Free Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira Page A

them.”
                  “Excellent. Is our lifeboat ready?” Clifford B. Richard asked.
                  “Almost,” John clarified.
                  “Finish it. It’s number seven, right?”
                  “Yes, only the G.P.S. is missing. The guns and money will go with us,” contemplated his aid.
                  “Let’s do this. I’ll gather the crew. You open the sea-cocks.”
                  They left. Lucas took the poor devils’ identification. One of them resembled him. His name was Louis Marcé. “Louis Marcé,” he repeated to himself. It suited him since his brother in Lisbon was Luís and he, too, would have the same name on the western side of the Atlantic. He also took the captain’s and John’s. He might offer them to the Canadian police. He opened a large backpack in the armchair and saw guns, ammunition, thirty-five kilos of one hundred dollar bills, the book, and the camera. The camera was heavy and went out the porthole, but the lense stayed right on the table as a paperweight.
                  He left with the backpack. No one was in the corridor. He went up the stairs. Out there, in the rain, the captain was reviewing the situation with his crew. Lucas walked to the opposite side of the ship. The first boat there was inscribed with a number that could have been either seven or one. He peered in and saw nothing. A hatch on the bow was ajar and, with his owl-like vision, he spied a tenuous intermittent luminosity. He entered the boat, looked through the hatch and saw a clock bomb. It was programmed to explode in sixty-seven minutes. So the captain wasn’t really counting on the sailors’ silence. He was going to silence them with the bomb and the sea-cocks. He took it and put it in the backpack. Lucas followed the string of lifeboats until reaching number seven and glanced inside: it was full of equipment. He went back. On deck, the sailors seemed agitated. He turned back to boat number seven but, passing by the galley, he had an irresistible idea; covered by the dark, he hung the clock bomb one meter from the pantry floor, like he had the manuscript.
     
                  He ran back to boat seven and opened the release mechanism, jumping in the vessel immediately. When it hit the sea, he was afraid the lifeboat was going to come apart, such was the shock, but it didn’t. Lucas confirmed that the boat had been released from the ship and started the motor, accelerating away from the condemned giant. When he was about three miles out, he took a Very light and fired it toward the ship. And then another. The response from the collier was not long in coming: a palisade of firearms disgorged lead at him. The latest developments were now known on the deck of that candidate for submarine service. Why did he fire the Very lights? Why? He didn’t know, but the sailors’ rage justified his initial gesture. At least aesthetically.
                  In fact, the captain and his accomplice had just reached his cabin when they saw a solitary object on the table, above a sheet of paper that said, “Thanks for the money, motherfuckers,” signed Louis Marcé. At that point, they heard shouting. An obese Chinaman had come across the bomb swinging in the air. He fled immediately proclaiming that there was dynamite in the galley.
                  “The boat,” Burton ordered and ran with his aid to the lifeboat. The space was there, intact, untouched, but the boat itself was missing, bobbing some three miles distant. Shortly thereafter, several sailors appeared alongside the captain, advising “bomb, bomb.” Cliff Burton ran to the pantry and saw one of his clock bombs hanging by a thread.
     
                  “It was the rat,” he snarled. “Check to see if the boats are operational.” They were all set with traps, as he well knew. At that point, a sailor announced,