As the Olds’s hood topped the crest of the rise and then dropped, Carver saw four cars parked close to each other near what looked like a broken section of fence. Two of the cars bore Solarville Police markings. There was a knot of men standing by the cars. Carver recognized Alex Burr, the cop Rogers, who had retrieved his cane from the smoked motel room, and the aggressively paunchy form of Chief Armont.
When he parked the Olds by one of the police cars and got out, he could see the dark, humped shapes of two airboats. What had appeared to be broken fence was part of a decrepit dock; the two boats were moored to it. Though Carver could hear water lapping, the airboats weren’t bobbing. They were sitting in the kind of shallow water they were made to skim.
Burr said hello to Carver and introduced him to two other men who were DEA agents. Armont nodded to Carver. He was wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeved blue shirt. His two men were in uniform. The DEA agents, including Burr, wore dark pants and black windbreakers with DEA lettered on their backs in foot-tall orange letters. The better to know friend from enemy if the action got heated. And heated action seemed to be anticipated: two of the agents were carrying semi-automatic shotguns as well as the handguns Carver was sure were concealed beneath the windbreakers.
Everyone except Burr seemed calm. He was in control, of himself and the operation, but it was easy to see that his adrenaline was pumping. There was a stiffness to his features and his single eye moved rapidly. When he spoke, tension like taut, vibrating wire grated in his voice. “Come on,” he said to Carver in his DEA way. “I’ll explain as we go.”
Carver didn’t ask where they were going. He limped to the nearest airboat, almost stumbling as his cane sank into the soft ground.
“Need some help?” Burr asked, trying to hurry him.
Carver declined, and almost dropped his cane as he scrambled into the boat and sat next to Burr. The boats were aluminum, about twenty feet long, with the familiar wide propellers in high cages mounted on the stern, well out of the water. They had everything to make them aircraft except wings. Armont, along with one of the DEA agents and the two uniformed cops, got in the other airboat. That boat was older and sat higher in the water. Carver peered at the two boat trailers half concealed in the reeds but couldn’t make out the license plates. He guessed the newer boat he and Burr were in was a DEA boat, the other belonged or was on loan to the Solarville police. A DEA agent sat behind the low windscreen in front of Carver. Up in the bow, a boyish blond agent with a pug nose, whom Burr had introduced as Marty something or other, was hunched over what looked like a small radio and was wearing bulky earphones that lent him a curiously mouselike appearance. Marty made a circular motion with his right arm, then pointed toward the swamp.
Lines were unlooped from the moorings, and the two air-boats came alive with sputtering roars and hunkered lower in the water. Carver could feel the powerful vibration shake the boat, run up his back from the base of his spine. The seats they were sitting in were hard, with straight backrests, bolted to the standard bench-type seats built into the boat.
“Better strap yourself in,” Burr said.
That seemed like sound advice. Carver felt around, found a safety belt, and fastened it, yanking it hard a few times to make sure the buckle had caught. He stuck his stiff leg out in front of him to get as comfortable as possible.
The throbbing rumble of the engines rose, and the boat Carver was in led the way into the dark swamp. Carver was aware of thick saw grass and reeds bending and parting in front of and under the boat. Now and then there was a rough bounce and hard vibration beneath the hull as they briefly skimmed over land rather than water. They were only going about fifteen miles per hour. The propeller that drove them forward made a muted beating sound like a helicopter rotor, barely audible beneath the roar of the converted aircraft engine that powered it.
Marty raised his arm again in a silent signal and held it steady.
The engines of both boats died, and they were drifting in a shadowed clearing, surrounded by the black trunks of partly submerged trees. Moonlight silhouetted the branches and the elegantly drooping Spanish moss and vines. Some of the vines dangled all the way down into the water. Carver couldn’t see much on either side; the reeds they were near were taller than the boat.
The boats bobbed silently in softly lapping water. No one in either of them talked for a few minutes, until Burr leaned close and said to Carver, “The Malone brothers are out there somewhere in their airboat.”
“How do you know?” Carver asked.
“We hid a bumper beeper on their boat. Kept a man on the signal, and when they went into the swamp, we knew about it.”
A bumper beeper was nothing more than a tiny radio transmitter that emitted a steady pulsing signal. They were magnetic and could be affixed to the bumper, or any other metal part of a car, and a listener tuned to the beeper’s frequency could follow the car, track it from a distance, unobserved. No reason it couldn’t work with a boat.
“The Malone boat is sitting motionless now,” Burr said. “Just like us. We’re about a quarter of a mile from them. They’re waiting for something, and we’re waiting right along with them.”
“You think they’re waiting for a drug drop?” Carver asked.
“They’re not out here fishing,” Burr said. “When they meet another boat or go to pick up anything dropped from a plane, we’re going to be there right afterward and see what we can find on them, who they’re dealing with.”
Carver wondered if Willis Eiler or Sam Cahill might be out in the swamp with the Malone brothers. “Are they alone?”
Burr slapped a mosquito. “No way to know. All we’ve got is a radio signal that gives us direction and distance.”
Carver was getting uncomfortable. He shifted position and was warned to move around as little as possible. Aluminum boats made noise when they were bumped, and sound carried far on the water. The frogs in the area were getting used to the boats’ presence now and started croaking again, providing a counterpoint to the hum of insects.
The swamp had accepted them, if grudgingly. Persistent mosquitoes reminded Carver of how grudgingly.
After about ten minutes, Burr stood up and leaned forward. He touched his forefinger to his lips in a gesture for complete silence, then he pointed skyward.
Carver could hear it now: the distant drone of a small plane. The noise seemed to be to the south, moving nearer. He tried to find the plane’s running lights but couldn’t. Either it was flying without lights or the canopy of moss-and-vine-draped trees completely blocked the view.
When the drone of the plane was nearer, it suddenly became much louder, as if the craft had dropped to a lower altitude.
Then it became fainter again, began to fade. The plane was climbing and flying away from them now.
Marty of the huge headphones said with urgency in his voice, “They’re moving!” The Malone brothers were on the prowl. Marty pointed out the direction to the agent at the controls.
The motors of both boats roared to life again, and they were off at high speed in the direction the agent had pointed. The police boat was behind and about a hundred yards to the left, keeping pace with them like a dark shadow of their boat.
The agent manning the controls was good and appeared to know the territory. The roaring boat vibrated, veered to miss trees by fractions of inches, shot through fields of reeds and tall saw grass that bent and snapped and whipped at Carver’s exposed right arm. The wind forced him to squint as they skimmed the water and sometimes the land as they sped through the moonlit swamp. He glanced behind them; the boat with Armont in it was still back there, a dark specter flitting among the partly submerged tree trunks and foliage. Neither boat was running with lights, which struck Carver as strange considering all the noise they were making.