Buried At Sea Page 12

  Jim molded his reasoning to fit Will's fears. "If it's me you're worried about, don't. 'They'

  won't bother me if I'm not with you."

  "Unless they torture you to death to find out where I am."

  Jim vaulted past that picture by reminding himself that Will had a gruesome way of drawing him into the circle of his fantasy. The only way around it was to answer Will in his own terms. "They'll know that you dropped me and sailed away. How would I know where you went?"

  "I can't take the chance they won't be waiting at the dock."

  "All you've got to do is drop me, you can keep going."

  "No way. The boat would be in clear view from the time we cross the bar. Look here."

  Will touched a finger to the chart and traced the channel through shallow banks and breaking seas. "Eight miles from the bar to Peter Point. Nine, nearly ten, to the oil terminal. Two hours to prepare àwelcome.' "

  "Let's go in now, in the dark."

  "At night? Are you serious? God almighty couldn't cross

  that bar in the dark. No, we'll head for the Calabar River." "How am I going to get out of there?" Jim asked. "I told you, my pals will get you to Lagos."

  "Pals you haven't kept in touch with?"

  "They'll be there."

  "Well, if 'they' have a dossier on you as long as your arm, `they' will look on the Calabar, too. Right?"

  "Wrong. They won't connect me to the Calabar."

  While they were arguing, the wind swung around and the Harmattan was back, blowing hard out of the northeast and throwing a gritty haze across the watery oil fields, blotting out terminal platforms and wellheads and derricks.

  Will was delighted. "Thank you, Lord." And to Jim, he said, "It could last a week. We'll beat east along the ten-meter line. They can't see us from shore and they can't see us from offshore. The current is with us. With any luck we'll make the Calabar before tomorrow night."

  Will led Jim up on deck. The "patrols"—if they were patrols—had vanished in the haze.

  Will started the engine. "Cast off. We're outta here."

  The boat slipped from between the rig's legs. Shooting glances over his shoulder, Will set his course east. They maintained that course for hours, tracing the ten-meter line with the aid of the sonar depth finder and angling away from the coast until the soaring orange gas flares were miles behind.

  "Take the helm. Steady as she goes."

  As his McVay Foundation Hawker Horizon flew high above the dark Atlantic, Andy Nickels awoke with a start, lunged for the satellite phone, and dialed Greg in Lagos.

  Over the pilots' shoulders, he could see dawn faintly silvering the horizon far ahead. Last night, coked to the eyeballs, he had made a terrible mistake.

  Greg reported that he had wrapped up the helicopter, but that the Joint Security patrol boats had found no sailboat anywhere near the Bonny estuary. He and his men were can-vassing Will Spark's known haunts in case they had abandoned the boat and somehow come ashore in a dinghy.

  Nickels cut him off. "Listen up, pal. We're getting indications that Spark operated under another name out there."

  AS HUSTLE ZIGZAGGED to stay out of eyeball range, dodged obstructions, and rolled on the swell, the voyage to the Calabar River took much longer than Will had predicted.

  "Oil wells have grown oil wells since I was here last. The joint is jumpin'."

  Petroleum structures were strewn along the coast. Jim saw drilling rigs and huge production platforms and immense storage tankers tethered permanently to single buoy moorings. And scattered everywhere was the dangerous debris of failed enterprises, wreckage, and calamity. Just before dawn, startled to hear the swells crash where the water was supposed to be deep, they cast their searchlight on a sunken rig. A leg rose seventy feet out of the sea at a crazy angle. The swells were smashing against the upturned remains of a helicopter landing pad.

  They ran all day and the dark was closing in again before they reached the Calabar. They dropped anchor outside the bar in ten meters of water. Will fixed their position precisely with the GPS.

  A hideous night followed, with Hustle rolling violently. She swung with the east-setting current from her anchor chain, which put her hull broadside to the southerly swell.

  Huge waves rolled her to the right as they approached, then heaved her left as they passed under. Fetching in from the Atlantic, they came like clockwork, a big roller every forty seconds. No sooner had one crashed, foaming on the bar, than the next shouldered the boat onto her side, flipped her the other way, and rolled on. Jim felt on the verge of throwing up all night. Will slept peacefully in his hammock, waking every twenty minutes to check their position with the GPS to confirm that they weren't dragging the anchor.

