O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [90]
“Hell, I’m not that smart,” Zach said.
“Could be. Could be that the subject has been badly overlooked. If you keep going the way you are going, ‘Random Study Sixteen’ can become an important work. Here’s where we start having some fun. You remember Richard X. Maple?”
“Yep.”
“Maple is leading an American team to draw up a naval protocol with the British Admiralty defining areas of vital national interest, joint use of facilities, intelligence sharing, joint training. You yourself predicted this at AMP.”
“I didn’t realize anyone was listening.”
“What do you know about the Amnesty Islands?”
Zach shrugged.
“It is a small archipelago of both volcanic and coral origin south of Jamaica, in the middle of nowhere, between the Mona and Windward Passages.
“Back in the 1700s, the British were unable to stop a brigand, Sebastian Lyme, from becoming the scourge of shipping on the Spanish Main. So they made a deal. Lyme was declared an earl and awarded the Amnesties as his earldom in exchange for protecting the British shipping lanes. Lyme only partly behaved. Entrance to the Amnesties is treacherous, with squalls, reefs, shifting channels, rock bottoms, and a convergence of rough weather.
“So long as British cargo was protected, the Brits turned a blind eye to the islands’ use as a pirates’ haven bulging with contraband.”
Zach got the flow. “Are the British turning the Amnesties over to us as part of the protocol?”
“That’s it. Paragraph ten. The Amnesties didn’t mean doodly shit to America until our recent ambition to build a canal. The islands will become very important, afford us an advance base, not a great one but a place from which we can monitor the seas to and from the isthmus.”
“What’s doing there now?”
“Still an earldom with the worst kind of sugar plantation operation. Dirty history, slave breeding in cribs, penal colony, black magic, orchids, mosquitoes, smugglers’ paradise, Chinese colony runs the port . . . There are a few thousand blacks working the cane fields and refinery. They die off young.”
“Trouble?”
“No, but I’ve never seen a black man from the Caribbean who wasn’t rightfully pissed off. There were a few surviving Carib Indians on one of the islands and they staged an insurrection about ten years ago and joined the other two million murdered by the Spanish, who were replaced with slaves. We’re not getting involved in local politics. We have other fish to fry.”
Ben spread a map. “Each island has several names. They’ve never been fully surveyed. For our purposes, we have identified them as Sinkhole, Mudhole, Blackhole, Asshole Major, Petite Asshole, Rat Hole, Bunghole, and the large island here, Shithole.”
Zachary toured them with a magnifying glass, smelling out Ben Boone’s prints. “Looks like the Amnesties are off the trail, isolated, away from prying eyes, and filled with beaches and jungle, a perfect training ground to practice landings and jungle warfare.”
“I’ve wanted these islands for a long time,” Ben said. “ ‘Random Sixteen’ ties in perfectly. The Corps can work up dozens of exercises. The navy can have itself a firing range. Future joint Marine-Navy maneuvers will home us in on the full possibilities of naval gunfire. All the things that ‘Random Sixteen’ will call for, future weaponry, wireless ship-to-shore communications, crafting the perfect landing boat, can be proven there. The navy has to give the Corps these islands to garrison. Capisce?”
“What are our chances?”
“ ‘Random Sixteen’ now becomes essential to shaking the Civil War dust off them hound-dog admirals.”
“Nothing,” Zach said, “nothing is going to get in the way of me getting this project done, and a hell of a lot faster than you think.”
They went over it again. It was heady stuff, a sweet coming together, and by Christ, Ben the old master could pull it off. They were glowing from the challenge.
“Anything exciting happen in