Matt Helm The Damagers E-Book

Donald Hamilton

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Take a gorgeous companion for a leisurely sail on a beautiful yacht. Sounds like easy duty for Matt Helm, except that the last three captains of the yacht died under mysterious circumstances. Matt will tangle with a crew of dangerous women, a terrorist squad, and an elite organization of death-dealing specialists. He had better be ready, if he wants to stay alive.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Donald Hamilton and available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

The Damagers

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

About the Author

THE DAMAGERS

Also by Donald Hamilton and available from Titan Books

Death of a Citizen

The Wrecking Crew

The Removers

The Silencers

Murderers’ Row

The Ambushers

The Shadowers

The Ravagers

The Devastators

The Betrayers

The Menacers

The Interlopers

The Poisoners

The Intriguers

The Intimidators

The Terminators

The Retaliators

The Terrorizers

The Revengers

The Annihilators

The Infiltrators

The Detonators

The Vanishers

The Demolishers

The Frighteners

The Threateners

TITAN BOOKS

The DamagersPrint edition ISBN: 9781785654886E-book edition ISBN: 9781785654893

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: February 20171 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 1993, 2017 by Donald Hamilton. All rights reserved.Matt Helm® is the registered trademark of Integute AB.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Did you enjoy this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website: www.titanbooks.com

THE DAMAGERS

1

My crew reported for duty early in October, a strapping Viking of a girl with long blond hair. Well, I’d figured they’d send me a girl when the time came, if it came. I was supposed to be doing my best to look harmless—a tempting target for sabotage and assassination—and a man and a girl cruising together on a boat look much more vulnerable than two men, even if the girl is a tanned Brunhilde almost six feet tall.

Standing on the dock with a seabag over her shoulder and a bundle of foul-weather gear under her arm, the impressive lady requested permission to come aboard, in good nautical fashion. Permission granted, she threw her belongings onto the side deck, about three feet higher than the floating dock, and swung herself up after it, disregarding the ladder I’d hung at the gate in the railing to make boarding easier.

“Nice sunny weather we’re having,” I said. “Unusual for Connecticut so late in the summer, if you still want to call this summer.”

“Connecticut is not so bad,” she said. “Maine, that is much different, just fog, fog, fog all the time.”

Okay. There was certainly no doubt that she was the right sex, the sex I’d expected, and she’d answered my Connecticut sunshine with Maine fog, so we had the official identification nonsense all taken care of.

“I live up forward, ja?” she said, after an appraising glance up the masts and around the deck. “You will show?”

“Let me take some of that stuff.”

“I carry it okay.”

My parents came from Sweden and I’ve spent some time in that country; but I couldn’t tell if the accent was real, and it didn’t matter. What the hell, nothing was real on this ship, particularly the skipper; as a sailor I make a great cowboy. Well, that was what the girl was for, to compensate for my nautical deficiencies.

I led her into the big, light deckhouse with its all-around windows giving a full view of the marina, the winding river that led to Long Island Sound, and the open salt marsh beyond. She followed me down two steps forward into the main cabin, considerably darker since it was illuminated by considerably less glass. The galley was to port facing a big table three-quarters surrounded by a U-shaped settee to starboard. The whole boat was paneled in teak and the upholstery was dark-red velour or something similar; kind of a bordello decor, but after living with it for a couple of months I’d grown to like it.

The boat was a husky thirty-eight-foot motor sailer built in Finland, of all places; and she was the most luxurious private vessel I’d ever inhabited, with wall-to-wall carpeting, refrigeration, hot and cold running water, and central heating, not to mention an intimidating array of navigational instruments, some of which I still hadn’t really mastered, even after studying the manuals hard. Well, my worries were over; my blonde shipmate was undoubtedly familiar with all the modern electronic miracles.

“Go on forward; there isn’t room for both of us,” I said, moving aside to let her squeeze past. “Watch your head. For anybody over five-eight, this boat ought to be a hard-hat area. I still brain myself twice a week forgetting to duck.”

“I know. They are all like that.”

