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  Acknowledgements and Dedication

  It is usual, and prudent, to claim that no characters in any novel are based on real people, which claim is certainly true of the characters in Crackdown, yet the fictional island of Murder Cay is based on the all too real Bahamian island of Norman’s Cay, and for details of that island, as well as for much other information about the narcotraficantes, I am indebted to the book The Cocaine Wars by Paul Eddy, Hugo Sabogal and Sara Walden.

  I must also acknowledge my extreme debt to Dr Laura Reid, erstwhile Medical Director of the Gosnold Treatment Center in Falmouth, Cape Cod, who educated me about cocaine, and about the difficulties faced by her patients who are trying to break their cocaine addictions.

  It seems to me that the true warriors of the drug war are people like Laura Reid and her colleagues whose battles and victories are rarely headlined. To them, and to all their patients who have defeated the evil, Crackdown is respectfully dedicated.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements and Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bernard Cornwell

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  You cannot cheat death. It is not an illusion. It does not melt into air, into thin air, it is instead a clumsy thing of the night, to be discovered in the dawn.

  And it was in the dawn, in a gentle Bahamian dawn, that I discovered Hirondelle.

  She had been a cruising yacht; a pretty thirty-eight-foot fibreglass sloop. She had been a graceful thing, and she had been butchered.

  When I found Hirondelle she was nothing but a barely floating derelict, so low in the water that I might have missed her altogether except that a heave of her sluggish hull flashed a reflection of the sun’s new wan light from a polished deck-fitting into my eyes. I was so tired that I almost took no notice, assuming that the scrap of light had been mirrored from a discarded and floating beer can, but something made me pick up my binoculars and there she was; a dead creature which rolled under the blows of the short dawn chop.

  I could see no one aboard the rolling hull. Her apparent abandonment, together with my weariness, tempted me to ease my helm to starboard and thus slip past the stricken boat that, like any other piece of floating junk, would have been out of sight within moments, and forgotten within hours, but curiosity and my sense of duty would not let me ignore her. There was still a slight chance that a wounded mariner was aboard, and so the wave-drenched wreck had to be boarded.

  At least the weather was being kind. There was no steep chop or gusting wind to make boarding the waterlogged hull difficult. Instead the dawn was a calm, lovely finish to what had been a perfect tropical night during which I had been reaching northwards with every sail set; jib, staysail, foresail, mainsail and both jackyard topsails. Wavebreaker must have looked unutterably beautiful in that ghostly sunrise until the moment when I ran her head into wind and pressed the buttons which controlled the electric motors that furled her sails. I still found it odd to be sailing a boat on which everything was mechanised, electrified or computerised because by inclination and income I was a sailor of simpler tastes, but for the present I was Wavebreaker’s hired skipper, and Wavebreaker was a luxury charter schooner, and the kind of people who rented her expected to find her loaded down with as many gadgets as a space shuttle.

  We had no charterers aboard on the morning I discovered Hirondelle. Instead we had been ‘dead-heading’, meaning that Wavebreaker sailed with only her crew aboard. The three of us had just spent four weeks off the western coast of Andros where Wavebreaker had been hired to make a television commercial for cat food. The notion of the commercial had been that an extremely wealthy cat had chartered the schooner to search the world’s oceans for the best-tasting fish, only to discover that Pussy-Cute Cat Food had already caught and canned the taste. The commercial must have cost Pussy-Cute millions of dollars, and Wavebreaker had been overrun with camera crews, designers, visualisers, scriptwriters, cat-handlers, fish-handlers, directors, account executives, make-up girls, hairdressers, line-producers, assistant-producers, real producers, as well as all the girlfriends and boyfriends and hermaphrodite-friends of everyone involved. Serious adults had argued passionately about the motivation of the rich cat, and even I, who had thought myself immune to the insanities of the film world, had been astonished when an elderly actor had been specially flown down from New York to imitate the beast’s miaow because the real thing had not been considered sufficiently authentic. The elderly actor, coming aboard Wavebreaker for the first time, had stared at me in astonishment; then, though he had never seen me in his life before, he spread his arms in familiar and lavish welcome. “Sweet Tom!” He had called me by my father’s name, and I had smiled wanly, then confessed that I was indeed Tom Breakspear’s son. “How could you not be?” the New York actor had demanded. “You’re the very image of him! Will you remember me to the old rascal?” Everyone knew my father. Everyone wanted me to know how they just loved my father. Everyone told me just how like my father I looked, though very few dared ask me from which of my father’s wives I had been whelped.

