lyda could have loved him.

Something was wrong and I knew it and it bugged me. But I couldn’t place it. I tried the light touch, but I was careful to let Valdez see the Luger.

“Dr. Romera Valdez, I presume?”

He inclined his head very slightly. “I am Dr. Valdez. Who are you, sir?”

I told him who I was and why I was there. He listened, expressionless, his dark eyes examining the three of us. Behind that smooth aquiline facade a lot of thinking was going on.

I wagged the Luger at him. “We better get moving, Doctor. We’re running on a very tight schedule and the worst is still ahead of us. I’m hoping that you know a safe way out of the Citadel.”

His smile displayed perfect teeth. “I do, yes. But I have no intention of going with you, Mr. Carter. You, and Miss Bonaventure, and your superiors in the United States Government, you are all laboring under a delusion. I have no desire to be saved, as you put it. I am perfectly content here working for Mr. Trevelyn and Dr. Duvalier. I am well paid and well treated. I have, fortunately, come to see the error of my ways, of my former thinking. I am very afraid, Mr. Carter, that you have wasted your time.”

Before I could answer old P.P. broke in. He had been fidgeting and breathing hard, like he had something heavy on his mind, and now the words gushed from his diseased throat in a torrent.

“That woman, Valdez! That Betty you got for me… she… Carter here says she KGB… explanation… I can’t think… and those black missiles… I never knew of them.… I demand, Valdez… I demand…”

Habit was too strong for the old man. Dying, tortured by pain and perversity, captive and helpless, he still thought himself the money god and that his whim was law. He ranted to Valdez. Valdez realized that bluff was hopeless and went for broke. I got caught like a sitting duck, the truth eluding me for the split second it took Valdez to reach into the drawer and come out with the machine pistol. Just too late I flopped on my belly, remembering the musette bag and grabbing for it as Thomas took a burst in the belly and folded down on me. Dying from bullets intended for me.

I rolled over frantically, trying to get behind a desk, the Luger extended at arm’s length and spitting at Valdez. He was standing now, wide legged, bracing himself against the desk as I hit him, swaying, but hosing away with the machine pistol. The old man caught a clutch of lead in the throat, drastic surgery, and spun around and fell across the black. Bright red arterial blood spurted from his mouth.

I took a slug along my ribs that made me yelp.

I cosseted the musette bag — better a slug in me than in it — and lay on the floor and blasted with the Luger until the clip ran out. The machine pistol gave a final burp and quit.

I fumbled another clip into the Luger while I watched him die. He dropped the machine pistol with a clatter of metal on stone. He clung to the desk and swayed, fighting to keep his feet. He looked at the front of his nice gray suit, where I had put four in around his heart, and then he looked at me and he tried to speak and couldn’t make it. His knees hinged and failed and he spun across the desk and then slid to the floor.

I was soaked in blood. Mine and that of Thomas and the old man. I grabbed the musette bag and leaped for the desk. I grabbed the dead man’s head and wrenched it forward and saw the scars faint behind the ears and along the jaw line.

I heard shouts and the pound of running feet. I saw the iron door ten feet from the desk, set into the wall, now slightly open and stuccoed with concrete to make it blend into the wall. Valdez’ private entrance. My way out of the trap. I darted through it like a ferret into a rabbit hole and slammed it shut and dropped an iron bar into place. I had a few seconds.

The narrow tunnel slanted upward. I ran. In dim yellow light that flickered and faded and came back and then faded again. I was running for my life but I still caught the rhythm as the yellow bulbs faded and glowed. Code! Someone was working a transmitter with power from the same generator that supplied the lights.

I rounded a corner and saw a splotch of light on the tunnel floor ahead. It came from a cave. I ran on my toes, the Luger ready, and peered in. It was a radio room. A man was sitting at a transmitter, wearing earphones, pounding on a key. In one corner, where the cave had been vented to carry off the fumes, a small generator was roaring away.

I was behind the operator before he knew I was there. I slammed his skull with the Luger butt, and he went sleepy-by, and I eased him down and sat in his chair. Carter had just come up with a very sneaky idea.

I sent it in clear, in plaintalk, so that Papa Doc’s DF stations would be sure to read it loud and clear. There was no time for subtlety and I had to hope they would believe and not look for the gimmick. I sent it with a hard fist, pounding it out into the Haitian dawn:

Red Hammer to Black Swan — have taken Citadel — Valdez and Trevelyn dead — our missiles safe — proceed at once with invasion as planned — blacks all uprising and will rendezvous you Gonaives — strike hard and long live freedom — Bennett.

I sent it twice. With what Hawk has called my fiendish grin. It would be a good ploy if it worked, and Papa Doc and his Army and Air Force, and the Tonton Macoute, were going to be one busy bunch of bastards. Gonaives was the logical town for a rendezvous. It was southwest of the Citadel; I intended to run like hell to the northwest.

