Clear and Present Danger

down on the bridge rail. The young man landed on his belt, and for a second it seemed that he'd break in half. The air whooshed out of his mouth, and his legs kicked, trying to find the deck before he dropped into the water.

'Christ, Bob!' Wegener managed to say as Riley picked him back up. The bosun spun him around, his left hand clamped on the man's throat as he lifted him clear of the deck with one arm. 'Put him down, Riley!'

If nothing else, Riley had broken through the arrogance. For a moment there was genuine fear in those eyes as the prisoner fought for breath. Oreza had the other one on the deck already. Riley dropped his man beside him. The pirate - Wegener was already thinking of him in those terms - pitched forward until his forehead touched the deck. He gagged and struggled for breath while Chief Riley, just as pale, rediscovered his self-control.

'Sorry, Captain. Guess I just lost it for a second.' The bosun made it clear that he was apologizing only for embarrassing his commanding officer.

'Brig,' Wegener said. Riley led both aft.

'Damn.' Oreza observed quietly. The quartermaster fished out his handkerchief and wiped his captain's shirt. 'Jesus, Red, what's the world comin' to?'

'I don't know, Portagee. I think we're both too old to answer that one.' Wegener finally found his matches and managed to light his pipe. He stared out at the sea for several seconds before finding the right words. 'When I joined up I got broke in by an old chief who told stories about Prohibition. Nothing nasty like this - he made it all sound like a great big game.'

'Maybe people were more civilized back then,' Oreza thought.

'More likely you couldn't carry a million bucks' worth of booze on a motorboat. Didn't you ever watch 'The Untouchables'? The gang wars they had back then were as nasty as the ones we read about now. Maybe worse. Hell, I don't know. I didn't join up to be a cop, Chief.'

'Me neither, Cap'n.' Oreza grunted. 'We went an' got old, and the world went an' changed on us. One thing I wish didn't change, though.'

'What's that, Portagee?'

The master chief quartermaster turned to look at his commanding officer. 'Something I picked up at New London a few years back. I used to sit in on some classes when I had nothing better to do. In the old days when they caught a couple of pirates, they had the option of doing a court-martial on the spot and settlin' things right then an' there - and you know something? It worked.' Oreza grunted again. 'I s'pose that's why they stopped doin' it that way.'

'Give 'em a fair trial - then hang 'em?'

'Hell, why not, sir?'

'That's not the way we do things anymore. We're civilized now.'

'Yeah, civilized.' Oreza opened the door to the wheelhouse. 'I can tell. I seen the pictures.'

Wegener smiled, then wondered why. His pipe had gone out. He wondered why he didn't just quit entirely as he fished for his matches again, but the pipe was part of the image. The old man of the sea. He'd gotten old, all right, Wegener thought. A puff of wind caught the match as he tried to toss it, dropping it on the deck. How did you ever forget to check the wind? he asked himself as he bent down to retrieve it.

There was a pack of cigarettes there, halfway out the scupper. Wegener was a fanatic on ship-cleanliness and was ready to snarl at whoever had tossed the empty pack when he realized that it hadn't come from one of his crewmen. The name on the pack was 'Calvert,' and that, he remembered vaguely, was a Latin American brand- name from a U.S. tobacco company. It was a hard pack, with a flip-top, and out of simple curiosity he opened it.

They weren't cigarettes. At least, they weren't tobacco cigarettes. Wegener fished one out. They weren't hand-rolled, but neither were they as neatly manufactured as something from a real American cancer factory. The captain smiled in spite of himself. Some clever entrepreneur had come up with a cute way of disguising - joints, wasn't it? - as real cigarettes. Or maybe it was just more convenient to carry them this way. It must have pitched out of his shirt when Riley flipped him around, Wegener realized belatedly. He closed the pack and pocketed it. He'd turn it over to the evidence locker when he got a chance. Oreza returned.

'Weather update. That squall line'll be here no later'n twenty-one hundred. The squalls are upgraded some. We can expect gusts up to forty knots. Gonna be a fair blow, sir.'

'Any problem for Wilcox and the yacht?' There was still time to recall him.

'Shouldn't be, sir. It turned south. A high-pressure system is heading down from Tennessee. Mr. Wilcox oughta have it pretty smooth all the way in, Cap'n, but it might be a little dicey for the helicopter. They didn't plan to get it to us until eighteen hundred, and that's cutting it a little close. They'll be bucking the front edge of the line on the way back.'

'What about tomorrow?'

'Supposed to clear off about dawn, then the high-pressure system takes over. We're in for some rollin' tonight, but then we got four days of good weather.' Oreza didn't actually voice his recommendation. He didn't have to. The two old pros communicated with glances.

Wegener nodded agreement. 'Advise Mobile to put the pickup off until noon tomorrow.'

'Aye aye, Cap'n. No sense risking a helicopter to haul garbage.'

'Right on that, Portagee. Make sure Wilcox gets the word on the weather in case that system changes course.' Wegener checked his watch. 'Time for me to get my paperwork done.'

'Pretty full day already, Red.'

'True enough.'

Wegener's stateroom was the largest aboard, of course, and the only private accommodation aboard, since privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded a skipper. But Panache wasn't a cruiser, and Wegener's room was barely over a hundred square feet, albeit with a private head, which on any ship was something worth fighting for. Throughout his Coast Guard career, paperwork was something Wegener had avoided whenever possible. He had an executive officer, a bright young lieutenant whom the captain stuck with as much of it as his conscience could justify. That left him with two or three hours' worth per day. The captain attacked it with the enthusiasm of a man on his way to a hanging. Half an hour later he realized that it seemed harder than usual. The murders were pulling at his consciousness. Murder at sea, he thought, as he looked at the porthole on the starboard bulkhead. It wasn't unknown, of course. He'd heard of a few during his thirty years, though he'd never been directly involved. There had been a case off the Oregon coast when a crewman had gone berserk and nearly killed a mate - turned out that the poor guy had developed a brain tumor and he'd later died from it, Red remembered. Point Gabriel had gone out and collected the man, already hog-tied and sedated. That was the extent of Wegener's experience with violence at sea. At least the man-made kind. The sea was dangerous enough without the need for that sort of thing. The thought came back to him like the recurring theme of a song. He tried to get back to his work, but failed.

Wegener frowned at his own indecision. Whether he liked paperwork or not, it was part of the job. He relit the pipe in the hope that it would aid his concentration. That didn't work either. The captain muttered a curse at himself, partly in amusement, partly in annoyance, as he walked into his head for a drink of water. The paperwork still beckoned. He looked at himself in the mirror and realized that he needed a shave. And the paperwork wasn't getting done.

'You're getting old, Red,' he told the face in the mirror. 'Old and senile.'

He decided that he had to shave. He did it in the old-fashioned way, with a shaving cup and brush, the disposable razor his only concession to modernity. He had his face lathered and halfway shaved when someone knocked at the door.

'Come!' It opened to reveal Chief Riley.

'Sorry, Cap'n, didn't know you were-'

'No problem, Bob, what's up?'

'Sir, I got the first-draft of the boarding report. Figured you'd want to go over it. We got everyone's statement on tape, audio, and TV. Myers made a copy of the tape from the boarding. The original's in with the evidence, in a lockbox inside the classified-materials safe, as per orders. I got the copy if you wanna see it.'

'Okay, just leave it. Anything from our guests?'

'No, sir. Turned into a pretty day outside.'

'And me stuck with all this damned paper.'

'A chief may work from sun to sun, but the skipper's work is never done,' Riley observed.