  At daybreak they saw white breakers foaming on a reef that marked the west side of the river. Will started the engine and piloted through the haze, fighting currents, skirting shallows, and repeatedly stopping to check on the GPS the positions of buoys marking channels.

  "Hey, young eyes. Do you see any fishing stakes? Sticks poking out of the water?"

  Jim tried to pierce the haze. "No. Not yet."

  "Good. If you did we'd be in trouble. No stakes means that's Tom Shot Bank. See why we didn't come in at night?"

  And then, gradually, as if noticing a friend emerging from a crowd, Jim began to realize that he was looking at land. A low, flat coast lay gray-green in the haze. "Land. I see land!"

  "Welcome to Africa."

  The main channel was marked by a ghostly parade of ships, their shapes and colors blurred by the haze—bulk carriers, container vessels, and rusty old general cargo freighters heading upriver to Calabar.

  Will aimed for a secondary channel, east of the main fairway, and the numbers on the sonar began jumping erratically as the water shallowed, deepened, shallowed again. At five meters, Jim checked the Sailing Directions spread on his lap and asked, "How much depth do we need?"

  "She draws three meters—get the slickers!"

  A sudden squall swept heavy rain across the estuary. It fell so hard they couldn't see the bow. Thunder cracked nearby. Lightning blazed. The squall passed, racing out to sea.

  The wind slackened as the river narrowed. "Run below and get the Deep Woods Off!

  from the medicine locker."

  Jim returned with the insect repellent just in time. Mosquitoes swarmed the cockpit, whining in their ears. "Slather it on," said Will. "Hair, ears, hat."

  Suddenly Will spun the wheel and Hustle leaned clumsily into a sharp turn. "Missed!"

  Will pointed and Jim saw floating just beneath the surface a submerged tree trunk twice as thick as a telephone pole.

  "Ship behind us."

  A Russian-flagged freighter steamed out of the murk. Will swung the wheel again and steered directly for the shore and into a clump of mangrove trees whose roots reached like spider legs into the water. Hustle came to a soft stop in the mud. The ship drew close, so close that Jim could read the name: WorldSpan President.

  Hustle was deep in shadow and the freighter steamed past. So deep, in fact, that it took them an hour to kedge her out of the mud, which necessitated inflating the dinghy, rowing an anchor out to deep water, and pulling the anchor line with a winch while the motor ran in full reverse.

  Towing the dinghy on a short line, Will headed upriver again, checking the GPS and the depth finder. "We're looking for a creek:'

  Jim shielded his eyes from the hazy sun glare and scanned the low, green, featureless shore, where the trees grew right into the water. Again, Will said, "You see why we don't go in at night?"

  "Is the creek buoyed?"

  "There'll be a stake or two, if we're lucky—there!"

  Will spun the wheel and the bow swept west toward some sticks standing in the water.

  As they motored closer, Jim saw a dark hole in the trees. Will slowed the engine. A creek overhung with branches indented the muddy river and tunneled into a swamp.

  Hustle nosed into semidarkness. Giant trees wal
led the sides. Their crowns met high overhead. There was no wind. The air felt thick and hot and was hard to breathe.

  Will steered cautiously down the middle, his eyes moving between the sonar depth finder and the masthead. He veered left to avoid tangling the wind vane, anemometer cups, and radio antennae in the overhanging vegetation. He swung right to motor around the prong of a sunken tree trunk, which the sonar showed taking up half the channel four feet beneath the surface.

  Will throttled back to dead slow and the boat moved in near silence. After weeks and weeks on the open sea, Jim felt the close-dwelling walls of trees loom oppressively. He had never suffered from claustrophobia, but at this moment, as they moved deeper and deeper into the dark slot, he longed to be out in the open.

  "A little creepy, isn't it?" said Will.

  "More than a little. How long is this creek?"

  "Better to ask how deep," Will replied, peering intently at the depth finder and suddenly altering course to shave one side.

  Ahead, at last, the trees thinned. Jim caught glimpses of the dull sky and finally the creek emptied into a broad lagoon. Deep in a mangrove swamp, the circular body of water was positioned like the hub of the spokes of a half-dozen creeks and streams.

