“Annabelle’s fine,” Jason said quickly.
“Jase, I’m afraid of this, I really am. We really might sink out there if those winds—”
“You won’t sink. Stop worrying.” He glanced toward the waiting truck.
“And even if this part of it works... well, Jase, with a hurricane blowing—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jason said.
There was a note of finality in his voice. He lifted his arm and again looked at his wristwatch. “They’re waiting for me,” he said. “It’s almost three.” He paused. “Do you know what time Alex is coming aboard?”
“Yes. Five-thirty.”
“You know what time you’re supposed to shove off, right?”
“Dawn,” Randy said.
“If everything goes as planned, we’ll radio the boat by eight-thirty, nine o’clock. If you don’t hear from us by ten at the very latest, you turn around and head back. Is that clear?”
“I know the plan,” Randy said wearily. “But I wish...”
Jason extended his hand. “Good luck,” he said.
Randy took it. For a moment the men stood facing each other with their hands in each other’s grip. They could not see clearly in the dark, but something unspoken passed between them. They knew what they were about to attempt, they knew the chances they were about to take, they knew the possible consequences.
“Good luck,” Randy whispered.
Jason smiled briefly, and then nodded and dropped Randy’s hand and walked quickly toward the waiting truck. From inside the truck a pair of hands threw back the tarpaulin flap. Another pair of hands reached down to help Jason up. A voice said something that was unintelligible to Randy. The truck ground into gear and then moved forward. Randy watched its disappearing tail lights. He looked at his watch. It was 3 A.M.
He sighed, wiped his face, and went back aboard the boat.
The Golden Fleece was a custom-built cruiser with her name lettered in a semicircle across her transom, together with the name of her home port: NEW ORLEANS, LA. She was a good-looking boat, newly painted maroon and white and black, the maroon covering the solid longleaf yellow pine of her bottom, the white marking her waterline, the black painted over her African mahogany topside. She had been designed for a British naval officer in the Bahamas during 1953, costing him £3,500 to build, and had been sold only three months ago to Jason Trench for $4,300. She was a good, steady offshore boat, propelled by twin, eight-cylinder, 185-horsepower engines, and capable of a top speed of thirty knots. Randy walked across the open cockpit, listening to the howling wind with misgivings, and then went into the wheelhouse and past the sink and icebox to where the charts were stowed overhead, near the Primus stove. He found the chart he wanted, and then went to the starboard side, unrolling the chart on the flat surface to the right of the binnacle. He flicked on the overhead light in the wheel-house and then glanced below to see if Annabelle had gone to bed yet. She was already asleep in the lower berth on the port side, one of four that hung two abreast on either bulkhead. He watched her for a moment. She was covered with a blanket, and the blanket rose and fell steadily with her even breathing. He wondered how she could sleep at a time like this, and then turned away and looked down at the chart, studying it nervously for perhaps the hundredth time.
On the chart, Ocho Puertos Key resembled nothing so much as a loin lamb chop, its eye tilted to the northeast, its tail straggling down toward Key West. For Randy, the image was instantly transformed into a more easily remembered one of sand and coral, of ocean rolling in against an essentially isolated shore. The drive down from Key Largo was sixty-two miles over a road that spanned the water skewer-straight, piercing island after island — sky, ocean, and bay blending into an incredibly open vista on either side of the highway. Marathon was forty-nine miles from Key Largo, and Knight Key was just beyond it. The Seven Mile Bridge began there, a two-lane span built across the open water and running, as its name made clear, for seven miles to Little Duck Key at the western end of the bridge. There were markers on all the keys leading to Ocho Puertos, each designating the name of the island, each passed in a wink, a network of short bridges connecting uninhabited Little Duck to uninhabited Missouri, uninhabited Ohio, Bahia Honda with its single house on the eastern end — and then the thousand-foot bridge and Ocho Puertos with a fixed bridge on its western end.
Offshore, the chart showed Hawk Channel and beyond that the Florida Reef.
Later today Alex Witten would be navigating through that reef and into that channel. If everything went the way Jason anticipated, they
If.
If, of course, Hurricane Flora did not roar into Miami and the keys sometime today or tomorrow. And if Annabelle Trench, who was eight months pregnant and carrying her baby like a mountain waiting to erupt, if Annabelle did not get sicker than hell in high seas and gale-force winds, and vomit or deliver or some damn thing long before their rendezvous with Jason on Ocho Puertos.
If.
Randy stowed the chart and snapped out the light. He went below and crawled into his bunk. Two feet away from him, he could hear Annabelle’s gentle breathing, and above that and beyond it, the high keening of the wind.
Gale force, he thought.
Alex would be coming aboard at five-thirty. They would put out to sea at dawn. He sighed, rolled over, and tried to get a little sleep before then.
She heard Randy as he came below, and she longed for a moment to talk to him, to voice her doubts about what they were doing and about to do, but then she felt this would be unfair to her husband; she should not express any fears that might later undermine his authority. She turned her head toward the bulkhead. The berth was tight and cramped, her baby kicked inside her, and she grunted and listened to the wind, and wondered where the truck was now. She should have stopped Jason. She should have thought of the right thing to say there on the dock ten minutes ago.
She should have thought of the right thing to say in New York City in the summer of 1961, when he first told her of the plan that had been taking shape in his mind for the better part of three months. He had been turning it over and over, he said, searching for a way to succeed where others had only failed before, and then recognizing that the only hope for success lay in complete failure. They were living on Second Avenue at the time, in a two-room apartment near Houston Street, and all the windows were open because it was one of the hottest days of the year; his voice had automatically lowered as he outlined the plan to her.
“There are two things a person can do, it seems to me,” he had said. “He can sit back and let others shape his destiny, he can let everybody walk all over him and not worry about a thing until the day that bomb falls — that’s one of the things he can do. Right, Annabelle?”
“I suppose so, Jason. But we do have a government, you know. We do have—”
“Why yes, certainly we have a government! That’s my whole point, honey! It’s the government I’m trying to preserve. That’s the whole point.”
“I don’t think I understand you, Jason.”
“Honey, it’s a matter of knowing what this country wants, and knowing how to help this country get what it wants.”
“How do you know what this country wants?”
“If you read the papers, if you read between the lines, you know exactly what it is we want. But more to the point, you know exactly what it is we do not want.”