Eye of the Tiger Part 8

It was a long ride out to the shack, every b.u.mp in the track hit me in the chest. One thing I had learned from I the evening's joliffications was that my original thoughts were correct - whatever that bundle off Big Gull Island contained, it could get a peace-loving gentleman like myself into plenty of trouble.

I was not so trusting as to believe that Inspector Daly had made his last attempt at interrogating me. just as soon as he recovered from the kick in his multiplication machinery which I had given him, he was going to make another attempt to connect me up to the lighting system. I wondered if Daly was acting on his own, or if he had partners and I guessed he was alone, taking opportunity as it presented itself.

I parked the pick-up in the yard and went through on to the veranda of my shack. Missus Chubby had been out to sweep and tidy while I was away. There were fresh flowers in a jam-jar on the dining-room table - but more important there were eggs and bacon, bread and b.u.t.ter in the icebox.

I stripped off my blood-stained s.h.i.+rt and dressing. There were thick raised welts around my chest that the cane had left, and the wounds were a mess.

I showered and strapped on a fresh dressing, then, standing naked over the stove, I scrambled a pan full of eggs with bacon and while it cooked, I poured a very dark whisky and took it like medicine.

I was too tired to climb between the sheets, and as I fell across the bed I wondered if I would be fit enough to work the night run on schedule. It was my last thought before sun-up.

And after I had showered again and swallowed two Doloxene painkillers with a gla.s.s of cold pineapple juice and eaten another panful of eggs for breakfast I thought the answer was yes. I was stiff and sore, but I could work. At noon I drove into town, stopped off at Missus Eddy's store for supplies and then went on down to Admiralty.

Chubby and Angelo were on board already, and Dancer lay against the wharf.

"I filled the auxiliary tariks, Harry," Chubby told me. "She's good for a thousand miles."

"Did you break out the cargo nets?" I asked, and he nodded.

"They are stowed in the main sail locker." We would use the nets to deck load the bulky ivory cargo.

"Don't forget to bring a coat - it will be cold out on the stream with this wind blowing-"

"Don't worry, Harry. You the one should watch it. Man, you look bad as you were ten days ago. You look real sick."

"I feel beautiful, Chubby."

"Yeah," he grunted, "like my mother-in-law," then he changed the subject. "What happened to your carbine, man?"

"The police are holding it."

"You mean we going out there without a piece on board?"

"We never needed it yet."

"There is always a first time," he grunted. "I'm going to feel mighty naked without it."

Chubby's obsession with armaments always amused me. Despite all the evidence that I presented to the contrary, Chubby could never quite shake, off the belief that the velocity and range of a bullet depended upon how hard one pulled the trigger - and Chubby intended that his bullets go very fast and very far indeed.

The savage strength with which he sent them on their way would have buckled a less robust weapon than the FN. He also suffered from a complete inability to keep his eyes open at the moment of firing.

I have seen him miss a fifteen-foot tiger shark at a range of ten feet with a full magazine of twenty rounds. Chubby Andrews was never going to make it to Bisley, but he just naturally loved firearms and things that went bang.

"It will be a milk run, a ruddy pleasure cruise, Chubby, you'll see," and he crossed his fingers to avert the hex, and shuffled off to work on Dancer's already brilliant bra.s.swork, while I went ash.o.r.e.

The front office of Fred c.o.ker's travel agency was deserted and I rang the bell on the desk. He stuck his head through from the back room.

"Welcome, Mister Harry." He had removed his coat and tie and had rolled up his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, about his waist he wore a red rubber ap.r.o.n. "Lock the front door, please, and come through."

The back room was in contrast to the front office with its gaudy wallpaper and bright travel posters. It was a long, gloomy barn. Along one wall were piled cheap pine coffins. The hea.r.s.e was parked inside the double doors at the far end. Behind a grimy canvas screen in one corner was a marble slab table with guttering around the edges and a spout to direct fluid from the guttering into a bucket on the floor.

"Come in, sit down. There is a chair. Excuse me if I carry on working while we talk. I have to have this ready for four o'clock this afternoon."