She unloaded her gear on the cabin table and made her way through the brief passageway to the wedge-shaped stateroom in the bow that had tapering twin berths obviously designed for a special race of people with very wide shoulders and very small feet. She surveyed her quarters with experienced eyes. She studied the overhead hatch for a moment to figure out the latch system and opened it, setting the braces to keep it from flopping back down. Having solved the ventilation problem, she tested the plushy red mattresses with her fingertips, checked for access, and decided that the port berth would be the easiest for her to operate out of; the starboard one would do for her gear. She hauled her seabag and oilskins forward and checked the doors along the brief passageway, returning to me.

“This is much fine,” she said. “Much locker space, and I even have for myself a klo… what you call a head, yes?”

It’s Swedish slang: klo, pronounced kloo, short for klosett, like in water closet. People can think of the damndest circumlocutions when they simply want to say crapper. The fact that she knew this one made me think her accent might actually be genuine.

I said, “Yes, there’s more plumbing aft so this one’s all yours. What do I call you?”

“My name is Siegelinda, Siegelinda Kronquist, but everybody calls me Ziggy.”

I said, “Seems a pity. Siegelinda is a mouthful, but it’s a pretty name.”

“Ziggy is okay. I will not be called Linda. Every stupid little American girl who wants to be a movie star is called Linda. Ziggy is fine.”

“Okay, Ziggy. I’m Matt.”

We shook hands on it. Her hand was sizeable and her grip was firm.

“Now you will show me the rest of this boat.”

I showed her the significant stuff in the galley: the groceries, the dishes, the drawer for the silverware (okay, stainless), the knife rack, the refrigerator, the sink, and the garbage can under the sink. I explained the three-burner propane stove and showed her the big butane lighter, the kind used to fire up charcoal grills, that I used to light it. I demonstrated the safety switch that, by remote control, cut off the gas at the propane tank in its vented locker aft. I explained to her how, any time you were through with the stove, you were supposed to turn off, not only the burners, but the main gas supply as well, and make sure the red warning light was out. Propane is heavier than air, and you don’t want to run any risk of having it leak out and collect in the bilge waiting for a spark to set it off…

The trouble with the girl was that she’d obviously been on so many boats that she knew practically everything I was telling her about this one. I sensed her attention wandering.

“You drink,” she said.

I saw that she was looking at the bottles. Behind the main cabin settee, along the side of the ship, were some small lockers flanking a couple of long shelves. There were seven bottle-sized holes in the bottom shelf for liquor storage—you don’t want any glass containers bouncing around loose on a boat when things get rough. I’d filled the rack with two fifths of Scotch, two of vodka, and three of wine, a California Chardonnay if it matters. I saw no need to apologize for them.

“I drink,” I said.

“That is good. I never trust a man who can not trust himself with sprit.” That was Swedish for spirits, meaning alcohol. “Now we will see the engine room, ja?”

The engine hid under the deckhouse floor. The instruction manual that came with the boat said that it should be checked daily when you were under way. That was obviously some kind of funny Finnish joke, since getting at the mill was a lengthy and laborious process that involved disassembling and removing the little pedestal table for the comer breakfast/cocktail nook, moving out the helmsman’s stool and everything else in the deckhouse, hauling up the carpet, lifting up two enormous hatches that were lead lined for soundproofing, and then dismantling the lead-lined box that surrounded, for further soundproofing, the big four-cylinder mill itself. There wasn’t a piece weighing much less than twenty pounds. The girl wanted to do the work so she would know how. I didn’t fight her.

When she had it all open, I pointed out the eighty-gallon fuel tanks port and starboard, the valves that controlled them, the water separator and fuel filters, the three batteries strapped into their boxes—two house batteries and one reserved for starting the engine—the pressure pump for the fresh-water system, and the pressure pump for the saltwater system that was used for hosing down the decks—also for cleaning off the anchor and chain when they came up muddy. Siegelinda Kronquist studied the engine for a moment.

“Ford?”

I said, “Yes. Eighty horsepower. It’s a Swedish conversion of a Ford block. Should make you feel right at home.”

“I understand not.” Then she laughed. “Oh, because it is Swedish? But I am American now. You know this boat pretty good, ja?”

“I’ve had since August to get acquainted with her.”

“I will put it all back now. I must learn how.”

“Be my guest.”

