The Night Boat

The Night Boat Page 7

A SWIRL OF dark smoke from straining diesel engines stained the blue of the afternoon sky. The men on the trawlers' decks called back and forth to each other as they yanked at thick hawsers and cables, securing them around heavy-duty cleats and bollards. Lines drew tight, coming up out of the sea with a popping sound, sending droplets of water flying. Someone called out, "Pull! Break her ass, there!"

Timbers creaked; the noise of diesels mounted, their vibrations pounding decks and churning the guts of the blacks who worked there. Sweat rolled off their backs beneath the hot sun. "Give 'er more," the captain of the Hellie shouted out, the stub of a Brazilian cigar clenched firmly in his teeth. "Come on, mon!" Water boiled at the stern. The captain looked across to the other trawler, the Lucy J. Leen, stretched tight on its spiderweb of hawsers. The Lucy's diesels were smoking, and it looked as if her captain was going to have to drop his main lines.

The Hellie's master squinted and exhaled a large cloud of blue smoke. Christ A'mighty! That big bitch had her nose stuck tight in sand; she wasn't going to move, no matter how much power they squeezed into the engines. One of the starboard lines was fraying fast; he saw it and pointed, "Hey! You men watch your fuckin' heads when that baby comes flyin' back, you hear me?"

Another trawler, a rickety old boat with a smaller draft, had secured lines onto the hulk's bow, pulling its nose out of the sand while the other bigger boats hauled at its length. The thing was heavy - heavier than she looked. The Hellie's master didn't want his diesels wrecked, and he was almost ready to tell his first mate to shut them down. But he'd told Steve Kip he'd do his best, and by God that's what he was going to do. "We're heatin'!" someone cried out, and the captain yelled back, "Let 'er heat!"

The props were foaming wild water at the sterns of the trawlers; now sand was coming up, too. That was a lot of power working in there. Shit! The captain grunted and chewed the butt. Fuckin' thing won't move!

But suddenly there was a sliding sound and the Hellie lurched forward. "Ease up!" the captain called out sharply. "Drop her down a few notches!" The diesels immediately began to rumble more quietly, and a man in the stern on the trawler securing the bow lines waved his arms.

"Okay," the captain called out toward the squat wheelhouse. "Full ahead."

"Full ahead!" The order went back, by way of two or three crewmen.

The Hellie began to move back, as did the Lucy J. Leen, still smoking badly, and the sliding noise intensified. Then, abruptly, it ceased. The submarine's bow began to swing free, and the beat-up trawler tightened its hawsers to keep control over the thing. Holding the U-boat secured within their circle, the trawler armada moved at a crawl past the wharfs where the crew of a Bahaman freighter watched from their aft deck. The swells rolled in toward the fishing wharfs, bobbing the small boats up and down against their tire-brows and bumpers, spreading out beneath the pilings, and smashing into the beach in a mass of oil-streaked foam.

The trawlers moved along the semicircle of the harbor, past the village toward the boatyard beyond. Past a couple of old, submerged wrecks with masts and funnels protruding from blue water, past another large trawler at anchor, past the boatyard wharfs they moved. The Hellie's captain looked along the port deck and could see the aluminum drydock shelters. The largest one, the one used as a temporary shelter for patrol boats during the war, was right on the lip of the sea. It had been built on a concrete bedding with a large door that could be raised or lowered and a dam and pumping system that could allow flooding; now the captain could see the open shelter doorway. It was set amid a jumble of unused, rotting piers the navy had built and then abandoned. It was going to be damned tricky getting such a length in there, damned tricky.

He watched the angle of the swells as they flowed around Kiss Bottom's bommies. The sea was running a bit rough this afternoon, and that was going to cause more problems. The Hellie's master had been a first mate on a British ocean-going salvage tug, and that was the primary reason Kip had asked him to oversee the operation. He'd towed for the British navy in the latter years of the war and had brought in many dead or dying ships to the Navy facilities here in this very harbor. He twisted around to check the lines. Number four fraying badly, number two as well. Goddamn it! he snarled to himself. No good rope in the islands these days! The Lucy J. Leen was cutting back somewhat due to her overtaxed diesels; someone was going to catch hell about letting those engines get in such a shit-awful shape.

