Arthur poured himself a short glass, adding juice, rather than his usual straight-up tumblerful. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “Happy birthday, Peta. Happy birthday to both of us.”
No one said much more until the rum was half gone. Peta sat away from the other three, on a locker which, she presumed, held life jackets. The spot was ideal in that she was close enough to see and hear them, yet far enough away from them to deal with the distraction of her own thoughts, which were none too pleasant. Every once in a while, a flying fish arced from the water, its silvery scales flashing in the moonlight, or a star shot across the heavens. She took solace in those signs, telling herself that the universe had forgiven her trespasses against it.
To port, she could see that they were rounding the peninsula of Point Saline. In a few minutes, the lights of the Cuban encampment would be visible, and the great black expanse of the airstrip they were building.
Her mind returned to the events which led up to tonight.
Why had Arthur, her father’s godson, insisted upon playing hero and martyr? Sure, he was a Marryshow and thus by nature a political beast, but as much as she adored him, she sometimes wondered about his sanity. Everybody knew he was none too fond of Prime Minister Bishop and his Communist regime, but so what? Arthur was a doctor, for God’s sake, not a warrior or a politician. He could have kept his nose clean. Then he wouldn’t have been arrested, and she wouldn’t have had to kill two people.
She stopped. There was no point to those thoughts. She turned away from the receding coastline of her home and focused on her three shipmates. While they were unique in many ways, and two of them weren’t Grenadian, they were typical of Grenada’s male population, who were die-hard chauvinists. Arthur was less so than most, at least in their private moments, but in the company of men he acted little better than the rest, who adored females of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages but believed them to be creatures of service, there to nurture them and to bed them. Like the others, he had no quarrel with women entering nurturing professions. They could become doctors and nurses and teachers. Anything else, law for example, or engineering, was a man’s domain.
Like drinking rum, which, too, was some pathetic rite of manhood, she thought as they started on the second half of the bottle. Westerhall was as close as they could get to pure alcohol, so it was none too surprising that their tongues loosened. They began to regale each other with a succession of stories of prior adventures which grew more daring and less believable in inverse proportion to the amount of rum left in the bottle.
By five minutes to midnight, they were well into their next bottle. In their drunken state, they seemed to have completely forgotten that Peta was there.
“We are the best,” Frik said, raising his glass.
“The very best,” Ray agreed, doing the same.
“Uh-huh.” Arthur tilted his glass in their direction.
Frik started to hold forth. Peta stopped listening until the end of his pronouncement. “…Daredevils Club,” he said. “We’ll meet every year…. New Year’s Eve’s a good time. Swap stories. See which of ushas taken the biggest risk. Whatcha think, guys?”
Peta glanced at her watch in the moonlight. Thirty seconds and it would be 1983. She rose to her feet and approached the table. “Happy birthday, Arthur,” she said.
“Happy birthday, Peta,” he echoed.
“And happy New Year…everyone.” She turned toward Arthur. “Are we all going to meet at Danny’s Grotto for our birthdaysand the Daredevils Club.”
“Not you, little Miss Sweet Sixteen,” Frik said, grinning inanely. He looked at the others. “You’re a succulent piece of meat, but you’re a kid. Besides, we don’t play women’s games.”
“S’right,” Ray added. “You’re just a kid. I’m not gonna be responsible for a kid risking her life on a stupid stunt. Especially a girl.”
“What doyou say, Arthur?” she asked, in a voice so soft that she seemed to be shouting. “Do you also think I have to grow balls to be a Daredevil? You’re a plastic surgeon. You could make me some. Or is killing two men enough to prove that I’m as tough as you are?”
“She makes sense, gentlemen,” he said, looking at Frik and Ray. They shook their heads vehemently. He turned back to Peta. “I’m outvoted,” he said. He had begun to slur his words. “Besides, I promised your father that I’d keep you out of harm’s way.” Clearly exhausted and more than a little drunk, he put his head down on the table, in the crook of his elbow, and fell asleep.
Peta looked back at the small spot on the horizon that was Grenada. She imagined she could hear music and shouting as, all along Church Street, bells rang out.
“Happy New Year, assholes,” she said, loudly this time. Then, disgusted, walked toward the prow of the boat and stared into the vast, dark ocean that lay ahead.
1
TRINIDAD, DECEMBER1999
After a full day on the platform observing the core samples being raised at the Dragon’s Mouth test drill site, what little patience Frikkie Van Alman might have had to begin with had dissipated.
He wouldn’t have been there at all, but the crew, skittish to begin with, had been downright nervous since the drill had passed through an undersea cavern. Frik was not renowned for his vast store of patience, but he could not ignore the continuing gloom among his workers. At the other sites there was always music, always someone dancing, someone hiding a joint or a bottle of beer. Here, the only sounds were the wind and the sea, the mechanical whirring of the drill, and the padding footsteps of workers who, morose and silent, moved with the speed of turtles.
“What’s eating at them, Blaine? Give me your best guess.”
Frik thought of Eduardo Blaine as his wholly owned subsidiary. The Venezuelan ran the only hotel in San Gabriel and managed the ferries that brought workers out to this site in the Dragon’s Mouth, the northern channel into the Gulf of Paria. He was also a pretty fair diver and knew how to fly the helicopter which transported the owner of Oilstar to this jack-up drilling rig.
“They don’t care for work in the Dragon’s Mouth.” Blaine made a weak attempt at a smile. “Tell you the truth, I’m not too crazy for it myself.”
Before Frik could say any more, the drill returned to the surface and its load of sludge and rock was tipped onto the platform for examination. He had ordered a core sample of the floor of the cavern, wanting more evidence that there would be oil under it before he went to the trouble—and expense—of having another section of pipe sent down to keep any oil from flowing into this new cavern.
Lying on top of the mud were four irregularly shaped objects such as he had never before laid eyes upon. He had the immediate impression of the turquoise he’d known as a child in South Africa, but these were a bluish green color that he couldn’t quite identify.
He walked over to the silt pile and stretched out to touch them.
“Don’t touch, Mr. Frik! Bad stuff!”
Frik looked around to see who had spoken and saw the backs of his workers as they scattered, all except Eduardo.
“He’s right, Señor Frik. Better not to touch.” In a show of bravado, the Venezuelan moved to Frik’s side. “See where they come from first. Make sure they’re not Obeah, or the Obeahman might get us.”
“Don’t tell me they’ve got you convinced about their kaffir bogeyman.” He’d dealt with enough shamanistic beliefs in his boyhood on the veldt that he was unimpressed by the men’s fear that the objects might be fetishes. Besides, when he’d first been told of the local superstitions, the anthropologist he’d talked to had said that this particular myth predated the arrival of the Africans and their Obeah worship. It was probably, in fact, as old as the first Arawaks to cross the gulf from Venezuela on their migration northward.