The Island by Peter Benchley Read Free Book Online

accurate. The grips were too small.”
    “They didn’t have to be accurate beyond about twenty feet. The fighting was all close-in.”
    “What about gunfights? You know, when they drew down on each other.”
    “I bet that didn’t happen ten times in ten years. If a fight came to guns, they shot each other any way they could. In the back, from under a table, behind a door.”
    “That’s not fair.”
    “It wasn’t meant to be fair. The point was to get it over with as quickly as possible, and walk away from it in one piece.” Maynard paused and looked at his son. “No fight makes any sense, Justin. If you get into one, all you should want to do is end it. ‘Fair’ is for the other guy to worry about.”
    The seat-belt sign lit up, and the stewardess announced over the intercom that they would be landing at National Airport in a few minutes.
    “I wish we could still shoot,” Justin said. Until a year ago, when Maynard’s parents had moved to Arizona, Maynard and Justin had spent frequent weekends shooting with Maynard’s father, who was called Gramps, on his small Pennsylvania farm. Gramps had been Marine Corps rifle champion during World War II, and during the Korean War he had tested weapons for the Pentagon. His eighteenth-century stone farmhouse was packed with military memorabilia, from a James I-cipher musket to a Ferguson breech-loading flintlock rifle used at the battle of Kings Mountain during the Revolution, to (Justin’s favorite] a rare example of the protean “Stoner system,” which made a one-man battalion out of a modern soldier. They had been good weekends, warm and close and cozy and exciting.
    “So do I,” Maynard said. “We will, someday.”
    “When?” Justin looked at him, wanting a promise.
    Maynard could not promise. “I don’t know.” He saw the boy look away, disappointed. “Hey, you remember when we shot skeet that time? You did really well.”
    “I got three.”
    “Yeah, but . . .” It was a stupid thing to bring up. Maynard had forgotten that the shotgun stock had been so long that Justin had had to hold it under his arm instead of against his shoulder. “I only got three the first time, too.”
    “Yeah, but the second time you got nineteen.”
    The plane dipped and bounced and slowed as the flaps were lowered.
    “Have you decided which place you want to see?”
    “The new one. Air and Space, I think it is. You said you’d be two hours.”
    “More or less. But don’t get excited if I’m a little longer. And for God’s sake, don’t leave the building.”
    “Dad . . .” Justin’s voice suggested insult and reprimand. His maturity and judgment had been impugned unjustly.
    “Sorry.”
    “What I still don’t get is, why you couldn’t talk to this guy on the telephone.”
    “The telephone isn’t a good way to meet people. They can’t get to like you or trust you. I have to make this man trust me.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I want him to tell me things he’s been told not to talk about. My hunch is, he talked about them once already, and it ruined his career.”
    “Then he’s not going to talk about them again.”
    “Maybe, but I hope he will. I hope he’s angry.”
    They took a taxi from the airport. Maynard dropped Justin at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space museum, armed with the phone number of Today’ s Washington bureau, “in case the place burns down or something.” Then Maynard gave the taxi driver an address uptown, near the Washington Cathedral.
    As the cab cruised along Rock Creek Parkway, Maynard reviewed the questions he planned to ask Michael Florio, the Coast Guard man who had been reassigned after questioning the boat disappearances. On the phone, Florio had been wary. At first, he had refused to speak to Maynard, had insisted on returning the call through the Today switchboard. It was an old-fashioned, but usually reliable, way to make sure that the caller was who he said he was—or, at least, that he worked where he said he worked.