“Dick tries his best to work on the water like everybody else on the island, but he’s a time bomb. Violent. Unpredictable temper. Flashbacks, and the thousand-yard stare. Booze. Drugs, maybe. The whole nine. Doesn’t belong at home anymore. He’s gonzo. Freaks out, and disappears. Reconnects with a few other throwbacks at the VA hospital. That’s all happening fifteen years ago. Uses old buddies or some VA contacts to help him drop out, maybe. Becomes a mercenary renting out to the highest bidder.”
Chalk asked, “How did this dipshit in wolf’s clothing come into my employ? And where is he now?”
Something about this whole Islands in the Stream angle was ringing a bell for Chalk. A Chesapeake sanction. Long ago. A buddy of his had been detailed to delete an operative who knew too much about something or other, and was threatening to peach on some Poobahs upstairs. Chalk remembered that his pal might have managed to kill somebody, but he was pulled off the gig before taking out the designated target. Fifteen years ago. That’s about the time Dick Blackshaw dropped out of sight. Chalk would have to dig into some fairly dusty files to figure out why it all sounded so familiar. A hell of a thing if the operative who got away back then was this same jackass. What were the odds of that? Starting to look pretty good apparently. He'd put Black Widow on the case.
Slagget wrapped it up. “Despite some intel training, Special Ops, Dick Blackshaw has been a screw-up all his life since ’Nam.”
Chalk held up a hand again. Slowly shook his head. “No. It’s Vietnam to those of you who didn’t have the honor to serve there. Viet. Nam. Not ’Nam. You were still crapping your nappies when I was up to my eyes in blood, muck, shit, and gooks. Say it right. And you say it with respect.”
Behind his smokescreen, the gung-ho patriotismo, Chalk had no trouble omitting that he’d coined his first million in Vietnam running smack to the States in his dead buddies’ coffins. Sometimes inside the bodies themselves if they were intact enough. Once, early in his career, he’d failed to intercept a shipment stateside, and five kilos of dope had been cremated by the grieving family along with their loved one’s body. Arriving too late to stop the cremation became one of the few times in life Chalk could remember openly weeping. The dead soldier’s family was quite touched.
Slagget looked abashed. “Since then, Dick Blackshaw’s been living dangerously; non-stop brink-of-death as a mercenary, with short breaks for drinking and whoring until his pay ran out. Angola, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Columbia, Bolivia, Somalia. If I have him pegged, at some point a few years ago, he smartens up. Doesn’t want to retire with a bullet as pension. He gets to thinking.”
Chalk mused, mollified for the moment. “You think this uber-wanker ripped us off so he could be The Man, and go home to get his long-overdue redneck ticker-tape parade?”
Slagget glanced at Clynch before saying, “Yes, Mr. Chalk. I do.”
Chalk thought for a moment more, tossed off the last of his scotch.
“Saddle up, compadres. We’re going to Smith Island. Get us some oysters. See if Dick-Willikers is available for a little confab. Short of that we’ll brace his son. See what he knows. We need to shut this down quick. We have two days until everybody starts technical climbing up our rectums. By then we gotta have the gold and the blueprints, and make everybody happy. Screw this up and we are dead, plain and simple. Pronto dead.”
CHAPTER 10
Dark water roiled on a dark night. Whitecaps appeared as if ether-born in the howling distance. Miss Dotsy wallowed under two and a half tons of cargo she was never built to carry. She plowed through the waves instead of gliding over them. With just one rogue broadsider, she would ship too much water and join the Nantucket Lance on the bottom.
Ellis had the helm. Ben kept watch on the cargo lest it shift. He also kept an eye out for other boats. None so far.
Ellis said. “Daylight in three hours. You have a plan?”
Ben hesitated to divulge too much to Knocker Ellis. The culler was a closed book. The ultimate unknown quantity. Ben had never asked Ellis to talk about Dick Blackshaw, and Ellis had never volunteered. He was not the type to yarn about the past over a beer. He damn sure wasn’t a gossip. It felt as though Ellis had known the corpse was Dick Blackshaw before Ben told him so. And working that particular oyster rock on that particular day had been Knocker Ellis’s suggestion. Ellis had too many secrets. For now, Ben told Ellis only where they were headed, and no more. “Deep Banks Island.”
Ellis involuntarily wrinkled his nose at the thought of their destination.
Ben smiled weakly. “Yep. The heron rookery there stinks to high heaven. Decades of guano. Nobody but bird watchers go there this time of year. And not in this weather. Not until the Christmas count.”
Ellis set a course to the north. He eyed the cargo. “We have at least three rhinoceri that we’re not talking about sitting in the corner.”
Ben had to yell over the engine and the wind. “Which one first? The full count of the gold? Your split? The bomb? Reckon we can safely call it a bomb.”
Ellis smiled. “How come we’re taking that damn gizmo along with us to Deep Banks Island? I thought you liked Nature, you being the big waterman, the fancy wildlife artiste and whatnot. Way I see it? There won’t be any split besides atoms with that bomb on this boat.”
Already exhausted, Ben spoke through clenched teeth. “Ellis, I’m working on it.”
Deep Banks Island lay north of the Martin Wildlife Refuge, which itself formed the northern landmass of the Smith Island archipelago. Ben navigated through a convoluted snarl of guts and streams into the heart of the island. With Miss Dotsy so weighed down, she could barely penetrate the smaller, shallower waterways as far as Ben wanted. Finally, he saw what looked like a dead sapling jammed in the mud directly off Miss Dotsy’s port beam. With almost all forward motion halted and her wheel churning up mud plumes in the water by the stern, Miss Dotsy was essentially aground. He cut the Atomic Four.
They sat still for a moment with the engine silent. Listening, letting their ears get used to the darkness, and their eyes to the silence. Hunters understood the need to allow all the senses recalibrate after a change in the immediate environment. The engine clicked and pinged as it cooled. Otherwise, they heard nothing but marsh and wind. The scratch of reed stalks against each other. In the distance, the ratching call of a heron waking. The stench of the rookery, pungent with ammonia, made their eyes water.
The tiny stream threading through the reeds off to the left was the on-ramp of a poacher’s highway running through many of the protected islands in the Chesapeake. Though wildlife sanctuaries were off limits to all hunters, Smith Islanders looked askance at banishment from their ancestral stalking grounds. Just below the surface of the water at low tide, a series of planks led into ponds and meadows where geese and ducks rested, perfectly set up for both the silent attack, and the poacher’s quick retreat. Without knowledge of this system of planks, staked-out Natural Resources Police were always mired to a halt, and rarely made an arrest in here.
His strength draining away from the long night, and sensing the early physical signs of Hell Week back in Coronado, Ben stepped over the side. “That tree marks the way in.”
They carried the first box between them, sliding their feet along the slimy planks inches at a time. Ben and Ellis soon disappeared in among the reeds, the skunk cabbage, dying lizard’s tail and joe-pye weed growing on all sides. Under immense stress from their combined weight, the old planks bowed and rocked with each step. They nearly toppled over more than once.