The civilian looked up with a tired smile to mute his earlier words. 'Petty Officer Oreza, smart as you are, you ought to be an officer.'
'If I'm so smart, how come we missed our friend last night?'
That guy we saw around dawn?'
'Kelly? Ex-Navy chief, solid guy.'
'Kinda young for a chief, isn't he?' English asked, looking at a not very good photo the spotlight had made possible He was new at the station.
'It came along with a Navy Cross,' Oreza explained.
The civilian looked up. 'So, you wouldn't think -'
'Not a chance in hell.'
The civilian shook his head. He paused for a moment, then headed off to the bunk room. They'd be going out again before sunset, and he'd need the sack time.
'So how was it?' English asked after the man left the room.
'That guy is shipping a lot of gear, Cap'n.' As a station commander, English was entitled to the title, all the more so that he let Portagee run his boat his way. 'Sure as hell he doesn't sleep much.'
'He's going to be with us for a while, on and off, and I want yon to handle it.'
Oreza tapped the chart with a pencil. 'I still say this would be a perfect place to keep watch from, and I know we can trust the guy.'
'The man says no.'
'The man ain't no seaman, Mr English. I don't mind when the guy tells me what to do, but he don't know enough to tell me how to do it.' Oreza circled the spot on the chart.
'I don't like this.'
'You don't have to like it,' the taller man said. He unfolded his pocket knife and slit the heavy paper to reveal a plastic container of white powder. 'A few hours' work and we turn three hundred thousand. Something wrong with that, or am I missin' something?'
'And this is just the start,' the third man said.
'What do we do with the boat?' asked the man with the scruples.
The tall one looked up from what he was doing. 'You get rid of that sail?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, we can stash the boat... but probably smarter to scuttle. Yeah, that's what we'll do.'
'And Angelo?' All three looked over to where the man was lying, unconscious still, and bleeding.
'I guess we scuttle him, too,' the tall one observed without much in the way of emotion. 'Right here ought to be fine.'
'Maybe two weeks, there won't be nothin' left. Lots of critters out there.' The third one waved outside at the tidal wetlands.
'See how easy it is? No boat, no Angelo, no risk, and three hundred thousand bucks. I mean, how much more do you expect, Eddie?'
'His friends still ain't gonna like it.' The comment came more from a contrarian disposition than moral conviction.
'What friends?' Tony asked without looking. 'He ratted, didn't he? How many friends does a rat have?'
Eddie bent to the logic of the situation and walked over to Angelo's unconscious form. The blood was still pumping out of the many abrasions, and the chest was moving slowly as he tried to breathe. It was time to put an end to that. Eddie knew it; he'd merely been trying to delay the inevitable. He pulled a small.22 automatic from his pocket, placed it to the back of Angelo's skull, and fired once. The body spasmed, then went slack. Eddie set his gun aside and dragged the body outside, leaving Henry and his friend to do the important stuff. They'd brought some fish netting, which he wrapped around the body before dumping it in the water behind their small motorboat. A cautious man, Eddie looked around, but there wasn't much danger of intruders here. He motored off until he found a likely spot a few hundred yards off, then stopped and drifted while he lifted a few concrete blocks from the boat and tied them to the netting. Six were enough to sink Angelo about eight feet to the bottom. The water was pretty clear here, and that worried Eddie a little until he saw all the crabs. Angelo would be gone in less than two weeks. It was a great improvement over the way they usually did business, something to remember for the future. Disposing of the little sailboat would be harder. He'd have to find a deeper spot, but he had all day to think about it.
Kelly altered course to starboard to avoid a gaggle of sports craft. The island was visible now, about five miles ahead. Not much to look at, just a low bump on the horizon, not even a tree, but it was his and it was as private as a man could wish. About the only bad news was the miserable TV reception.
Battery Island had a long and undistinguished history. Its current name, more ironic than appropriate, had come in the early nineteenth century, when some enterprising militiaman had decided to place a small gun battery there to guard a narrow spot in the Chesapeake Bay against the British, who were sailing towards Washington, DC, to punish the new nation that had been so ill-advised as to challenge the power of the world's foremost navy. One British squadron commander had taken note of a few harmless puffs of smoke on the island, and, probably with more amusement than malice, had taken one ship within gun range and let loose a few salvos from the long guns on his lower deck. The citizen soldiers manning the battery hadn't needed much encouragement to make a run for their rowboats and bustle to the mainland, and shortly thereafter a landing party of Jack Tars and a few Royal Marines had rowed ashore in a pinnace to drive nails into the touch holes, which was what 'spiking guns' meant. After this brief diversion, the British had continued their leisurely sail up the Patuxent River, from which their army had walked to Washington and back, having forced Dolly Madison to evacuate the White House. The British campaign had next headed to Baltimore, where a somewhat different outcome resulted.
Battery Island, under reluctant federal ownership, became an embarrassing footnote to a singularly useless war. Without so much as a caretaker to look after the earthen emplacements, weeds overtook the island, and so things had remained for nearly a hundred years.
With 1917 came America 's first real foreign war, and America 's navy, suddenly faced with the U-boat menace, needed a sheltered place to test its guns. Battery Island seemed ideal, only a few steaming hours from Norfolk, and so for several months in the fall of that year, 12- and 14-inch battleship rifles had crashed and thundered, blasting nearly a third of the island below mean low water and greatly annoying the migratory birds, who'd long since realized that no hunters ever shot at them from the place. About the only new thing that happened was the scuttling of over a hundred World War I-built cargo ships a few miles to the south, and these, soon overgrown with weeds, rapidly took on the appearance of islands themselves.
A new war and new weapons had brought the sleepy island back to life. The nearby naval air station needed a place for pilots to test weapons. The happy coincidence of the location of Battery Island and the scuttled ships from World War I had made for an instant bombing range. As a result, three massive concrete observation bunkers were built, from which officers could observe TBFs and SB2C bombers practicing runs on targets that looked like ship-shaped islands - and pulverizing quite a few of them until one bomb hung on the rack just long enough to obliterate one of the bunkers, thankfully empty. The site of the destroyed bunker had been cleared in the name of tidiness, and the island converted to a rescue station, from which a crashboat might respond to an aircraft accident. That had required building a concrete quay and boathouse and refurbishment of the two remaining bunkers. All in all, the island had served the local economy, if not the federal budget, well, until the advent of helicopters made crashboats unnecessary, and the island had been declared surplus. And so the island remained unnoticed on a register of unwanted federal property until Kelly had managed to acquire a lease.
Pam leaned back on her blanket as they approached, basting in the warm sun beneath a thick coating of suntan lotion. She didn't have a swimsuit, and wore only a bra and panties. It didn't offend Kelly, but the impropriety of it was vaguely disturbing for no reason that stood up to logical analysis. In any case, his current job was driving his boat. Further contemplation of her body could wait, he told himself about every minute, when his eyes darted that way to make sure she was still there.