The Hamlet Warning (16 page)

Chapter 18

Minus
4
Days
,
13
:
28
Hours

The tanker overshot the Mona Passage. That was the consensus of Johnson’s experts. Simply poor navigation, they said. The ship’s track, monitored in the suite at the Jaragua as reported from Langley, showed that the ship maintained a steady west-southwest heading 22.3 nautical miles beyond the point where a turn to port normally would be expected. The experts assumed that the ship’s captain, uncertain of his exact fix, made landfall to confirm his navigation with visual or radar sightings.

Loomis suspected otherwise. He pointed out that the ship was equipped with Loran. He believed the ship’s eccentric course might have been for another purpose. But Johnson sided with the experts.

“They say Loran isn’t all that accurate,” Johnson argued. “Sometimes returns from the ionosphere confuse things. Captains who depend on Loran sometimes wake up lost. Among younger crews, celestial navigation is becoming a lost art. They depend on Loran. And we checked. The ship doesn’t have the more accurate short-ranged Decca system.”

“What exactly is your constant aerial surveillance?” Loomis asked. “Satellites?” 

“Loomis, if I knew I probably couldn’t tell you. And if I could, you probably couldn’t understand it. My impression is that it’s some sort of infrared, heat-seeking gadget. The experts swear by it.”

“And you trust the experts.”

“Don’t you?”

“The experts told the people in Johnstown that if that old dam did break, it’d only raise the level of the river eighteen inches. The experts told the thirty thousand people in St. Pierre that if old Mount Pelée did blow her top, there was no threat to human lives. The experts …”

“All right, I get your point. So sometimes the experts are wrong. You have some other way of watching that ship?”

“What do those surveillance scans look like? You ever see one?”

“No. But I imagine they’d be gibberish to us common folk — swirls of color and so forth, requiring a high degree of interpretation.”

Loomis examined the tracks on the plot map and measured distances. “They weren’t far from land here, and here,” he pointed out. “I’d feel much better if we asked your people for a recheck of those two points.”

“The ship maintained speed each place,” Johnson said. “I don’t see how they could have off-loaded cargo underway at fifteen knots.”

“Johnson, as an intelligence officer, you have a few shortcomings,” Loomis told him. “Any third-rate deck crew in the navy could do that trick in their sleep.”

“But the track of any other vessel would show.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m guessing. A wooden-hulled diesel, with exhaust discharge under water, moving into the track of a large ship, might not show up very well. Not unless the interpreter were looking for it specifically.”

“All right,” Johnson said. “I’ll ask Langley for a restudy of those points. I’ll tell them the Dominican Republic’s resident expert doubts their competence.”

*

With all preparations made, Loomis left the Jaragua suite for the night and returned to his quarters. He showered and sprawled across the bed. When he awoke, María Elena was beside him and the telephone was ringing. Loomis turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the receiver.

El Jefe’s voice came to him strained and tired. “Both Santiago and San Francisco have fallen,” he said. “La Vega has extremely heavy fighting and may not hold out long. For all effects, Ramón now controls the entire Cibao. He may move on the capital at any moment. We must make preparations.”

Loomis sat up, struggling against sleep, wondering how much of El Jefe’s panic was from fatigue. He checked his watch. Just after 4:00 A.M. From the open balcony came the faint sound of far-away shooting, and Loomis could see the glare of distant flares floating to earth. “What’s the situation here?” he asked.

“Relatively quiet,” El Jefe said. “There’s some action the other side of the Duarte Bridge. Ramón thus far has concentrated his full attack in the Cibao. He has drawn our strength. We have nothing left for the
distrito
.”

“Ramón may be moving too fast,” Loomis said. “He may not be able to secure or supply what he’s gained. Things may not be as bad as they seem.”

“I’ve told myself that,” El Jefe said. “But I must face facts. My army consists of only nine thousand men. Three infantry brigades, one artillery battalion, and one antiaircraft battalion. Ramón has engaged one brigade in Santiago, another in San Francisco, and inflicted twenty percent casualties in less than two days of fighting. The survivors of both brigades are demoralized, totally without spirit. The government forces are collapsing. And for the defense of the capital, Colonel Escortia has at his disposal only one infantry brigade and one artillery battalion.”

Loomis again felt restrained by the limitations of his job. Under the government’s organization charts, his sole concern was palace security and investigation of subversive activities. By law and common courtesy, he was supposed to leave the fighting to the military. Yet, he had far more combat experience than most of El Jefe’s generals. Once more he felt compelled to speak up.