It was quiet but for the hum of the generator. I had a little time yet. I got a wad of plastique from the musette bag and shaped it and decided that the transmitter console was as likely a spot as any. I didn’t have any idea what the weather was like outside, and I had to guess and take a chance. I was using a barometric fuse.

I worked fast, not wanting to think about it, and hooked the detonator into the fuse and set it for high pressure. I gave myself as much margin as I could and it wasn’t much. Nothing happened and I was still in one piece and I eased the console shut and grabbed the musette bag and legged it to hell out of there. The plastique was new stuff, super, invented by the AXE people and roughly equivalent to ten tons of TNT. I wished to be far away when it let go. Where I really wanted to be was on the bounding main, heading Stateside, but I didn’t count too much on it.

I started down the tunnel again. Gradually the throbbing of the generator faded away. I came to an iron ladder set into the stone and leading upward through the top of the tunnel. Mist coiled down on me, and cold rain touched my face, and I breathed again. I had guessed right on the weather. That pressure fuse wouldn’t trip the detonator until the weather cleared.

There had been no pursuit, no effort to take me or cut me off, and until now I had been too busy to think much about it. Now I did and I heard the sound of gunfire funneling down the shaft and I understood a little. They were fighting up there. Who was fighting whom I didn’t know, any more than I knew why they were fighting, but it made me very happy. If they kept their little intramural war going maybe I could fade quietly away into the jungle and head Tor the coast.

I sighed. Before I could do that I had to get off the Citadel. I had to presume that my tunnel was blocked at both ends. I didn’t want to go back and I didn’t think it would be much healthier forward. That left the ladder. I started climbing.

Chapter 14

Fine rain pelted down at me as I climbed. The iron rungs were slippery. Craning up, I could see a manhole slice of gray light, a dull slab of dawn. There was a riffle of gunfire, spastic in the morning, and cracking little sonic booms slashed the air.

I stopped just below the circular opening. I listened and identified; four or five submachine guns chattering, the dullish crump-banging of grenades, a spatter of rifle fire. The ball was waxing hot. I didn’t know what it was all about, and I really didn’t want to find out, but I knew I had to. I had to run for it and now was as good a time as any.

I leaned far back on the iron ladder and craned up, an angular view,and saw a long mound of rusty cannon balls. Part of an ancient cannon muzzle with a belled flare. The main gun platform of the Citadel.

Lead whispered above me. I said to hell with it and pushed myself up and out of the hole. Ducking, crouching, I ran for the shelter of a crumbling wall to my left. It opened into a court. Someone shouted and I heard a familiar voice and lead slashed in front of me. Shards of stone nicked my face. I gave up on the court and took a headlong dive into an arched casemate. I lay with my face in stone and dust and thought about that voice. Duppy!

Gunfire kept crackling away. I wormed around and stuck my nose out the casemate’s arch. WHAM—a 32-pound cannon ball smacked the stone two inches from my face. I made like a turtle, cursing. From somewhere over me I heard Duppy laugh.

“Good morning, Carter. You stepped into it this time my friend. That casemate is blocked at the far end — no way out for you.”

I squirmed back a little. I yelled. “What happened to your accent, Duppy? Or, since we’re playing truth this morning, Diaz Ortega? My brain was running around like a mouse in a cage, trying to figure a way out.

He laughed in basso. “Yes, Carter. Looks like the masquerading is over, huh? Where are P.P. and Valdez?” I allowed myself a sneer. “Why should I tell you, Ortega?”

“Why not, man? You’ll be dead soon. Ease your conscience, maybe. That information won’t do you any good in the grave.”

He was right. “Dead. Both of them. Old P.P and the phony Valdez. The second phony Valdez — the one you planted on P.P. and Papa Doc.”

Another cannon ball creamed the stones just in front of me. A flying splinter slashed, my face. I moved back instinctively and felt a stab of pain in my side where the slug had nicked me. My tee shirt was crusty with blood under the heap-uniform coat and I was sweating. I began to twist out of the coat. I was resigning as a major general in Papa Doc’s Army.Another spate of gunfire, then silence. Ortega said “So you know about that, too. I underestimated you, Carter Careless of me. Of course I didn’t know you were Nick Carter until a few hours ago. Not that it matters now You can’t get out of your hole and as soon as my people clean up P.P.’s men, and a few of the Tonton Macoute, we’ll take care of you. All we have to do is unblock the tunnel and come into the casemate after you. You can’t run away.”

I surveyed the rain-swept gun platform with its rusty old cannon and the piles of moldering balls. Beyond, like frozen surf, the green, mist-topped hills marched away to the sea Maybe he was right, at that. I had put my head into it. He had me trapped pretty good.