Dark-green water roiled inside the abandoned naval shelter. He could see the workmen waiting with their sturdy hawsers to secure the hulk. The trawlers passed the shelter; the smaller craft with the bow lines turned in front of the submarine and made for the open doorway. Diesels shrilled, but in another moment the hulk responded and started moving bow-first toward the shelter. Simultaneously the larger boats cut their engines; now it was up to the small boat to line up the submarine with the shelter and take it in. Moving steadily and slowly, the bow trawler maneuvered into position, heading its own nose into the darkness of the shelter. The other boats swung around, using their combined power to haul the U-boat forward. At the last moment the small boat dropped its lines and swung sharply to starboard; the U-boat was cutting a bow-wake, moving too fast, so the trawlers cut back on their engines to slow it.

The U-boat moved into the shelter, and though its speed had been reduced, it still sent water crashing into the concrete sides of the shelter basin. Its bow crunched against concrete even as men leaped aboard her and caught lines to tie the boat to iron cleats. The trawlers dropped their lines then and swung off, and for a moment the heavy swells thrown up by the action of the boats sent foam and spray flying inside the drydock basin. The dock workers fought to lash the hulk down, but as the swells subsided the water smoothed out and the boat held firm between tightly pulled fore and aft hawsers.

Kip stood and looked at the thing. God, what a machine! He took a last puff on his cigarette and tossed it into the brackish water; the butt hissed and went up underneath the hull. He was standing on a wide concrete platform level with the hull which ran around the entire shelter. Ladders leading off the platform that would normally have gone down to a dry pit were almost submerged. Behind Kip was an abandoned work area now jammed with old crates and forgotten machinery, a carpentry area where a stack of timber lay, an electrician's cubicle now cluttered with pieces of iron and thick coils of all-purpose wiring. The concrete flooring was coated with a film of aged oil. The entire shelter smelled of sweat, diesel fuel, and oil, and compounding the odors was the fetid smell of the hulk itself. It was decaying, Kip thought, right in front of his eyes.

"She's in tight," said a tall, barrel-chested black with a gold tooth gleaming in his mouth. "Sure hope you know what you're doin'."

"I do, Lenny," Kip said.

"Mr. Langstree, he be back from his trip to Steele Cay tomorrow or the next day, and when he find out what he got in here... well, I don' think he goin' to like it too much, you know?" Lenny Cochran was Langstree's foreman. He had agreed to go along with this because Kip was the constable and a man he respected, but he was still worried his boss was going to come down hard on him.

"He's never had need to use this basin," Kip reminded him, sensing the man's unease. "It's just full of junk the British navy left behind - just a damned storage warehouse. If he jumps, you tell him I ordered you and the rest of the men, and send the old goat over to see me."

Lenny smiled. "Shouldn't talk 'bout Mr. Langstree that way."

There was a rattle of chains and the sound of a winch in operation; the far bulkhead slid down into the water, just missing the stern and submerged propellers of the submarine by a few feet. The only light in the shelter streamed through a series of large, rust-edged holes in the roof almost thirty feet above them. Water gurgled noisily around the U-boat's hull vents; its conning-tower and periscope shafts loomed high. Shadows played across the shelter's opposite wall as several of the men moved about, examining the boat at a respectful distance.

"She ain't in such bad shape," Lenny said softly. He looked down the boat's length and whistled. "Mon, she must've been hell in her day, you know?"

"I'm sure of it." The deck was fully out of water now, and the sea streamed in rivulets through the mass of debris, making strange whispering noises that echoed within the shelter. Kip looked past the tower bridge toward the stern, then something caught his eye and he jerked his head back. Jesus! he thought, stunned. What was that!

He was almost certain he'd seen someone standing there, hands on the iron coaming, a dark, lean figure of a man staring down at them. He saw now it was an interplay of shadows and light, locking together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, through one of the roof holes. Christ, that had given him a shock! Jumbies, he told himself sarcastically, and then chided himself. Don't go thinking voodoo, Kip; there are no such things as haunts.

"What's the matter, Kip?" Lenny asked him a second time - Kip had not seemed to hear before.

"Nothing." He blinked his eyes and looked back to the bridge again. A shadow, that was all.

And then he was certain someone was staring at him.

Kip turned his head. In the corner, near the wreckage of timber that had once been a naval carpentry shop, a red dot glowed. As Kip watched, the dot flared and a stream of smoke rolled out, like a ghostly essence, through a splotch of light. A black man smoking a thin cigar, wearing faded jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt, emerged from the shadows. He had no expression on his hard face; there was a cold, rather cunning set to the line of his lips, but he moved with an animal-like grace.