  A village of stilt houses simmered in the afternoon heat, lifeless, except for the smoke that drifted over tin roofs. They dropped anchor a quarter mile across the water from it.

  No one seemed to notice their arrival.

  "Where is everybody?"

  "The men are fishing. The women are indoors. Nobody but a damned fool goes out in the sun."

  Jim thought that at least they'd stick their heads out the door. The place looked deserted.

  Canoes and skiffs littered a mud beach beside the dock. That narrow break below the smoky village was the only place where the mangroves didn't block access to the water.

  "I see boats pulled up on the beach. They're not fishing." "Maybe they're at a party."

  "It doesn't look like they have much to party about. Shall we?"

  "I'm going to clean up first. Run ahead if you like. I'll blow the airhorn when I want you to pick me up."

  "It's a long way to row and hot as hell," said Jim. "Can't I take the motor?"

  'They'll steal it," said Will.

  Some children gathered on the dock. Jim inspected them in the binoculars. Stick children, skin and bones, the smallest naked, the older ones in scraps of cloth, all barefoot. Suddenly they scattered. An outboard-powered canoe nosed out of a narrow tributary and headed for the dock.

  A shapely young woman in a tight white dress ran down to the water, shielding her eyes with one hand and waving toward Hustle with the other.

  "Well, I'll be damned," said Will. "Give me the glasses?' "You know her?"

  "Looks like I'm forgiven?'

  "For what?"

  "Leaving . . ." Will answered and softly sung a new verse of the song he occasionally sang about "po-lice" taking him by the arm:

  "My good gal loves me,

  Everybody knows.

  'Cause she paid a hundred cash dollars. Just to buy my suit of clothes."

  Will passed Jim the binoculars. Jim adjusted the spread to his eyes as the woman hitched her skirt over her thighs and climbed down into the canoe. "She's eating a lot better than those skinny kids. Who is she?"

  "Old friend?'

  She stood in the canoe, steadying herself on the shoulder of one of the men. The straps of her silver backpack tugged at her breasts. "She doesn't look old enough to be that old a friend. Jesus, Will, what was she, twelve, when you saw her last?"

  "You might want to check out her little sister. Probably grown up by now. Condoms are in the medicine locker. . . Will took back the glasses and studied the village carefully.

  "She's a chief's daughter—if you can believe her father's business card. These days, everybody's a chief. Damned few Indians left in Africa." Will began shaking his head in the same way Jim had seen him do at sea when rocketing thunderheads darkened the sky. "Strange."

  "What's strange?" Everything about the broad lagoon looked strange to Jim's eyes—the deserted wooden shacks, the listing dock, the dark mass of the mangroves, the green, oil-streaked water.

  "Strange that she's still hanging around here. I thought she lit out for Lagos. Maybe she's just home on a visit. She sure didn't buy that dress here."

  "Or that disco pack."

  ". . Wonder where Daddy is."

  "Will, I'm going to run ashore. Check out the flights." "Flights? From what airport?"

  "You said you'd help me connect."

  "Hang around. Maybe later you can catch a ferry heading upriver to Calabar."

  Will made "catch a ferry" sound like "hop a Metro North commuter train." From a village with one rickety dock and an abandoned pier on a deserted lagoon?

  "It's late. I don't want to get stuck in the dark. The sooner I get going, the better."

  "Okay, if you think you can handle it. Got any cash?"

  Jim nodded, eyeing the spider-leg roots of the mangroves that barred the shoreline. He pulled out the wallet he'd stuffed into the pocket of his jeans.

  "Don't flash your roll. Take fives—only fives. No twenties. And whatever you do, don't drink the water. They've got fleas swimming in it that'll give you river blindness."

  Jim ran below, left his wallet in his bag—after rolling some five-dollar bills around his Visa card—and grabbed a bottle of Poland Spring water.

  Back up on deck, Will handed him a can of Deep Woods Off! "Better spray more on.

  Mosquitoes carry malaria—you got your malaria shot?"

  Even Shannon had laughed at all the shots Jim had gotten before he left. But he was glad of it now; this poison

  green swamp looked like a giant stewpot for every Third World disease and infection known to medical science. Will Spark was playing on his fear of it, playing him like a violin. Fuck him.

  "And don't get in any vehicle with a stranger?'

  "That won't be a problem. I don't see any vehicles. And they're all strangers."