I was thinking fast and getting nowhere. I believed him about the casemate being blocked behind me. If I stuck my head out, or tried to make it across the gun deck and over the parapet, I would be a sieve before I had gone six feet.

At least I could keep him talking. That way I would know where he was. I wondered how many men he had, and how he had managed to infiltrate them in with P.P.’s and Papa Doc’s men.

I cupped my hands and yelled up at him. Lyda tell you about me?” She had, of course. I took a fragmentation grenade out of the musette bag.

“She did, Carter. The lady is a little disappointed and angry with you at the moment. I’m responsible for that, I’m afraid. As you Yanks say, I sold her a bill of goods.”

“I bet you did.” I pulled the pin of the grenade and started wriggling to the mouth of the casemate.

“I convinced her that P.P.’s decoy was the real Valdez and that you and the CIA tricked her, played her for a sucker, and one of you killed him. She believed me.”

It was my turn to laugh. “You did a little sweating, didn’t you? When you thought that Lyda and your phony Valdez might have to meet face to face? That would have loused up your plans pretty good, huh, Ortega?”

I turned over on my back with my right hand extended, the grenade plump and secure in my fist.

He laughed. “I admit it. I was worried for a time. I need that invasion of hers to distract Papa Doc. But that’s all right now. Swan is on her way back to the boat, and the invasion is on again. I let her and Papa Doc knock themselves out, then I take over.”

“But without your phony Valdez as a figurehead. How do you explain that to the blacks and mulattos?”

He said a very nasty thing to me. I laughed and slid out of the embrasure on my back and tossed the grenade up in a long arcing loop. Lead spanged around me as I ducked back. Ortega screamed a curse. But the bastard had guts. He tossed the grenade back down at me. It exploded in the air six feet from my hole and the concussion rocked me and fragments sang and pocked the casemate. Nothing hit me.

His laugh was a little weak. “I admire your guts, Carter. I hate to kill you. I really do. If you give up, we might be able to work something out.”

I blinked stone dust out of my eyes. “That might be fun, 1 agreed. “What would we work out — how to run Haiti together?”

He didn’t answer. I could hear him snapping orders to someone. The firing had dwindled now and I figured that Ortega had just about made it, was in possession of the Citadel. I studied the clouds over the distant hills. They had lifted a bit. And it had stopped raining. I listened, straining my ears. Nothing. Nothing yet. I reached for another grenade.

I wanted his attention. Wanted to know where he was. I said: “You’ll have to rule without your Queen, Ortega. I killed her. Was that her real name, Bettina Smid?”

Silence. Then: “You killed Bettina?”

“You hard of hearing, Ortega. Or is it the acoustics in this place? I said I killed her. Had to break up a little pornography party with P.P. to do it. She died like a lady, Ortega, which I doubt she was.”

He had a foul mouth on him. I hadn’t known how foul. He came near to shocking me. I listened and could tell that he had moved closer to the parapet. I thought about the grenades being short fused, but I had to risk it. I let the handle spring away and I counted—1–2—3—4–5.

I reached out and lobbed it up.

It must have exploded level with the parapet up there. Ortega screamed in pain and rage. More rage than pain, for he kept yelling orders and cursing me and I hadn’t gotten him.

After that he wouldn’t talk to me, though I tried to bait him.

“Were you in love with the Smid woman, Ortega? How was she? From the little I saw she knew her way around a bed. All in the line of duty? Anything for good old KGB?”

I couldn’t draw him. No gunfire now. I heard the clink and rattle of tools at the far end of the casemate tunnel. They were opening it up. When they had it open all they had to do was stick a couple of machine guns in and hose me down. I was covered from the front.

Just to see how covered I was, I stuck a hand out and flapped it fast and grabbed it back. Lead sang into the arch from three directions. I swore and scrunched back as far as I could. No place to hide, Carter.

I heard it then. A faint mosquito buzzing. A light plane, a spotter. It came down out of the clouds and nearly scraped a mountain and came humming toward the Citadel. In an effusion of love I blessed Papa Doc and his DF stations. They were on the ball.

Over me Ortega was bellowing orders. Quiet. Stay out of sight. Don’t fire. Everything must appear normal. He promised to shoot the man that made a revealing move.

I grinned. He had already decided to kill me and I had nothing to lose. I started pulling pins and hurling grenades as fast as I could. I rolled them out on the gun deck and heard them bang and spatter just as the spotter plane swept low over me. I could see the pilot craning and speaking into his mike. I rolled out of my hole and emptied a clip at him from the Luger, being careful to miss. I dived back, cold and sweating at the same time and with mush where my spine had been. A hell of a chance but I had gotten away with it.