I took one look at the frail naked corpse on the slab. It was a little girl of about six years of age with long dark hair. One look was enough and I moved the chair behind the screen so I could see only Fred c.o.ker's bald head, and I lit a cheroot. There was a heavy smell of embalming fluid in the room, and it caught in my throat.

"You get used to it, Mister Harry." Fred c.o.ker had noticed my distaste.

"Did you set it up?" I didn't want to discuss his gruesome trade.

"It's fixed," he a.s.sured me.

"Did you square our friend at the fort?"

"It's all fixed."

"when did you see him!" I persisted, I wanted to know about Daly.

I was very interested in how Daly felt.

"I saw him this morning, Mister Harry."

"How was he?"

"He seemed all right." c.o.ker paused in his grisly task and looked at me questioningly.

"Was he standing up, walking around, dancing a jig, singing, tying the dog loose?"

"No. He was sitting down, and he was not in a very good mood "It figures." I laughed and my own injuries felt better. "But he took the pay off?"

"Yes, he took it."

"Good, then we have still got a deal." "Like I told you, it's all fixed."

"Lay it on me, Mr. c.o.ker."

"The pick up is at the mouth of the Salsa stream where it enters the south channel of the main Duza estuary." I nodded, that was acceptable. There was a good channel and the holding ground off the Salsa was satisfactory.

"The recognition signal will be two lanterns - one over the other, placed on the bank nearest the mouth. You will flash twice, repeated at thirty-second intervals and when the lower lantern is extinguished you can anchor. Got that?"

"Good." It was all satisfactory.

"They will provide labour to load from the lighters." I nodded, then asked. "They know that slack water is three o'clock - and I must be out of the channel before that?" "Yes, Mister Harry. I told them they must finish loading before two hundred hours."

"All right then - what about the drop off?"

"Your drop off will be twenty-five miles due east of Rastafa Point."

"Fine." I could check my bearings off the lighthouse at Rastafa.

It was good and simple.

"You will drop off to a dhow-rigged schooner, a big one. Your recognition signal will be the same. Two lanterns on the mast, you will flash twice at thirty seconds, and the lower lamp will extinguish. You can then off load. They will provide labour and will put down an oil slick for you to ride in. I think that is all."

"Except for the money."

"Except for the money, of course." He produced an envelope from the front pocket of his ap.r.o.n. I took it gingerly between thumb and forefinger and glanced at his calculations scribbled in ballpoint on the envelope.

"Half up front, as usual, the rest on delivery," he pointed out.

That was thirty-five hundred, less twenty-one hundred for c.o.ker's commission and Daly's pay-off. It left fourteen hundred, out of which I had to find the bonus for Chubby and Angelo - a thousand dollars - not much over.

I grimaced. "I'll be waiting outside your office at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, Mr. c.o.ker."

"I'll have a cup of coffee ready for you, Mister Harry." "That had better not be all," I told him, and he laughed and stooped once more over the marble slab.

We cleared Grand Harbour in the late afternoon, and I made a fake run down the channel towards Mutton Point for the benefit of a possible watcher with binoculars on Coolie Peak. As darkness fell, I -came around on to my true heading, and we went in through the insh.o.r.e channel and the islands towards the wide tidal mouth of the Duza River.

There was no moon but the stars were big and the break of surf flared with phosph.o.r.escence, ghostly green in the afterglow of the setting sun.

I ran Dancer in fast, picking up my marks successively the loom of an atoll in the starlight, the break of a reef, the very run and chop of the water guided me through the channels and warned of shoals and shallows.

Angelo and Chubby huddled beside me at the bridge rail.

Occasionally one of them would go below to brew more of the powerful black coffee, and we sipped at the steaming mugs, staring out into the night watching for a flash of paleness that was not breaking water but the hull of a patrol boat.

Once Chubby broke the silence. "Hear from Wally you had some trouble up at the fort last night."

"Some, I agreed.

"Wally had to take him up to the hospital afterwards."

"Wally still got his job?" I asked.

"Only just. The man wanted to lock him up but Wally was too big."

Angelo joined in. "Judith was up at the airport at lunch time.

Went up to fetch a crate of school books, and she saw him going out on the plane to the mainland."

"Who?" I asked.

"Inspector Daly, he went across on the noon plane."

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

"Didn't think it was important Harry. "No, I agreed. "Perhaps it isn't."

