Operation Fireball (10 page)

We both straightened self-consciously. “What’s gonna happen to ol’ Slater now?” Wilson asked uneasily.

“If he weren’t absolutely necessary to us, I’d let him rot in the Gitmo brig,” Erikson said angrily. “The chief gunner’s mate handles disciplinary problems on a ship this size. Those were two of his men, muscled-up ammunition handlers, probably, who lugged Slater away. They’ll throw him into the food locker, since the destroyer has no brig as such, and if he gives them a hard time, they’ll handcuff him to a stanchion.”

Erikson looked at me. “Getting rid of that bottle really helped. If they figure Slater as blowing his stack rather than liquored up, there’s less chance his seabag will be confiscated. The Cuban uniforms aren’t in his bag, but there’s enough of an unexplainable nature to keep us answering questions for the next forty-five years.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Slater will be confined in the food locker for the balance of this cruise,” Erikson said in the tone of a man thinking out loud. “And I don’t want either of you to try to see him. Let him sweat it out. Under normal procedure, he’ll be transferred from the ship to the Gitmo brig under armed guard. The trouble is that once he’s in custody on the base, only a military court can move him out.”

Erikson frowned, considering. “If he’d taken a swing at me, I could elect not to press charges. The minute he laid a hand on the chief, though, he scuttled himself. What I believe I’ll do is ask the chief to let me be the accuser. I’ll agree to press charges, but if this destroyer doesn’t remain more than overnight at Gitmo, I can always change my mind and decide to drop the charges after it sails. Then I might be able to get Slater released to my custody.”

“Goddamn that knothead,” Wilson muttered. “Four million bucks may be down the drain over a swig of rotgut whiskey.”

“There’s one good thing that will come of this,” Erikson added. “No one will bother you two now. No ship’s personnel is going to become too chummy with a couple of sailors whose buddy clobbered their chief.”

It turned out that Erikson was right about that.

Wilson and I could have been a pair of rivets in a bulkhead for all the attention we received from the crew. Even at mess we sat alone at one end of a long table. It was as though we had a disease. It might have been my nerves, but the hearty meal tasted like different shapes and colors of pablum.

All except the coffee.

It’s true what they say about Navy coffee.

It was the best I’d had in years.

• • •

We went back to the crew’s quarters after the meal and I stretched out on a bunk. Wilson took the one above mine. The compartment was dimly lighted by only a couple of bare bulbs protected by heavy-gauge wire. I had heard the crew talking about going to watch a movie on another part of the ship. There were just a couple of sailors in the sleeping quarters with us, and they paid no attention.

I couldn’t sleep, although I felt tired. The movement of the sea had picked up after dark. The gentle rocking at sunset had increased to a constant undulation. I was trying to shake off my queasy stomach and make a serious effort at sacking out when there were footsteps on the ladder and a flashlight shined in my face. “Commander wants to see you,” the messenger announced.

He prodded Wilson with the flashlight and roused him with the same words. Chico had been sleeping soundly, and he hit the steel deck sleepily. “What’s it about?” he asked.

“How long have you swabs been out of boot camp?” the sailor sneered. “Follow me.” I remembered one of Erikson’s dictums. In the military don’t ask questions.

We climbed the ladder with the sailor in the lead. On deck the wind hit me in the face. It was blowing hard enough to force its way down my throat. The ship’s motion was much more pronounced on deck, and I had to hold on to a handrail as I made my way along the deck behind the messenger. The wind carried to us the hissing sound of the knifelike bow of the destroyer ramming its way through the running sea. Where the moon should have been there was only an obscure light behind heavy cloud cover.

The guide tugged open a heavy steel door and we went down a narrow passage until he stopped in front of a wooden cabin door. He knocked sharply twice. “Come in!” Erikson’s voice said.

I was relieved to hear that it was Erikson. When the messenger said “commander,” I thought he meant the ship’s commander. Wilson and I entered the cabin. The messenger remained outside. With the cabin door closed, there was barely enough room for us to stand in front of a small desk behind which Erikson sat. “At ease, men!” he said in a strong voice. I realized that it was pitched to carry out into the passageway. If Wilson had been any more at ease, he’d have fallen over sideways. We both should have been standing at ramrod-stiff attention.

“I’m supposed to be questioning you about the fracas on deck with Slater,” Erikson said quietly. “Making up my mind whether I want to press charges. An investigating officer has to be appointed, so if I, as a lieutenant commander, want to instigate proceedings, it will have to be a man of higher rank than if Chief McMillan puts the bee on Slater.”

