Two months passed before Dahlia was sure of him, two months of listening, of watching him build and scheme and fly, of lying next to him at night.
When she was sure, she told Hafez Najeer these things and Najeer found it good.
Now, with the explosives at sea, moving toward the United States at a steady 12 knots in the freighter
Leticia,
the entire project was threatened by Captain Larmoso's treachery and perhaps by the treachery of Benjamin Muzi himself. Had Larmoso interfered with the crates at Muzi's orders? Perhaps Muzi had decided to keep the advance payment, sell Lander and Dahlia to the authorities, and peddle the plastic elsewhere. If so, they could not risk picking up the explosives on the New York dock. They must pick up the plastic at sea.
Chapter 6
The boat was fairly standard in appearance---a sleek sportfisherman 38 feet long---a "canyon runner" of the kind used by men with a lot of money and not much time. Each weekend in the season many of them blast eastward through the swells, carrying paunchy men in Bermuda shorts to the sudden deeps off the New Jersey coast where the big fish feed.
But in an age of fiberglass and aluminum boats, this one was made of wood---double planked with Philippine mahogany. It was beautifully and strongly made and it had cost a great deal. Even the superstructure was wood, but this was not noticeable because much of the brightwork had been painted over. Wood is a very poor radar reflector.
Two big turbocharged diesels were crammed into the engine room and much of the space used for dining and relaxing in ordinary craft had been sacrificed to make room for extra fuel and water. For much of the summer, the owner used it in the Caribbean, running hashish and marijuana out of Jamaica into Miami in the dark of the moon. In the winter he came north and the boat was for hire, but not to fishermen. The fee was $2,000 a day, no questions asked, plus a staggering deposit. Lander had mortgaged his house to get the deposit.
It was in a boathouse at the end of a row of deserted piers in Toms River off Barnegat Bay, fully fueled; waiting.
At 10 A.M. on November 12 Larder and Dahlia arrived at the boathouse in a rented van. A cold, drizzling rain was falling and the winter piers were deserted. Lander opened the double doors on the landward side of the boathouse and backed the van in until it was 6 feet from the stern of the big sportfisherman. Dahlia exclaimed at the sight of the boat, but Lander was busy with his checklist and paid no attention. For the next 20 minutes they loaded equipment aboard: extra coils of line, a slender mast, two long-barreled shotguns, a shotgun with the barrel sawed off to 18 inches, a high-powered rifle, a small platform lashed onto four hollow floats, charts to supplement the already well-stocked chart bin, and several neat bundles that included a lunch.
Lander lashed every object down so tightly that even if the boat had been turned upside down and shaken, nothing would have fallen out.
He flicked a switch on the boathouse wall and the big door on the water side creaked upward, admitting the gray winter light. He climbed to the flying bridge. First the port diesel roared and then the starboard, blue smoke rising in the dim boathouse. His eyes darted from gauge to gauge as the engines warmed up.
At Lander's signal, Dahlia cast off the stern lines and joined him on the flying bridge. He eased the throttles forward, the water swelling like a muscle at the stern, the exhaust ports awash and burbling, and the boat nosed slowly out into the rain.
When they had cleared Toms River, Lander and Dahlia moved to the lower control station inside the heated cabin for the run down the bay to Barnegat Inlet and the open sea. The wind was from the north, raising a light chop. They sliced through it easily, the windshield wipers slowly swiping away fine raindrops. No other boats were out that they could see. The long sandspit that protected the bay lay low in the mist off to port and on the other side they could make out a smokestack at the head of Oyster Creek.
In less than an hour they reached Barnegat Inlet. The wind had shifted to the northeast and the ground swells were building in the inlet. Lander laughed as they met the first of the big Atlantic rollers, spray bursting from the bows. They had mounted to the exposed upper control station again to run the inlet, and cold spray stung their faces.
"The waves won't be so big out there, sport," Lander said as Dahlia wiped her face with the back of her hand.
She could see that he was enjoying himself. He loved to feel the boat under him. Buoyancy had a fascination for Lander. Fluid strength, giving, pushing with support reliable as rock. He turned the wheel slowly from side to side, slightly altering the angle at which the boat met the seas, extending his kinesthetic sense to feel the changing forces on the hull. The land was falling astern now on both sides, the Barnegat Light flashing off to starboard.
