You really are a bloody menace, Sam, he thought. Brilliantly talented, but you just don’t fit anymore. Such a pity, really. If only you’d smarten yourself up and abide by the rules, there could be a place for you. But not now. Not now that you have really upset people like Robert Inglis. It will be a different world in the nineties—my world, a world for people like me. In three years, maybe four, I shall have the Chief’s desk, and there will be no place for people like you anyway. Might as well go now, Sam, old boy. We’ll have a whole new officer group by then—bright young staffers who do what they’re told, abide by the rules, and do not upset people.
Sam McCready smiled back.
You really are a prize asshole, Timothy, he thought. You really think the gathering of intelligence is about committee meetings and computer print-outs and kissing Langley’s butt. All right, it’s good, the American signals-intelligence, and their electronic intelligence. The best in the world—they have the technology with their satellites and listening devices. But it can be fooled, Timothy, old boy.
There’s a thing called maskirovka, which you have hardly heard of. It’s Russian, Timothy, and it means the art of building phony airfields, hangars, bridges—entire tank divisions—out of tinplate and plywood, and it can fool the American Big Birds. So sometimes you simply have to go in on the ground, put an agent deep inside the citadel, recruit a malcontent, employ a defector-in-place. Timothy, you’d never have made a field man, with all your club ties and your aristocratic wife. The KGB would have had your balls for cocktail olives in two weeks flat.
Gaunt was beginning his last defense, trying to justify what had happened in the Caribbean, trying not to lose the sympathy of the two Controllers who last night had appeared willing to change their minds and recommend a reprieve. McCready stared out of the window.
Things were changing, all right, but not the way Timothy Edwards thought. The world, in the aftermath of the Cold War, was going quietly crazy—the noise would come later.
In Russia, the bumper harvest was still ungathered for lack of equipment, and by the autumn it would be rotting in the sidings for lack of rolling stock. Famine would come in December, maybe January, driving Gorbachev back into the arms of the KGB and the High Command, and they would exact their price for his heresy of this summer of 1990. The year 1991 would be no fun at all.
The Middle East was a powder keg, and the best-informed agency in the region, the Israeli Mossad, was being treated like a pariah by Washington, and Timothy Edwards was taking his cue from there. McCready sighed. The hell with them all. Perhaps a fishing boat in Devon was the answer after all.
“It all really began,” said Gaunt, opening the file in front of him, “in early December, on a small island in the northern Caribbean.”
McCready was jerked back to the realities of Century House. Ah yes, the Caribbean, he thought—the bloody Caribbean.
A Little Bit Of Sunshine
Chapter 1
The Gulf Lady came home across a bright and glittering sea an hour before the sun went down. Julio Gomez sat forward, his ample rear end supported by the cabin roof, his moccasined feet upon the foredeck. He drew contentedly on one of his Puerto Rican cheroots, whose foul odors were blown away across the uncomplaining Caribbean waters.
He was, in that moment, a truly happy man. Ten miles behind him lay the underwater drop-off, where the Great Bahama Bank falls into the Santaren Channel; where the kingfish run with the wahoo, and the tuna hunt the bonito, who in turn hunt the ballyhoo and all on occasions are pursued by the sailfish and the big martin.
In the scarred old box astern of the open fishing deck lay two fine dorado, one for him and one for the skipper, who now held the tiller and steered his game fisherman home to Port Plaisance.
Not that two fish had been his entire day’s take; there had been a fine sailfish that had been tagged and returned to the ocean; a mess of smaller bonito that had been used for baitfish; a yellowfin tuna that he had estimated at seventy pounds before it dived so hard and so deep he had had to cut line or see his reel stripped before his eyes; and two big amberjack that he had fought for thirty minutes each. He had returned the big fish to the sea, taking only the dorado because they are among the finest eating fish in the tropics.
Julio Gomez did not like to kill. What brought him on his annual pilgrimage to these waters was the thrill of the hissing reel and the running line, the tension of the bowed rod, and the sheer excitement of the contest between air-breathing man and monstrously strong fighting fish. It had been a wonderful day.
Far away to his left, way out beyond the Dry Tortugas, invisible well below the western horizon, the big red ball of the sun was dropping to meet the sea, giving up its skin-flaying heat, conceding finally to the cool of the evening breeze and the oncoming night.
Three miles ahead of the Gulf Lady, the island straddled the water. They would berth in twenty minutes. Gomez flicked the stub of his cheroot to a sputtering grave in the water and rubbed his forearms. Despite his naturally saturnine complexion and olive skin, he would need to apply a good layer of after-sun cream when he got back to his boarding house. Jimmy Dobbs on the tiller had no such problem: He was an islander born and bred, and he owned his boat and chartered it for the visiting tourists who wanted to fish. On his deep ebony skin, the sun had no effect.
Julio Gomez swung his feet off the foredeck and dropped from the cabin roof into the stern.
“I’ll take over, Jimmy. Give you a chance to swab down.”
Jimmy Dobbs gave his ear-to-ear grin, handed over the tiller, took bucket and broom, and began to swab the fish scales and fragments of gut out through the scuppers. Half a dozen terns appeared from nowhere and took the floating scraps from the wake. Nothing goes to waste in the ocean— nothing organic, that is.
There were, of course, more modern charter fishing boats plying the Caribbean—boats with engine-linked power hoses for cleaning down, with cocktail bars, with television and even video shows; with banks of electronic technology for finding fish, and enough navigational aids to go around the world. Gulf Lady had none of these things. She was an old and chipped clinker-built timber vessel powered by a smoky Perkins diesel, but she had seen more white water than the smart boys from the Florida Keys could shake a radar scanner at. She had a small forward cabin, a tangle of rods and lines, redolent of fish and oil, and an open afterdeck with ten rod-holders and a single fighting chair homemade in oak, cushions extra.
Jimmy Dobbs had no silicon chips to find the fish for him; he found them himself, the way his father had taught him, with eyes for the slightest hint of change in the water color, the ripple on the surface that should not be there, the diving of a frigate bird far, far away; he had the gut instinct to know where they were running this week and what they were feeding on. But find them he did, every day. That was why Julio Gomez came every vacation to fish with him.
The sheer lack of sophistication of the islands pleased Julio, the lack of technology of the Gulf Lady. He spent much of his professional life handling America’s modern technology, tapping queries into a computer, steering a car through the tangled traffic of central Miami. For his vacation, he wanted the sea, the sun, and the wind—those and the fish, for Julio Gomez only had two passions in life, his job, and his fishing. He had had five days of the latter, and just two more to go, Friday and Saturday. On Sunday he would
have to fly home to Florida and on Monday morning report for work with Eddie. He sighed at the prospect.
Jimmy Dobbs was also a happy man. He had had a good day with his client and friend, he had a few dollars in his pocket to buy a dress for his old lady and a fine fish to make supper for them both and their brood of kids. What more, he reasoned, had life to offer?
They berthed just after five at the rickety old wooden fishing quay that ought to have fallen down years ago but never had. The previous Governor had said he would ask London for a grant to build a new one, but then he had been replaced by the present man, and Sir Marston Moberley had no interest in fishing. Nor in the islanders, if the bar talk in Shantytown was to be believed—and it always was.
There was the usual scuttling of children to see what the catch had been and to help carry the fish ashore, and the usual banter in the lilting, singsong accents of the islanders as the Gulf Lady was made fast for the night.
“You free tomorrow, Jimmy?” asked Gomez.