Wilson hitched a leg onto a corner of Erikson’s desk. “Don’t you think—” he began, then became aware that Erikson was glaring at the leg. Wilson slowly removed it. Erikson was playing the game for all it was worth, but after what had happened, I could hardly blame him. “It’d be good if you’re the one to gig Slater,” Wilson began over again. “That way it’ll give you a chance to drop the charges later an’ have Slater released to you.”

“There are two problems,” Erikson answered. “First, I have to convince the chief to let me press the charges. I don’t think that will be too difficult. McMillan is burned up enough at Slater for making him look foolish in front of the crew that he wants the book thrown at him. The chief is apt to think I’m better able to lower the boom.”

“You said there were two problems,” I mentioned.

Erikson grimaced. “The plan would work if the destroyer were going to tie up at Gitmo only overnight. At dinner tonight, though, the skipper told me they’ll be anchored there for a week.”

There was a short silence.

“So?” Wilson said at last.

“So I’m playing it by ear.”

I don’t know how much sleep Wilson got the balance of the night in the narrow bunk of the rolling, pitching destroyer, but I didn’t get much.

WE DISEMBARKED
at Guantanamo in the dark and in a driving rainstorm. The lights of the base were almost obliterated in the sheets of tropical rain. “They don’t get too much rain here as a rule,” Erikson observed before we left the destroyer. “The hills usually divert even the hurricanes.”

“Just our luck to catch a good one,” Wilson groused.

The transient barracks chief was unhappy to see us. Grumbling, he slipped on his poncho and led us to a two-story temporary building. From his remarks we learned that he had been up before during the night bedding down a load of replacements who had made it to the base in a four-engine Navy transport from Parris Island just before the bad weather closed down the airfield.

“Grab any unoccupied bunk,” the chief told us. “And fall in with the replacements in the
A.M
. when they’re called to chow.”

He went off and left us. From where we stood inside the entrance, I could see forty-odd sailors and marines sacked in while they awaited assignment to permanent quarters. “Let’s try the second deck,” Wilson suggested. “Might be less traffic.” When we climbed the stairs, we found out it was true. We staked out a corner at the far end of the building to avoid as much contact as possible.

Erikson had told us to get some rest because it would be late afternoon before he could get back to us. I slept most of the morning, skipping breakfast when the mess call came. After lunch the time really dragged. Wilson pulled out a deck of cards and we played gin rummy for a quarter a game. Chico had no card sense and lost consistently. Then he began to cheat flagrantly with no improvement in his results. I called off the game finally.

When four o’clock arrived with no sign of Erikson, I began to get edgy. Outside, the storm was worse. Thick, low-hanging clouds pressed close to the ground and all but blotted out the rocky hills. The constant drumming of the rain on the roof just above our heads was getting to me. By five o’clock I could see lights burning all over the base through the rain-streaked windows.

Wilson had just laid down on his bunk when a raucous voice thundered up the stair well. “All you swabbies up there on the second deck—fall out for work detail! Report down here in fatigues and ponchos in two minutes! On the double!”

“We’d better go,” Wilson said after momentary indecision. He rolled off the bunk. “If that joker checks and finds us here, we’d have to answer too many questions.”

“But how will Erikson find us?”

Wilson shrugged. “You’re in the Navy now,” he said with a fine edge of sarcasm in his voice.

I followed him, since I could see no way to avoid it. We reached the lower floor while a loud-voiced Marine sergeant was forming the transients into a ragged line stretching down the barracks aisle. We fell in at the far end. “Get aboard the trucks outside!” the sergeant shouted. “You’ll be taken to Warehouse number seven to load sandbags. File out and load. MOVE!”

“Somethin’ must’ve busted loose,” Wilson observed. The ranks ahead of us began to bottleneck at the door as the first departures flinched in the face of the storm. The sergeant’s bull voice got them moving again. A surging mass of rain-slicked backs went up over the tail gates of the tarpaulined 6x6 trucks as if prodded by hot irons. The headlights of an approaching pickup spotlighted the red-faced sergeant just as Wilson and I ran out into the salt-seasoned rain.

“These two belong to me, Sergeant!” Erikson’s welcome voice boomed from the pickup. The Marine took in the visor-peaked cap with rain protector beneath which could be seen the commissioned officer’s insignia. He saluted and turned to the trucks. Wilson and I started to pile into the pickup. “Go back and get your gear,” Erikson instructed us. “And step on it.”

We were back in minutes. Erikson drove while Wilson and I dripped water on the floor of the cab beside him. It was crowded because we had taken the seabags inside with us to keep them out of the rain. “Isn’t this weather a blinder?” Wilson asked.