  "You'll be okay. They'll know you're with me." Will helped him over the side into the rubber boat and snubbed it close with the painter while Jim fitted the oars. When he started to shove off, Will held the rope. "A word of advice about our Nigerian hosts."

  "What?" Jim asked impatiently. Uninviting as the village looked, he was anxious to get to it so he could arrange a way out of here.

  'They are convinced they're the smartest, most deserving people on the continent. Ask any other African and they'll tell you that Nigerians are the loudest, pushiest, most demanding people in Africa. A Nigerian would rather shout than whisper. Here, what sounds like a bar brawl at home is just two pals saying hello."

  "Like guys yelling in the locker room."

  "Exactly." Will beamed like a priest offering Communion to his favorite acolyte. "Staking out turf with noise." "Billy!" the girl called from the canoe. "Billy C." "Who's Billy C.?"

  "Nickname." Will glanced at the approaching canoe and sobered rapidly. "Main thing is, never show fear—hang on a minute. You might as well say hello to Margaret"

  Margaret scrambled aboard, giggling and greeting Will with lipstick kisses on his cheeks.

  "Billy. Billy. Billy."

  Jim hardly registered that the silent men in her boat immediately pushed off and motored away. Margaret was practically falling out of her dress. Her skin was very black—as black as the absence of light—and framed a friendly smile that gleamed like ice.

  Will introduced Jim as "my shipmate."

  "Hello, muscle man."

  Margaret leaned down toward Jim in the dinghy and ex-

  tended a plump hand. A warm electric jolt of skin and her generous décolletage were acute reminders that it had been six long weeks since he had even seen a woman.

  "Must you go?" she asked in an English accent.

  He was vaguely aware that her eyes had the elsewhere glow of a woman seriously stoned. She wouldn't let go of his h
and and was actually pulling him and the rubber boat closer. He smelled perfume, marijuana, and woman. She cocked her head, teasing him, daring him. Promising? Mocking? Who knew? She was older than he had guessed from her bouncy body, more woman than girl, closer to his own age—high and happy and out for a good time.

  He glanced at Will. Will returned a shrug, vastly amused and apparently at ease with whatever decision Jim made.

  He didn't suppose that Margaret fit Shannon's idea of an adventure when she'd sent him sailing. Squalls and breaking seas were more like it, and their unspoken thought, he assumed, was that they would fess up first, if either wanted to mess around. No blindsiding.

  No fait accompli–ing.

  Trouble was, at this very moment in this very place, Margaret would fit any man's idea of adventure to a T. And it wasn't as if Shannon were waiting with a great big yes. It would serve her right for saying no. And it might be good for him to step out a little.

  But if he wanted to try to pick up as close as possible to where they had left off, wouldn't it be better to go home still exclusive? Was he nuts? For all he knew at this very moment Shannon was—well, probably not. She would be up-front about it.

  "Nice to meet you, Margaret. I have to go. See you later, Will."

  She squeezed his hand with a wistful "Later?'

  Jim sat down in the dinghy, pushed off from Hustle's high side, dipped the oars in the water, and rowed clumsily toward the distant dock. Margaret chirped a question he couldn't hear and Will laughed.

  It was a hot pull over the still lagoon—long enough for a variety of erotic what-if scenarios to gallop through his mind. Maybe later, after he arranged a ride, grabbed a beer

  somewhere, and headed back to the boat. Will's, remark about Margaret's sister was clanging in his skull, too. Maybe she'd be waiting at the dock. Or he'd bump into her on the street. Hi, there. Jim Leighton. Just dropped anchor in the lagoon. So what do you do for fun around here?

  He looked over his shoulder to make sure be was on course. The smoke-shrouded village was still deserted. But at the dock, as he looped the dinghy's bow line around a weathered piling, the rickety structure began to shake.

  He looked up to see four tall, gaunt teenagers drift out to greet him. Machetes dangled from their waists. Their feet were bare, the skin of their toes and heels cracked. Their plaid shirts were patched, the cuffs of their long pants in tatters. The handles of their machetes were wrapped in dirty cord and frayed electrical tape, and the blades were pitted. But where the edges showed through their makeshift scabbards, they gleamed as silvery as the sharpest knife in Will Spark's orderly tool chests.