She made it look easy, swinging the awkward slabs of lead-lined plywood back into place without much apparent effort. She was wearing short, but not excessively short or tight, blue denim cutoffs, well faded and fashionably frayed; her legs were brown and magnificent, and she had long feet tucked into ancient brown moccasin-style boat shoes. I had a hunch we wouldn’t see much of those shoes; they were made to come off easily, and she looked like barefoot-nature-girl to me. As far as I’m concerned, broken toes hurt like hell, and cuts and splinters aren’t much fun, either; besides, when you kick somebody with suitable shoes it’s more effective than when you kick them without.

Above the waist, Miss Kronquist wore a thin T-shirt with a cartoon face on it. Even thought there was no TV on board and I don’t watch it much even when I have it, I recognized a character that had recently taken the country by storm. What was under the idiot face was unfettered and spectacular. I helped her put the carpets back into place and replace the deckhouse furniture.

“Carpets on a boat are stupid,” she said. “Where is the bilge pump?”

“It’s the middle switch in the panel right behind you. It’s marked. There’s a manual pump for backup, in that locker to port. And the wash-down pump can be rigged to suck bilge water instead of seawater in an emergency. I should have shown you when we had the engine room open.”

“You can show me later; let us hope we do not sink today.” She looked ahead through the windshield at the machinery mounted in the bow. “An electric windlass? What if the electricity fails?”

“It can be worked manually. The emergency handle is clipped to the bulkhead right over there by the port deckhouse door.” I pointed to it, a one-inch stainless steel pipe about eighteen inches long, with a plastic grip.

“And what is aft?”

“My stateroom, down two steps. Plumbing to starboard. Double berth, well, you can see it from up here. The rudder head, emergency tiller, and hydraulic steering machinery are under it.”

“A double berth is convenient, ja?” she said, looking down into the aft cabin without expression.

“If you can find somebody to occupy the other half,” I said. I hesitated, but it was a lot of girl on a boat that seemed to have got a lot smaller since she came aboard. As a normal male, I had to be thinking along certain lines— well, I was—and it had better get said and put behind us. “You’re welcome to fill the vacant space any time, Miss Kronquist. Don’t hesitate to wake me if I’m asleep.”

She regarded me steadily for a moment. I noted that her eyes were very blue. “But you will never come up forward to bother me in my little cabin, is that what you wish to tell me, Matt? It is my decision?”

“Yours entirely, Ziggy.”

“That is good,” she said calmly. “I will think about it when I know you better. Now you will tell me about the life jackets and flares and other nonsense the Coast Guard loves so much, so I can show them if they board us, and then you will go and pay the marina while I warm up the motor, and when you come back we will get under way, yes?”

I glanced at my watch. “It’s almost lunchtime.”

“We can eat as we sail. I will make sandwiches. With eighty horsepower this boat should cruise good at seven or eight knots; if we start now, we can be in Montauk before dark. Those who send me, they want this boat to stop wasting time and money here, where nothing happens, and start moving south, where maybe something does happen.”

“Aye, aye, skipper.”

“No. You are the skipper. I am just the big stupid Swede girl you bring to pull the ropes, and maybe sleep with. And maybe not. Let everybody guess; it will do them good.”

I hesitated. “Well, just let me know how you want to divide up the work on board. As you’ve probably been told, I haven’t had much cruising experience. Hell, that’s why you’re here.”

There were sliding doors port and starboard, open now, letting the breeze blow right through the deckhouse. It blew a lock of blonde hair across her face as she stood by the big wooden steering wheel. She tossed back the yellow strands and looked at me gravely for a moment with those blue Norse eyes.

“The work?” she said. “But the division is really very simple, Matt. I will keep us afloat. You will keep us alive. Okay?”

2

“You were selected because you have had some experience with boats,” Mac had told me back in early August.

I remembered that I’d groaned at the time, but not aloud. That’s the way it works in our outfit. We’re not big enough to support a bunch of temperamental specialists. If you once manage to figure out how to paddle a canoe across a farm pond in the line of duty, you’re the resident clipper-ship expert forever after, as far as Mac is concerned.

He went on: “The boat’s name is Lorelei III. It is an eight-year-old motor sailer, ketch rigged—that means two masts, I believe—displacing about twelve tons. It is currently lying in a slip in the Pilot’s Point Marina in Westbrook, Connecticut, about twenty miles east of New Haven. It is being offered for sale, its owner having died last spring. You will travel there and inspect it with a yacht broker. You will also, for appearances’ sake, look at some other boats he has lined up for you, but this one will strike your fancy and you will buy it. I am told it needs considerable work. You will have that done and learn how to sail the craft as well as possible in the time available.”

