Ben asked, “You have any history with this Chalk? Know him from Vietnam, maybe? Was he there when you were?”
Ellis said nothing more.
This was hell for Ben. Not only was his father dead after years of no contact, his mother was now firmly involved. More than that, Chalk near as swore he had her captive. Through the years, Ben carefully maintained a nebulous image of Ida-Beth safe and happy somewhere, but with a tragic fairy-tale spell holding her in exile from Smith Island and her family. He carefully cleaned and checked Knocker Ellis’s rifle in the cuddy cabin. If he killed Chalk now, he might sever his last link to finding his mother alive. Ben was disgusted with himself. After all, closure was for suckers. Wasn’t it?
They set Miss Dotsy on a large, slow, circular course to the southeast of the Point No Point Lighthouse ruins. Fighting the storm exhausted them even more. At least Miss Dotsy’s repaired gearbox was holding, so far.
Ellis manned the helm for the first half-hour. Feet set wide, Ben propped himself against the cuddy cabin with binoculars scanning the bay as best he could. Ellis’s rifle lay cleaned, inspected, dry, loaded, and secured just inside the cabin door.
CHAPTER 42
The GPS Chalk swiped from Hiram Harris’s Palestrina said the Point No Point Lighthouse should be in easy view by now. He remembered how damn tall it was. So imposing and phallic. Like having a big dong for a hideout. Chalk got a kick out of that. It sure beat a bat cave. Who wanted to hole up in some dank, Freudian vagina? How was that cool? Now, even when the inflatable crested the waves, he still saw absolutely nothing. It was understandable on one level. The storm sooted out the daylight with heavy rain, wind-blown spume, and thick cloud.
Slagget said, “Maybe this gale knocked the light out.”
Chalk checked the GPS again. Though not really night at all, he needed to try anything to see better. “Hell. Give me the goggles, Bill.”
Slagget passed Chalk the NVGs. Chalk slipped the straps onto his head and flipped the switch. The gallium arsenide photocathode sucked in the wan light, beamed it to the phosphor screen. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, the screen transformed the dark gray water into liquid emerald.
Even this late generation of goggles still tunneled his field of vision to just forty degrees down from the usual naked-eye one hundred ninety. He swiveled his head hard to the left and right of the boat’s extended rhumb line, searching. Somewhere close, he expected to see the loom of the lighthouse beacon even if heavily obscured through low cloud. Just one lousy glimmer would do.
Instead of light, a chasm of darkness rose up at him out of the water, a black wound hacked out of the squall-battered sky. Chalk reeled back like the victim of a cheap effect at a 3-D movie. “Damn!”
Chalk pulled the inflatable’s motor hard to starboard, wrenching the boat over to port. The bright beacon was not there. Worse, the lighthouse’s iron caisson foundation lay dead ahead not twenty feet away. Its top section was peeled outward like a gigantic rusty flower blossom with serrated petals, some bent down to Chalk’s eye level. The next wave would have surfed the inflatable straight into the harrow-like wreckage of the iron wall. For once, Chalk was grateful the skiff in tow was such a heavy drag, like a sea anchor. Above the caisson, the lighthouse was gone. Just not there. A phallus cum vagina dentata.
Then Slagget pointed to wreckage in the water. “What the hell?”
Planks and shingled sections of the lighthouse’s mansard roof surged in an eddy to leeward of the ruin. There, the caisson was split wide open from the top to down below the water’s surface. It created a miniature harbor of calmer water within. No, the lighthouse was not like a flower here so much as the open, jagged collar of a headless court jester’s motley.
Tahereh shouted. “Look! A boat!”
More improbable than the lighthouse’s total destruction was the sight of the Palestrina still afloat, moored to the caisson’s remains on a twenty foot painter. Chalk veered the inflatable toward the deadrise. On the upside, now they had three boats to use for an attack to retrieve the gold: the Palestrina, the inflatable, and the old outboard skiff, such as it was.
Slagget jumped from the inflatable over to the Palestrina, tied the painter to the big deadrise’s stern cleat. Tahereh crossed next, Chalk steadying her from behind with his two big hands on her hips. Then he beckoned to Tahereh’s men in the skiff to pull themselves and the leaky outboard in close with the tow line so they too could board the Palestrina.
Chalk turned his attention to the Palestrina’s cockpit. It was littered with blasted masonry from the lighthouse’s destroyed middle story. Here and there a few bricks lay still cemented together. A chunk of roof dormer and its window had spun through the air and landed forward under the Palestrina’s hardtop. A single pane of glass remained intact.
Chalk ordered, “Clean this crap up. Pitch it overboard. What the hell happened here?”
Two of Tahereh’s men, al Mubi and al Temiyat, boarded Palestrina from the outboard skiff. At forty-three, al Mubi was Tahereh’s oldest squad member. He had fought the Soviets as a boy in Afghanistan. Al Temiyat helped al Mubi clear debris as best they could, seasick as they were. Last, Surur of the notched ear, a former Islamic literature student from Pakistan, leapt gamely from the skiff, pitching himself over the deadrise’s transom. He landed hard on the deck, clutched at his ear and retched out a violent dry heave. The Simon Clynch of Tahereh’s team, he was not cut out for sea duty.
Slagget said, “The whole lighthouse is stonked! Something must have set off our grenades. Maybe Gavin was horsing around. And what about the chick?”
Chalk said, “Dollars to doughnuts she’s dead.”
Tahereh and al Mubi started lifting the section of dormer with its remnant of glazed window frame. Suddenly they froze, eyes riveted on the debris. Something was staring back at them through the frame. A childhood monster peering through a bedroom window; a demon.
Chalk was the first to snap the hex. He staggered forward, grabbed the edge of the dormer, threw it aside. There lay a burned human body. Hair singed. Clothing charred. Flesh, medium-well. Fists up in the classic pugilistic burn posture.
Chalk said, “Jesus fucking Christ!”
Slagget said, “Not by a long shot. That’s Gavin!”
Al Temiyat began shouting at Tahereh in Pashto-accented Arabic. He’d been pulling the skiff in to cleat it closer to the Palestrina’s stern. He pointed at the skiff’s old Evinrude outboard. There was a big bullet hole in the left engine cover.
“Now what?” Chalk went aft steadying himself by holding the Palestrina’s washboards. He tried to examine the skiff’s engine from the deadrise. The wave action made it hard to see.
He ordered, “Slagget! Jump back in that skiff! Get the engine cover off!”
Slagget obeyed. “Somebody must’ve shot the thing back at the boat ramp.”
Chalk wasn’t buying. “No, this wasn’t an accident. And besides, we hid the boat too far away and down in that ditch for it to take a hit. Anybody hear a shot just now?”
Tahereh said, “Out here? Impossible. Not over this storm.”
The engine’s perforated cover was barely fastened in place. A quick yank, and it came off in Slagget’s hand. He shined a flashlight on the mess inside. The cable assembly was a rat’s nest. The fuel line was nearly severed. The engine was ruined.
Slagget said, “Hello.”