The Pirate's Daughter (38 page)

“Quatre Sables,” the acting captain said.

“Yes,” Wilson said.

The acting captain began to pace the stateroom again, and when he stopped pacing and turned around, his eyes held the answer.

“Lander,” he said lightly. “I believe I know where I've heard that name before. He was the chap who traced the river Niger from its source to the sea, Richard Lander. A bookish, quiet sort from Cornwall who just picked up one day and went off to Africa. He succeeded where dozens of others had failed. Went to Sokoto with Clapperton in 1832. When Clapperton died, he reached the coast on his own. Captain Morris had the man's book somewhere.…”

The acting captain went to the shelves and extracted a thick volume with a red leather binding and marbleized flyleaf. Wilson remembered it almost immediately from his childhood, from among the dusty volumes in the library at his great-aunt's house. He took it and opened to the title page:
The Journey of Richard Lander from Kano to the Sea—Along with a Record of Captain Clapperton's Last Expedition to Africa with the Subsequent Adventures of the Author
. The volume felt right in Wilson's hand. He tried to remember something that his great-aunt had told him about an ancestor who had traveled and written a book, but her voice in his head faded out, enveloped by the static of the years. Perhaps Africa had been in his blood all along.

“Would be something if you were related to that chap,” Acting Captain Worthington said. “Quite ironic, really—”

There was a flash of white light from the darkness beyond the porthole, and a few seconds later the distant crash of thunder. Thirty-foot waves hit the side of the ship as the storm bloomed out of Africa. But HMS
Gadfly
was sturdy and fast. They weighed anchor and sailed beyond the dirty weather into the open sea.

Quatre Sables revealed itself in morning light as a dark bundle on the horizon. Just before dawn, a faint wind blew from the direction of the island, and Wilson caught the familiar stench of the place, and it was as if a cold hand had grabbed his gut from pubic hair to belly button.

A hundred yards off the port bow, HMS
Hyperion
mirrored the
Gadfly
in dark silhouette. Coded signals flashed back and forth between the two ships; flags snapped in the ocean breeze. The jet engines of the Sea Harriers started with a wheeze, then warmed into a steady scream. Men in camouflage fatigues and combat gear moved purposefully across the deck. Despite the noise and motion, Wilson could hardly keep his eyes open; he had never been a morning person—then, suddenly, he was wide awake and the sea breeze was sharp and fresh in his nostrils, and he was ready for whatever would come.

At 0500 hours, the sky began to brighten in the east. Acting Captain Worthington assembled the crew on the main deck below the superstructure. He wore combat fatigues and camouflage paint on his face but eschewed the heavy armament of his marines and carried only a pistol at his side. He spoke through a small microphone attached to his tunic, and his words were carried electronically to the
Hyperion
riding the waves in the near distance.

“Sailors and marines of the Blockade Squadron,” he said, “I will be brief as we have a job ahead of us today. We look around and see a world sliding back into ruin and savagery. Five thousand years of civilization, the intellectuals tell us, are at an end—our beliefs exhausted, our achievements in the past. They tell us we are becoming a footnote, going under with all hands and all engines, sinking into the depths with our God and our laws, our academies of natural and applied sciences, our presidents and kings, our literature and legends,
our poets and painters and musicians, our critics and the critics of our critics. Perhaps it is true, perhaps our time has come, and the world is making way for something new, and we may hope something better. That is not for me to say. I am a soldier, that is tomorrow's business, and we are here today. But I will promise you one thing”—he swung around and with a dramatic gesture indicated the white ensign of the Royal Navy flying from the topgallant—“as long as that flag is hoisted every morning to meet the rising wind, chaos will have an enemy!”

He paused to cough into his hand, and a variety of coughs and sniffles echoed from the men below. “As always, England asks only this of you, that each man do his duty. Good luck.”

The acting captain turned away. But before he crossed the hatch, someone shouted, “Three cheers for the acting captain!” and the hurrahs of the men ascended into the brightening sky.