“Ramón still has a long way to go,” he said. “And thus far, his most important gains probably have been psychological. Your men didn’t expect heavy opposition. They got it. Now, they’re disorganized and confused. Ramón’s men are high and maybe without much reason. Ramón can’t possibly have the logistics established to supply them with food and ammunition for sustained fighting.”

“What would you propose?”

“I would make more use of the air force,” Loomis said.

“Ten old F-100 Super Sabres, twelve Mirage jets, and three old Northrop F-5 fighter bombers,” El Jefe said. “One Huey gunship. Valuable, but practically worthless under the present circumstances. If there were some way of giving close support to the ground forces, I would be willing to risk a few civilian casualties. But the pilots are not well trained, and even on the ground the fighting is chaotic, confused. I simply cannot bring myself to order heavy bombing, to murder innocent people caught in the combat zones.”

“The planes could be used as a psychological weapon,” Loomis pointed out. “You could fly in supplies to the government forces, right over rebel rooftops. The more trips, the better. Far more trips than necessary. That would convince them government troops are not lacking supplies. You could send the Mirage jets over to rock Ramón’s men with sonic booms. After a warning pass or two, a little light strafing wouldn’t do much damage, but it’d scare them, remind them they’re mortal. And I’d print up some leaflets. It doesn’t matter what the printing says. The real message would be that they
could
be bombs. I think all that would give your men a much-needed psychological boost, and time to prepare a counterattack. And it’d give Ramón’s men some second thoughts about the whole thing.”

The intensity of his voice had awakened María Elena. She lay looking up at him, listening.

El Jefe considered the suggestions. “That might be very effective,” he agreed.

“There’s something else,” Loomis said. “We may still need to contact Ramón, to inform him of Hamlet.” The line was silent for a moment. Such a thought was contrary to El Jefe’s principles; one never dealt with the enemy. El Jefe had been reluctant in approving Loomis’s earlier efforts to contact Ramón.

“Will that really be necessary?” he asked.

“I’m half-convinced the material isn’t aboard the tanker,” Loomis told him. “And if it’s not, we may have to appeal to Ramón for help in finding it. Conceivably, it might be in rebel-held territory. And if he moves on the capital, he’ll hamper our search here.”

“But how do we know Ramón himself isn’t involved?”

“Logic. The CIA claims its tangle with the Hamlet Group in Lisbon was one of the biggest confrontations with a clandestine force in years. Ramón simply isn’t in that league. And there is no evidence that the Hamlet people need him.”

“I’m not so certain,” El Jefe said.

“Hamlet has money, power, position,” Loomis said. “It’s obviously international in scope. The company just lost a man in Lisbon. He managed to take four Hamlet operatives with him. The Lisbon station picked up two live ones in a caper at Estoril. Octopus had complete dossiers on all six — every one was a veteran mercenary. The two live ones knew nothing except that they’d been hired, and at good pay, to do a job. Look at the logic. Why would the Hamlet people risk their whole worldwide operation by tying it to Ramón’s back-country revolution? It makes no sense. I’m positive Ramón is not involved.”

“Even so, I still don’t see why we need to bring him into the the matter. What could he do?”

“If the bomb is planted, and we can’t find it, we may have to ask him to agree to a cease-fire.”

“I don’t think he would listen. He would suspect a trick.”

“We could convince him. He’s not stupid. If he sees that the country, or at least the capital, is in danger, he would understand that this is his problem, too.”

The line was silent while El Jefe wrestled with the matter. “I once tried to get in touch with Ramón,” he said. “At one point, I thought he might listen to reason, that we might find common ground, resolve our differences. I could find no trace of him. I sent word and received no reply.”

“All the news correspondents are trying to arrange interviews,” Loomis said. “The
New
York
Times
and the
Washington
Post
have made contact with him. I’m keeping watch on both. They may lead us to him.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” El Jefe said. “We can cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Loomis called the Jaragua suite for a situation report. The tanker had reached the lower end of the Mona Passage and was now heading westward. The
Duarte
was two thousand yards in her wake, keeping close surveillance. All seemed normal.

María Elena stirred from the bed and shuffled through Loomis’s music collection. She selected a tape, threaded the machine, and turned up the sound: Segovia playing Villa-Lobos. She came back to bed.

