Gates of Hades (2 page)

Rumpmiller could not have explained why he used hand motions rather than verbal orders to direct his armed fiveman party to split up and search the ship.

Minutes later, Chief Petty Officer Wilson was back, his face white. “Sir, you'd better see this.”

“What . . .”

But Wilson had already turned his back to lead the way, and the light breeze snatched the words into the emptiness of the Pacific.

At first, Rumpmiller thought his original hypothesis about vodka had been correct; in dealing with Russian seamen, it usually was. The men lying in a lake of drying blood, all eight of them, seemed to have two mouths, the lower one set in a grin.

Acid bile rose in his throat as he realized each man had had his throat cut.

For an instant, Rumpmiller thought he was going to be sick. Somehow he managed to swallow, hoping he was keeping his composure in front of the petty officer. “Chief, gather the boarding party and search every inch of the ship. Shoot anyone who even looks unfriendly.”

The petty officer started to turn, stopped, and asked, “Even the holds, sir?”

Rumpmiller wasn't about to have his men smelling like overripe fish if he could avoid it. “No, secure the holds. Nothing gets in or out. They can be searched when the ship is towed to port.”

Rumpmiller could hear feet running across the steel deck as Wilson's foghorn voice bellowed orders. He swallowed again and felt a little better as he looked around the
room. A mess area, he surmised, since a small galley was adjacent. The plastic tabletop was pocked with cigarette burns from overflowing ashtrays. A number of glasses rolled across the floor as the ship rocked back and forth. He had no idea what the ship's full complement would be, but he knew these trawlers were built for a maximum of mechanization and a minimum of manpower. It was possible the whole crew was right here, lying in sticky puddles of their own life fluids.

He shook his head.

Impossible.

If all the crew were here, then who had manned the ship while its crew was being slaughtered like so much beef? Who had sent the SOS; who had put down the boarding ladder?

He stepped over the coaming into the galley. Eight plates were stacked in the stainless-steel sink. A nearly empty bottle stood nearby. He didn't need to read the Cyrillic label to tell him at least part of his original premise was true.

For the first time, he noted the smell of something burned, an odor over the metallic smell of drying blood. Not marijuana. He'd smelled enough of that during his stint on the East Coast, where years ago it had not been uncommon to encounter armadas of bales of cannabis either jettisoned by a pursued dope runner or waiting to be picked up by one. The coast guard had burned enough of the contraband that he would never forget the scent.

Which this wasn't.

More like sulfur, maybe struck matches. Although it was unlikely, the smell was strongest near what looked like a small rock garden in one corner, round white stones surrounded by a pair of very ugly plants. Why would a fishing trawler carry rocks and spindly plants? Maybe the captain wanted it there. Whatever, the stones and plants were not the problem at hand.

Nothing else caught his attention, nothing that might indicate how or why these men were dead and the ship left abandoned.

The question brought on a queasiness worse than he had felt when he saw the bodies. It was as if the killer or killers had wanted the ship and its macabre cargo to be found, wanted to make sure the world noted his or their handiwork.

A message of some sort?

If so, sending the distress signal and leaving the boarding ladder made a certain sick sense.

Very sick.

Even so, that didn't answer other questions, like how had eight seamen been overcome with not even a struggle? He saw no defensive wounds.

Any way he looked at it, the problem would not be Rumpmiller's for long—no longer than it took to radio Dutch Harbor.

Atlanta Journal Constitution,
August 16

Princess Juliana International Airport
Philipsburg, St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles
December 20

Williford Watkins liked Americans. Were it not for Americans, he would have to live solely on what he got for working in the tower at the island's airport, a salary that never would have paid for the used twenty-eight-foot sport fisherman in which he took American tourists diving, snorkeling, and fishing for as much as a thousand dollars a day. His job, the one in the tower, consisted of eight tedious hours five days a week, doing little more than making sure the runway was clear of aircraft and telling the Air France or Lufthansa pilots, “Cleared to land.”

The boring nature of his job was why he let his curiosity take hold when that particular Gulfstream IV landed. According to the routing slip Williford picked up from the rack, the plane was Swiss, but the numbers painted on the tail were unlike any Swiss registration he had ever seen.

Since his shift was over, or near enough by island standards, he walked downstairs and over to the customs and immigration section of the terminal. He had a charter at
the dock at Marigot, over on the French side of the island, but the fish weren't going anywhere and the anglers could wait. This was, after all, the Caribbean, where time was approximate at best.

The two pilots from the Gulfstream were filing their general declarations, the papers every country of entry required that listed passengers, cargo, and point of departure. His curiosity stirred once again when he noted there was only one passenger, a swarthy man with angry eyes. The dark man glared at Williford's dreadlocks and Bob Marley T-shirt. Williford smiled at him, just the way the tourism bureau said to do to all white folks. The dark man turned away.

That was unusual, too.
Most mon come to St. Maarten, they be happy, not angry.
The charter could wait a little longer.

Williford went outside into the brilliant sunshine of another day in paradise. His sunglasses, cooled by the aggressive air-conditioning inside, fogged over in the humid heat. The parking lot where he had left the Samurai he had bought with the money from his American charter customers was to his right. He turned left toward the flight operations building.