“How much time?”

“If your mission is not completed before winter weather sets in, the boat will have to be moved south. You should plan to have it seaworthy by late September.”

It seemed to me that he was skipping lightly over a couple of important details that needed further explanation. He was wearing his customary gray suit; and his face was unreadable, as usual, made more so by the bright window behind him through which I could see Washington, D.C., if I wanted to see Washington, D.C. I was more concerned with the familiar, lean, gray-haired gent with the black eyebrows, on the far side of the big desk, who’d called me back from my New Mexico home sooner than I’d anticipated.

I’d hoped to have the whole summer free to train a young Chesapeake Bay retriever I’d acquired in the course of a recent assignment; I’d even hoped, optimistically, to have the autumn free to hunt him. Instead I’d had to leave him with a professional trainer in Texas I’d used before— who’d undoubtedly do a better job of completing his education than I could have, but I’d miss the fun of doing it myself—and rush east to learn that I was about to become a yachtsman.

I asked about one of the details that concerned me: “What did the boat’s owner die of?”

Mac glanced at me sharply, annoyed at having his instructions interrupted by a question he’d probably intended to get around to answering later.

After a moment, he said, “Truman Fancher had a heart attack in North Carolina, near a small town called Coinjock, while bringing his boat north from Florida along the Intracoastal Waterway. He was steering at the time. His wife was taking a nap down in the cabin. She awoke when the boat veered out of the channel and ran aground.”

“A heart attack,” I said without expression.

“That was the official verdict.” Mac paused, and went on deliberately. “The boat was refloated without damage and brought to its home marina in Oyster Bay, New York.”

“Where’s Oyster Bay?”

Mac said, “It’s on Long Island but not very far from New York City… That was in June. Early in July, Lorelei III was lent to a married couple, friends of the Fancher family, for a weekend cruise. The woman, Mrs. Henrietta Guild, came on board on a Thursday to lay in supplies and make other preparations. Her husband was to join her after work on Friday. When Mr. Nathaniel Guild arrived at the dock on Friday evening, he found the boat dark. Going aboard, he stumbled over his wife’s body. She was in her nightgown; she had been killed by several blows to the head. The weapon was apparently the emergency handle for the power windlass, employed to bring the anchor up manually if the electricity failed. Apparently it was kept in a convenient place in the cabin ready for use.”

“A weapon of opportunity,” I said. “Looks as if whoever did the job didn’t come intending to kill. A professional hitman would have brought his own club.”

“Perhaps,” Mac said. “Or perhaps that is exactly what he wants us to think. At any rate, the body was quite cold, so the crime had presumably taken place the night before.” After a moment, he went on. “The family then chartered the boat to a young man named Martin Jesperson, who planned to cruise up the coast to Maine and back.”

“New Englanders say ‘down the coast to Maine,’” I told him. “Because the prevailing winds blow that way. The hard part is coming back against them, uphill so to speak.”

“Indeed? That is very interesting.” Mac’s voice was dry. “Heading out Long Island Sound, Mr. Jesperson had some engine trouble. He used the radio to call for help, and was towed into the nearest marina. The following day, after a mechanic had solved his problem, he started eastward again; but only a few hours later the Coast Guard was notified that a ketch-rigged vessel was aground on a nearby shoal with nobody visible on deck. The boarding party found Lorelei III uninhabited. Jesperson’s body was not recovered until the following day. Mr. Jesperson had apparently fallen overboard and drowned. The verdict was accidental death. The boat was returned to the marina. It has, as I indicated, been put up for sale. You will be given the funds with which to buy it.”

I grimaced. “A real hoodoo ship, eh? Let me get the history straight. Who was Truman Fancher?”

“He was a wealthy man who had a yacht dealership in Oyster Bay—more a hobby, I gather, than a serious source of income—and was a well-known sailor. He had made an impressive racing record with series of large, fast sailing yachts. However, when well up in his sixties, Mr. Fancher retired from competition, sold his latest racing boat, and bought the comfortable motor sailer that concerns us, in which he cruised Long Island Sound and New England in the summer, Florida and the Bahamas in the winter.”

