Hakim frowned. “I will put your boat over the side and leave you to it, then.”
“No. You will do as you are told, or the Hormuz will find itself with a new master.”
Hakim’s arms and shoulders went rigid. Badr thought the man might have thrown the missile at him, if he could have lifted it. He tried to stare Badr down for a moment, but then his eyes sidled away.
“What must be done?”
“First,” Badr said, “you will reverse course. We are going back to where we came from.”
The eastern coast of Florida was hazy, muted, and variegated greens that muddied into one another. Seven miles offshore, the Kathleen cut the long swells easily, cruising at twenty knots. The stereo speakers on the flying bridge and the stern deck reverberated with Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets.” Unfortunately, the clients had brought along their own cassette tapes.
McCory was on the bridge, dressed in cutoffs and a red-and-white striped soccer shirt, his feet up on the instrument panel. He wore sunglasses and a baseball cap adorned with the Miami Dolphins’ logo. From time to time, he checked the automatic pilot.
On the wrap-around bridge lounge seat, the two kids — boys, ten and twelve years old — were playing checkers. The view of the sea had bored them a half hour out of Edgewater.
The clients, two couples in their thirties, were on the aft deck, in the shade of the white canvas awning he had rigged. They were sitting in deck chairs around the table, drinking margaritas. Having a good time. Their laughter swelled and ebbed.
McCory didn’t run many charters. He didn’t want to infringe on the business of the charter captains who based themselves at Marina Kathleen. Occasionally, if they were fully booked, he would take a party out on the Starshine, his thirty-eight-foot sport fisherman. Today was different. The outing was an early-morning run down to Cape Canaveral to watch a Titan IV launch. It had been booked three weeks before by the two men, who were engineers with one of the aerospace companies.
The launch had been expectedly delayed three times before it got off successfully and spectacularly. White fire and heavy contrails arcing into the bright blue Atlantic skies. McCory had enjoyed it. Then, he had grilled sirloin steaks for lunch, hot dogs for the boys.
He kept resisting the impulse to nudge the throttles forward, hunting for the Kathleen’s top end of thirty knots. He felt restless. It was difficult to maintain his normal, easygoing demeanor. He wanted to get up and pace the deck.
Grab an airplane for Washington.
March into the Hoover Building and say, “I did it.”
The fact that the Sunday papers down in the salon reported that the dead man, Muhammed Something-or-other, was some kind of terrorist didn’t make it any easier.
McCory had killed another human being.
Didn’t know the man but tried to paint a picture of him. Guessed he was a killer of innocents, assumed he had created carnage in Italy, Beirut, the Gaza strip, somewhere, but it still caused him to ache deep inside.
Like a drunk, driving a lethal weapon, swerving into a teenager on a dark road. Didn’t mean it, officer.
Didn’t make it right.
He was beginning to question his own motives in taking the SeaGhost, too. When he first saw the newspaper photos, it had been anger that ruled heart and head. That had evolved into a basically simple plan of grabbing the boat, composing an elaborate analysis of the boat in comparison with Devlin’s drawings, then making some kind of big splash. Press conference, maybe. Humiliate the damned Navy.
That had changed in the millisecond of impact with the Zodiak.
Everything was different. From the papers and newscasts, it was apparent that the Navy thought the… Warriors of Allah had taken both boats. There was a massive search underway all over the western Atlantic. McCory had seen the Navy and Coast Guard ships out in force. A Coast Guard cutter had put into New Smyrna Beach and Edgewater on Saturday afternoon, disgorging a bunch of sailors who ran along the coast asking the citizens if they had seen anything. Showing them The Post photo of the SeaGhost.
A lieutenant (j.g.) had hit up Marge Hepburn, she told him. Marge hadn’t seen any strange boats.
Now, he wasn’t certain what he would do. Admitting to the Navy that he had taken the SeaGhost also meant submitting to a charge of manslaughter, or reckless endangerment, or something along that line. Daimler could tell him. Would tell him, in fact.
McCory had been on the run before, but he had been running from an insurance company, not the law or the Navy. He was tired of running.
Still, he had to do something.
By the time he tied up in Slip 1, disembarked his clients, hosed the salt rime from the decks, and cleaned the salon, he had not stumbled over any solutions. He changed the sheets in the bow cabin. The sea had made one of his couples romantic. It was three-fifteen.
McCory checked the office and found that Marla Fox had replaced Marge. She already had the Windex and the paper towels out and was eyeing the back windows with some distaste. She was a cheery and chunky seventeen-year-old. She was also a trusting soul, somewhat daring, and not afraid of some of the things she should be afraid of.
“You really think those windows need cleaning?”
“Marla, you can’t see the other side of the waterway.”
“Isn’t this supposed to be in my contract, or something?”
“You don’t have a contract.”
“Oh.”
“Anything new?” he asked.
“Dan called in and told me to credit him with a couple hours on his time sheet. Somebody lost a water pump, and he replaced it.”
“I can’t believe Crips would work on Sunday.”
“He was probably drunk,” Marla said, and she had a point.
He spent a couple more minutes talking with her, then searched under the kneehole of his desk for the cardboard tube he wanted. He went out to the fueling dock where he kept the Camrose tied up. She was a nineteen-foot Chris Craft runabout that he had fully disassembled, rebuilt, and refinished. Born in the same year as McCory, she sported a Vee-drive and a Chrysler marine engine. Mahogany wood and blue leather. More elegance than get-up-and-go, but he liked her. The Kathleen and the Camrose, he owned outright. He owed over fifty thousand dollars on the Starshine, but her charters brought in just enough to meet the payments and the maintenance. No profit in her, just yet.
He also owed a quarter-million dollars on the marina. The cash flow was sufficient to meet his overhead and give him a couple thousand a month in salary. McCory had long since given up the notion that he would one day be a millionaire. More likely, he would die owing a million.
Then again, he had never aspired to millionaire status. One day at a time, with enough left over to buy a bottle of Dos Equis.
Releasing the spring lines, he clambered aboard and blew the bilges while she drifted from the dock. The engine caught on the first revolution, and McCory slipped it into gear and eased out of the marina while the engine warmed up. The exhaust gurgled in the water behind.
The flat planes of the windshield glass reflected the bright sun in little shatters of light that bounced back onto the highly polished mahogany of the foredeck. He guessed the afternoon temperature at above ninety. The sweat trickled down his sides.