The spotter plane swung away and made for the clouds again. He had seen enough, I hoped. I kept hoping for the next ten minutes while nothing happened. They had stopped work on the tunnel behind me.

I yelled into the silence. “Better run for it, Ortega! Papa Doc’s air force is going to be here any minute now. I promise you. I tipped off his DF stations in plain code.”

A breeze swept the gun deck and brought his answer from afar, foul and full of hate. I couldn’t blame him. I had monkey-wrenched his plans in every way.

The fighters came in and I went to worrying about my own ass. There were four of them, old and obsolete jets, but plenty good enough for this job. They came down one at a time, snarling out of the clouds and making their pass the length of the Citadel, machine guns spitting and cannons pounding and, just as the first jet finished its run and climbed again, it dropped a pair of light bombs. Papa Doc might be a little confused, might not know exactly what was going on, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

For once I said a real little prayer — that Lyda Bonaventure would have second thoughts, think it out, break a leg — anything to keep her from getting back to Sea Witch and starting a half-cocked invasion. Papa Doc would murder her.

A bomb hit a stack of cannon balls and the air was dark and filled with solid whistling death. I cringed in my hole and somehow survived it. A foundry started up in my skull. I lay and shivered and shook and cursed and the blood started running down my side again. The planes came back for another run.

Cannon and .50s pocked and chewed and ravaged the Citadel. A bomb lifted one of the old cannon and swept it toward me like a toothpick in a hurricane. I watched a couple of tons of ancient iron float toward me and I froze and told myself that at least it would be quick. The berserk cannon missed me and sheared off the top half of the arch and kept going through twelve feet of stone and mortar.

The last jet fighter made his pass and climbed away and left the quaking ruins. Namely me. I had a feeling that I was Adam, the only man alive in this devastated “paradise. I tottered to my feet and had sense enough to jam another clip into the Luger and take my last grenade from the musette bag. I was in shock and rubbery legged, and my head wanted to float away. At first, when I heard the blatting of the helicopter, I didn’t believe it. I stared at it, unable to react, as it came fluttering in and, crazy — crazy — settled down on what was left of the gun platform. I think I made a little bow and said something stupid. Like: “Welcome to my mountain top. Pull up a bomb crater and rest a spell. Don’t mind me, I am always this green, and do you happen to have a strait jacket on you?”

The rotors flapped. A man — not a thing from Mars, but a real man — leaned out and screamed at me.

“Bennett! Bennett! Get in, man. Come on — come on— come on!”

“Hank Willard! Scrawny, dirty, ginger-bearded and broken-toothed Hank. I nearly wept as I ran. I got in. He pushed something and the egg-beater lifted and tilted. The rats came out of the stone work again. You never really kill all of them in a bombing attack.

Slugs began to zip through the plexiglass. Hank ducked and said, “Now what the screwing hell? I thought the shooting was over.”

I came back from that limbo where I had been floating. I grabbed his arm and pointed down. “There. Over there! Make a pass at him. Just one pass.”

Diaz Ortega was standing on a hillock of shattered stone and firing at us with a rifle. His head was bandaged and his huge black chest was red with blood and his teeth flashed as he screamed.

Hank Willard shook his head. “No! Crazy — it only takes one slug to knock us down. I won’t—”

I put my fingers on his skinny arm and squeezed. I shoved the Luger in his face. “Make a pass at him!”

He nodded and flipped the wheel and we went slanting down toward Ortega in a long glide. I leveled the Luger, steadying it on my left forearm, and started squeezing off the clip. The black man, in a wide-legged stance, stood his ground and gave me shot for shot as we swooped at him. The cockpit was full of metallic bees. I squeezed off my last shot. Ortega dropped his rifle, clutched at his chest, fell, got up and began to run. I flung my last grenade. As we tilted and climbed I saw a red blossom grow out of the small of his

“Jesus Christ — Jesus Christ—” Sweat was streaming into Hank’s beard. I patted his arm and smiled at him. I loved him like a brother. I pointed toward the coast. “Take her away.”

Hank took her away. He eased the ‘copter over a mountain and into a valley and started tree hopping. A couple of times I didn’t think we were going to make it.

The last one scared the hell out of me and I yelled, “Pull her up, for God’s sake. I don’t want to get killed now. I just crawled out of a grave.”

Hank shook his head and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Can’t. They’ll cream us. Those bastards are knocking down everything in sight and asking no questions.”

Two of Papa Doc’s fighters were dogging us.

“Long as we stay on the deck we’re all right,” Hank said. “Those fighters can’t pull out of a dive fast enough.”

We brushed a hilltop, and I closed my eyes. I distinctly saw a bird’s nest with three brown eggs in it.

