White Cargo Read Free

you call him from Santa Marta and ask him to meet us in Panama? You know what a great crew he is.”
    “I don’t think Dell is interested in sailing these days. Besides, he’d probably get arrested going through customs.”
    “Cat, you need to patch it up with him,” she said, gravely.
    “Wrong, Jinx,” Cat replied, quickly, “Dell needs to patch it up with the world. How can I possibly patch it up with him while he’s doing what he’s doing? Are we going to have big, family Sunday dinners and worry about the cops busting in on us? Am I going to take him sailing through a dozen foreign ports and have to sweat getting busted in customs every time?”
    “He needs your help.”
    “I’ll give him my help when he’s ready to ask me for it. It’s been rejected too many times.” God knew that was true; he had given up thinking about the number of scrapes he’d gotten the boy out of, the number of new schools and fresh starts he’d financed. In marked contrast to Jinx, Dell had always been rebellious, lazy, and surly.
    Katie appeared in the companionway with two plates of pancakes and they both shut up.
    Cat grinned at her. “Now I remember why I married you.”
    “You want these in your lap, buster?” Katie grinned back.
    Jinx patted his belly. “Yeah, you might just as well apply them directly to the paunch. Why go to the trouble of eating them?”
    Three hours later, the entrance to the harbor at Santa Marta loomed ahead. The three of them stood in the cockpit and gazed at the land. To their right, a group of high-rise buildings stood behind a fringe of palms. “That’s the beach area,” Cat said. “The port is over there to the left, behind that little island. The main town is at the port.” An older, more Spanish group of buildings could be seen beyond the beach.
    Suddenly Katie said, “Cat, let’s don’t go in here. I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.”
    Cat didn’t speak for a moment. Katie had had bad feelings about things before, and she was usually right. “Oh, hell, Katie,” he said, finally. “We’re half an hour away from getting the alternator fixed. Showers for everybody!”
    Katie said nothing.
    Glancing frequently at the chart, Cat held his course for the harbor entrance.

2
    C AT HAD EXPECTED A MARINA OF SOME SORT, HOWEVER PRIMITIVE, but he was disappointed. There was an area to his left that berthed half a dozen modern ships, loading and unloading; there was a mixture of smaller craft around the harbor—a small coaster or two, some fishing boats, and the odd sportfisherman—and tied next to a concrete wharf were four or five sailboats, ranging from roughly twenty-five to fifty feet in length.
    With Jinx and Katie standing by with lines at bow and stem, their regular drill, Cat eased the yacht into a vacant spot at the wharf. Jinx had changed into a bikini, and he could almost hear the eyeballs click on the boats around them and on the quay as she hopped ashore and secured her line.
    Cat slipped the binoculars from around his neck, deposited them on a cockpit seat, and stepped onto the deck. “Get some clothes on, kid,” he said as he brushed past Jinx. “We’re in a strange place; there might be some strange people.” She rolled her eyes, sighed, and jumped back aboard. Cat climbed a rusty steel ladder and came onto an area containing some buildings that appeared to be warehouses. Nothing like any small-boat repair facility.A couple of hundred yards away, traffic bustled through downtown Santa Marta, an orderly collection of white stucco buildings dotted with palms and other tropical vegetation. He could see the spires of a small cathedral over the red-tiled roofs. He turned to see a soldier approaching, bearing an old American .30-caliber carbine, the sort he himself had carried as a Marine officer.
    “Hasta la vista,” Cat said to the soldier, exhausting his Spanish.
    The soldier asked something in Spanish.
    “Speak English?” Cat asked, hopefully. It was going