The pointless nature of this proactive salvo was illustrated in abrupt fashion as the machine gunner aboard the Stingray helicopter, only momentarily distracted by Po’s dive, let loose on the Venezuelans with his. 50-caliber gun. In guilt-ridden overcompensation for his failure to properly defend the agents aboard the OTH, the machine gunner continued to pummel the bodies of his targets with round upon round of shells long after both men had died, riddling the rear, then the midsection, then the whole length of the Trinity, shouting obscenities at the offending gunmen as he went. Sparks flew, then smoke spewed, and finally the entire stern of the Trinity erupted in a blast wave of orange flames. Roiling black clouds followed the explosion into the Caribbean sky as flames licked skyward, reaching twenty or thirty yards above the deck of the yacht.
It wasn’t until this pyrotechnics display had been all but consummated that the machine gunner remembered and took aim on the man who’d dived overboard.
By then, however, the pilot of the helicopter had begun screaming at the machine gunner through his radio headset to cease fire. When the gunner did not comply with his order, the pilot pulled the Stingray out of the fray. By the time the machine gunner finally relented, both he and the pilot could plainly see that Po Keeler’s outstretched arms were raised skyward in hapless surrender. He was treading water almost directly beneath the helicopter, head mostly submerged, sputtering and gasping as he sought to reach his hands as high in the air as possible to indicate his innocence.
Keeler began a frantic dog paddle for the hull of the OTH chase boat. He held one arm aloft as he pulled himself aboard with the other, maintaining his one-armed gesture of surrender throughout. At length he managed to turn himself around and plant his rear end on the gunwale, where he proceeded to raise his other arm and drop his head in relief and disgust.
At that point the task force commander followed the protocol he’d been instructed to heed in cases of armed conflict within foreign territorial waters. Following a cryptic update from the pilot of the Stingray, the commander hooked himself into a satellite phone line from the bridge of the task force’s main cutter and dialed the man he knew to be the head of law enforcement operations for Road Town.
The Coast Guard’s designated liaison for any such drug-interdiction activities inside the borders of the British Virgin Islands was the longtime head of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force and newly elected chief minister of the BVIs. He was a man who, despite his elevated status as chief minister, still went by the nickname he’d bestowed upon himself during a time when he’d held a more junior position on the force.
The full name of the task force’s designated liaison was Roy Emerson Gillespie, but those who’d met him-and even a few who hadn’t-knew to call the man by his preferred, self-appointed nickname: Cap’n Roy.
3
Cooper studied his opponent. Prescription sunglasses keeping anybody from reading his eyes, long-sleeved silk shirt somehow made to look like a polyester blend, a single, curling tendril of smoke rising all day and all night from the cigarette he kept clasped in his hand-Cooper didn’t recall his taking a single drag on the cigarette in forty hours at the table, and yet that tendril of smoke remained, rising endlessly from the season ticket the man’s yellow-nailed fingers kept for themselves at the edge of the felt.
There was never once a change in the expression on the man’s face, only a mild wince that never eased, as though he’d had prosthetic makeup applied before assuming his position at the table. Earlier, Cooper had noted the resemblance to photographs he remembered seeing on the back of Tom Clancy novels; as the battle wore on, he began to wonder whether the man cleaning his clock for twelve straight hours might actually have been the best-selling author, before writing this off as a delusional endeavor enacted by his fatigued, inebriated mind.
Of all the skill-free competitors who’d made it through to the eight qualifying tables-a roster loaded with Russian mob bosses, CEOs both current and deposed, even a head of state-Cooper just had to get stuck with this clandestine four-time World Series of Poker champion bluffing him out of the building from behind his Tom Clancy prosthetics. With maybe eighty percent of the paid-in-full bozos taking Fidel up on his offer-comped charter jet, free digs aboard the converted cruise liner, and an endless sup ply of brown-skinned hookers, all in exchange for a one-time $250,000 entry fee-just to blow their money…
They had worked more or less together in picking off the other competitors at their table for the first twelve-hour session, but once the amateurs were dispensed with, Clancy had begun working him over like a speed bag. He did so most notably on three separate intentional busted bluffs, where the prosthetic Clancy had made a relatively large wager on dog-shit hole cards, losing as though it was becoming a habit, careful each time to “accidentally” reveal his cards rather than just cede the hand. Cooper knew what he was up to-Look, buddy: when I bet big, I’m always bluffing-but his knowledge held no value as the momentum began to shift, his piles shriveling like a scrotum in ice water. He felt as though he was watching a train wreck develop, the way he figured you’d feel when parked on the tracks inside a stalled, locked car, that blinding, Cyclops headlight of the train making its relentless approach.
All of which had set the stage perfectly for the moment in which he was now mired.
Head-to-head, the winner moving on to the finals-loser headed home two-fifty large in the hole. Forty hours of this hard-earned semifinal round culminating in the largest pot Cooper had ever seen, every color of chip imaginable covering every square inch of the felt. Clancy had just taken Cooper’s ten-thousand-dollar softball of a last-round raise and bumped him another two hundred grand. Clancy, of course, wasn’t risking all of his chips: the bastard still had maybe four hundred grand stacked beside the cigarette hand, and knew perfectly well his raise was enough to force Cooper all-in. Engineered to psychological perfection, no less: Cooper had been losing consistently for a couple hours now, and Clancy knew Cooper had become starved for a win, tempted to gamble on Clancy holding another of those dog-shit hands he’d let him see so many times in a row.
Cooper suspected Clancy was holding a high pair, a good place to be in a game of Texas Hold ’Em featuring three face cards out there on the flop. Meaning it had come to this: Cooper could hold on to his remaining eighty some thousand in chips-cling to this crumbling cliff he’d been trying in vain to prop up-or roll the dice, as it were, and give his opponent the chance to put him out of his misery. His pair of sixes in the hole had a snowball’s chance in Havana of winning the hand, but if he didn’t play for the steal, he’d be out of chips in another thirty minutes anyway.
Cooper pushed the last of his chips into the gargantuan pot, pointed a finger and lowered his thumb to indicate a trigger-pull in the direction of his opponent, and eyed the backs of Clancy’s pair of cards. Over they came, and Cooper took in the colorful pair of kings, meaning Clancy was full of kings over jacks, and that the tendril of smoke and prosthetic mask were headed for the final table and a shot at the five-million-dollar championship prize, while Cooper, with his deadly two pair, was headed home around two hundred and fifty-two thousand lighter than when he’d stepped off the porch of his bungalow five days back.
For the hell of it, as the man raked in the enormous pile of chips, Cooper examined his opponent’s expression one last time, checking for any outward sign of satisfaction, pleasure, vengeance, or thrill. He found none-only the unchanging prosthetic wince.
The tendril rising.
Cooper left.
He took a three-hour catnap in the morning sun, going without a lounge chair, just laying himself out on a towel by the lone functioning pool. Wearing nothing but a pair of green Tommy Bahama shorts decorated with palm trees, he passed out until he felt alert enough to get behind the wheel of his Apache-point his racing boat east and try to stay awake while it took him home.