“It could be a break for us,” Erikson answered. “Or it could have been if that fool Slater hadn’t fouled up.” He scowled. “I liberated this pickup from the motor pool and picked up our crates from the holding warehouse. They’re in the back. I’d have been along sooner, but I stopped off at the combat intelligence center to check out the current defense and security situation. We don’t want to be poking around the perimeter in the dark completely out of touch as to installations.”

The metronomic slap-slap of the windshield wipers punctuated his words. “The whole station is on hurricane alert, which means everyone’s going to be too busy to pay much attention to us. From the way this thing is making up, I’d say it won’t be long before everyone is hanging onto something solid to keep from being blown away.”

“It’s a hurricane?” Wilson asked.

“Not yet. I checked at the met office. Wind is now up to force seven and predicted for force nine. That would mean gusts up to seventy miles an hour. It’s a good time for us to move out.”

“But what about Slater?”

“We’re going after him now. Drake, this is going to be your bag. Whatever it takes to do it, we’ve got to get Slater out.” I opened my seabag, took out my .38, and stuffed it into my waistband beneath my poncho. Erikson saw the movement. “I don’t want anyone killed!” he said sharply.

That didn’t jibe very well with the remark about whatever it took to get Slater out, but I didn’t say anything. Erikson slowed the truck to a crawl near a low, T-shaped building on our right. It sat in the center of a circular plot of ground outlined by a curving road that surrounded it like a moat. “That’s the brig?” I asked.

“That’s it.”

“Drive around it.” Erikson circled the drive. The front portion of the building was wooden frame structure and the el in back was concrete block. Barred and wire-mesh-covered windows marked it as the cell block. The building was a tin can. I doubted that there were even reinforcing rods in the cinder block. “Not even a fence,” I said.

“Superfluous,” Erikson replied. “The base has two fences around it with a well-guarded area in between. Castro provides another guarded area beyond that. No prisoner is going anywhere.”

“I’ve seen all I need to out here. How about the inside?”

“Play it straight from my cues when we go in,” Erikson said.

He parked the pickup and led the way in. There were three people in the outer office, a Marine corporal with a holstered .45 at his side, a buxom, auburn-haired Wave in a blue uniform, and a three-chevroned sergeant behind a desk with a nameplate saying
SERGEANT OF THE GUARD
.

“You three are the only ones on duty?” Erikson asked.

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered after springing to his feet at sight of Erikson’s insignia. “Plus Corporal Gates on cell duty inside.”

“I’m Commander Erikson. You’re holding a man named Slater on charges?”

The sergeant glanced at the Wave who had the crossed quills of a yeoman embroidered on her sleeve. Her young face had a wide mouth. She was smirking at Wilson who was staring boldly at her well-filled tunic. She had overlapping incisors, which gave her a minx-like look. She realized belatedly that the sergeant was looking in her direction. “Yes, sir,” she said hurriedly. “We do.”

“I’m detailed to investigate the case,” Erikson said. “Can you provide space for me to interrogate these witnesses?”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “You can use the O.D.'s office right there.” He pointed. “He was called out on some trouble down at the motor pool.”

Like a liberated pickup truck, I thought. “In there, you two,” Erikson said to Wilson and me. I pointed to an electric water cooler at the far end of the room next to the barred outer doors leading to the concrete section of the building. Erikson nodded permission. I walked down to the cooler and let the cold, slightly brackish water rinse out my mouth while I studied the barred doors. From where I was standing I could see another set of barred steel doors inside a narrow corridor beyond the first set.

“Well?” Erikson said to me when we were all in the O.D.'s office. The half-glass partition let us look outside into the larger room, where the three on-duty personnel were seated.

“Nothing doing from the inside,” I reported. “The two sets of doors are electronically operated. The sergeant has a key, and the corporal inside the cell block has a key. Both would be needed to open the doors, and at a quick look they’re operated from separate control boxes.”

Chico Wilson had been smiling at the Wave through the glass partition. The girl was watching him and doing no work. She looked like a rabbit fascinated by a snake. Wilson turned his head to look at us. “So let’s take these three out here an’ crush out of the place,” he said.

Neither Erikson nor I said anything. We both knew it was impossible because of the timing involved. Even if we immobilized the sergeant, the armed guard, and the Wave, the corporal inside could button himself up and thumb his nose at us. “What about asking to have Slater brought out here so you can question him?” I asked Erikson.

“Normally the sergeant wouldn’t have the authority without the say-so of the O.D.,” Erikson said doubtfully. “We’ve nothing to lose, though. Try it.”

I went outside to the sergeant’s desk. “The commander wants to question the prisoner now,” I said.

“You know I can’t bring him out here without the O.D.'s okay, sailor,” he answered.