I must have groaned aloud, because Hank gave me a hurt look. “Don’t be so screwing critical, Bennett, or whatever your screwing name is. I only had two lessons on these damned things.”

I stifled my reply. Better not to upset him.

The jets turned back. They were low on fuel and running for base. I breathed a little easier and started looking for the — old U.S. Fruit dock and buildings and praying that Lyda was there and we could make a run for it before Papa Doc got his coastal patrol into action. I wasn’t kidding myself that the helicopter would go unnoticed. Papa Doc was alerted now— and how he was alerted — and the fun had just begun.

We hit the coast. I saw Tortuga lying on the horizon off shore and knew we were too far west. I gave Hank the bearing and we started east, buzzing low over the beaches and coves. Now and then a black face stared as we swished by. No one shot at us.

Aware of a great craving, I bummed a cigarette off Hani and tried to relax. With luck, a lot of luck, we might make it yet.

“Where did you get the chopper?” I asked.

“Stole it. There was a pad in P.P.’s backyard and there she was, just sitting and asking to be used. That was after I came back.”

I craned out the window. That damned dock couldn’t be far now. “Came back?”

Hank gave it to me briefly. He had passed on my instructions and Duppy, though in rage, had still agreed to the covering fire. When things got too hot they had all three cut out and started back for the coast. Then Duppy left them.

“Just vanished,” Hank said. “One minute he was there, the next he wasn’t.”

I smiled. Yes. Duppy — Ortega — had known I was about to tear down his playhouse and he had to try and stop me. He had guessed that I would get to the Citadel and had gone there to wait for me. I had forced his hand, all right.

“That left you and the girl,” I said. “What then?”

Hank gave me a sidelong glance and pulled at his beard. “We talked. She was gonna go back to your boat and get her people and start the invasion. I talked her out of it. I think.”

“You think?” He had me worried.

“I said I would go back and hang around and look for you. I said we should hear your side before she did anything fatal.”

“That was pretty good thinking, Hank.”

“She was already having second thoughts. I knew you didn’t trust that Duppy, so I didn’t, and when she had a chance to think it over I don’t think she did either. She was convinced at first, though, that you had set up this Valdez guy for murder. The guy they killed on the road. She was pretty mad and Duppy handled her pretty good. But later—”

The sun had been shining for some time. It was a bright, beautiful, clear-cool day. I remembered and glanced to my right, to where the Citadel was a massive purple blur on its mountain top.

Suddenly the blur dissolved into streamers of red and yellow. Jagged rockets of stone soared upward in curving trajectory, hung in midair, plummeted downward. Black matchsticks that could only be cannon went into brief parabola and vanished into the gaping hole in the side of the mountain. A pillar of smoke began to build and sway in the wind. Sound and blast reached us and shook the helicopter like a giant terrier killing a rat. We sank and rose and brushed the tops of a stand of tall trees.

Hank Willard fought the controls and stared in awe. “What for Christ’s sake was that?”

I took a long look. The Citadel still stood, but it would never be the same. “Little thing called a barometric fuse,” I told him. “Don’t let it worry you, pal. Let Papa Doc try to figure it out.”

He shook his head and the ginger beard fluttered like a tattered ensign. “So much screwing stuff that I don’t understand,” he muttered. “Maybe if we get out of this you’ll explain, huh?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Not now, though. No time. Look down there. We’ve got another problem.”

We flapped along toward the old dock and the rotting outbuildings. There was no sign of Sea Witch and I hoped that meant she was still under the dock. It was a good bet, for a moment later Lyda Bonaventure came running out of one of the buildings, looking up and waving a scarf. She seemed glad to see us. I was glad to see her, but at the moment I was wondering what in hell a Russian submarine was doing in this part of the world. Just off Papa Doc’s shore, her black hull glistening in’ the sun as she surfaced, water streaming from her jutting sharp sail on which was emblazoned, in red, the hammer and sickle.

“Now what the screwing hell?” exclaimed Hank. “This is turning into a screwing nightmare!”

I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

Chapter 15

And yet it made sense. The submarine was a catalyst that melded a lot of the plot. Later I saw that. At the moment we were in new trouble.

The engine quit as Hank was hovering and bringing her down. We did the last fifty feet in an express elevator. The ‘copter was a total wreck, and Hank and I rolled out of her, cursing a blue streak and nursing a whole new assortment of cuts and bruises. None of which I felt. I was running and shouting orders and wondering how much time we had and how long we could bluff.

Because I hadn’t meant to force Duppy’s hand this much! He had gone whole hog and called in his comrades.

I grabbed Lyda’s hand and pulled her along with me. Hank came limping after, cursing and complaining. We pounded out on the dock just as a hatch on the sub opened and an officer stuck his head up.

