About fifteen minutes after they had arrived, the troopers found the drunken man and woman in the back of the bait and tackle shop.
“My name is Willy,” the man said. “This here is my girl Ginny.”
“I never saw him before in my life,” the woman said.
“We got some questions to ask you, Willy,” one of the troopers said.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like where all your friends ran off to.”
“I don’t have to tell you nothing,” Willy said.
The trooper smiled. “Sure,” he said. “But we think you will.”
About ten minutes past dawn on Monday morning, October seventh, the U.S.S. Bunt radioed Miami to say it had recovered some additional material from the water.
“Only thing we can figure,” the Bunt reported, “is that the boat was heading for Haiti.”
“Which boat?”
“The one the Merc hit.”
“Oh, really? How do you get that?”
“Well, this crate we fished out of the water was loaded with pamphlets.”
“What kind of pamphlets?”
“Communist stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“Communist propaganda. It’s in French — that’s what they speak in Haiti, you know — but one of our men translated it for us. It’s all about Duvalier, the dictator down there, and how the people should rise up against him the way the Cubans rose up against Batista, and how they would be helped with arms and explosives and food and whatever else they needed. You should read this stuff. It’s wild, believe me.”
“Just the Merc’s luck, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“To run into a bunch of Communist fanatics,” Radio Miami said.
Acknowledgments
While simultaneously absolving them of any blame for inadvertent errors I may have made, I would like to thank the following gracious and helpful people for the valuable information they supplied to me during the writing of this noveclass="underline"
Mr. Gordon E. Dunn, Chief Tropical Meteorologist of the United States Weather Bureau in Miami; Miss Geraldine B. Kamp of the Miami-Dade County Chamber of Commerce; Mr. L. R. Verchereau of the Lower Keys Chamber of Commerce; Mrs. Tom Cadenhead of the Upper Keys Chamber of Commerce; Mrs. Gloria Strassner of the Key West Chamber of Commerce; Mrs. Frank Malone of the Key West Garden Club; Mr. Michael E. Hart of the Chris-Craft Corporation; Mr. Robert Wacker, Jr., of the American Cyanamid Company; Mr. Daniel Mountin of the National Rifle Association; Mr. J. Fuller of the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company; Capt. W. K. Thompson, Jr., of the United States Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington; Lt. George Mitchell and Lt. Bobby Wilks of the Coast Guard Air Station at Floyd Bennett Field; Lt. J. C. Goldthorpe of the Third Coast Guard District...
...and especially, for their untiring patience and willingness to answer the hundreds of questions I put to them:
Lt. (jg) C. L. Larance of the Seventh Coast Guard District in Miami, and...
Lt. Commander Rudy Roberts of the Third Coast Guard District in New York.
EMcB