At 0530, the Sea Harriers lifted off the launch pads and streaked low over the waves toward Quatre Sables. For the next hour they rolled and buzzed above the stronghold of the pirates like angry bees. From the deck of the
Gadfly
, two miles out, the air strikes were silent and beautiful. Plumes of flame shot into the blue; clouds of red and green smoke billowed up like dragons. By 0715 the pirate vessels in the harbor had been sunk beneath half a fathom, the barracoon and wharves were on fire, and a greenish flame burned from the ridge where the fine homes of the Thirty Captains lay in ruins.

The
Gadfly
moved in for a close-range bombardment with its 118 mm guns at 0800, then Wilson went out on the motor launch with the second wave of marines commanded by Lieutenant Peavy. He
joked with the men; they seemed in good spirits, eager for a little action after dull months of patrol duty aboard ship. Then, as the launch entered the harbor, Wilson saw something he had hoped he would not see: The
Dread
lay sunk at her mooring near the shipyard. Only the airtight midsection containing the navigational octagon remained afloat, burning quietly, flames reflected in the oily water.

The wharves were a mess of shattered debris. Fires burned everywhere. The bodies of pirates and dockworkers lay bleeding in the rubble, the innocent side by side with the guilty. Wilson joined Lieutenant Peavy's marines as they advanced up the slope. They went at a dogtrot through the shanty city, which had not been touched by the morning's air strikes. He saw the same big-bellied children staring out with hunger-dulled eyes, the same cardboard hovels, the same desiccated corpses lying half buried in garbage in the streets. The stench of this squalid settlement was the stench of a despair that would never go away.

“The poor are always with us,” Lieutenant Peavy murmured.

Wilson said nothing.

The gates of the ridge settlement had been blasted off their hinges. Not two of the homes of the Thirty Captains were left standing. Wilson ran down the shell road to Cricket's house, now a smoldering, irregular pile of charred bricks and timber. He clambered over the mess afraid of what he'd find. He found a piece of marble bathtub, smoldering lumps of charred clothing, Cricket's guitar perfectly intact. His old copy of Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
lay half burnt beneath a twisted wreck of lawn furniture. It was hopeless. There was no way of telling if Cricket lay beneath the blackened mess. Perhaps it was her tomb.

His knees felt weak. He sat on a bit of foundation and put his head in his hands. Had it been her fault? What could you expect from a girl raised as a pirate? She had been as beautiful and deadly as a shark in the water. And the deadliness had been part of the beauty; it had not been possible to separate the two. The wind blew black
smoke over the sun. The wind smelled of jet fuel and burning rubber. The sound of lamentation came from the shanty city below.

“Is this your doing, Lander?”

Wilson turned around and saw Dr. Boursaly stumbling up the pile of rubble. The doctor's medical coat was torn and greasy, his face a dirty smudge. He looked like he had been hiding under a car. In his left hand he held a broken-necked bottle of gin, his lips cut and bleeding from it, the blood dribbling down his chin. Wilson knew the man was a drunk, but he had never seen him drunker.

“Had to do it, Lander,” the doctor slurred, and put an accusing finger against Wilson's chest. “Like a good fucking Boy Scout. Brought in the cavalry, you self-righteous bastard!”

Wilson felt like hitting him. An explosion went off below. They held their breath, and a hot wind blew up the slope.

“We had a good thing going here,” Dr. Boursaly said when the air cleared of smoke. “Outside the fucking rules of fucking bourgeois society. Where the hell else is a drinking man going to get a job? I told you to do something about the situation, but I didn't mean it; that was just to talk. And you married into the Thirty Captains. You were rich!”

“Slavery,” Wilson said. “Remember, Doctor? Piracy and murder. Those things had to be stopped.”

“There you go again,” the doctor shouted. “Applying your Boy Scout standards to another culture. Boy Scout! Fascist!”

“It's only the fact that I am a Boy Scout that keeps me from punching you in the eye,” Wilson said.

The doctor smiled bitterly, took a swig off the broken-necked bottle of gin, and cut his lip again. Blood and gin drooled down the glass. The sight was disgusting. Wilson snatched the bottle away and threw it shattering to the rubble.

Dr. Boursaly gasped. “That was the last bottle of gin on the island,” he said in a tragic voice, and for a moment Wilson thought the man would throw himself to his hands and knees to lap up the drops glittering on the shards. Instead he gurgled helplessly, and his
eyes rolled up in his head. Wilson stepped out of the way, Dr. Boursaly went facedown in the dirt.

