Kelly waited a few minutes, letting his eyes gather a fuller picture in the darkness, selecting his route of approach. He’d come in fine on the bow so that the body of the ship would screen him from view. He could hear more than one voice now. A sudden rolling laugh from a joke, perhaps. He paused again, searching the ship’s outline for a bump, something that didn’t belong, a sentry. Nothing.
They’d been clever selecting this place. It was as unlikely a spot as one might imagine, ignored even by local fishermen, but you had to have a lookout because no place was ever quite that secure ... there was the boat. Okay. Kelly crept up at half a knot now, sticking close to the side of the old ship until he got to their boat. He tied his painter off to the nearest cleat. A rope ladder led up to the derelict’s weather deck. Kelly took a deep breath and started climbing.
The work was every bit as menial and boring as Burt had told them it would be, Phil thought. Mixing the milk sugar in was the easy part, sifting it into large stainless-steel bowls like flour for a cake, making sure it was all evenly distributed. He remembered helping his mother with baking when he’d been a small child, watching her and learning things that a kid forgot as soon as he discovered baseball. They came back now, the rattling sound of the sifter, the way the powders came together. It was actually rather a pleasant excursion back to a time when he hadn’t even had to wake up and go to school. But that was the easy part. Then came the tedious job of doling out precisely measured portions into the little plastic envelopes which had to be stapled shut, and piled, and counted, and bagged. He shared an exasperated look with Mike, who felt the same way he did. Burt probably felt the same way, but didn’t let it show, and he had been nice enough to bring entertainment along. They had a radio playing, and for breaks they had this Xantha girl, half-blasted on pills, but ... compliant, they’d all found out at their midnight break. They’d gotten her nice and tired, anyway. She was sleeping in the corner. There would be another break at four, allowing each of them enough time to recover. It was hard staying awake, and Phil was worried about all this powder, some of it dust in the air. Was he breathing it in? Might he get high on the stuff? If he had to do this again, he promised himself some sort of mask. He might like the idea of making money off selling the shit, but he had no desire at all to use it. Well, Tony and Henry were setting up a proper lab. Travel wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass. That was something.
Another batch done. Phil was a little faster than the others, wanting to get it done. He walked over to the cooler and lifted the next one-kilo bag. He smelled it, as he had the others. Foul, chemical smell, like the chemicals used in the biology lab at his high school, formaldehyde, something like that. He slit open the bag with a penknife, dumping the contents into the first mixing bowl at arm’s length, then adding a premeasured quantity of sugar and stirring with a spoon by the light of one of the Coleman lamps.
“Hello.”
There had been no warning at all. Suddenly there was someone else there at the door, holding a pistol. He was dressed in military clothes, striped fatigues, and his face was painted green and black.
There wasn’t any need for silence. His prey had seen to that. Kelly had reconverted his Colt back to .45 caliber, and he knew that the hole in the front of the automatic would seem large enough to park a car to the others in the room. He pointed with his left hand. “That way. On the deck, facedown, hands at the back of the neck, one at a time, you first,” he said to the one at the mixing bowl.
“Who the hell are you?” the black one asked.
“You must be Burt. Don’t do anything dumb.”
“How you know my name?” Burt demanded as Phil took his place on the deck.
Kelly pointed at the other white one, directing him next to his friend.
“I know lots of things,” Kelly said, moving towards Burt now. Then he saw the sleeping girl in the corner. “Who’s she?”
“Look, asshole!” The .45 went level with his face, an arm’s length away.
“What was that?” Kelly asked in a conversational voice. “Down on the deck, now.” Burt complied at once. The girl, he saw, was sleeping. He’d let that continue for the moment. His first task was to search them for weapons. Two had small handguns. One had a useless little knife.
“Hey, who are you? Maybe we can talk,” Burt suggested.
“We’re going to do that. Tell me about the drugs,” Kelly started off.
It was ten in the morning in Moscow when Voloshin’s dispatch emerged from the decoding department. A senior member of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, he had a pipeline into any number of senior officers, one of whom was an academician in Service I, an American specialist who was advising the senior KGB leadership and the Foreign Ministry on this new development that the American media called détente. This man, who didn’t hold a paramilitary rank within the KGB hierarchy, was probably the best person to get fast action, though an information copy of the dispatch had also gone to the Deputy Chairman with oversight duties for Voloshin’s Directorate. Typically, the message was short and to the point. The Academician was appalled. The reduction of tension between the two superpowers, in the midst of a shooting war for one of them, was little short of miraculous, and coming as it did in parallel with the American approach to China, it could well signal a new era in relations. So he had said to the Politburo in a lengthy briefing only two weeks earlier. The public revelation that a Soviet officer had been involved in something like this—it was madness. What cretin at GRU had thought this one up? Assuming it really was true, which was something he had to check. For that he called the Deputy Chairman.
“Yevgeniy Leonidovich? I have an urgent dispatch from Washington.”
“As do I, Vanya. Your recommendations?”
