"Save the sightseeing for later," I said. "This is where we split up. Michelle and I will take the Honda to check out the crater to the volcano, and its approaches. Sweets, you and Li Chin will have to hoof it to St. Pierre. But this is a small island, and you don't have more than a couple of miles to go."
"Right on," said Sweets easily. "I could use the exercise anyway."
"I can always carry him if he gets tired," said Li Chin.
Sweets chuckled, adjusting his Walther and the gravity-blade knife.
I motioned to Michelle, grabbed the Honda by its handlebars, and started pushing it across the field.
"Rendezvous tonight at seven, the Reine de la Caribe, just off the main square in Fort de France," I called back over my shoulder.
Sweets and Li Chin nodded, waved, and set off in the opposite direction. A few minutes later Michelle was seated in back of me on the Honda and we were chugging slowly on the approach to the crater of Mont Pelee.
Eleven
Seven hours later we had learned two facts. It had been seven hours of chugging along dusty dirt roads, in the full blast of the sun, sweat soaking our bodies, dust choking our mouths, the sun blinding our eyes. Seven hours of arguments with police, deliberate misdirections from field workers, sullen refusals of information from town officials. Seven hours of walking through scrub and across volcanic rock fields, and then lying on our bellies in those same rock fields, trying to see what was going on several hundred yards away.
It had all been worth it.
The crater of the volcano, we had learned, was closed to public access. The two officially marked paths from the base to the crater, recommended for tourists as a pleasant two-hour hike, had been barred by high wooden barriers. Each barrier had a gate manned by a uniformed guard, who politely but firmly denied access, saying the paths to the crater were "closed for maintenance work."
The other two paths to the crater weren't open to the public, either. And they weren't paths. They were well-surfaced roads, obviously put down in the last six months or so. They were on the eastern side of the volcano, and well-hidden from the public roads around the volcano's base, connected to those roads by dirt roads, each of which was barred by heavy wooden gates — again, with uniformed guards.
If you went the long way round, on foot, groping your way through jungle vegetation around the volcano's base, then through scrub and over volcanic rock, you could get a glimpse of what was traveling on those roads to the crater.
Trucks. At least one every fifteen minutes. Heavy canvas-covered trucks with liftgates. Empty. They came from the south, the Atlantic side of the island, and were coming fast. They emerged from the crater going back to the south, heavy-laden, slow, riding low.
In the back of each truck, you could see two guards. They were dressed in full battle dress, and they were carrying automatic weapons.
"Shall I spell it out for you?" I asked Sweets and Li Chin, after telling them the whole story that evening.
"No need to spell it out for this dude," said Sweets. "The letters are OAS, a mile high. And in a paramilitary operation a mile wide. And just as obvious."
"Which is one of the reasons they made Martinique their base of operations," said Li Chin. "They've got some friends in the French administration here who are willing to turn a blind eye to the whole thing."
"And also," put in Michelle, "it is obviously an ideal spot from which to launch an attack on the refinery off Curaçao."
I nodded in agreement, and took another sip of my drink. We were sitting around a table in the Reine de la Caribe, drinking tall, frosty glasses of the local rum punch. It was good, and I hoped that the langouste — the Caribbean version of lobster — we had ordered for later would be just as good. And nourishing. I had a feeling we were going to need plenty of energy reserves in the next twenty-four hours. Sweets and Li Chin, who had managed to pick up some more respectable clothes in the market, looked just as fatigued as Michelle and I.
"Well," said Sweets, adding another two spoonfuls of sugar to his punch, "you had a busy day, Carter. But me and my friend here, the Afro-Asian alliance you might call it, managed to dig a little bit of what's going down ourselves."
"Such as?" I demanded.
"Such as, St. Pierre is deader than East Peoria on a Sunday night in February after a blizzard," said Li Chin. "Fish, fish, and more fish. And fishermen. Fishing. That's it."
"Now, we don't have anything against fish," said Sweets. "In fact, we had a real tasty one for lunch, in a sort of sweet and sour sauce. But…"
"He means sweet and sweet," said Li Chin. "First time I've ever had dessert as a main course. And mackerel, yet."
"Anyway," went on Sweets with a smile, "we figured that, like you said, it was a small island, so we hopped one of those jitneys, those public taxis, and took us a little tour across the island to the south coast."
"Where," broke in Li Chin, making the two of them begin to strongly resemble a Mutt and Jeff act, "we found the action. If you want action, try Lorrain and Marigot."
"Fishing villages on the south coast," I said.
"Where there's damned little fishing going on," said Sweets, spooning up sugar from the bottom of his drained glass. "Never in all my life have I seen so many fishing boats, big and little, sitting around not fishing in good fishing weather. And trucks visiting the harbor, to carry some kind of machinery out to them, when it looks to me like a lot of them don't even have engines."
"Yachts?" I asked.
"Yachts, skiffs, sloops, brigantines, yawls — everything from a rowboat to a schooner," said Li Chin.
We all sat in silence for a moment. The waiter came and put down baskets of bread and rolls. From outside in the main square, there was a sound of music and laughter, cries of native voices. Crowds. It had begun some time ago, and been increasing imperceptibly as we sat over our drinks. I saw Sweets' eye flick toward the windows.
"What's going on out there?" he asked the waiter idly. To my surprise, he spoke not in French or English, but in fluent Creole patois, the native language of the French Antilles.
"Carnival, M'sieur," said the waiter, smiling broadly. "It is the Mardi Gras, the last day of feasting before Lent. We have the parades, the costumes, the dancing. There is much gaiety."
"Sounds like fun," said Sweets. "Too bad we…"
"Nothing is fun for me with my father where he is," Michelle broke in sharply. She turned to me. "Nick, what are we going to do?"
I took a sip of my drink. The noise of crowds was getting louder, closer. I could hear the liquid bobble of a steel drum band, probably imported from Trinidad, and the catchy rhythm of the native Martiniquais beguine, played on horns.
"The basic setup is obvious," I said slowly. "The OAS have some sort of headquarters inside the crater of Mont Pelee. It would be easy to carve a network of tunnels and chambers out of the volcanic rock — as long as you disregarded the danger of setting off the volcano again. And I think the OAS are willing to take even that kind of chance with the deal they have going for them."
"And you think my father is being held there?" Michelle asked anxiously.
I nodded.
"I think that whatever kind of underwater explosive device the OAS is producing is being made there. Then trucked down to the two ports to be loaded aboard boats."
"Small boats?" said Sweets with mild incredulity. "Tiny boats? Regular fishing boats?"
"That's what I don't understand yet," I admitted. I found that I had to talk louder, to be heard above the street sounds of the carnival. The parade must be very close to the restaurant now. "How could any propelled underwater device be launched from a small boat? And if it isn't propelled, how can even an innocent-looking fishing boat get inside the sea-installed security cordon which by now will have been set up around the Curaçao refinery? But we know that the OAS is loading something onto those boats, and we have to assume it's the explosive devices. Which brings us to our problem."