Soft Targets

lashings. Switching tanks under such conditions was a peril he had not fully appreciated and, his hands numb even with the heating elements, he was clumsy. The empty tank, moved by vagaries of the current, bumped hard against the keel and was gone, bobbing in the wake of the Bitch, a perfectly obvious sign to anyone who saw it. Graham was grunting over his halyards and saw nothing else; the huge dacron sail lay flaccid along the mains'l boom and required all his con­centration. The manfish nearly lost his fresh tank as well but finally lashed it to his chest and hung in his straps, hands tucked under his armpits for warmth.

The crossing took nearly five hours. At one point the manfish saw, with a terror he denied, a great gray mass that levitated toward him from below. He fingered the Sharkill. No fish, he hoped, could possibly be so vast—and then he saw that it was a sandbar, the Bitch gliding so near it she could have run aground. He debated cutting loose to swim for shore which, he felt, must be very near. He waited for surer signs; a wise decision. He was two kilometers from land.

Port Angeles, huddled in the protecting arm of Angeles Point, sprawls along the Washington State side of Juan De Fuca Strait with its back to the rain-sodden Olympic Mountains. Charles Graham rounded the point in a subtle riptide to see the town, coming about expertly despite the odd sluggishness of the Bitch. He scanned the wharves for `Baztan,' who was much nearer than he knew, and offered a line to a friendly idler who caught it and made it fast. When he had secured the Bitch fore and aft, Graham stepped up to resecure the idler's clumsy work, then strolled away alert for a frail old man with a tough little man.

The friendly idler waited for a few moments, then shifted the toothpick in his mouth and dallied behind Graham. The FBI was better at tails than at knot-tying.

Fifty meters from the Bitch, a burly man under a long-billed cap nodded to another man, who adjusted his face plate, clamped his mouthpiece, and slid from his boat into the water. Once they bonded their transmitter just under the water-line near the stern of the Bitch, they could fix her location whenever they liked for as long as the battery lasted. The transmitter was disguised as marine growth. If Graham noticed it he would, at worst, only remove it. Customs and Immigration fretted about Graham on both sides of the border. The burgundy mains'l had almost fooled the watchers in Port Angeles but hull lettering and Graham's features had not changed. His mains'l could be explained as borrowed; a minor viola­tion. Better to give him a long leash and, while they were at it, to check his hull. It would not be the first time a man had run contraband in his keel.

The manfish had lashed one of the B-four bags to a distant piling and was wrestling with the second bag when he saw, impending above him in the sunlit murk, the second manfish. He quickly released the bag which tumbled slowly out of sight below, fumbled for carabiners on the third bag, saw that he would be too late. He unzipped the third bag, heedless of the masses that cascaded lazily downward, and armed the Sharkill.

The stubby Sharkill, no larger than a baseball bat with handles, had been an afterthought purchased chiefly for study. It was also said to be effective on even the largest carcharadon, firing a single salvo of small concussion warheads rocket-propelled in a conic pattern. It was a di­rectional pattern, designed to implode flesh, a great hammerwave of water to surround and pulverize a shark's gristle without releasing blood in the water. The Sharkill was an almost-perfect weapon, but its warheads were stupid: they had to be set for the quarry's distance or they would streak away, quicker than bar­racudas, to explode at maximum range. For once, the little man had skipped a detail.

He kicked backward, shielded by the keel, and aimed the weapon as the new arrival spotted him. It did not matter who the intruder was; better a mysterious underwater explosion now, than an excited SCUBA enthusiast on the wharf in moments. If all but known friends are enemies, then all strangers are enemies. He triggered the Sharkill.

The young agent saw a silver-gray gleam in the other swimmer's hands. It did not look like a weapon until it fired. Six petals unfurled into streamers that sizzled past him, one passing be­tween his knees, but before he could wheel to escape he felt the distant shocks.

The warheads continued for thirty meters in the water, two exploding far below, the others slanting outward. Two more broke the surface and, unencumbered by water, detonated in air bursts well beyond the boat that contained the agent in the baseball cap. The last two warheads flanked the FBI boat before triphammering its shallow-draft hull.

