It is as though she were saying we are all friends now and there win never be any trouble nor any wildness again, Thomas Hudson thought. Why is she so dishonest? A river can be treacherous and cruel and kind and friendly. A stream can be completely friendly and you can trust it all your life if you do not abuse it. But the ocean always has to lie to you before she does it.
He looked again at her gentle rise and fall that showed the Minervas as regularly and attractively as though she were trying to sell them as a choice location.
“Want to get me a sandwich?” he asked Ara. “Corned beef and raw onion or ham and egg and raw onion. After you get breakfast, bring a four-man watch up here and check all the binoculars. I’m going outside before we go in to Antón.”
“Yes, Tom.”
I wonder what I would do without that Ara, Thomas Hudson thought. You had a wonderful sleep, he told himself, and you couldn’t feel better. We’ve got orders and we are right on their tails and pushing them toward other people. You’re following your orders and look what a beautiful morning you have to follow them in. But things look too damned good.
They moved down the channel keeping a good lookout, but there was nothing but the calm, early morning sea with its friendly undulations and the long green line of Romano inland with the many keys between.
“They won’t sail very far in this,” Henry said.
“They won’t sail at all,” Thomas Hudson said.
“Are we going in to Antón?”
“Sure. And work all of that out.”
“I like Antón,” Henry said. “There’s a good place to lay to, if it’s calm, so they won’t eat us up.”
“Inside they’d carry you away,” Ara said.
A small seaplane showed ahead, flying low and coming toward them. It was white and minute with the sun on it.
“Plane,” Thomas Hudson said. “Pass the word to get the big flag out.”
The plane came on until it buzzed them. Then it circled them twice and went off flying on down to the eastward.
“He wouldn’t have it so good if he found one,” Henry said. “They’d shoot him down.”
“He could send the location and Cayo Francés would pick it up.”
“Maybe,” Ara said. The two other Basques said nothing. They stood back to back and searched their quadrants.
After a while the Basque they called George because his name was Eugenio and Peters could not always say Eugenio said, “Plane’s coming back to the eastward between the outer keys and Romano.”
“He’s going home to breakfast,” Ara said.
“He’ll report us,” Thomas Hudson said. “So in a month maybe everybody will know where we were at this time today.”
“If he doesn’t get the location mixed up on his chart,” Ara said. “Paredón Grande, Tom. Bearing approximately twenty degrees off the port bow.”
“You’ve got good eyes,” Thomas Hudson said. “That’s her, all right. I better take her in and find the channel in to Antón.”
“Turn port ninety degrees and I think you’ll have her.”
“I’ll hit the bank anyway and we can run along it until we find that damned canal.”
They came in toward the line of green keys that showed like black hedges sticking up from the water and then acquired shape and greenness and finally sandy beaches. Thomas Hudson came in with reluctance from the open channel, the promising sea, and the beauty of the morning on deep water, to the business of searching the inner keys. But the plane working the coast in this direction, turning to run over it with the sun behind it, should mean no one had picked the boats up to the eastward. It could be only a routine patrol, too. But it was logical that it should mean the other. A routine patrol would have been out over the channel both ways.
He saw Antón, which was well wooded and a pleasant island, growing before him and he watched ahead for his marks while he worked in toward the bank. He must take the highest tree on the head of the island and fit it squarely into the little saddle on Romano. On that bearing, he could come in even if the sun were in his eyes and the water had the glare of a burning glass.