The Casbah Killers

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The damned rubber raft wouldn’t paddle. It was like sitting on a roller coaster in Coney Island in the middle of the night. Only the roller coaster was wet, it wasn’t Coney Island but the coastline of Morocco and the pre-dawn, inky blackness of a moonless night, some five or so miles above the port of Casablanca.

I’d been told that not so very long ago, before the Delure jetty was built, steamers stopping at Casablanca always anchored far offshore. Passengers were lowered in wicker baskets to bobbing, overcrowded bumboats for the trip to shore. Capsizings were frequent, shattered nerves a certainty and I was getting an idea what they went through. Long underwater sandbars and heavy seas made most of the Moroccan coastline on the Atlantic a constant succession of towering swells and rolling breakers.

My little rubber raft rose up on the crest of every swell and then came down into the trough with a roar of wind and foam, only to be lifted up again instantly on the rise of the next one. I’d been lowered — raft, equipment and me — from one of the big Marine ’copters from the carrier Saratoga. I wore a tight, one-piece oilskin, not unlike a frogman’s suit, over my clothes. In the raft was a small knapsack and a bundle, both wrapped in the waterproof covering.

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