Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [34]
Crouched as far down as possible, Charlie kept his hands on the accelerator. He tried to steel himself by remembering that he and Drummond had escaped worse.
That reduced the odds of their succeeding again, come to think of it. Better not to think, he decided.
The Amphibus reached thirty kilometers per hour, according to the speedometer, slashing through the waves.
The hail of bullets dwindled to a sprinkle, then nothing. The ruckus of gunfire and sirens receded and was soon drowned out by the inboard engines’ hums. Charlie felt safe enough to emulate Drummond and climb back onto the bench.
Through what remained of his window, he glanced aft at the policemen standing at the water’s edge, their heads lowered.
“Now what?” Charlie asked.
Drummond didn’t reply, fully attuned to the French chatter from the walkie-talkie pressed to his ear. After a moment, he said, “They’re dispatching two Coast Guard cutters.”
Charlie looked to shore. The airport now appeared the size of a dollhouse. Other than the engines, he heard only the patter of waves against the hull and a faint cry of a seabird. The moonlit seascape could have been used by the Martinique Travel Bureau.
“How about we get out and let this thing keep on chugging to sea, so that when the cops get to it, there’s nobody aboard?” Charlie said. “We can use one of the life rafts to get back to the island.” He thought back to what Bream had said: Anybody who wants to sneak onto Martinique can pull up in a million places by boat.
“They’re also sending a helicopter.” Drummond indicated the walkie-talkie.
“Super. With a searchlight?”
As he sometimes did, Drummond massaged his temples, as if trying to trip the button that activated his memory. “Sorry,” he said in conclusion.
“Okay, how about a more basic survival question?” In this respect, Charlie thought, Drummond’s tradecraft was practically ingrained. “If you were now, hypothetically, a fugitive, what would you do?”
“Swim to shore.”
“But they’d still see you.”
“Not if I swam underwater.”
“It’s got to be a couple of miles at least.”
“Well, that would be my best course of action, if I were a fugitive.”
The distant cry, which Charlie had thought of as a seabird’s, grew louder, into a whine. He recognized it. Helicopter rotor.
He gripped his door handle. “Well, either way, we need to get out of here now.”
“This way,” Drummond said, unlatching the door to the cargo hold.
“What difference does it make?” Charlie asked.
Pushing open the door, Drummond pointed into the dark hold. The glow from the console outlined walls blooming with vests, masks, fins, and cylindrical tanks like the one that had flown out the rear door and onto the runway.
“I guess you’ve scuba dived off an amphibious rescue vehicle before too,” said Charlie, who had never even snorkeled.
Drummond pulled on a wet suit. “Maybe so.”
A minute later the whine of the rotor turned into a series of raucous thumps. The moonlight delineated the approaching helicopter from the night sky. Dressed like frogmen, Charlie and Drummond sat on the edge of the open cargo doorway.
“Some handicapper I am, thinking coming here would be simple,” Charlie said, effectively to himself.
With a splash, Drummond fell backward into the sea.
Charlie followed suit, sinking into water that was warm and, better, ink black.
In a preposterously small rented Peugeot, Stanley and Hadley raced to Les Trois-Îlets, a seaside village off the coast where the Amphibus had just been found.
Undercover as the well-heeled Atchisons, they checked into the five-star Hôtel L’Impératrice, a remnant of the 1960s’ embrace of garish opulence. The lobby was dominated by a lush rain forest replete with a three-story coral cliff enshrouded by luminescent mist, the result of a booming waterfall and as many filtered spotlights as a Broadway stage. At the frothy base of the fall was