  But now, thank God, I was free of miaowing Thespians, and Wavebreaker was sailing back to her home port on Grand Bahama where, in just twenty-four hours’ time, she would begin her last charter of the season. Then came Hirondelle to spoil the dawn.

  I had been alone on deck when I first saw the wreck. Ellen had been sleeping in the stern-cabin’s king-sized bed, and Thessy had been snoring in one of the clients’ forward cabins. It was only when we were dead-heading that we were allowed to make free with the air-conditioned luxuries of the boat’s staterooms. The brochure promised our charterers the ‘authentic sea-salt taste of tropical seafaring’, though sailing on Wavebreaker was about as authentic as Pussy-Cute’s miaow.

  The whine of the sail-furling motors brought an alarmed Thessy running on deck. He stood blinking in the new daylight, then stared in astonishment at the waterlogged white hull which rolled sluggishly under our lee. We were now close enough to read the name on her transom and could see that the derelict was called Hirondelle, and hailed from Ostend. The small waves slopped and splashed across the neat blue lettering. It seemed a terrible waste to have run from that grim North Sea port safely across the Atlantic to what must have seemed like the sunlit paradise of the Bahamas’ sheltered shallow waters, only to meet this savage fate.

  And something savage had happened to Hirondelle: She was a mastless mess, trailing a tangle of sodden rigging. Her coachroof and deck were riddled with holes; so many holes that groups of them had joined together to make dark, jagged and splintered craters. My first thought was that someone had run berserk with an industrial drill, but then I saw a glint of brass in her scuppers and I recognised an empty cartridge case and knew I was looking at bullet holes. Hirondelle had been machine-gunned. Someone had poured fire at her, but she had stayed afloat because she was one of the few production boats that were built to be unsinkable. Foam had been sandwiched between her fibreglass layers and crammed into every unused space inside her hull and that foam was now holding her afloat, fighting against the dead weight of her ballast and engine and winches and galley stove.

  “Help me with the skiff,” I said to Thessy.

  “You think someone’s on board?” he asked with a trepidation that matched my own, for God only knew what horrors might be concealed in the darkness of those cabins.

  Thessy and I unlashed the skiff that hung from Wavebreaker’s stern davits, I climbed aboard, and Thessy worked the electric motors that lowered me down to the small petulant slap of the early morning waves.

  Ellen
appeared on deck just as I was casting off. She was dressed in a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt that served as her nightdress. She yawned, then scowled at the Belgian yacht.

  “Morning!” I shouted cheerfully.

  She scowled at me, but said nothing. Ellen was never at her brightest and best first thing in the morning.

  I pulled the skiff’s outboard into life, then puttered across to the waterlogged yacht. As I got close I saw that her underwater hull had been holed by bullets which must have been fired from inside the boat because all the splinters had been driven outwards so that the hull looked like some giant and exotic sea urchin with red and white fibreglass spines.

  I tied the skiff’s painter to one of Hirondelle’s cleats and climbed gingerly on to the foredeck where I cautiously lifted what was left of the forward hatch to peer into the bow cabin. I half expected to see a body, but there was only dark water sloshing a few inches beneath the deck. No blood had been diluted by the water, or none that I could see. I edged my way aft and stepped down into the flooded cockpit. I steeled myself to look into the main-cabin, but I need not have worried for the big saloon was as blessedly empty of horror as the forecabin. Hirondelle held nothing but flotsam; so much flotsam that the water in her main-cabin looked like sludge. My eyes adjusted to the gloom and I saw that the sludge was really a thick layer of floating cornflakes, loose cigarettes, and a million scraps of foam that must have been shattered out of the hull by the gunfire. Embedded in that heaving mess were a plastic mug, some wooden clothes pegs, a broken pencil, a red shirt and a mutilated, sodden chart. There was a dark smear on the lip of the coachroof that might have been blood, but could just as easily have been a spill of varnish.