After exchanging some good-natured insults with the men in the single room, he found a copy of
World Aircraft Registrations,
thumbed through the country-by-country directory, and turned to Switzerland. He had been right: the Gulfstream's registration was not listed. Putting the heavy volume on a table, he tried the directory by registration letters. Fortunately, the United States was the only nation that had so many aircraft it used numbers instead of letters.

It took him only a few minutes to find out that the Gulf-stream, or at least its numbers, were Syrian.

Williford checked his watch. His charter customers weren't going to be happy, but he couldn't quit now. Crossing the room, he picked up a telephone connected to the small air-traffic control center located in the base of the tower he had just left.

“Freddy,” he said when a familiar voice came on the line, “th' Gulfstream you mons worked a few minutes ago; where it come from?”

What he heard made his curiosity sit up and take notice. The plane had been handed off from San Juan Center, the air-traffic control facility for high-altitude traffic in this part of the Caribbean, but it had
not
been handed off in sequence from London to Greenland to New York to Miami centers, the normal sequence for flights from Europe. Instead, it had commenced the transatlantic part of its journey with Tenerife Center in the Canary Islands. Williford wasn't sure what part of the Caribbean those islands occupied, but he did know something was crazy as a marlin with its bill stuck in a boat hull.

There was something he had read in the men's room while he was taking a break a few weeks ago, something about the Americans wanting to know about suspicious flights. He supposed they wanted to further their endless (and, in Williford's opinion, hopeless) effort against the drugs that journeyed northbound in volumes unequaled by tropical fruit. Maybe if he called the Americans, they could somehow send him charter business six months from now, in the summer, when things got slack.

He dialed the number of Miami Center.

The next morning, Williford figured the Americans had sent at least one charter, lack of summer notwithstanding. Except the four men who knocked on his door at sunup were already sweating in suits and ties.

“Can't go now, mon,” Williford said. “Can't go till afta work.”

One of the men gave him a smile with no humor in it. “We'll only be a minute, Mr. Watkins. You'll be on your way in no time. We need your help.”

From the looks of them, four large men whose wilting suits did little to conceal muscle, they didn't need help from anyone. They also didn't look like the kind who
would go away just to make sure a man got to work on time.

Williford really hadn't intended for them to come into his two-room cottage, not till his wife, Caroline, could get the place cleaned up a little, but they pushed right past him into the half of the house that served as a living room.

One of the men was carrying a book of photos. He sat in Williford's easy chair, the only upholstered one in the house, and opened the book. “We'd like you to take a look. . . .”

Caroline emerged from behind the sheet that divided off the bedroom and gave Williford a look that could have burned a hole in the linen before she left without a word on her way to her job at Mullet Bay, one of the resorts along the beach. She didn't like to have company in the house before she was dressed.

The four men in suits seemed not to notice as the one with the book continued. “See if any of these men are the passenger on that Gulfstream.”

And he was. An unmistakable likeness was on the second page. Williford pointed, and all four of his visitors nodded as though sharing a secret.

“Who he be?” Williford naturally wanted to know.

“A man we got business with,” the man with the book said, and gave another smile, one that reminded Williford of a shark approaching a wounded fish.

 

 

Washington, D.C.

The White House, Oval Office at the same time

In the opinion of Sam Hoffman, senior senator from Georgia, the president's plan was irrational, ill-considered, and utter rubbish. Worse, it would be seen for what it was: an effort to appease the opposition. Still worse, it could cost the party support from its most generous constituency.

It wasn't all the president's fault his poll numbers were now pushing Nixon's. The people screaming the loudest about gasoline prices were largely the same ones who had stridently opposed the building of new refineries, expanded drilling in Alaska, or nuclear power. Those demanding “affordable housing” howled when he permitted limited cutting in national forests to increase the supply of wood, the backbone of the home-building industry.

The list was nearly endless.

Actually, the president was well intentioned. A Vietnam veteran who had never even been mentioned in the same breath as any scandal, he had served his state and his country for over thirty years in every capacity, from state school superintendent to governor, from Congress to the
White House. Married for over forty years, church elder. The all-American Mr. Clean who was just now learning that, even as president, he really couldn't please everybody, a fact that disappointed him no end.

But the president's plan was far too transparent to jack a feather off the floor, let alone the president's abysmal polls.

Senator Sam, as he liked to be called by his constituents, was always awed by the White House. Scant places in America contained more history—history that few in Washington understood, much less read. In this town, history was what had been said last night by the talking heads on CNN. The president was a prime example. Seated behind the desk on which Lincoln had supposedly signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the man could give you the current poll numbers to two decimal points, but his knowledge of the past was a blank slate. Appeasing opposite interests didn't work.

Never had, never would.

Like all politicians, he was much more interested in the future.

Specifically, his future.

“I need your help on this, Sam,” the president said. “As chairman of the Environmental Study Committee, your endorsement of the plan is essential if we're going to get bipartisan support.”

Sam chose to ignore the
we,
which was either the royal plural or included him in a plan he viewed as both deceptive and useless. Neither was a pleasant possibility.