“I could do it,” she said quietly.

“Do what?”

“Contact Ramón. I could walk right out the front door of this place and fly right to him, just like Mary Poppins. I wouldn’t even need the umbrella.” 

“But you couldn’t fly back. Ramón would see to that.”

“I could get the message to him, though. And he’d believe me. There’d be no other reason for me to go to him voluntarily.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Loomis said. “We may not need to contact him at all. I just wanted El Jefe aware of what we might have to do. I’m just keeping the options open.”

“Damn it, Loomis, you’re always spoiling my big scenes,” María Elena complained. “If you hadn’t been along, I might have been martyred there in the jungle. Headlines all over the world. Front page. It would have been a glorious funeral — you’ve probably never seen the dramatics these Latins put into something like that. It would put a crack in the foundations of the Vatican, but the church might have restored me to a state of grace. I would have been buried in white!”

“The way you describe it, I’m sorry I missed it,” Loomis said.

“I might have had a theater named after me: the María Elena de la Torre National Theater. I might have made the cover of
Time
magazine again. They might even have gotten a few facts right. And all my movies would have been rereleased. I might have become a cult! Oh shit, Loomis, why do you do these things to me?”

“You’ve got a cult,” Loomis said. “Me.”

“Anyway, I could do it.”

“There’s no need at this point,” Loomis said. “Maybe I’m imagining things. Maybe the materials
are
aboard the tanker.”

“And on the other hand, maybe they’re not,” María Elena said. 

Chapter 19

Minus
4
Days
,
02
:
00
Hours

By 11:00 A.M. the tanker was hull-down on the horizon to the southeast, a faint, dirty smudge against the cobalt-blue sea. Johnson stood at the window of the Jaragua suite, oversized binoculars to his eyes, trying to see the ship through the haze of its own stack gas. Loomis didn’t bother with the binoculars. He now knew everything he needed to know about the ship. The search itself was the problem.

“I can’t see the destroyer yet,” Johnson said.

“It’s in place,” Loomis told him. He had just received word that the destroyer would overtake the tanker five miles out to demand that the tanker slow to five knots and drop anchor one mile offshore. Loomis moved to the window and looked down at the Jaragua pool, where two fashion models from New York were supplementing quick divorces with Caribbean sun. A retired army couple from Virginia sipped rum and Coke beside the beds of poinsettias under the palms by the pool. Through the motionless upper leaves of the palms, on a level with the third-floor headquarters suite, he could see the approaching tanker, eighteen miles out. In little more than an hour the search would begin. He went back to the tables to study the charts.

The Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company had provided the complete plans for the ship down to the last rivet and plate. And from various sources throughout the world the CIA had assembled information on the ship and crew. All the material, gathered in Washington and flown by jet to Santo Domingo, was now spread on the hotel tables. Loomis had spent hours digesting the information. Yet he had the uncomfortable feeling that somewhere something had been overlooked.

He spread out the blueprints once more. The tanker was typical, no different from hundreds turned out in the years before the oil-shipping industry learned the economics of supertankers. In its early days the tanker had been considered a giant itself: 887 feet long and sixty-five thousand tons deadweight. But the tanker was now twenty-three years old. Most modern tankers were twice its size.

The layout of the ship also was conventional. Ten huge center tanks occupied most of the space amidship. Each center tank had wing tanks on both port and starboard, totaling thirty bulk cargo spaces. The fittings were old style, with high-suction lines to within a few feet of the bottom on each tank. Separate, low-suction stripping lines were attached to the bottom of each tank to drain sludge. And each tank was equipped with heating coils to facilitate cold-weather pumping.

The search teams had been divided into four groups. Each was assigned to a specific area of the ship. The teams were now receiving final briefing in separate rooms.

“A” Team would search the tanker’s bow: a maze of dry cargo spaces, pump rooms, deep tanks, boatswain’s stores, and the chain locker. “B” Team, responsible for the midship tanks, had received spur-of-the-moment training to handle the special equipment required. “C” Team would search the engine spaces and boiler rooms housed in the stern section along with more pump rooms and the ship’s fuel tanks. “D” Team would search the main deck and ship’s superstructure: the crew’s quarters, galley and cargo spaces aft, and the three-deck bridge superstructure slightly forward of midship.

And every space would have to be combed inch by inch.

