White Cargo by Stuart Woods Page B

dozen round trips.”
    â€œHow will they know who we are?”
    â€œWe’ve got a code. Idlewild is Bravo One, we’re Bravo Two. How’d you meet Carlos, Cat?”
    â€œWe had a mutual friend. How’d you meet him, Bluey?”
    Bluey laughed. “I was dusting crops in Cuba in ’59. Batista was still in power, but Fidel and his merry band of men were pressing hard. A lot of foreigners—a lot of Cubans too—were leaving the country, but I stuck around. There was money to be made, and I was young and foolish. One day, I was gassing up the airplane, and this Cuban peasant sidles over to me and asks me if I want to make some extra money. Asks me in an American accent. I do a double take, then I say, sure, I’d like to make some extra money. He gives me a camera and says he wants some pictures of a beach near the cane field I was spraying, wants ’em from less than a hundred feet, a couple hundred yards offshore. I made two or three passes, got the pictures, got paid. We had a few beers, got along. The beach was at a place called Bahia de Cochinos. Bay of Pigs.”
    Bluey poured himself some soup from a thermos Spike had given them, then continued. “When Castro broke out, I flew the crop duster to Key West—liberated it, you might say—and started a little business in Florida. Couple years later, when I’m pretty sick of crop dusting, I get a call from Carlos. God knows how he found me. Next thing I know, I’m in Guatemala, where they’re training Cubans for the party at the Bay of Pigs. During the invasion I dropped supplies onto the beach from a DC-3, not the most fun I ever had, and I took a little shrapnel in the ass doing it. I ditched in the ocean and got picked up by a landing craft. Carlos was waiting for me when they took me aboard ship. Over the years since, he’s popped up now and then with a job, always for good money.”
    â€œHe’s CIA, then?” Cat asked.
    â€œIf you say so,” Bluey chortled. “He never once showed me his credentials, just his money. That was alwaysgenuine, so I never asked questions. He’s a good bloke, though.”
    â€œI guess he is, at that,” Cat said. “He’s all right with me, anyway.”
    â€œYou sleepy?” Bluey asked.
    â€œAre you kidding? My adrenaline is still pumping from your low flying.”
    â€œYou take the airplane for a while, then. I’ll grab a nap. Just keep scanning the oil pressure, cylinder-head temperature, and oil temperature.” He pointed out the gauges. “If anything gets out of the green, or if you’re worried about something, wake me up.” He wound his seat back and tipped his hat over his eyes.
    Cat glanced around the instrument panel. With the loran navigating and the autopilot flying, there wasn’t much to do. He ate a sandwich and drank some coffee. The engine droned reassuringly on, and the gauges held rock steady. The moon came up and reflected on the sea below, silver on blue. The stars wheeled above in a cloudless sky. Cat felt a kind of contentment from knowing that he was doing all he could do—at least as close to contentment as he had come since the yacht went down, and he savored the moment as best he could with Jinx still in the front of his mind. Once in a while he still got an involuntary flash of the bloody palmprint, even though he now knew that the body had not been Jinx’s. He wondered who the poor girl had been and why she had been murdered with Katie. It made no sense at all, and that bothered him. Had he imagined the voice on the phone was Jinx? Had she really gone down with Katie and Catbird? Was he risking his life and his liquid wealth on a fool’s errand to find a girl who couldn’t be found because she was at the bottom of the sea?
    A couple of hours out of Haiti, Cat stirred himself from his reverie to check the instrument panel, as he had every few minutes since Bluey had