The fleeing FBI agent in SCUBA gear found his own boat settling as he boarded it, nearby tourists too stunned by the air bursts to find his predicament funny. The burly agent in the cap, clambering to the wharf, shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears. In moments he realized the situation, and the wetsuited agent found canisters in his boat before it was completely awash. He tossed the canisters to the wharf. The third agent raced to the Bitch and, arming the canisters, hurled them into the water on both sides of the sloop.

The manfish saw the canisters fall, saw silent puffs as each discharged several liters of chemi­cal. He knew the chemical was intended for him and did not wait to discover its function. As the material spread, it thickened into a colloidal gel that turned many cubic meters of sea water into salt treacle. It would have immobilized him had he not fled. He swam to the pilings, found his one secured bag, and used churning flipper-strokes to put him as far down the wharf as possible before he turned to proceed along the shoreline a few meters below the surface.

He continued until his breathing supply was exhausted, the light beginning to fail as shallows forced him near the surface. He lay still then, the bag his anchor in the shallows, gasping the salt air and awaiting his ally, darkness.

Charles Graham went through predictable stages for the federal agents: anger, innocence, astonishment. He did not believe he had car­ried a human parasite across Juan De Fuca ('He'd freeze his balls off!') until a wetsuited agent recovered damning evidence from below the Bitch.

They let him reconsider his innocence overnight and began afresh the next morning with a rough-smooth treatment. Chilton, the husky agent, was rough. Polsky, the tier of inferior knots, was smooth. In the cell with Graham, Polsky leaned against the wall. Chilton stood with one foot on Graham's bunk, furry forearms crossed over his knee. 'The very least that's going to happen is impoundment of your boat,' Chilton finally said with poisonous relish.

Polsky withdrew the toothpick from his mouth. 'Unless you can show good faith,' he murmured.

'At worst,' Chilton continued, 'you'll end up playing rock hockey with a sixteen-pound hammer in British Columbia Penitentiary.^'

Graham looked from one to the other. 'I'm clean! Take the Bitch apart, you won't find a thing.' He glared at Chilton. 'I think it's a frame; you bunch of pussies planned this whole thing!'

'Somebody sure did,' Polsky agreed. He let Graham chew on that for a moment while he chewed the wooden splinter. 'It wasn't us, Graham. Chilton thinks it was you.' He seemed about to go on, then gave a quick headshake. 'Doesn't matter what I think.'

Suddenly it mattered very much to Graham. 'What, what? Your guess is as good as mine...'

'My guess? Somebody knew you were com­ing. Somebody used you. Somebody wanted to make you look like an asshole.'

Graham was silent long enough to fumigate a few details for inspection. The deal with Baztan was dead, now. The Basque could have set him up for somebody, all right. Not Baztan himself, he was already in Port Angeles. Or was he? A glaze washed over Graham's face. 'There was one guy I mentioned it to,' he hazarded, and soon found himself checking photographs in a room without bars. Graham had met a few men whose photographs graced the stack, but nobody looked like his client.

With Graham's help, the agents forwarded a report that included 'Baztan's' habits of packing heat and heavy cash. Graham was released with orders to drop in for a chat with the RCMP in Victoria. As Graham was casting off, young Polsky sprinted down the wharf with a sheaf of fresh photographs from Washington. The wirephotos covered a cross-category of diminu­tive men who had used Basque cover, met the other criteria, and were hoped to be almost anywhere but in the United States. Graham iden­tified the same man Pelletier had, instantly, without doubt. It was an eight-year-old alien registry photo.

'Arif?' Graham studied the data with the photo. 'Who's Hakim Arif?'

Polsky sat down heavily on the Bitch's transom. After a moment he looked up. 'Well, there was Abd-El Kadr; his boys used to stuff testicles into empty eye-sockets after a raid,' said Polsky, very matter-of-fact. 'Then there was General Qassem, who liked to have his enemies tossed to his troops a piece at a time. All's fair in a jehad—holy war.

'Dr. George Habash was a pediatrician who bazookaed a schoolbus,' he continued, staring evenly at Graham,