“And he was bringing her up from Florida last spring, when he died.” I frowned, thinking it over. At last I said, “Afterward, a surprising number of people seem to’ve been interested in a dead man’s boat; it seems almost indecent the way the poor old bucket was hardly given a chance to catch her breath after losing her owner so tragically. You’d think that, even if they yearned to sail on a boat on which a man had just died, folks would be a little hesitant about approaching the grieving family so soon. The way you told it, Fancher was barely buried and the boat was hardly back in her home slip before people were beating on the door asking to borrow or charter her.”

Mac gave me the thin smile that’s about as much amusement as he can manage. “Your instincts are sound, Eric,” he said. My real name is Matthew Helm, but I answer to Eric on official occasions; and this office is about as official as we get. Mac went on. “You do not need to take the matrimonial bonds of the Guilds too seriously, or their close friendship with the Fanchers. Actually, they were not married, and neither of them was named Guild, any more than Jesperson was named Jesperson.”

“I see,” I said, although that was an exaggeration. “So we’re all phonies together. Well, I don’t mind owning a yacht, even a jinxed one, but I hope nobody expects me to impersonate a yachtsman. They speak a special language that I never quite mastered the previous times I had to operate afloat. The jargon is as bad as computerese; just trade RAMS and ROMS for ports and starboards. It’s almost impossible to fake. If I pretend to be an old salt, I’ll be spotted as a phony right away.”

Mac nodded. “So we are making you a book sailor, occupation photojournalist, from the waterless deserts of the Southwest, who has read every nautical volume he could lay hands on—we’ll supply you with a suitable, well-thumbed library to bring aboard—and dreamed of sailing alone around the world in the wakes of Captain Joshua Slocum and Sir Francis Chichester, but never actually handled any vessel larger than an outboard fishing skiff. But an uncle died and left you a fairly substantial sum of money, a little over two hundred thousand dollars.” The background, apart from the nautical reading and the rich uncle, was fairly close to my own; the photojournalist cover is one I often use by default, when there’s no pressing need for me to assume another identity. Mac went on. “You decided to haul your cameras and word processor east and follow your salty dream. It is really amazing how many people have that dream. Even in our cynical profession it seems that a considerable number of the men, and even some of the women, hope upon retirement to buy little cruising boats and sail away into the sunset.”

I asked, “Am I supposed to sail away into the sunset on the good ship Lorelei III?”

“No. At least not immediately, and if you do go, as I have said, the direction will be south, not west. But first you will spend the remainder of the summer, as I said, just fixing up the boat and learning how to sail it.”

I frowned. “What’s so special about this particular motor sailer aside from the fact that three people have died on her?” I asked. “Or off her, if Jesperson actually died in the water.”

“We have not been told what else makes the boat unique, if anything does,” Mac said. “As for the deaths, Truman Fancher may have had a genuine heart attack— he’d had one earlier, but had made a good recovery— but there is apparently some room for doubt. In order to dispel or confirm that doubt, and to find the answers to some other questions, Mr. and Mrs. Guild, so-called, were ordered aboard Lorelei III by the agency that has now requested our assistance. That is as much information as we have been given. Our colleagues are operating on a strict need-to-know basis.”

I sighed. “And as usual they don’t think we need to know very much. I suppose Jesperson was put aboard, officially, to investigate what happened to Fancher and Guild, and I’m going on this jinx ship to investigate what happened to Fancher, Guild, and Jesperson.”

Mac nodded. “At least that is the ostensible goal of your mission. And I think you can safely assume that, while Mr. Fancher may just possibly have died a natural death, the individual who clubbed to death the lady calling herself Mrs. Guild was not just a stray seagoing mugger even if he did use a weapon he found on the scene, and the so-called Mr. Jesperson was not really alone on board and did not really fall overboard by accident.” He regarded me for a moment. “In support of this assumption is the fact that when Nathaniel Guild recovered from the first shock of finding his ‘wife’ dead, he smelled propane; the boat was full of it. The master gas valve was open and a hose had been removed from a certain fitting. I’m afraid I can’t give you the exact technical details, but a candle was found on the counter in the kitchen—I suppose I should call it a galley. Fortunately ‘Mrs. Guild’ had left a hatch open that her murderer failed to spot and there was a thunderstorm the night she was killed; the high wind caused enough of a draft to blow out the flame that had presumably been left burning. If it had continued to burn, Lorelei III would have exploded violently when the gas rose high enough in the cabin to be ignited.”

