The Vulcan Disaster

I froze. The radio went down, but the owner let fly a string of Greek curses at the intruder in the dialect of the Piraeus waterfront. I slowly stuck my head up over the rail. The guy had his back to me, no more than three feet away. I waited until the deck creaked again and used the covering sound to slip up over the side. He never knew what hit him. I gave him a nice karate chop on the side of the neck. I eased him to the deck quietly.

Going below was trickier; it meant opening and closing doors. I slipped into the galley area, dark and unoccupied now, and found the ladder leading down to the next deck. It was ornamental hardwoods all the way; every tiptoed step made its own creak, and I was fully expecting to run into trouble the moment I entered that elegant hallway with the pictures and the tapestries.

Instead I found the area unguarded, but there were still those lights down the way, in the saloon area. I slipped into the unoccupied guard booth — the one with the Alhambra filigree work and the priest’s chair inside it — and shucked the oxygen tank and the flippers. Barefoot, I’d make a lot less noise. And I wrapped the three weapons I carry virtually everywhere and stowed them in their proper places: Wilhelmina in a holster inside the wet suit, Hugo up one sleeve, Pierre down near my crotch. I zipped everything up about halfway. Then I stepped cautiously out into the hall.

There were voices down the way: a man’s and a woman’s. I could make out no more than this until I reached the saloon. Then, as I slipped into the brightly lit area, testing every step for creaks underfoot, I could make out more of the conversation. The voices were coming from the half-closed heavy oak door that, all the time I’d been aboard the Vulcan; had walled away from passengers and crew alike all sight or sound of the owner of the ship, Vassily Alexandrovich Komaroff, arms merchant, dealer in war and destruction.

Only it wasn’t Komaroff talking. It was two other people.

I knew those voices.

Going right through that half-open door didn’t make any sense at all. I didn’t even know the layout of the room.

Someone was coming down the hall behind me.

I ducked into the open door of Alexandra’s room and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I yanked Wilhelmina out and jacked a bullet into the chamber. In the dark it wasn’t easy, but I gradually worked my way through the cushions and accumulated mess of her room to the paneled bulkhead that separated her place from her father’s. Halfway across the cluttered room I could already hear the voices through the wall; it must not, I decided, be as thick as I’d thought.

On the way my bare foot hit something on the floor. I bent over and felt with my free hand. The naked little slave wouldn’t be taking any more beatings; she was cold and dead. I bent my head over her, closer; there was the faint smell of almonds, lingering in the still air. Poison: cyanide.

I stood up again, feeling old and tired, but feeling, also, that Leon had been right. It was the endgame, the one that ends in mate, nice and final. I took a firmer grip on Wilhelmina and edged closer to the wall. I listened to the voices.

“...you double-crossed me, damn you. The transfer was to have been made on Cyprus on the twentieth. There was no ship. We had a deal...”

“Deal? With petty thugs like yourself? With a schoolyard gang of petty thieves and muggers like your Sons of David? Don’t be ridiculous. We accepted your help, here and there, true. You fulfilled a useful function for us along the way, throwing suspicion in another direction. As long as the authorities and their little men in counter-intelligence thought the shipload of arms was intended for a dissident group inside Israel they were thrown off the track; they did not suspect that the arms would be delivered instead, on the twenty-fifth, to the P.L.O., intact, with a new set of papers, off Rhodes. Just in time for... but Shimon, my dear, didn’t you want to provoke a full-scale attack on the Israeli border? Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Yes, but not with a disparity in arms. Not this way. Not only the first line of the Israeli defense will be wiped out, but our own people, our infiltrators, our fifth column. They won’t have a chance.”

“All the better, I say. War is a matter between principals, two in number, Shimon. Two at a time. The more splinter groups there are around, the more messy it becomes when the war is won and it comes time to establish a power structure. There will be no place in the new Palestine, once the Israelis have been annihilated, for quislings like yourself. Nor, for that matter, for fanatics like the Black Septembrists, or for any of their fatuous little friends in Japan and elsewhere...”

“Alexandra — you have taken sides?”

“And why not? When the new government comes to power in the Middle East it will remember its friends in the world of commerce, of business. It...”

“But your father... he always...”