"That the boat killed old man Kephas?" the man said to Kip. His eyes didn't seem to register the men's presence; they focused somewhere on the submarine. His name was Turk; he had only recently arrived on the island, and Kip had already had trouble with him, throwing him in the cell two Saturdays before for brawling. Langstree had bailed him out; the young man was supposed to be an expert hand at a torch, and Langstree was paying him top wages for a welder. But Kip had seen a lot of these island drifters pass through, and he knew Turk was a rootless, undisciplined type of man.

"What happened to Kephas was an accident," Kip said.

The young man had a tough face, thick eyebrows, a black goatee. "I saw the body this mornin'. Bad way to die." He exhaled smoke through flared nostrils. "Why you put that thing in here, to hide it?"

"Go on about your business, mon," Lenny cautioned him.

Turk ignored him. "I hear some things 'bout that fucker. I hear it's a Nazi sub."

Kip nodded.

"How 'bout that, huh? Goddam bitch jus' corked off the bottom, ain't that so? I never heard of that happenin' before. What's inside her?"

"A few tons of corroded iron, twisted bulkheads, maybe a couple of live torpedoes." Kip said. And what else? he wondered suddenly. What had Moore mentioned about the sealed hatches?

"Why don't you open it up and have a see?" Turk raised an eyebrow.

"Too dangerous. And I'm not that curious."

Turk nodded, smiling thinly. He turned and stared at the boat for a moment, then took the cigar stub out of his mouth and flicked it. It hit iron, falling in a shower of sparks into the placid water. "Off the Caymans couple or three years ago," he said, "somebody found a German gunboat sunk in about a hundred feet. They used an underwater torch to get through a few collapsed bulkheads, and they burned into a vault. You know what that fucker yielded?" He looked from one man to the other. "Gold bars. Made those fellas rich. Fuckin' rich."

"Gold bars?" Lenny asked.

"That's bullshit." Kip interrupted quickly. "And if you think this beat-up crate's carrying gold bars you're out of your mind."

Turk shrugged. "Maybe not gold. But maybe somethin' else. Those goddamn Nazis carried all manner of stuff with 'em. You never know 'til you look."

"The only thing in there is a lot of old machinery," Kip told him.

"Maybe so, maybe not." Turk smiled again, his eyes still blank.

Kip recognized that hungry look. "Now you hear me. If you're thinking about doing a bit of free-lance torching, forget it. Like I say, you spark some explosives and you'll be picking gold bars off the streets of Heaven."

The other man held up his hands defensively. "I'm talkin', that's all." He smiled again and walked past the constable toward the battered frame door set into one wall. He opened the door, admitting a shaft of blinding sunlight, and was gone.

"He got no respect for elders," Lenny said. "He's trouble, but he damn good at what he does."

"So I hear." Kip gazed at the U-boat for a few more seconds, feeling a chill creep up his back. He could hear the sounds of it settling; creaking timbers, water sloshing around, the groan of a deep metal bulkhead - eerie, distant voices. "Lenny," he said, "keep the workmen away from here, will you? I don't want anybody fooling around with this thing, and what I said about explosives maybe being on board is true."

"Okay," Lenny agreed, nodding. "I do what you say." He raised his voice and called to the rest of the men, "She down now, let's get on with our business! J.R., you and Murphy got a hull-scrapin' to finish up! Percy, you done paintin'? Come on, let's get back!"

Kip clapped the man on the shoulder and made his way out. But even in the fierce sun, his eyes aching from the glare, he saw the image of a dark form standing on that conning tower, as silent and motionless as Death itself. Keep it up, he told himself, starting the jeep's engine. You'll be seeing jumbies in your soup. He drove out of the boatyard, heading for the fishermen's shanties. Like it or not, he had to pay a call on the Kephas woman. There was work to be done, and a sorry task it was indeed.

But before his jeep had made a hundred yards more he felt that chill again, like a premonition. He had a wall inside him, cutting him in half, blocking off a dark place where he feared to look.

That boat had been built to destroy; it had been baptized in blood and fury, and God only knew how many ships and good men had gone down in the wake of its torpedoes and guns. Boniface's words haunted him: Take it out of the harbor. Sink it. Sink it. Sink it.

"How, by God?" he said aloud.

Abruptly the bright colors of Coquina village came up around him, and his mind had just begun to wonder how he could soothe the Kephas woman when he felt the first slow scrape of jagged nails across the wall inside his soul.