Showboating isn’t my style, but I had a feeling that Hazel wouldn’t have as much trouble with Wilson again.
CHAPTER NINE
Slater called me into his room that night.
On the boat that morning he had seemed more relaxed, but I had seen him earlier in the evening downstairs at The Castaways, staring down into his glass of beer. “Ever get the feelin’ you’re losin’ your nerve?” he began abruptly.
“I’ve had the feeling.”
He hadn’t expected an answer. He was wrapped in his own feelings. “This last bit did somethin’ to me, Drake. I can’t seem to get myself screwed down. Or geared up, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t seem to want to—” He didn’t finish.
“It wears off,” I said, trying to soothe him.
“It had better.” His tone was savage. “I don’t like the way I feel right now. When I laid this job out to Erikson, I thought it would be a piece of cake. Now—”
Again he left the thought dangling. He lit a cigarette, studied its burning end, and changed position in his chair. “I been wantin’ to talk to you, anyway,” he resumed. “About our little project.”
“Yes?”
“A four-way split plus a percentage to Redmond, the cruiser first mate, really thins out the gravy.” He waited to be sure that I had taken in what he said. “A two-way split’d be a lot better, wouldn’t it?”
I wondered if he had made the same proposition already to Chico Wilson. They hadn’t seemed friendly, but they were certainly birds that flocked together naturally. “You mean you and I?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“How?”
He waved a hand. “Long as we understand each other, it shouldn’t be hard to work out,” he said vaguely. “Accidents happen.” He grinned, displaying his strong-looking teeth. “Think it over.”
“I will.”
“An’ don’t stop at thinkin'. We could—”
There was a knock at the door. After a moment it opened and Erikson thrust in his head. “Meeting in my room right away,” he said, and disappeared again.
“King of the mountain,” Slater snorted, but he got to his feet.
We went down the hall together. Wilson and Erikson were already in the room. “The destroyer sails tomorrow at seventeen hundred hours,” Erikson said when I closed the door. “That’s five P.M. to you.” He was looking at Slater. “Although I suppose you’ve been studying your ‘Bluejacket’s Manual.’ ”
Slater kept quiet and Erikson went on to make a quick run-through of our schedule. He didn’t say anything he hadn’t said before, but this time it had an air of immediacy. Afterward he and Wilson got into a technical discussion I couldn’t follow. The handsome Chico seemed recovered from his previous subdued demeanor.
A weather map was pinned on a wall. “It may be early for the hurricane season,” Wilson argued, “but this pressure system makin’ up down here looks like trouble.” His finger was on the map at a point three or four hundred miles south of Bermuda. “What do we do if it develops into a real storm?”
“Tell your man Redmond we’ll wait in Havana for the right conditions,” Erikson said. “He won’t have to risk the
There were none, and the meeting broke up.
I went across the hall, undressed, and stretched out on the bed. It was about an hour before Hazel came upstairs after putting in her trick at the shortwave radio set. “The balloon goes up tomorrow,” I told her when she entered our bedroom.
“He told me,” she said. She sat down on the bed beside me. “Up to now it seemed as if we were playing a game.”
“Up to tomorrow,” I corrected her.
She didn’t reply.
She smoked a cigarette, took a shower, and came to bed.
It seemed to me she held me more tightly that night than during all our previous lovemaking at The Castaways.
We were ready at four thirty the next afternoon. Hazel and I had said our good-byes previously. Erikson had spent the afternoon packing and repacking the gear in our seabags. When the time came to leave in the summoned taxi, he handed me the bag with the Navy fatigues and Cuban uniforms. We were in whites. Wilson and Slater had heavier seabags, plus each had one of the small crates to carry.
It was only an eight-block ride to the front gate of the Key West Naval Station. We piled out of the cab with Erikson in the lead. He returned the Marine guard’s salute, then disappeared into the building housing the Officer of the Day. We waited on the sidewalk.
In five minutes he came out again. Two minutes later we boarded a gray bus that used the main gate as a turnaround point. It made a circuitous route through the base. We stopped at the commissary, ship’s store, CPO Club, hospital, and three barracks. I was surprised at the number of navy wives and civilians.
The bus finally made a straight run along a line of warehouses and entered the dock area. Erikson again showed the forged naval orders, this time to a guard manning the gate. He received a spit-and-polish salute and stepped smartly down the wharf with the rest of us in trail. I could see that Slater was making heavy weather of it with his seabag in his left hand and a crate cocked awkwardly on his right shoulder. Wilson moved easily under the same load. I brought up the rear, perspiring in the tight-fitting dress whites. No one paid any attention to us.
We boarded the destroyer, going up the sloping gangplank in Erikson’s wake. Although I’d read and practiced the protocol, I didn’t feel too confident in employing it. I remembered to keep my thumb in and my elbow out when I saluted the O.D. standing next to the rail. I made a quarter-turn to repeat the salute to the flag hanging limply at the stern. I was surprised at how impressive the brief ceremony was.
Erikson had warned us that he had to confine most of his activity to officers’ quarters and that he couldn’t be with us. Amidships in the narrow waist of the destroyer he turned us over to a rating, who led us below to the crew’s quarters. Vibrations rippled through the steel ladder we descended as the ship’s engines turned over.
It had been hot abovedecks. It was hotter below. The neat bunks against the steel walls in the cramped space of the quarters reminded me too much of the prison hospital in Florida. From the expression on Slater’s face, he had his own memories. Underfoot, the vibrations in the steel deck increased. A bobbing and yawing motion indicated that we were under way.
We were alone when the rating left us. Every member of the crew evidently had a job to do while the destroyer was getting under way. Slater kicked his bulging seabag to one side and sat down on a bunk. There was a clatter on the sloping steel ladder leading down to our level, and I turned to see a pair of highly polished black shoes descending it. Legs thickened into heavy thighs followed by a rotund torso encased in a jacket with three rows of multicolored ribbons over the left chest pocket.
The stripes around the sleeve cuff that would indicate that our visitor was an officer were missing, but one sleeve between wrist and elbow carried a slanting row of gold service stripes. “Chief petty officer!” Wilson hissed. “Don’t salute!” He kicked Slater on the leg, motioning for him to stand. Slater responded but slowly. His lethargic reaction wasn’t missed by the small, dark eyes in the CPO’s weather-beaten face.
“So you’re the sandbaggers we’re ferrying down to Gitmo,” the CPO said. His tone indicated that he felt no enthusiasm for the chore. He reached for Slater’s arm and took hold of it, turning the wrist. “If you’re going to report in these whites, you’d better stow them before you look like grease monkeys.” He pointed to a smudge of dirt on Slater’s jumper sleeve. “Break out your work clothes.”