They ran out of the drizzle into watery winter sunlight as they cleared the shore and, looking back, Dahlia watched the gulls wheeling, very white against the gray clouds banked behind them. Wheeling as they had above the beach at Tyre when she was a child standing in the warm sand, her feet small and brown beneath her ragged hem. She had followed too many strange corridors in Michael Lander's mind for too long. She wondered how the presence of Muhammad Fasil would change the chemistry between them, if Fasil was still alive and waiting with the explosives out there beyond the 90-fathom curve. She would have to speak with Fasil quickly. There were things that Fasil must understand before he made a fatal mistake.
When she turned back to face the sea, Lander was watching her from the helmsman's seat, one hand on the wheel. The sea air had brought color to her cheeks and her eyes were bright. The collar of her sheepskin coat was turned up around her face and her Levis were taut around her thighs as she balanced against the motion of the boat. Lander, with two big diesels beneath his hand, doing something that he did well, threw back his head and laughed and laughed again. It was a real laugh and it surprised her. She had not heard it often.
"You are a dynamite lady, you know that?" he said, wiping his eye with his knuckle.
She looked down at the deck and then raised her head again, smiling, looking into him. "Let's go get some plastic."
"Yeah," Lander said, bobbing his head. "All the plastic in the world."
He held a course of 110 degrees magnetic, a hair north of east with the compass variation, then altered it north 5 more degrees as the bell and whistle buoys off Barnegat showed him more precisely the effect of the wind. The seas were on the port bow, moderating now, and only a little spray blew back as the boat sliced through them. Somewhere out there beyond the horizon, the freighter was waiting, riding the winter sea.
They paused at mid-afternoon while Lander made a fix of their position with the radio direction finder. He did it early to avoid the distortion that would be present at sundown and he did it very carefully, taking three bearings and plotting them on his chart, noting times and distances in meticulous little figures.
As they roared on eastward toward the "X" on the chart; Dahlia made coffee in the galley to go with the sandwiches she had brought, then cleared away the counter. With small strips of adhesive tape, she fastened to the countertop a pair of surgical scissors, compress bandages, three small disposable syringes of morphine, and a single syringe of Ritalin. She laid a set of splints along the fiddle rail at the counter edge and fastened them in place with a strip of tape.
They reached the approximate rendezvous point, well beyond the northbound Barnegat-to-Ambrose sealane, an hour before sunset. Lander checked his position with the RDF and corrected, it slightly northward.
They saw the smoke first, a smudge on the horizon to the east. Then two dots under the smoke as the freighter's superstructure showed. Soon she was hull up, steaming slowly. The sun was low in the southwest, behind Lander as he ran toward the ship. It was as he had planned. He would come out of the sun to look her over, and any gunman on the ship with a telescopic sight would be dazzled by the light.
Throttled back, the sportsfisherman eased toward the scabby freighter, Lander studying her through his binoculars. As he watched, two signal flags shot up the outboard halyards on the port side. He could make out a white "X" on a blue field and, below it, a red diamond on a white field.
"M.F.," Lander read.
"That's it. Muhammad Fasil."
Forty minutes of sunlight remained. Lander decided to take advantage of it. With no other vessels in sight, it was better to risk the transfer in daylight than to take a chance on mischief from the freighter in the dark. While there was light, he and Dahlia could keep the rail of the freighter covered.
Dahlia broke out the Delta pennant. Closer and closer the boat crept, its exhaust burbling. Dahlia and Lander pulled on stocking masks.
"Big shotgun," Lander said.
She put it in his hand. He opened the windshield in front of him and laid the shotgun on the instrument panel, muzzle out on the foredeck. It was a Remington 12-gauge automatic with a long barrel and full choke, and it was loaded with 00 buckshot. Lander knew it would be impossible to fire a rifle accurately from the moving boat. He and Dahlia had gone over it many times. If Fasil had lost control of the ship and they were fired on, Lander would shoot back, blast the stern around, and run into the sun while Dahlia emptied the other long shotgun at the freighter. She would switch to the rifle when the range increased.