  “What happened to her?” Ellen shouted. Wavebreaker had now drifted so close to Hirondelle that the schooner’s huge hull was casting a shadow over me.

  “God knows.” I pulled the flimsy remnants of the chart out of the water.

  “Are we going to salvage her?” Ellen was leaning over Wavebreaker’s rail and the sun, rising behind her, turned her mass of red hair into an incandescent haze.

  “She’s beyond help!” I called back. The waterlogged Hirondelle was much too heavy for Wavebreaker to take in tow, and I had neither the time nor the equipment to patch the hull and pump it dry. Besides, Hirondelle had been so badly damaged that no yard would ever think of trying to rebuild her. Not only had the Belgian boat been riddled with bullets, but I could see great gouges where an axe had been taken to the boat’s decking. It all seemed so pointless. Hirondelle had clearly been a beautiful boat, yet someone had wantonly tried to destroy her.

  I tossed the soaking chart into the skiff and stooped to see if there was anything else I should take from the cabin. I was not searching for plunder, but rather for any clue as to who might have owned this boat or what might have provoked its destruction. I found nothing, except that as I stepped back from the companionway my bare feet trod hard and painfully on some lumpish sharp objects. I ducked down in the cockpit, groped on the grating underfoot, and came up with a handful of cartridge cases. Some were brass, but most were green-lacquered steel. They were 7.62 millimetre cartridges, military issue, and I had a half-memory from the dozy days when I had slept through the perfunctory Warsaw Pact familiarisation lectures that only a few East European countries lacquered steel cartridges green.

  It was all very peculiar. A Belgian boat in Bahamian waters with Warsaw Pact cartridges? What was clear to me was that someone must have stood in this cockpit and fired a machine-gun down the companionway into the main-cabin. They had hoped to shatter the bottom of the hull so that Hirondelle would sink without trace, but they had not reckoned with the foam sandwiched in the boat’s hull, and thus the evidence of their crime, if crime it was, still floated.

  Thessy had started Wavebreaker’s engines. The wind had been driving the big schooner down on to Hirondelle so now Thessy gave the schooner’s propellers a burst of power that churned the sea white and drove her clear. The schooner’s shadow vanished, letting the new day’s sun slash at me with brilliant force and lance through a line of bullet holes that had pierced the side of Hirondelle’s coachroof. The shafts of new sunlight lay like spears of gold in the cabin’s muck-ridden gloom. I wondered if I should explore the boat further, but decided that such an exploration was best left to the police.

  I tossed my handful of cartridge cases into the skiff, then went forrard along Hirondelle’s flooded deck to where an undamaged whisker pole lay in its foredeck clips. I tied the red shirt to the pole’s top, then rammed my makeshift flagpole into one of the bullet holes so that the treacherous hulk would be visible to any other mariner. Then I climbed back into the skiff, feeling oddly desolate. There is something very sad about mindless destruction, especially of a boat.

  I went back to Wavebreaker where, as Thessy stowed the skiff, I called the Royal Bahamian Defence Forces on the VHF radio. I reported our position and my opinion that Hirondelle was a danger to navigation; then, feeling very virtuous, I revealed my discovery of the empty cartridge cases and my suspicions that the Belgian boat, and perhaps its crew, had met with a sinister fate. The Bahamian radio operator did not seem particularly interested.

  Ellen, who had come below to pull on a pair of shorts and a shirt, listened to the last words of my transmission. “That was a waste of time,” she said scornfully.

  “Why?” I had long learned not to be offended by Ellen’s caustic remarks. She had an Irish-American mother and a Polish-American father, which volatile blend had produced a girl of startling beauty and nitro-glycerine temper.

  “Just what do you think happened to that boat?” she asked me in a venomous voice. “You think it’s something simple like an insurance scam? Or a clumsy waste-disposal job?” She paused, waiting for my answer, but I gave her none. “Drugs,” she answered for me.

  “We don’t know that,” I protested.