I said, “Well, if there is something on board that somebody doesn’t want found, the simplest answer is to destroy the boat completely. What about the other incident?”

“There was over a foot of water in the cabin when the Coast Guard arrived. The discharge hose of the galley sink apparently leads directly to a valve—I believe they call it a sea cock—in the boat’s hull which, open, allows the dishwater to drain into the ocean. The clamps had been loosened and the hose had been pulled off the valve, which was left open, allowing the sea to pour in. And the bilge pump had been turned off. It is assumed that the boat was actually aimed eastward, in the hope that it would sink where Long Island Sound is reasonably deep, but some malfunction of the automatic pilot, which was engaged, caused it to swerve to the north and hit the shoal. The quick response of the Coast Guard prevented it from filling completely. They, of course, immediately shut the sea cock and pumped out the water.”

“Just the same, it sounds as if I’m going to have a soggy mess to deal with,” I said. “That saltwater never really dries.”

Mac said, “We are, as I’ve said, supplying you with a cover of sorts; if the opposition, whatever it may be, thinks that we, or you, are stupid enough to trust it to keep you safe, so much the better. We are, of course, hoping that it will not.”

I nodded. “So I’m not really there just to investigate two or three murders, or even to search the boat for interesting clues. It’s also a decoy job. Since the vessel seems to be reluctant to tell us anything, maybe we can get some answers from the people who are haunting it homicidally?” I made it a question.

Mac did not answer directly. He said, “The agency concerned, which has been keeping Lorelei III under observation since Jesperson’s death, has decided that somebody else should be put aboard. However, having lost two of their own valuable people on this boat, they think it advisable to replace them with more expendable human material from other government sources.” He shrugged. “Well, it is what we are paid for, Eric.”

A polite name for our organizational mission, which is not publicized around Washington, is counter-assassination. When a government agency starts losing people to somebody too tough for them to handle, they can call on us to take him, or her, out for them, discreetly. But very often we’re called in simply because there’s a hot spot that needs filling by a gent, or lady, somewhat more bullet proof than the usual run of government employees. This was a fairly typical situation: somebody had come up short a couple of agents and didn’t want to risk misplacing any more. Just me.

I said, “If somebody does come for me, what’s my reaction supposed to be?”

“Very simple,” Mac said. “First, you prevent them from killing you, and from destroying the boat. Then you capture them and call a certain telephone number, and they will be taken off your hands. If you should of necessity wind up with some dead ones, it will be understood, and you will be protected, but live and garrulous ones are preferred. The lady who passed on the instructions spoke in terms of a giant conspiracy; she would like one of the conspirators for interrogation.”

I sighed. “Oh, gee, golly, another giant conspiracy, I don’t know if my heart can stand it, sir.” I yawned widely. Mac did not react to my horseplay, and I went on. “But if I sit on that boat until the cold autumn winds start to blow, and nothing happens, then, you say, I’m supposed to cast off the dock lines and proceed south?”

“Yes,” Mac said. “You will head for Florida by a route that will be given you, hoping for trouble along the way. By that time, you should have the boat in good cruising order, and yourself, too.”

It was time to bring up another important detail he seemed to be neglecting. I said, “Maybe. But with all the work to be done on this motor sailer, it’s obviously not going to be available for boating practice a lot of the time; and I’ve only got a couple of months. I doubt that even if I had the whole summer to play with it I could turn myself into a real seaman and navigator. Sure, I can fake it—I’ve done it before; sailing isn’t all that difficult—but this is a hell of a lot bigger boat than anything I’ve ever managed by myself, and if these people feel it’s important to get her south in one piece, they’d better give me some help. Cruising alone, little as I really know about it, there’s a chance I’ll have their expensive bucket on the rocks before I’m out of Long Island Sound.”

Mac nodded. “I told our friends that, while you had managed to survive several missions afloat, you could hardly be called an expert seaman. They said it was hoped the operation would be concluded before autumn; but if it was not, they would supply a good hand to help you…”

3

Ziggy Kronquist had the sail up before we passed Duck Island, just outside the river entrance. Again she wanted to do it all herself so she’d learn where everything was and how it worked.