I waved and yelled. Let him think it was a reception committee. The natives were being liberated and were mad with the joy of it. He waved back and I saw him fumbling with a binocular case.

I yelled at Lyda. “The trapdoor — where is the damned thing?” I couldn’t make it out.

She found it and raised it and I pushed her down in front of me. “Get the lines off her, Lyda. Hank, go up front and get one of those recoilless rifles. Get as many rounds as you can carry. Hurry! I’ll take the engines and the con.”

Hank glared at me. “You mean we’re gonna — you gone out of your screwing mind?”

I lashed a kick at him. “We are. Get moving! We can get in the first couple of shots because they don’t know the score. Hubba it, sonny! We get hung up here and Papa Doc has got a rope waiting for you, remember?”

He took off. Lyda was throwing away the mooring lines. I made a long jump for the cockpit and started the engines and slammed her in reverse. As we came foaming out from under the dock I cast a glance at the sub. Four men on her deck now and they were all watching us with glasses. My throat got a little drier. She had a deck gun and machine guns. A couple of sailors came out of the hatch carrying submachine guns slung across their chests.

Hank came pounding back carrying the recoilless and some ammo.

“In the deckhouse,” I yelled. “Fire out the port when I swing around. Try to hull her! Under the water line, keep her from submerging.”

Hank as pale. He threw a frightened glance at the sub. “Hell, man! They’re on to us.”

An officer was pointing and yelling and men were racing for the deck guns. I put the juice to Sea Witch, full throttle, and she roared and lifted her bow. Lyda lost her footing and nearly went overboard. I beckoned her down into the cockpit with me. She had not, as yet, spoken a single word. Now she smiled and reached for my hand and squeezed it, still not speaking. That was all right, then. We were friends again.

I put Sea Witch in a long curve to cross the T of the sub’s bow. Standard naval tactics. Admiral Carter! I shouted at Hank. “Start firing, goddamn it. Use armor piercing!”

The Ivans were slow on the machine guns, but the deck gun barked at us. Flame spouted. The fly bridge went to hell. Lyda squealed With excitement and ran for the deckhouse.

Hank let go with the recoilless rifle and the .57 mm ruined a machine gun and spattered two men over the sub’s deck.

“Lower!” I screamed. “Lower, damn it! Hull her.”

I saw the patrol boat rushing up from the east, a bone in her teeth, the black and red of Haiti flaunted on her forepeak. My heart sank. Then I had a thought and yelled at Lyda. She was firing a machine gun at the sub.

“Lyda — get that Haitian flag and break it out! Hurry it up.”

A shell from the sub’s deck gun damned near took off my head. It burst far to port, but the air concussion twisted my head and deafened me for a minute. Hank got a round into the sub below the water line. There was a spurt of flame and smoke and the sub heeled a little.

“On target,” I screamed. “That’s it — give her more of those.”

I crossed the T and took Sea Witch on out to sea. Hank got in two more below her water line. Lyda came running back and ran up the black and red ensign. J prayed and waved at the patrol boat, now surging past us toward the sub, and I told Hank and the girl to wave and grin and clap hands and dance with joy.

We put on a pretty good act. Loyal Haitians welcoming succor. The patrol boat bought it and kept going, closing fast on the sub and opening fire with her bow chaser and machine guns. One of Papa Doc’s fighters came out of the clouds and nosed down in a long whining dive at the sub. It was beautiful. His cannon and machine guns swept the deck of the sub, and that was that. Her hatch was down, but she made no effort to submerge, and I figured that Hank had loused up her innards with the .57 mms. What was left of her crew and Papa Doc would soon be having a little talk. I knew what was on that sub and I felt a little sympathy for the Russians. Not too much. When you fish in forbidden waters you have to expect to get bitten.

I had full throttle on Sea Witch, trying to get her up to thirty knots, because I had a nasty premonition that we weren’t out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.

Hank and Lyda came back to the cockpit. Hank was carrying a bottle of whisky. I knew he was a drunk, but I didn’t say anything. The guy had earned his booze.

Lyda poured the stuff into three glasses and we all had a drink. I pointed astern and said: “I was going to propose a toast, but I think it would be a little premature. Look and see if you see what I see?”

The patrol boat was still hull down on the horizon, but without question she was dogging us. Someone in command was curious.

Hank Willard took a hefty drink, then another. He grinned at Lyda and me. “What the screwing hell! We did our best. If they catch us and hang us at least I won’t feel the rope.” He lifted the bottle. “So here is to us and screw Papa Doc. The Russians, too.”

Lyda put her hand on my arm and smiled. “I–I’m sorry, Nick. I didn’t trust you. I believed Duppy’s lies and I nearly did a crazy thing back there.” She kissed my cheek. “I am sorry. I want you to know that — if we don’t make it after all. I was wrong. You were right in everything.”