  “Oh, Nick!” Ellen was exasperated. “These are the Bahamas! Whoever was on that boat was stupid enough to get involved with drugs, and if you get involved with that boat’s fate, then you’ll be just as stupid. Which means that you should chuck that chart and those cartridges overboard. Now.”

  “I shall hand them over to the proper authorities,” I said stubbornly.

  “God save me from feeble-minded males.” She turned towards the galley. “You want some coffee?”

  “The prime purpose of the Defence Forces is to guarantee freedom of navigation in Bahamian waters,” I said very pompously.

  “Oh, sure!” Ellen laughed as she pumped water into the kettle. Thessy was still on deck where he had reset Wavebreaker’s sails and taken the helm. I glanced at the fluxgate compass over the chart table to see that we were once again heading northwards. Ellen lit the galley stove, then unscrewed the lid from the jar of instant coffee. “The real purpose of the Bahamian Defence Forces”—she pointed a teaspoon at me to emphasise her words—”is to present the appearance of being zealously engaged in the war against drugs; which appearance of diligence is designed solely to placate the American government who otherwise might issue an official warning to its citizens that the Bahamas are no longer a safe destination for the vacation trade, which warning will effectively stifle the islands’ tourist and casino trade which, after drugs, are its most profitable industries.” She offered me the pitying and self-satisfied smile of someone who has just proved a debating point. “So no one will thank you for drawing attention to a visiting yacht filled with inconvenient bullet holes. Such things are bad for the tourist business.”

  “Thank you for explaining it, Professor,” I said sarcastically.

  She grimaced at me. Ms Ellen Skandinsky, PhD, never liked being reminded that she had abandoned a tenured professorship in Women’s Studies to run away to sea; a decision that she liked to portray as quixotic, but which I suspected had been sparked by the pure boredom and pomposity of academic life. Ellen herself swore that she had made the change in order to discover ‘real life’, a commodity eviden
tly unavailable on campus and one which she believed necessary to her true ambition, which was to be a writer. For Ellen, ‘real life’ had proved to be a one-room cold-water apartment behind the Straw Market, an unpaid volunteer’s job with a Bahamian Literacy Project, and a paid job as a ship’s cook, a job so traitorous to her former life and feminist beliefs that even she was astonished to discover that she enjoyed it. I think Ellen had been even more astonished to discover that she and I had become friends in the months we had worked together, no more than friends, but close enough for her to be wondering whether to sail away with me around the world. Not in Wavebreaker, but in my own boat that needed to be rebuilt before I took it across the South Pacific.

  I heard a whine of servo-motors and guessed that Thessy had turned on the automatic pilot. He came down the companionway, holding the chart I had rescued from Hirondelle and which I had spread to dry on Wavebreaker’s deck. The torn paper was still sodden. “Nick?” There was consternation in his voice. “Do you know vere they vere two nights ago?” Thessy had the Bahamian out-islander’s odd Dickensian accent. He was seventeen years old, skinny as a sopping-wet cat, and was Wavebreaker’s first and only mate, which also made him the boat’s steward, gorilla, ship’s boy, skivvy and mascot. His real name was Thessalonians, and he was just as pious as that New Testament name suggested. “Do you see, Nick?” He was pointing at the wet chart that he had draped across the galley table. “They vere there just two days ago. Only two days!”

  The chart had been soaked in sea-water, but salt cannot remove the pencil notations from a chart, and whoever had sailed Hirondelle had been a meticulous navigator. A pencil line extended from No Name Bay just south of Miami and reached across the Gulf Stream and into the Bahamas. Hirondelle’s navigator had sailed much of the course by dead reckoning, and I could see just where that navigator had finally taken a fix and discovered that he or she had underestimated the northwards current of the Gulf Stream, but by very little, so that the Belgian yacht had only been five nautical miles off its estimated course. That course had curved to the south of Bimini towards a tiny island, lost all by itself between the Biminis and the Berrys, with the unprepossessing name of Murder Cay. The pencil line ended there, punctuated by a small circle enclosing a dot beside which the navigator had written the date and time of Hirondelle’s arrival. And that arrival, as Thessy had noted, had been just two days before. No neat pencilled line betrayed Hirondelle’s departure from the ill-named Murder Cay.