Burr seemed to know what he was thinking. He leaned close and yelled, “The Malones can’t hear us over the sound of their own engine when they’re moving! And we only move when they do!”
Carver braced his body with his stiff leg and nodded. It seemed pointless to try to scream an answer over the din.
Marty raised a forefinger and made a rapid circling motion with his hand, then he looked back and grinned like a schoolkid on a snipe hunt. He was having a grand time.
So was Burr. He was grinning, too. This was what his life was about. “We’re getting the signal now from the homing device on the packages dropped by the plane!” he shouted.
Now they didn’t really need the signal from the bumper beeper to keep from losing contact. They and the Malones were tuned to the same guiding signal emanating from the transmitter packaged with whatever had been parachuted into the swamp. The beeper on the Malone boat was being used only to track it in relation to the DEA and police boats. The signal from the swamp was drawing all three boats like a magnet; only the timing of the operation was in doubt.
The boat changed direction slightly, continued at high speed through the swamp. Whenever it skipped over dry land the thumping and jolting on the hull seemed about to tear it apart. Carver bounced constantly and would have left the seat if he hadn’t been belted in. He didn’t see how Marty, up in the bow, where the motion was more violent, could stay in the boat even with a seat belt. The DEA agent swayed and rolled with the thrashing of the bow, as if he could read the dark terrain and anticipate the boat’s reactions.
He raised a hand. The boat slowed, the bow dropped, and water began to slap at the sides of the metal hull. They began to drift. The other boat also had slowed. It moved in closer, and both idling engines were cut off.
Now the silence of the swamp closed in.
But not quite.
Carver could hear the rising, falling drone of the Malones’ airboat in front of them. Except for its warbling, it was similar to the sound of the plane that had dropped the drugs.
The drone changed pitch drastically, remained steady for a while, then died.
“They’ve picked it up!” Marty said.
Burr shouted something Carver didn’t understand, waved his arms, and both engines kicked over, then snarled to full throttle. The bow of the boat rose again and they were speeding toward a rendezvous with the unsuspecting Malone brothers and their smuggled drug shipment.
Both boats had spotlights switched on now, playing brilliant white beams over the swamp in front of them, sending reflected light dancing like wild spirits among the trees. Secrecy and silence were impossible now, and unnecessary so close to the end of the hunt. Their quarry would know they were being pursued. The airboat with Armont in it even had a siren, which howled an eerie singsong yodel as the two boats screamed across water and lowland and closed in on the Malones. The police boat pulled wide left, circling like a night predator among the trees.
And Carver could see the Malone boat ahead, in a clear pool of moonlit black water beneath huge, overhanging moss-draped limbs.
There appeared to be four men in the boat. One of them-it looked like a Malone-stood up and turned to the others. The Armont boat was almost on the other side of them now, threading its way through the trees and hanging vines. Both boats would be on them in less than a minute.
The four figures in the Malone boat milled around frantically. Carver saw the stern drop, then rise again as they tried to start the engine. Apparently whoever was at the controls was too panicky to get the boat going.
Then the Malone boat did start. Its bow rose unbelievably high, and it shot off among the vertical shadows of tree trunks, toward the deeper, denser swamp.
Carver was shoved back in the seat as his boat gave chase. Wind blossomed his shirt, and small vines and branches whipped at his arms and face. He leaned toward the middle of the boat to avoid them. A large flying insect bounced hard off his forehead; for an instant he heard it buzz past his ear as it tumbled behind into the whirring propeller.
The airboat suddenly skidded sideways over dry land, dropped jarringly back in the water, roared ahead several hundred yards, then stopped with the huge propeller barely ticking over inside its cage.
Carver was still leaning forward, his seat belt digging into his stomach. He peered ahead over the lowered bow.
The Malone boat sat dead in the water. Rather, it sat on land. The Malones had tried to breach a bar of grassy ground that was wider than they’d thought. Their boat had become lodged; the engine had died.
Armont’s boat came into sight, slowed, and drifted in closer to the Malone boat. Two of the men in the boat stood up. Carver heard the pop of gunfire.
Burr yelled and their own boat leaped forward. Marty had the big earphones off and was standing precariously in the bow, blasting away with a handgun. Like Mickey Mouse transformed into Dead-Eye Dick. Burr had a gun out too, and had tripped his safety-belt buckle and was out of his seat, scrambling toward the bow. Carver hit his own buckle, was jarred loose from where he was sitting, and rolled as low as he could between the seats. His cane was bouncing and clattering in the bottom of the boat. He wished he’d brought a gun.
The boat skewed sideways, stopped, bobbed violently. Carver’s right arm was wet from the spray of water topping the hull. More shots. And the resonating roar of the shotguns with their heavy loads.
Then shouting. Some of it in Spanish.
“Okay! Okay, you bastards!” a voice yelled. “We give up, dammit! We fuckin’ give up!”
The boat was drifting sideways. Carver poked his head up. Armont and his cops, and the DEA agents, were all in the knee-deep water, leaning forward and pushing and splashing toward the Malone boat. Two of the drug runners in the boat were standing, their hands raised. Another was slouched in a seat. The fourth lay facedown in the moon-illumined grass beside the grounded boat, with outflung arms, and what looked like a wide-brimmed straw hat upside down next to his head.
Carver cursed his bad leg. He wanted to get out of the boat, wade over, and help out, see what the hell had happened. Instead he sat and waited. He didn’t feel like having to be rescued when he and his cane got stuck in the mud.
“You okay?” Burr yelled over at him, while the agents swarmed around their suspects, frisking them, reading them their rights, tending to the man in the seat, who apparently was wounded. They were ignoring the man on the ground. Carver knew what that meant.
“Okay!” he yelled.
Goddamned cane!
The three padded and plastic-wrapped packages in the Malone boat contained raw heroin and were equipped with homing-signal miniature transmitters. Neither of the men with the Malones was Sam Cahill or Willis Eiler. They were Latins, probably Marielitos. One of them was dead. Gary Malone was shot in the shoulder, and was sullenly waiting for an ambulance back on the side road off South Loop.
Carver and Burr had tried to get the Malones to tell them where Willis and Cahill were, but nobody with anything more to lose was talking until they’d met with their attorneys. They’d been caught in this phase of the game before and knew the moves.
By midnight Gary Malone was being operated on for removal of the bullet. The body of the dead Latino had been taken away for autopsy. And Sean Malone and the surviving Latino were in jail in Solarville, awaiting transfer to federal custody and arraignment on controlled-substance charges.