“If the American claims are true, I urge immediate action. Public knowledge of such idiocy could be ruinous. Could you confirm that this is indeed under way?”
“Da. And then ... Foreign Ministry?”
“I agree. The military would take too long. Will they listen?”
“Our fraternal socialist allies? They’ll listen to a shipment of rockets. They’ve been screaming for them for weeks,” the Deputy Chairman replied.
How typical, the Academician thought, in order to save American lives we will send weapons to take more of them, and the Americans will understand. Such madness. If there was ever an illustration as to why détente was necessary, this was it. How could two great countries manage their affairs when both were involved, directly or not, in the affairs of minor countries? Such a worthless distraction from important matters.
“I urge speed, Yevgeniy Leonidovich,” the Academician repeated. Though far outranked by the Deputy Chairman, they’d been classmates, years earlier, and their careers had crossed many times.
“I agree completely, Vanya. I’ll be back to you this afternoon.”
It was a miracle, Zacharias thought, looking around. He hadn’t seen the outside of his cell in months, and just to smell the air, warm and humid as it was, seemed a gift from God, but that wasn’t it. He counted the others, eighteen other men in the single line, men like himself, all within the same five-year age bracket, and in the fading light of dusk he saw faces. There was the one he’d seen so long before, a Navy guy by the look of him. They exchanged a look and thin smiles as all the men did what Robin was doing. If only the guards would let them talk, but the first attempt had earned one of their number a slap. Even so, for the moment just seeing their faces was enough. To not be alone any longer, to know that there were others here, just that was enough. Such a small thing. Such a large one. Robin stood as tall as his injured back allowed, squaring his shoulders while that little officer was saying something to his people, who were also lined up. He hadn’t picked up enough Vietnamese to understand the rapid speech.
“This is the enemy,” the Captain was telling his men. He’d be taking his unit south soon, and after all the lectures and battle practice, here was an unexpected opportunity for them to get a real look
. They weren’t so tough, these Americans, he told them. See, they’re not so tall and forbidding, are they? They bend and break and bleed—very easily, too! And these are the elite of them, the ones who drop bombs on our country and kill our people. These are the men you’ll be fighting. Do you fear them now? And if the Americans are foolish enough to try to rescue these dogs, we’ll get early practice in the art of killing them. With those rousing words, he dismissed his troops, sending them off to their night guard posts.
He could do this, the Captain thought. It wouldn’t matter soon. He’d heard a rumor through his regimental commander that as soon as the political leadership got their thumbs out, this camp would be closed down in a very final way, and his men would indeed get a little practice before they had to walk down Uncle Ho’s trail, where they would have the chance to kill armed Americans next. Until then he had them as trophies to show his men, to lessen their dread of the great unknown of combat, and to focus their rage, for these were the men who’d bombed their beautiful country into a wasteland. He’d select recruits who had trained especially hard and well ... nineteen of them, so as to give them a taste of killing. They’d need it. The captain of infantry wondered how many of them he’d be bringing home.
Kelly stopped off for fuel at the Cambridge town dock before heading back north. He had it all now—weft, he had enough now, Kelly told himself. Full bunkers, and a mind full of useful data, and for the first time he’d hurt the bastards. Two weeks, maybe three weeks of their product. That would shake things loose. He might have collected it himself and perhaps used it as bait, but no, he couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t have it around him, especially now that he suspected he knew how it might come in. Somewhere on the East Coast, was all that Burt actually knew. Whoever this Henry Tucker was, he was on the clever side of paranoid, and compartmentalized his operation in a way that Kelly might have admired under other circumstances. But it was Asian heroin, and the bags it arrived in smelled of death, and they came in on the East Coast. How many things from Asia that smelled of death came to the Eastern United States? Kelly could think of only one, and the fact that he’d known men whose bodies had been processed at Pope Air Force Base only fueled his anger and his determination to see this one thing through. He brought Springer north, past the brick tower of Sharp’s Island Light, heading back into a city that held danger from more than one direction.
One last time.
There were few places in Eastern America as sleepy as Somerset County. An area of large and widely separated farms, the whole county had but one high school. There was a single major highway, allowing people to transit the area quickly and without stopping. Traffic to Ocean City, the state’s beach resort, bypassed the area, and the nearest interstate was on the far side of the Bay. It was also an area with a crime rate so low as to be nearly invisible except for those who took note of a single-digit increase in one category of misbehavior or another. One lone murder could be headline news for weeks in the local papers, and rarely was burglary a problem in an area where a homeowner was likely to greet a nocturnal intruder with a 12-gauge and a question. About the only problem was the way people drove, and for that they had the State Police, cruising the roads in their off-yellow cars. To compensate for boredom the cars on the Eastern Shore of Maryland had unusually large engines with which to chase down speeders who all too often visited the local liquor stores beforehand in their effort to make a dull if comfortable area somewhat more lively.