There were a dozen reasons why Daly might go out to the mainland, none of them remotely connected with my business. Yet it made me feel uneasy - I didn't like that kind of animal prowling around in the undergrowth when I was taking a risk.

"Wish you'd brought that piece of yours, Harry," Chubby repeated mournfully, and I said nothing but wished the same.

The flow of the tide had smoothed the usual turmoil at the entrance to the southern channel of the Duza and I groped blindly for it in the dark. The mud banks on each side were latticed with standing fish traps laid by the tribal fishermen, and they helped to define the channel at last.

When I was sure we were in the correct entrance, I killed both engines and we drifted silently on the incoming tide. All of us listened with complete concentration for the engine beat of a patrol boat, but there was only the cry of a night heron and the splash of mullet leaping in the shallows.

Ghost silent, we were swept up the channel; on each side the dark ma.s.ses of mangrove trees hedged us in and the smell of the mud swamps was rank and fetid on the moisture-laden air.

The starlight danced in spots of light on the dark agitated surface of the channel, and once a long narrow dugout canoe slid past us like a crocodile, the phosph.o.r.escence gleaming on the paddles of the two fishermen returning from the mouth. They paused to watch us for a moment and then drove on without calling a greeting, disappearing swiftly into the gloom.

"That was bad," said Angelo.

"We will be drinking a lager in the Lord Nelson before they could tell anyone who matters." I knew that most of the fishermen on this coast kept their own secrets, close with words like most of their kind. I was not perturbed by the sighting.

Looking ahead I saw the first bend coming up, and the current began to push Dancer out towards the far bank. I hit the starter b.u.t.tons, the engines murmured into life, and I edged back into the deep water.

We worked our way up the snaking channel, coming out at last into the broad placid reach where the mangrove ended and firm ground rose gently on each side.

A mile ahead I saw the tributary mouth of the Salsa as a dark break in the bank, screened by tall stands of fluffy headed reeds. Beyond it the twin signal lanterns glowed yellow and soft, one upon the other.

"What did I tell you, Chubby, a milk run."

"We aren't home yet." Chubby the eternal optimist. "Okay, Angelo.

Get up on the bows. I'll tell you when to drop the hook."

We crept on down the channel and I found the words of the nursery rhyme running through my mind as I locked the wheel and took the hand spotlight from the locker below the rail.

"Three, Four, knock at the door, Five, Six, pick up sticks." I thought briefly of the hundreds of great grey beasts that had died for the sake of their teeth - and I felt a draught of guilt blow coldly along my spine at my complicity in the slaughter. But I turned my mind away from it by lifting the spotlight and aiming the agreed signal upstream at the burning lanterns.

Three times I flashed the recognition code but I was level with the signal lanterns before the bottom one was abruptly extinguished.

"Okay, Angelo. Let her go," I called softly as I killed the engines. The anchor splashed over and the chain ran noisily in the silence. Dancer snubbed up, and swung around at the restraint of the anchor, facing back down the channel.

Chubby went to break out the cargo nets for loading, but I paused by the rail, peering across at the signal lantern. The silence was complete, except for the clink and croak of the swamp frogs in the reed banks of the Salsa.

In that silence I felt more than heard the beat like that of a giant's heart. It came in through the soles of my feet rather than my ears.

There is no mistaking the beat of an Allison marine diesel. I knew that the old Second World War Rolls-Royce marines had been stripped out of the Zinballa crash boats and replaced by Allisons, and right now the sound I was feeling was the idling note of an Allison marine.

"Angelo," I tried to keep my voice low, but at the same time transmit my urgency. "Slip the anchor. For Christ's sake! Quick as you can."

For just such an emergency I had a shackle pin in the chain, and I thanked the Lord for that as I dived for the controls.

As I started engines, I heard the thump of the fourpound hammer as Angelo drove out the pin. Three times he struck, and then I heard the end of the chain splash overboard.

"She's gone, Harry," Angelo called, and I threw Dancer in to drive and pushed open the throttles. She bellowed angrily and the wash of her propellers spewed whitely from below her counter as she sprang forward.

Although we were facing downstream, Dancer had a fiveknot current running into her teeth and she did not jump away handily enough.