Yet Loomis had the persistent feeling that he was walking into a trap. And long ago he had learned to trust his instincts. He studied the blueprints, analyzing what clues he could dredge up from his subconscious.

The more Loomis thought, the more all the unknowns narrowed to one question: Who were the Hamlet people?

The Lisbon incident as described by Johnson still disturbed him. He felt that if he knew where to look, the Lisbon operation might provide some indication.

“Who was the man who got wasted?” Loomis asked.

Johnson placed the binoculars on the windowsill and rubbed his eyes. “Mike Elliott,” he said. “I don’t think you knew him. He came in later. I worked with him, a time or two.”

“Good man?”

“In his own way. But shy on discipline. He had a weakness for women.”

“Imagine that,” Loomis said.

“We think they used a girl to suck him in. She was a known prostitute. But we haven’t been able to learn why he went from the airport directly to a nightclub. He was seen there alone, then later leaving with the girl.”

“Maybe he knew her,” Loomis said. “Maybe the opposition had her staked out, hoping he’d show.”

Johnson considered the theory. “Possible,” he said.

“Probable,” Loomis said. “And that may mean they’re ahead of us, anticipating.”

“You have a sneaky mind,” Johnson observed.

“It’s the company I keep,” Loomis said.

*

The tanker refused to obey or acknowledge signals from the
Duarte
. Ordered to slow to five knots, she maintained a steady fifteen, steering straight toward harbor. The
Duarte
repeated the order and issued coordinates for mandatory anchorage. The tanker refused to reply. Two miles from shore, the
Duarte
sent a five-inch shell across the tanker’s bow. The shell splashed less than two hundred yards off the tanker’s starboard bow, raising an instant column of water fifty feet high. Perceptibly, the tanker slowed. The
Duarte
moved in closer and repeated the coordinates for anchorage.

Loomis and Johnson watched the action through binoculars, standing in the bow of a fifty-foot motor launch. The thirty Dominican marines with them would serve as the boarding party. As they watched, the dull boom of the Duarte’s five-incher came to them across the distance, a full fifteen seconds after the shell splash had disappeared.

“I think that did it,” Johnson said, studying the ship. “He seems to be altering course, moving out of the channel.”

Their launch was tossed by deep swells. Loomis had difficulty keeping his binoculars trained on the ship, but he could see a half-dozen men moving toward the bow. “They’ve called away the anchoring detail,” he said. “They’re going to drop the hook. We might as well go on out there.”

He turned and motioned to the coxswain of the launch, who nodded and rang his bells for more power. The launch turned sharply to starboard as the coxswain steered for the opening in the breakwater.

As they came abreast of the ancient cannon at the mouth of the muddy Ozama, the tanker dropped anchor. The roar of the anchor chain playing out through the hawse pipes sent seabirds along the breakwater scurrying into the air. The
Duarte
didn’t anchor but stood by less than five hundred yards off the tanker’s beam. 

Loomis could see that the
Duarte’s
quad-forty mounts amidships were manned and ready.

They rounded the breakwater jetty. The coxswain turned the launch sharply to port to meet the first full swells from the open sea and steered straight for the ship.

“Bigger bastard than I thought,” Johnson said.

From their vantage point, low on the water, the high sides of the tanker loomed like cliffs. The coxswain maneuvered the launch around to the starboard side. Loomis couldn’t see anyone on deck or in the ship’s superstructure. But as the coxswain slowed, turning the boat in a circle toward the ship’s side, a head appeared at the railing. As Loomis watched, the man raised a loud-hailer.

“What the hell is this?” the amplified voice boomed in English. “What the fuck you cocksuckers want?”

“Well, they sure sound like our kind of people,” Johnson said.

Loomis motioned, and a crewman brought him a hailer. He put it to his mouth and pulled the trigger. “Lower a ladder,” he yelled at the man. “We’re coming aboard.”

The head disappeared. For a full minute, Loomis thought his demand might be ignored. Then three crewmen went to work, swinging out a small boat boom. When it was secured, a thirty-foot Jacob’s ladder tumbled out and dangled from the boom to the surface of the sea.

“Christ, are we going to climb that?” Johnson asked.

“We might try going up the anchor chain,” Loomis said. “But I think the ladder would be easier.”

“I’ll sure say one thing for them,” Johnson said. “They don’t believe in making anything easy for anybody.”