“Maybe you’d like to try telling the commander that?” I tried to bluff him.

“
You
tell the commander,” he passed the buck to me.

I started back to the partitioned office. Chico Wilson was seated on a corner of the Wave’s desk, speaking to her in a low tone. She was smiling and reapplying pale pastel lipstick. When I passed her desk, the large-breasted girl was snickering. “Just like you figured,” I told Erikson. “He says he can’t do it. Do we have the plastic explosives that I put on your original ‘want’ list?”

“Yes. They’re in the smaller crate on the pickup. Why?”

“I can shape a charge and peel off half the back wall of the cell block with no more fuss than a taffy pull. It wouldn’t even rattle their coffee cups inside here.”

Erikson’s eyes narrowed as he stared at me. “What about the guard inside?”

“He’d be in between the two sets of locked doors. No problem. Even Slater would only get an earache. I can muffle the blast so nobody can hear it a hundred yards away in this storm. That doesn’t go for the people in the office here. They’d have to be tied up while we siphoned Slater out of the back end and took off.”

Nobody ever said Erikson couldn’t make up his mind. “Wilson!” he called.

Chico Wilson left the simpering Wave and strolled into the office. He was smiling. “Guess what?” he said.

“Wilson, go out to the pickup and open the smaller crate—”

“Guess what?” Wilson said again, interrupting in unmilitary fashion. “Slater isn’t here.”

“Isn’t here?” Erikson echoed.

“I told the chick Slater was in for doin’ what I wanted to do to her, an’ after she got through sayin’ ‘Oh, you!', she mentioned that an officer an’ two guards took all the prisoners out on a work detail.”

“But the sergeant said—”

“She said in the rush nobody entered it in the log. The sergeant doesn’t know. An’ she said the work detail is supposed to be takin’ down the outdoor movie screens on the base.”

“You earned your dollar today, Wilson,” Erikson said. We left the office. “I’ll be back to speak to the O.D. later, Sergeant,” Erikson said on his way out the door.

“Are we any better off having to look for Slater all over the base?” I asked Erikson as we climbed into the pickup again.

“You’re not thinking like a military man, Drake,” Erikson said as he shot the pickup down the road. “If any movie screen is going to be saved, you can damn well bet the very first one will be the screen at the officers’ quarters.”

The pickup plowed through the buffeting rain. We passed the White Hats Club and the CPO Club before we came to the Officers’ Open Mess. It was a low, rambling building with a large swimming pool lashed by the rain. Just beyond it was a sloping, fan-shaped concrete slab covered with form-fitting plastic theater seats. A dozen men were wrestling with wrenches, pliers, and a block- and-tackle, attempting to ease down the wide, cinemascope screen whose upper edge fluttered and vibrated in the steadily increasing wind. An officer and two noncoms bawled conflicting instructions at the rain-soaked men.

“Looks like a Chinese fire drill,” I said as Erikson parked the pickup.

“You two stay here out of sight,” Erikson ordered as he opened the door. It blew out of his hand. “Or you’ll find yourselves hijacked into another work detail.” He recaptured the door, slammed it, and ran toward the melee at the front of the theater apron.

Wilson and I scrunched down in the cab. The pickup rocked in the wind gusts. “What a night!” Wilson muttered. “An’ we got to go a good ways on foot.”

His remark reminded me of a personal problem. I looked out at the wind-driven rain, then took off my white cap. I unfastened the tabs on my wig and removed it, rolled it tightly, pulled up my shirt, and inserted the wig in the pouch of my money belt. Then I replaced the white cap on my nude skull. A wet wig is a dead giveaway.

Wilson watched the performance. “Man, you look like a different—hey, bulls-eye! Here they are!”

Erikson and a panting Slater appeared beside the pickup. Slater looked pale, tired, and unhappy. He had a nasty-looking, bleeding gash on his left thumb. “Outside and into the back, Wilson,” Erikson directed when he opened the door. “Climb in there with him, Slater.”

Wilson started to argue, then slid sullenly from the cab. He had to help Slater into the back of the pickup. “We don’t have Slater’s seabag,” I said to Erikson as he got under the wheel again.

“We won’t have it, period,” Erikson said. “It’s impounded with his personal belongings. I’ve been trying to remember what I packed in it. Fortunately I duplicated sensitive items. I’m afraid we’re going to be short on some things. Ammunition, for one.”

My tension must have showed more than I realized. Erikson glanced over at me and smiled. He seemed in high good humor. “Relax,” he said. “We’ve got better than a five-mile ride to the northeast gate. It’s the last driving we’ll get to do on U.S. soil for a while, so you might as well enjoy it.” He glanced at his watch as the pickup bored through the rainy night.