Dr. Borden, one of the paramedics, and Jack Porter went over to the Bel Hudson in one of her lifeboats. Jack was another veteran CIA guy; his title on the Glomar Explorer was director of security. Jerry supposed he visited the freighter to make sure it really was British and not crawling with Soviet spies.

The Bel Hudson evidently checked out, because the lifeboat came back with the seaman who was having chest pains. Getting him out of the boat and onto the Glomar Explorer turned out to be another adventure. He couldn’t, or said he couldn’t, climb a rope ladder, so they secured him on a stretcher and swung him aboard with a crane.

That would have been fine if the crane operator, who wasn’t used to handling such light weights, didn’t slam him into the ship’s metal flank a couple of times before finally landing him. Jerry figured that, if the guy hadn’t had a coronary before, the trip up would have given him one.

He was white as a sheet when Dr. Borden and the paramedic escorted him to sick bay. The verdict soon spread: he hadn’t had a heart attack, but he did have some banged-up ribs that didn’t come from his exciting arrival. He also had a vague memory—which hadn’t come out before—of getting into a drunken brawl with the Bel Hudson’s skipper in the ship’s lounge.

“How can you be drunk enough to forget a fight like that?” Jerry asked.

“Talent. Talent and practice,” Dave Schoals answered.

When they asked the sailor if he wanted to get swung back into the lifeboat, he climbed down the rope ladder, maybe not so nimbly as a monkey but nimbly enough. The Glomar Explorer sent back a case of frozen steaks with him to liven up the Bel Hudson’s larder.

Jerry expected that would be the end of it, but the freighter’s lifeboat made a return trip with several bottles of scotch. At dinner that night, everybody on the Glomar Explorer got a finger of golden-amber fluid. Jerry wasn’t much of a whisky drinker. He tried not to cough when he knocked his back.

“Tastes like medicine,” he said.

Steve clicked his tongue between his teeth. “The younger generation is ignorant,” he said. “That’s mighty good medicine. Expensive medicine, too.”

“If you say so.” The last time Jerry’d knocked back neat whisky, he’d been thirteen. It was right after his bar mitzvah, and he’d gone to the synagogue to help make a minyan for a morning service. One of the old men who was a regular at such affairs gave him a little knock in the bottom of a glass—and then laughed liked hell when he choked on it.