“Need any help up there, Mr. Lander?” It was Lieutenant Peavy with two Royal Marines, just coming over the pile of shattered tiles and masonry that had once been Cricket's patio.

“I've got someone for you,” Wilson said. “A doctor. He might be able to help with the wounded.”

At Lieutenant Peavy's orders, the marines took Dr. Boursaly by the armpits and hauled him down to the shell road.

“My God,” Lieutenant Peavy said, “you say this man's a doctor?”

“Yes,” Wilson said. “Sober he's pretty good. Drinks like a maniac, though. Just keep him dry.”

Bloody and pale against the crushed shells, Dr. Boursaly looked dead. But when the marines went to lift him onto a stretcher, his head lolled to one side, and his voice issued forth, high-pitched and hollow as a ventriloquist's dummy.

“You think your wife's buried beneath that crap,” the doctor said. “Wrong, Boy Scout! Minute she put in, she went straight back to him. She's probably screwing the bastard right now!” Then he laughed and the laugh came out as a bloody bubble that popped on his lips, and he passed out, eyes open, and the marines took him away.

Another explosion from below lit the sky in white flame above the island. Lieutenant Peavy shielded his eyes. The hot wind sucked the oxygen from the air for an excruciating few seconds.

“That's the demolition boys having a go at the oil storage tanks,” the lieutenant said. “Looks like they're doing a thorough job.”

“Sow the ground with salt,” Wilson said, half to himself.

“Not a bad idea from the looks of things,” Lieutenant Peavy said. “But what's this about your wife?”

Wilson didn't answer immediately. He frowned down the shell road in the direction of the jungle.

Wilson worked his way down the jungled slope into the Portugee's tilled valley. It was hard going, and when he reached the road to the Villa Real, scratched and exhausted, the sun stood at about four in the afternoon. The baroque facade of the villa looked pink as a castle in a fairy tale in this lazy light. Wilson felt a chill as he went up through the empty classical garden, past the long shadows the hedges made on the acre of lawn. When he crossed the bridge over the moat, he glanced down and saw the sheep cowering below, one of them lying dead as two others sniffed stupidly around the bloated carcass.

Wilson's footsteps echoed in the courtyard, scattered with brittle palm fronds. Cricket's Volkswagen Thing was parked next to the big blue Lagonda, beside the dry fountain. The Portugee's glossy vehicle looked seedy, decrepit in this light. It listed to one side on two crumpled tires; rust flecked the chrome of its wire wheels. Wilson went up the stairs and tried the door, which fell open at his touch. The villa was full of the usual oppressive smell of dust, old wax, mildew, and varnish, but there was something different in the air this time, a sharp, sweet odor like burnt perfume.

“Cricket?” Wilson shouted, and the villa echoed with the sound of his voice.

The Goyas and Murillos were gone from the front hall; the salon was empty of furniture. He looked upstairs and down, followed bleached corridors into abandoned rooms. It could easily take a week to find someone in this place, he thought—then he went back downstairs and followed the burnt smell into the library.

The big windows here faced west. Pale afternoon sunlight streamed through the diamond panes of stained glass. The library was lit in a rose and blue gloom like the chapel it had once been. Cricket sat sprawled at the big table, her leg thrown over the arm of
the Portugee's easy chair, a silk robe hanging open over her breasts. Besides the robe, she wore a pair of red panties and wet-looking red nail polish on her toes, which were spread apart with cotton balls. On the table, a long-stemmed pipe, still smoking, and the hollowed-out hemisphere of an orange. A jar of opium and a bottle of red nail polish sat open on the collected Byron that Wilson remembered from months before.

Wilson approached the table slowly. Cricket's face wore an overheated flush, her eyes glassy and red. She was very high on the stuff and didn't seem surprised to see him.

“Hi, Wilson, baby,” she said lazily. “Glad to see you've still got your skin.”

Wilson came up to the table and stared down at her and put his hands in his pockets. “It's the end, Cricket,” he said. “The game is up. A company of British marines will be here soon. Better get some clothes on.”