I laughed at the two of them. Hank was fondling the bottle like a baby and Lyda regarded me, speculatively, with long brown eyes in which the yellow specks swirled.

“You guys are a little premature, too,” I said. “We’re not taken yet! Ever heard of the three-mile limit?”

Hank, using the bottle as a spy glass, sighted back. “I don’t think, Admiral, that they ever heard of it.”

The patrol boat was gaining on us. There was nothing we could do. I had Sea Witch on full throttle and I had her on a NW by N bearing and that was it. The rest was up to fate or whatever you want to call it. One thing — it was going to be a long stern chase for that patrol boat. Sea Witch was very nearly matching speeds with her, and the patrol boat was barely inching up on us. But it was early, and I knew I couldn’t count on darkness bailing us out. To break the tension I decided to get them talking.

I told them what had happened after I left them. From time to time I glanced astern. The patrol boat was still creeping up. She was going to ignore the coastal limit. I had been afraid of that. Papa Doc’s boys would not worry about a little piracy, Lyda clasped her slim tan fingers and frowned. “What a fool I was! I trusted Duppy — the man you say was Diaz Ortega. All the time he was KGB.”

“He was good,” I consoled. “I lucked into the identification because I do my homework with the files. And he fooled P.P. and Papa Doc, too, remember. They never saw him, or even knew he existed, but he fooled them just the same. He planted a phony Dr. Romera Valdez on them. The man was a mulatto, probably a Cuban, and he must have been a ringer for Valdez to begin with. They made it a little more convincing by using plastic surgery. I saw the scars after I killed him.”

Hank took a drink and said, “This is all too screwing complicated for me. I’m just a simple fly boy who wants to get back to Hong Kong before Mai Ling gives away my grog shop.” His reddened eyes skittered at me. “I ever tell you I had a little business? I ever tell you, huh?”

I knew that Hank was not going to be any sweat, he was a drunk and an innocent,»but he didn’t have to know what I had to tell Lyda. I put the boat on gyro and told him to sit there and watch the patrol boat. Call me when she got within range.

He grinned and pointed to the recoilless rifle and a little pile of .57 mm shells. “I’ll knock the crap out of them.”

I took Lyda into the deckhouse. She watched me as I made drinks and lit cigarettes. Finally she said: “Romera is dead, isn’t he? He has been dead for a long time.”

“Yes. More than five years, if I’m putting it together right. You want to hear it all?”

She leaned toward me, her fragile nostrils pinching out smoke. “I do. I must. I–I think I fell out of love with him a long time ago, but I want to know.”

“Here it is. It goes back to the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians didn’t pull out all the missiles.” Hawk’s précis had told me that.

“Some were hidden in caves. Near Managua, not more than fourteen miles from Havana. We knew it — from the over-flights by spy planes — but we didn’t push it. Let sleeping dogs lie, you know. But we watched.

“Someone, I would say Duppy, got an idea how to use those missiles. In Haiti. Start a phony revolution, then take over. By that time the missiles would have been moved into Haiti and he would be holding an ace. But he needed a front, a good one, a figurehead. The man had to be a Haitian. Someone who was well known and trusted.”

The girl nodded. “Of course. Romera Valdez.”

“Sure. Duppy had his men in Haiti and he knew that Papa Doc was really going to kidnap Valdez. Maybe Papa Doc wanted missiles — the real Valdez was a physicist — or maybe he just wanted to get rid of Valdez. Anyway he planned to snatch him, and Duppy found out about it. So Duppy snatched Valdez first, killed him, and set up a phony in his place. Papa Doc kidnapped Duppy’s man! Thinking he had the real Valdez.”

Her eyes teared, and she gulped at her drink. “Then the man I saw that day, the one who ran from me into the subway, wasn’t really Romera at all. It was—”

“Yes, kid. It was the phony. You must have scared hell out of him. They must have known about you — they wouldn’t overlook that — but they thought the phony Valdez could play it cold and drop you. It didn’t work out that way. You were lovesick and you called and you threatened and you made a hell of a nuisance out of yourself. And you were damned lucky!”

She got it. She rubbed her mouth and her fingers trembled. “You mean that night, when he promised to come see me, he was going to—”

“He was going to kill you. You were causing too much trouble. Remember what he said that night?”

She licked her lips with a small scarlet tongue. “I remember. He said, ‘Be sure you’re alone.’ ”

“Yes. I said you were lucky. He was on his way to kill you that night. But Papa Doc’s goons grabbed him on the way, thinking he was the real Valdez.”

Lyda covered her eyes with her hands. “And Romera? The man I knew and was in love with?”

