2
WINTERS stood on the deck by himself, smoking quietly. It was not a large boat, this converted trawler, but it was very fast. They had not left the dock until after four o’clock and they had almost caught up with their prey already. The commander rubbed his eyes and yawned. He was tired. He blew smoke out over the ocean. On the eastern horizon there was just a faint suggestion of dawn. To the west, in the direction of the moon, Winters thought he saw the dim light of another boat.
These young people must all be crazy, he thought to himself as he reflected back on the events of the evening. Why the hell did they leave? Did they push Todd down those stairs without his knowing it? It would have been so much easier if they had just stayed there until we returned.
He remembered the look on Lieutenant Ramirez’ face when he had interrupted the telephone conversation that Winters had been having with his wife, Betty. “Excuse me. Commander,” Ramirez had said. He had been out of breath. “You must come quickly Lieutenant Todd is injured and our prisoners have escaped.”
He had told his wife that he had no idea when he would be home and then joined Ramirez for the short walk back to the administration annex. On the way Winters had been thinking about Tiffani, about the difficulty he had had in explaining to the seventeen-year-old why he could not just drop everything and meet her at the party. “But you can work any day or night, Vernon,” she had said. “This is our only time to be together.” She had already drunk too much champagne. Later in the conversation, when Winters had made it clear to her that he almost certainly would not make it to the party at all, and that he would probably ask Melvin and Marc to take her home, Tiffani had become petulant and angry. She had stopped calling him Vernon. “All right, Commander,” she had said, “I guess I’ll see you at the theater on Tuesday night.”
The phone had clicked off and Winters had felt an ache tearing through his heart. Oh fuck, he had thought for a moment, I’ve blown it. He had imagined himself jumping in the car, forgetting Todd and Ramirez and the Panther missile, and driving over to the party to sweep Tiffani into his arms. But he had not done it. Despite his incredible longing, he was not able to pull himself away from his duty. If it was meant to be, he told himself consolingly, then those flames of passion will burn again. But even with his limited romantic experience Winters knew better. Timing is everything in a love affair. If momentum is lost at a critical moment, especially when the rhythm of the passion is heading for a climax, it will never be regained.
Ramirez had already called the doctor on the base and he had arrived at the annex just after the two officers. While they were standing there together, Ramirez had insisted to Winters that it must have been foul play, that Todd could not have fallen so hard unless he had either been pushed or thrown down the concrete steps. The lieutenant had begun to stir during the doctor’s examination. “He has a bad concussion,” the doctor had said after he first checked Todd’s eyes. “He’ll probably be all right but he’ll have a ferocious headache in the morning. Meanwhile, we’ll take him over to the infirmary and sew up that gash in his head.”
To Winters it didn’t make sense. While he was waiting patiently in an adjoining room for the doctors and nurses to finish the stitches in the lieutenant’s head, Winters tried to figure out what possible motive Nick and Carol and Troy could have had for attacking Todd and then escaping. The Dawson woman is smart and successful. Why would she do it? He wondered if perhaps the trio might have been involved in some kind of big drug transaction. That would at least explain all the gold. But Todd and Ramirez did not find any indication of drugs. So what the hell is happening?
Lieutenant Todd had been kept awake during the procedure in the emergency room. He had been given only a local anesthetic to reduce his pain. But he had not been very lucid in response to the doctor’s simple questions. “That sometimes happens with a concussion,” the medical officer had told Winters afterward. “He may not be very coherent for the next day or two.”
Nevertheless, around two o’clock, immediately after Todd’s head had been shaven, stitched, and bandaged, Commander Winters and Lieutenant Ramirez had decided to ask him about what had occurred at the annex. The commander could not accept Todd’s answer, even though the lieutenant repeated it twice verbatim. Todd had insisted that a six-foot carrot with vertical slits in its face had hidden in the bathroom and had jumped him while he was trying to take a piss. He had escaped that first assault, but the giant carrot had then followed him into the main room at the annex.
“And just how did this thing — ”
“Carrot,” interrupted Todd.
“And how did this carrot attack you?” continued Winters. Jesus, he had thought, this man has cracked. One bump on he head and he has finally flipped.
“It’s hard to describe exactly,” Lieutenant Todd had answered slowly. “You see, it had four doodads hanging out of these vertical slits in its head. They were all mean looking — ”
The doctor had come up and interrupted. “Gentlemen,” he had said with a perfect bedside smile, “my patient desperately needs rest. Surely some of these questions can wait until tomorrow.”
Commander Winters remembered an overpowering sense of bewilderment as he watched the gurney take Lieutenant Todd from the emergency operating room to the infirmary. As soon as Todd was out of earshot, the commander had turned to Lieutenant Ramirez. “And what do you make of all this, Lieutenant?”
“Commander, sir, I’m no medical expert . . .”
“I know that, Lieutenant. I don’t want your medical opinion. I want to know what you think about the, uh, carrot business.” Damn him, Winters had thought. Does he have so little imagination that he can’t even react to Todd’s story?
“Sir,” Ramirez had replied, “the carrot business is outside my experience.”
To say the least. Winters smiled to himself and flipped his cigarette into the water. He walked over to the little wheel-house and checked the navigator. They were only seven miles from the target boat and converging rapidly. He pulled back on the throttle and put the boat into neutral gear. Winters did not want to draw any closer to the Florida Queen until Ramirez and the other two seamen were awake and in position.
He estimated that it was still about forty minutes until sunrise. Winters laughed again about Ramirez’s unwillingness to venture a comment on Todd’s carrot story. But the young Latino is a good officer. His only mistake was following Todd. Winters remembered how quickly Ramirez had organized all the details of their current sortie, picking the high-tech converted trawler for speed and stealth, rousting the two bachelor seamen who worked for him in Intelligence, and establishing a special link between the base and the trawler so that the whereabouts of the Florida Queen would be known at all times.
“We must follow them. We really have no choice,” Lieutenant Ramirez had said firmly to Winters after they had verified that Nick’s boat had indeed left the Hemingway Marina just after two o’clock. “Otherwise there’s no way we could ever justify our having taken them into custody in the first place.”
Winters had reluctantly agreed and Ramirez had organized the chase. The commander had told the younger men to get some sleep while he formulated the plan. Which is simple. Okay, you guys, come with us and answer the questions or we’ll charge you under the sedition act of 1991. Now, after putting the boat in idle, Winters was ready to wake Ramirez and the other two men. He intended to apprehend Nick, Carol, and Troy as soon as it was daylight.
The wind around the boat changed direction and Winters stopped a minute to check the weather. He turned his face toward the moon. The air suddenly felt warmer, almost hot, and he was reminded of a night off the coast of Libya eight years earlier. The worst night of my life, he thought. For a few moments his resolve to carry out his plan wavered and he asked himself if he was about to make another mistake.
Then he heard a trumpet blast, followed maybe four seconds later by a similar but quieter sound. Winters looked around him in the placid ocean. He saw nothing. Now he heard a group of trumpets and their echo, both sounds distinctly coming from the west. The commander strained his eyes in the direction of the moon. Silhouetted against its face he saw what appeared to be a group of snakes dancing out of the water. He went inside the wheelhouse to fetch a pair of binoculars.