“Get back to me when you know more, OK?”
“OK.”
But he didn’t. Joe heard it first from his own TV, during a newsbreak on one of the early morning talk shows. Details were sketchy, still iffy, and still repeated the guerrilla story, but by reading between the lines Duffy quickly concluded Rossi was behind it all.
Nobody, it seems, was hit anywhere near as hard as the Japanese. The damage was almost completely confined to their operation. There would be no significant effect on Rossi’s mining operation.
Duffy expected to hear lots more later, since four people were reported killed or missing during the raid, whose chief objective seemed to have been the destruction of the weir that held the lilies in place against the river’s current. According to the official report, the rebels had sent rafts filled with explosives into the weir.
The reporter didn’t say so, but Duffy would have been willing to bet that the cleanup operation was pretty much out of business.
When Winston called a few minutes later, he confirmed this. “They got him out of the woods, Joe, and then he got rid of them. He was through using them and they were getting in his way…”
“He covered himself, like always. Nobody’ll ever be able to hang it on him. The last report I heard said the Brazilian police had picked up a self-confessed rebel named Bermudez. They’ll probably hold him until the heat is off and then turn him loose.
“I don’t think there are any rebels, I think Rossi bought somebody in the local government. It’s incredibly corrupt, you know. This’ll all just die a quiet death and once again the bad guys will have won because the good guys don’t care enough for justice to fight for it.”
“I hope you’re wrong, Joe. He’s my employer. If he gets mad at me I’m out of a job—but, that doesn’t mean I like what I see any more than you do.”
Amazon Trader was a bulk carrier, displacing fifteen thousand tons. Greek by registry, she had a cosmopolitan crew, but her owners and officers were American. Her regular run was between the Amazon ports and the Great Lakes when the St. Lawrence Seaway was open and down to the Argentine when it wasn’t. She hauled grain to feed the cities of the Amazon Basin.
At the moment she was some 300 kilometers downstream of Manaus. Laden to the Plimsoll line and riding low in the water she made a mere five knots against the current.
James Wooster, the third mate, lowest in seniority, naturally drew the night watch. Unlike the open sea, where only inclement weather tormented sailors, this river had insect life in profusion, which never seemed to sleep. To escape this Wooster huddled in the wheelhouse with the helmsman, a Pakistani whose English was tolerable but who was an absolute failure at conversation. Wooster was almightily bored.
Until the handset on his belt squawked out his name he had been about to doze off, mesmerized by the yellow-green eye of the ship’s radar and the steady hum of the sonar signal feeding out of the fathometer.
“Bridge?”
“Go ahead.”
“Pittman, on the bow watch,” came the reply, in the soft sing-song of Jamaican English. “Sir, I see something dead ahead I can’t identify. At least I think I see something. It’s real low in the water and it isn’t reflecting the light from the channel markers.”
Wooster glanced again at the radar screen. “Nothing on screen. What’s the range?”
“Seven, maybe eight hundred meters. Too far for the spotlight. Just barely detectable through the glasses.”
“Keep your eye on it, I’ll get back to you.”
Wooster had the engine room telephone in his other hand by then. “Reduce speed to one half,” he ordered when they answered. He turned to the helmsman. “Hold us steady.”
Then, taking a quick glance at the radar and sonar displays and seeing nothing obvious he pressed the talk bar on his handset to question to the lookout some more. “What does this thing look like?”
“Still closing, sir, but slower. It’s beginning to look solid, less and less like an oil slick,” the lookout answered. “That’s what I thought it was at first, even though a slick would have re-fleeted some light, but now it’s drifted closer. I think it’s solid, something floating on the surface, or maybe just underneath the surface.”
“Is it on a collision course?”
“Yes, sir. Half a kilometer away now, close enough for the spotlight. I have it in the beam now. It’s green, that is, they’re green. There’s lots of them. They cover the whole channel.”
“Wait one.” Wooster glanced at the table taped to the wall, searched out the proper engine speed to hold station against the current, then picked up the telephone again. “Reduce speed to fifteen revolutions.”
When the loud rumbling in the ship’s innards subsided and told him she no longer labored to make headway, Wooster stepped over to the console and flicked on the ship’s intercom. He patched it into the command channel of the handset he carried, and turned the output down so only the helmsman would hear it.
Once again back to the lookout he said, “Keep a close watch on it. Tell me if it gets any closer. I’m on my way forward now.” He gestured to the helmsman, who acknowledged with a nod.
“It seems to have stopped drifting, sir,” the lookout’s voice cackled as Wooster went out the wheelhouse door.
The handset then fell silent while Wooster moved almost at a run. Even before he reached the lookout station he could see the light playing back and forth over the mass of green circles. He had a ridiculous thought: they looked almost like lily pads, but even the giant ones farther upstream never got more than a meter or two across. These were much larger.
“Give me the light.”
The lookout handed him the spotlight, together with the cloud of insects that had been attracted to it. Wooster began a careful survey of the floating mass. This seemed to occupy the entire channel and to stretch off in the distance upstream at least as far as the beam would penetrate. He held the light in one hand and studied the objects through his binoculars. “They are lily pads,” he gasped.
“They don’t seem to be getting any closer, sir.”
“Then, they must be stuck on something,” Wooster replied. “In this current anything that isn’t anchored would be way past us by now.”
Wooster pulled his handset out of his pocket, and pressed the talk bar. “Wake the captain,” he said, knowing the helmsman was the only one who could hear him.
“Yes, sir,” the helmsman acknowledged. “Sir, we are now getting sonar echoes. They show the channel ahead is completely obstructed. Something goes all the way from the surface to the bed of the river.”
“Hold her steady,” Wooster replied. “If the range closes let me know at once.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wooster turned the spotlight off long enough for the insects to disperse, then got an even better idea. He flicked it on again, then handed it to Pittman and stepped to the other side of the ship. He was still within conversational distance but away from the bugs.
In a few minutes Captain Ives appeared behind them. He was dressed in slippers and robe, with his usual dilapidated cap protecting his bald pate from ravaging mosquitoes.
Wooster handed him the glasses, endured a long silence and a couple of ambiguous grunts, then blurted, “How does something that big get out into the channel without anybody noticing?”
“Who knows?” Ives replied grumpily. “Who cares? These shouldn’t be any problem for a vessel our size.” He turned to the lookout. “Gimme your radio.”
Wooster, on whom the inference was not lost, waited pensively. He would rather endure a little criticism than find himself accused of wrecking the ship.