I did it as gently as I could. “He was dead by then, Lyda. Dead and buried where he would never be found. I wasn’t going to give her any details, even had I known them. But I could guess — a concrete jacket in the river, a grave in the pine barrens on Long Island, a fire in the Jersey flats, a man in a junk car being squeezed into a four by four hunk of metal and shipped abroad. Better let it lie.

She wiped her eyes and went to the bar to freshen her drink. “They waited a long time, Duppy and his people.”

I nodded. “Yes. They’re very patient. And they had to wait for the Cuban thing to cool down. There was a lot of planning involved. They had to be sure the trick would work, that Papa Doc and P.P. Trevelyn would accept the phony Valdez as the real thing.”

I grinned at her. “They must have had some bad times. The phony Valdez wasn’t a physicist — probably an actor— and they had to cram him and nurse him along. No wonder Papa Doc’s missiles didn’t work. But the real missiles, the black ones I saw in that cave, they would have worked. They were just starting to bring them in, by submarine and freighter, at night, and they would be bringing in skilled people, too.

“All Duppy needed then was his revolution. He wanted you to do that for him, and while you and Papa Doc were at each other’s throats he would move in and take over. Those people never give up — they couldn’t do it in Cuba, so why not Haiti!”

All of a sudden she smiled. “Maybe it isn’t so bad, Nick. I still have Sea Witch and the guns and the money.”

I frowned at her. “And Papa Doc is still running Haiti. As far as you are concerned he is going to keep on running it. Remember what I told you — no monkey business. One wrong move, sweetheart, and you end up in the slammer.”

Lyda Bonaventure laughed and smiled and crossed her long legs and I could see the fireworks sparking in her brain. She would lie low for a time, that I knew, but sooner or later she would make another try at it. I sighed. Let someone else worry about that. Maybe Hawk could find me a nice assignment in Lower Slobbovia.

The first shell came in, arching over Sea Witch and bursting far in front of us. We ran out on deck.

The patrol boat was gaining steadily. She fired again and this time the burst was closer.

Hank Willard was staggering around the deck trying to get the recoilless rifle loaded. He waved a round of .57mm and shouted defiance at the patrol boat.

“Come on, you bastards. Come on and fight!” He lurched and was almost overboard and I grabbed him. He dropped the shell into the water. I hauled him back.

“Don’t give up the ship,” he carolled. “We ain’t started to fight yet. Full steam ahead and screw the screwing torpedoes.”

I took the ammo and rifle away from him and led him back to the cockpit. “Calm down, Commander. Let’s not agitate them too much. They’ve got the range and the weight on us — they can sit out there and rip us to pieces.”

I had done everything I could, and I had lost. But maybe it wasn’t so bad. When Papa Doc heard my story he might even let us go. Give us a medal or something. Dream on, Carter.

I looked at the Haitian flag and then at Lyda. “Better get ready to strike that thing. We’ve shot our wad.”

“Nick — look!”

A lovely sight. Excalibur was racing over the horizon. I blessed the Coast Guard. She was on station as promised. Maybe she was exceeding her orders a bit, but we were on the high seas and I didn’t think the patrol boat was going to make a big thing of it.

I was so right. The patrol boat was already veering off, her wake making a foamy circle as she turned back. Hank clung to the cockpit and thumbed his nose.

Excalibur cut in behind us and her lamp blinked rapidly. You will proceed to States under our escort.

I sure would!

I signaled understanding and compliance. I ducked into the cockpit and set a new course and snapped her back on gyro. Hank lolled in the chair, bottle in hand, regarding me sleepily and singing to himself.

“You gonna get my ass straightened out with the State Department when we get home?”

I grinned and nodded and patted his shoulder. Of a sudden I felt very, very good.

“I will do my best,” I assured him. “You are not exactly the salt of the earth, Hank, but you are still okay. I will do all in my power to get your ass straight with State. You just try to keep it that way in future.”

He waved at me and took a drink. I went through the deckhouse to the stateroom. The door was locked. I knocked.

“Who is it?”

What the hell? “Nick,” I said. “You’re expecting maybe Papa Doc?”

She giggled through the door. “I just wanted to be sure it was you. I like Hank all right, but not like that.”

“Like what?”

She opened the door. She had draped all the portlights and she wore a robe and under the robe were the white stockings and the white garter belt.

“Close the door,” she said softly. “Lock it. We don’t want him barging in.”

We sure didn’t.

Just before we got really involved I heard Hank break into song again. “Ohhhhhh, on the road to Mandalay where my little Mai Ling stay…”

I hoped he didn’t fall overboard. I was in no mood to stop what I was doing.

The End

Content

Nick Carter
The Black Death

PORTRAIT OF A SPY

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15