"Don't worry about trying to hit somebody with the boat pitching," he had told her. "Rattle enough lead around their ears and you'll suppress their fire." Then he remembered that she had more experience with small arms than he.
The freighter turned slowly and hove to with the seas nearly abeam. From 300 yards, Lander could see only three men, on her deck and a single lookout high on the bridge. One of the men ran to the signal halyard and dipped the flags once, acknowledging the Delta Lander was flying. It would have been easier to use radio, but Fasil could not be on deck and in the radio shack at the same time.
"That's him, that's Fasil in the blue cap," Dahlia said, lowering her binoculars.
When Lander was within 100 yards, Fasil spoke to the two men beside him. They swung a lifeboat davit out over the side, then stood with their hands in sight on the rail.
Lander idled his engines and scrambled aft to rig a fender board on the starboard side, then mounted to the flying bridge carrying the short shotgun.
Fasil appeared to be in control of the ship. Lander could see a revolver in his belt. He must have ordered the deck cleared except for the mate and one crewman. The rust streaks on the freighter's side glowed orange in the lowering sun as Lander brought the boat under her lee and Dahlia threw a line to the crewman. The sailor started to make it fast to a deck cleat, but Dahlia shook her head and beckoned. Then he understood and passed the line around the cleat and threw the end back.
She and Lander had rehearsed this carefully, and she quickly rigged a doubled after bowspring---a connection that could be cast off instantly from the smaller craft. With the rudder hard over, the engines held the boat's stern against the ship.
Fasil had repacked the plastic explosive in 25-pound bags. Forty-eight of them were piled on the deck beside him. The fender board scraped against the side of the freighter as the boat rose and fell on the muted seas in the lee of the ship. A ladder was flung over the
Leticia's
side.
Fasil called down to Larder, "The mate is coming down. He is not armed. He can help stow the bags."
Lander nodded and the man scrambled down the side. He obviously was trying not to look at Dahlia or Larder, sinister in their masks. Using the lifeboat davit as a miniature cargo crane, Fasil and the sailor lowered a cargo net containing the first six bags and the automatic weapons in a canvas-wrapped bundle. It was a tricky business in the lively boat to time exactly the moment to release the load from the hook, and once Lander and the mate went sprawling.
With twelve bags in the cockpit, the loading operation paused while the three in the boat passed the bags forward, stowing them in the cabin in the bow. It was all Lander could do to keep himself from ripping open a bag and looking at the stuff. It felt electric in his hands. Then came the next twelve bags and the next. The three working in the boat were wet with sweat despite the cold.
The hail from the lookout on the bridge was nearly carried away by the wind. Fasil spun around and cupped his hands behind his ears. The man was waving his arms and pointing. Fasil leaned over the rail and yelled down, "Something's coming, from that way---east. I'm going to look."
In less than 15 seconds he was on the bridge, snatching the binoculars from the frightened lookout. He was back on the deck in an instant; wrestling with the cargo net, yelling over the side.
"It's white with a stripe near the bow."
"Coast Guard," Lander said. "What's the range---how far away?"
"About 8 kilometers, he's coming fast."
"Swing it down, God dammit."
Fasil slapped the face of the crewman beside him and put the man's hands on the lifting tackle. The cargo net bulging with the last twelve bags of plastic swayed over the sea and dropped quickly, ropes squealing in the blocks. It dropped into the cockpit with a heavy thump and was quickly lashed down.
On the freighter deck, Muhammad Fasil turned to the sweating crewman. "Stand at the rail with your hands in sight." The man fixed his eyes on the horizon and appeared to be holding his breath as Fasil went over the side.
The mate standing in the cockpit could not take his eyes off Fasil. The Arab handed the man a roll of bills and pulled out his revolver, touching the muzzle to the man's upper lip. "You have done well. Silence and health are one. Do you understand me?"
The man wanted to nod, but was prevented by the pistol under his nose.
"Go in peace."
The man went up the ladder as rapidly as an ape. Dahlia was casting off the bowsprit.
While this was going on, Lander looked almost pensive. He had demanded from his mind a projection of possibilities based on all he knew.