Trooper First Class Ben Freeland was on his regular patrol routine. Every so often something real would happen, and he figured it was his job to know the area, every inch of it, every farm and crossroads, so that if he ever did get a really major call he’d know the quickest way to it. Four years out of the Academy at Pikesville, the Somerset native was thinking about advancement to corporal when he spotted a pedestrian on Postbox Road near a hamlet with the unlikely name of Dames Quarter. That was unusual. Everybody rode down here. Even kids started using bikes from an early age, often starting to drive well under age. which was another of the graver violations he dealt with on a monthly basis. He spotted her from a mile away—the land was very flat—and took no special note until he’d cut that distance by three quarters. She—definitely a female now—was walking unevenly. Another hundred yards of approach told him that she wasn’t dressed like a local. That was odd. You didn’t get here except by car. She was also walking in zigzags, even the length of her stride changing from one step to another, and that meant possible public intoxication—a huge local infraction, the trooper grinned to himself—and that meant he ought to pull over and give her a look. He eased the big Ford over to the gravel, bringing it to a smooth and safe stop fifty feet from her, and got out as he’d been taught, putting his uniform Stetson on and adjusting his pistol belt.
“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “Where you heading. ma’ am’?”
She stopped after a moment, looking at him with eyes that belonged on another planet. “Who’re you?”
The trooper leaned in close. There was no alcohol on her breath. Drugs were not much of a problem here yet, Freeland knew. That might have just changed.
“What’s your name?” he asked in a more commanding tone.
“Xantha, with a ex,” she answered, smiling.
“Where are you from, Xantha?”
“Aroun’.”
“Around where?”
“ ’Lanta.”
“You’re a long way from Atlanta.”
“I know that!” Then she laughed. “He dint know I had more.” Which, she thought, was quite a joke, and a secret worth confiding. “Keeps them in my brassiere.”
“What’s that now?”
“My pills. Keep them in my brassiere, and he dint know.”
“Can I see them?” Freeland asked, wondering a lot of things and knowing that he had a real arrest to make this day.
She laughed as she reached in. “You step back, now.”
Freeland did so. There was no sense alerting her to anything, though his right hand was now on his gunbelt just in front of his service revolver. As he watched, Xantha reached inside her mostly unbuttoned blouse and came out with a handful of red capsules. So that was that. He opened the trunk of his car and reached inside the evidence kit he carried to get an envelope.
“Why don’t you put them in here so you don’t lose any?”
“Okay!” What a helpful fellow this policeman was.
“Can I offer you a ride, ma’am?”
“Sure. Tired a’ walkin’.”
“Well, why don’t you just come right along?” Policy required that he handcuff such a person, and as he helped her into the back of the car, he did. She didn’t seem to mind a bit.
“Where we gain’?”
“Well, Xantha, I think you need a place to lie down and get some rest. So I think I’ll find you one, okay?” He already had a dead-bang case of drug possession, Freeland knew, as he pulled back onto the road.
“Burt and the other two restin’. too, ’cept they ain’t gonna wake up.”
“What’s that, Xantha?”
“He killed their ass. bang bang bang.” She mimed with her hand. Freeland saw it in the mirror, nearly going off the road as he did so.
“Who’s that?”
“He a white boy. dint get his name, dint see his face neither, but he killed their ass, bang bang bang.”
Holy shit.
“Where?”
“On the boat.” Didn’t everybody know that?
“What boat?”
“The one out on the water, fool!” That was pretty funny, too.
“You shittin’ me, girl?”
“An’ you know the funny thing, he left all the drugs right there, too, the white boy did. ’Cept’n he was green. ”
Freeland didn’t have much idea what this was all about, but he intended to find out just as fast as he could. For starters he lit up his rotating lights and pushed the car just as fast as the big 427 V-8 would allow, heading for the State Po
lice Barracks “V” in Westover. He ought to have radioed ahead, but it wouldn’t really have accomplished much except to convince his captain that he was the one on drugs.
“Yacht Springer, take a look to your port quarter.”
Kelly lifted his mike. “Anybody I know?” he asked without looking.
“Where the H have you been, Kelly?” Oreza asked.
“Business trip. What do you care?”
“Missed ya,” was the answer. “Slow down some.”
“Is it important? I have to get someplace, Portagee.”
“Hey, Kelly, one seaman to another, back down, okay?”
Had he not known the man ... no, he had to play along regardless of who it was. Kelly cut his throttles, allowing the cutter to pull alongside in a few minutes. Next he’d be asked to stop for a boarding, which Oreza had every legal right to do, and trying to evade would solve nothing. Without being so bidden. Kelly idled his engines and was soon laying to. Without asking permission, the cutter eased alongside and Oreza hopped aboard.
“Hey, Chief,” the man said by way of a greeting.
“What gives?”
“I was down your sandbar twice in the last couple of weeks looking to share a beer with you, but you weren’t home.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to make you unfit for duty.”
“Kinda lonely out here with nobody to harass.” Suddenly it was clear that both men were uneasy, but neither one knew why the other was. “Where the hell were you?”