The tanker rode high in the water, the Plimsoll well above the surface. As the coxswain brought the boat in under the boom, Loomis studied the huge, raw red patches of lead paint protecting the metal from rust. Little of the original color — black — remained. Various exhaust lines along the ship’s side spewed sewage, bilge pumpings, and deck drainings into the sea, raising a strange mixture of smells. Even in the context of most tramp freighters, this one was filthy.

A boathandler moved past Loomis, carefully walking the gunnels, and snared a dangling boom line with his boathook. As the coxswain killed the engine, the boat-handlers pulled in slack on the lines and held the launch in place under the swaying Jacob’s ladder. With the swells running four and five feet, the bottom of the ladder couldn’t be anchored. Loomis slung his Heckler MP5, grabbed the ladder, and went up first. There was a trick to it. The ladder was stiffer when approached from the side. Otherwise, one’s feet tended to shoot skyward.

Oddly, there were no curious faces at the rails. Loomis climbed rapidly up to the boom. As he pulled himself up onto the hardwood, catching his breath with short gasps, he could see three officers and a group of seamen waiting on deck. No one moved to help him. Sweating heavily from the exertion, Loomis waited until his breathing returned nearer to normal. He then inched his way across the boom to the steel deck. As he walked toward the group, he singled out the officer wearing a cap with a tarnished scrambled-egg insignia.

“Captain Larson?” Loomis asked. “I’m Clay Loomis of …”

“I don’t give a fuck what your name is,” Larson interrupted. “What you mean, firing that fucking gun? What do you want?”

Loomis measured him for a moment. Larson stood six-feet-three or four. He would weigh close to three hundred pounds, with more muscle than fat. And he was one of the ugliest specimens of humanity Loomis had ever seen. A long scar gave the left side of his face a ribald leer. His nose was flat, and his pale blue eyes and blond hair seemed strangely obscene and out of place in company with the swarthy, pockmarked face.

Loomis kept his voice level and unemotional. He didn’t bother to unsling his Heckler.

“I’m aboard this ship as the personal representative of the President of the Dominican Republic,” he said. “Anything you say to me will be considered said to him.”

Larson remained silent, waiting. The ring of misfits around him looked as if they’d been salvaged from Devil’s Island. Loomis kept his eyes on Larson. He could hear Johnson and the boarding party coming up behind him.

“A man aboard this ship was exposed in Lisbon to bubonic plague,” Loomis said. “You and the ship are in quarantine under International Sanitary Regulations of the World Health Organization, third annotated edition, and the International Health Regulations, as adopted by the twenty-second World Health Assembly in 1969. You and your men will be taken ashore for thorough physical examinations.”

“I’ll be goddamned if we will,” Larson said. “I’m not leaving this ship. I’m captain. Nobody tells me what to do.”

“That’s your privilege,” Loomis told him. “But you’ll be going against explicit orders from your owners. And you can’t go in to dock and off-load here until you comply. If you put to sea, you’ll have the same problem anywhere you go, with any country or port in the civilized world.”

Larson looked past Loomis to Johnson and his men. “Who are all these people?” he asked.

“World Health Organization and a half-dozen other agencies, all working with Dominican Republic Health Service,” Loomis said. “As you may know, the plague is transmitted by a rat-flea chain. These professionals and their crews will fumigate the entire ship. A medical team is waiting ashore for you and your men. The whole thing will take less than forty-eight hours. It’s been cleared with your owners.”

Larson stared at the boarding party. His mouth worked several times before he could form words. Loomis had a strong feeling that Larson was reacting more in fear than from surprise and anger.

“Impossible,” Larson said. “I’ve got dock space in Houston Friday. And there’s a load waiting in Aruba.”

“You know maritime law as well as I do,” Loomis said. “Houston would put you in quarantine.”

“Which one of my crew is supposed to be sick?”

“Not sick. Exposed. An able by the name of Stanislaus Boleslaw.”

Larson laughed as if he had found the solution to his whole problem. “Shit, Boleslaw’s dead,” he said.

Johnson walked up beside Loomis. His face showed no surprise at the news. “Not from vomiting, diarrhea, and high fever, I hope.”

“Naw. Fell over the side. Third day out. No loss. A boozer. Never did a lick of work.”

“Just for the record, did anyone see him fall?” Johnson asked.

“Shit, nobody there to see. He wasn’t missed until he didn’t show for morning watch. We held an official inquiry. It’s all in the log. You’ll find I keep good books.”