She couldn’t have cared less and said so. I didn’t give a damn myself and I had to laugh every time I thought of what the officers and men of the cutter must be thinking. Especially the skipper. He knew, without knowing the details, that I was on a serious mission, and it must have shocked his staunch old soul to watch us playboying around on Sea Witch. I wondered if he would put it in the log, or include it in his report to Washington, and what the expression on j Hawk’s face would be like when he read the report.
Lyda came to stand beside me now and we watched the I cutter disappear over the horizon. She stood behind me, her breasts just touching my bare flesh and nuzzling my ear with her moist lips. We had become quite fond of each other by J this time.
The Excalibur was out of sight.
“She’ll run into Guantanamo,” I said. “Give the crew a little leave, take on some supplies, then come back here to cruise on station. I just hope to Christ we see her again.”
“Amen,” said Lyda. She gave me a sharp, excited look of conspiracy and I could almost hear her boiling inside. We were about to get down to the nitty gritty, and she was happy and ready.
In the west the sun was falling fast and lavishing color on the Passage. Lavender and gold and crimson and blue purple. An occasional flying fish skittered in a sparkle of silver. The sea was calm, running in long, shallow, green troughs crested with lace, and the tradewind from Africa was sweeping steadily and moistly cool in our faces. No other craft was in sight and, with night about to come, that suited me fine. From here on it was going to be very tricky.
I smacked her taut behind and told her to go fix dinner. Then I throttled the engines, keeping bare way on her, and snapped on the gyro. I now had a number of problems.
I had read and memorized the precis Hawk gave me, then destroyed it. It was a headache, nothing but more work and more trouble and more danger, but that couldn’t be helped. It also added considerably to the cast of characters— something I could have done without — for this soup already had too many cooks fooling around with it. I had read about Paul Penton Trevelyn, and seen an occasional rare and outdated picture of him, but now I might have to meet this weird character in the flesh. I might even have to kill him.
P.P. Trevelyn, as he was usually called, was an eccentric billionaire who made his permanent home in Haiti. Hawk admitted, in the precis, that AXE didn’t have a hell of a lot on P.P., and what they did have was out of date and not very reliable. P.P. was a mystery man, a recluse and a rabid Fascist, and he and Papa Doc were as thick as the thieves they undoubtedly were. P.P. made Howard Hughes look like a raving extrovert and had more money then Getty. The most recent picture of him was twenty years old.
P.P. was also the head of Papa Doc’s intelligence service, and put up the money for it. It was P.P. who was holding Dr. Romera Valdez on his huge estate near the ruins of Sans Souci palace and not far from The Citadel. It was my guess, and that of the CIA and AXE, that Mr. Trevelyn was calling a lot of Papa Doc’s tunes.
Lyda thought so, too, and she admitted that it was going to be tough to get Valdez out of P.P.’s clutches. The man had a private army! That made two armies I would be up against — Papa Doc’s and P.P’s.
I was still brooding over this when she called me to come and eat. I tossed my cigarette overboard and took a last look around. The sun was gone, and the colors faded, but in the quiet immensity of the sea gloaming there was a quality of peace and serenity that gripped and held me, the more because I knew it might be a long time before I had the feeling again. If ever. This was going to be a rough one and I felt distinctly uneasy.
After dinner I told Lyda to get out all our charts and notes and make them ready for a last council of war. I went topside and cut the engines and put an already rigged sea anchor on Sea Witch. It was fully dark now, with just a sliver of moon in the east. We had this stretch of the Passage to ourselves and I didn’t turn on any running lights. After a last check around I made my way through a clutter of lashed oil and water jerricans and back down to the deckhouse. Lyda had slipped into her halter and a light sweater, against the slight chill, and was poring over the charts and a clipped sheaf of notes.
I lit cigarettes for both of us and squinted through smoke at the charts. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get on with this. I want to run into Tortuga tonight and hide before it gets light. You got anybody on that island?”
She nodded and frowned down at the chart, wetting her lips with a long pink tongue. “A few people, yes. If nothing has happened.”
“You can get in touch with them without danger to us?"
I watched her closely. We had been together long enough for me to know when she was lying, or even thinking about lying. Now I frowned at her. “You would have heard, wouldn’t you, if anything had happened? You are the Black Swan, the boss lady.”
She nodded, but gave me a tart look. “I mean recently, Nick. In New York I would have heard, yes, but we’ve been a little out of touch the past few days, yes?”
She had a point there. Except for working Excalibur a couple of times I had maintained strict radio silence, and there hadn’t been any broadcasts from Port-au-Prince to indicate trouble. We had been monitoring Radio Haiti constantly. That didn’t mean a damned thing, of course. Papa Doc is a very secretive man.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll have to chance it. Are there many people on Tortuga?” It was an island off the northern coast of Haiti, about 20 miles from Port de Paix on the mainland, and an old private hangout.
“Not many. Some fishermen and a few blacks. There isn’t much there.”
“A place we can hide the boat and camouflage her?”
She nodded. “No trouble there. A lot of coves and inlets. You’re worried about air patrols?”
I was sure as hell worried about air patrols and I said so. Papa Doc didn’t have much of an air force, but I didn’t have any, and it only takes one plane to spot a boat that shouldn’t be there.
Then she brought up an old, and sore, subject. We had argued about it all the way from Key West.
“If you would only let me use the radio, Nick! I could call my people on the mainland and it would be so much easier than doing it the way you want to. I—”
“No, goddamn it!” I slapped the table hard with my palm. Amateurs get on my nerves at times.
“It would make it easier,” I went on. “Easier for Papa Doc and this P.P. Trevelyn. How do I know how many DF sets and monitoring stations they’ve got? Transmitting to the mainland is asking for it, Lyda. They’d get a fix on us and that would be it. End of story. End of us. And don’t bring that up again!”
“Yes, Captain. I won’t.” Her smile had the familiar mockery in it.
“We stick to my original plan,” I said. “We lie in Tortuga while you make a contact and send him to your people on the mainland. Verbal only. No notes. Your messenger will set up the rendezvous on the mainland for tonight. That is the way it is going to be.”
“Of course, Nick.”
“Another thing,” I went on, “I don’t want any of your friends coming aboard Sea Witch. If they try it I’ll have to shoot them. Get that straight, Lyda. Because I’ll do it, and if the gunfire starts too soon we’re cooked. We might as well send Papa Doc a telegram.”
She saw the sense in that and agreed, unsmiling. “I know. I don’t especially want the blacks to know what we’ve got aboard — since there is to be no invasion. They — they might get ideas of their own.”