by Roland Smith
“Yes, sir.”
Blackwood and the captain walked into the mess, where a half-dozen men were waiting for them. Blackwood had worked with all of them before and had paid them several small fortunes over the years. But what ensured their loyalty was that he knew things about their pasts that they would prefer stay there. They all knew that if they betrayed him, they’d end up in prison — or worse. Blackwood would hunt them down and kill them along with their families, girlfriends, and anyone else they cared about. There was not a place in the world they could hide from Noah Blackwood. They all sat up a little straighter as the man strode confidently to the front of the mess.
“Let me begin by saying that upon the successful completion of this mission, I will be depositing one hundred thousand dollars into each of your accounts.”
This announcement was met with loud cheers. He let the men go on for a moment, then held up his hand for them to stop.
“Not a bad wage for a few hours’ work,” Blackwood continued. “But of course there are risks involved, something you’re all used to. This mission is of a personal nature — a very personal nature. Travis Wolfe has kidnapped my granddaughter and is holding her hostage aboard the Coelacanth. Years ago, he also kidnapped my daughter, Rose, and murdered her. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough legal evidence to prove this, so he’s been a free man all these years.
“I know what you’re all thinking: Why didn’t I just have him killed? Believe me, I have tried, but Travis and his partner Ted Bronson have powerful friends in our government and elsewhere, and this has protected him from the retribution he so richly deserves. Tomorrow, with your help, he’ll get what’s coming to him, and I’ll get my grandchild back.”
He showed the first slide.
“This is my granddaughter, Grace.”
In fact, it was a photograph of Rose at about the same age. Blackwood didn’t have a photograph of Grace, but it didn’t matter because she and Rose looked nearly identical. Blackwood managed to squeeze out a single tear from his left eye and allowed it to run down his tanned face and disappear into his perfectly cropped white beard. The single tear produced the desired effect on the tough men sitting in front of him: shock. None of them had ever seen Dr. Noah Blackwood cry. None of them thought him capable of shedding a tear. At that moment they would have done anything for him. And by the day’s end, they would have to do more than they knew.
Noah wiped the tear away. “Sorry,” he said, as if he were struggling to regain his composure, which had never left. “You will be happy to hear that Butch McCall has been aboard the Coelacanth since it left Cryptos Island, making arrangements for your arrival. What you don’t know is that he is in disguise.”
Noah clicked to the next slide, showing the new Butch McCall. The men laughed.
“Butch took this digital photo of himself a few hours ago. I wouldn’t laugh. Inside, he is the same Butch McCall. He’s included a note for you, which I will read.” Noah took a sheet of paper out of his pocket and cleared his throat. “‘If any of you even point a weapon at me or the other person we have aboard, I will put a bullet through your eye.’”
The men were not laughing now. They all knew Butch McCall.
Noah put another picture on the screen. “This is the other person Butch is referring to. To help you distinguish between hostiles and friendlies, Butch, his partner, and all of you will be wearing green armbands on your left arms. Lose them or remove them, and you will become targets.”
Noah put up pictures of Al Ikes, Roy, and Joe. “This is their security force.”
“Three guys?” the leader of the group asked. His name was Pepper.
“Three extremely dangerous guys,” Noah said. “They need to be taken out as soon as you board. The man in the suit is ex–CIA. The other two are ex–Navy SEALs. A verified kill on any one of them is worth an extra ten thousand to whoever takes them down. And they’re not alone.” He brought up another slide. “Bertha Bishop is on board. I know she looks like a fat old woman, but she’s a former Army Ranger. She could kill everyone in this room in the time it just took me to utter this sentence.”
“I served under her,” one of the men said. “She got me thrown out of my unit and court-martialed. I’ll put her lights out for free.”
The men laughed.
“It would be a life-ending mistake to underestimate her,” Noah warned. “She got the drop on Butch in the Congo and put him down like he was a child. I wouldn’t underestimate her husband, Phil, either.” He showed a photo of Phil Bishop. “He’s nearly as skilled as she is.”
Next, Noah showed them photos of Marty O’Hara and Luther Smyth.
“Kids?” one of the men said.
Noah gave them a solemn nod. “I’m afraid so. I know that all of you are going to have a hard time with this. I’m not comfortable with it, either. But there will be no survivors aboard the Coelacanth. Youngsters, everyone, will go down with the ship. If they don’t, you are going to have to kill them up close after the ship sinks. If you’re uncomfortable with this, you better make sure the kids are locked up or incapacitated before the explosives you set go off.”
“Dead men tell no tales,” Pepper said.
Noah nodded gravely. “If there are any survivors, we’ll all be dead.”
He showed another photo of Rose. “Needless to say, if any of you harm Grace in any way, all of your contracts are canceled.” He paused. “Along with your lives. Your job is to protect Grace — with your own life if necessary. Is that understood?”
The men nodded.
“Butch and our other person on board will be responsible for getting Grace off the Coelacanth safely. But if something should happen to either of them, it will be your responsibility to bring Grace to me. I need to warn you, though, she is not going to come willingly. Travis Wolfe and the others have poisoned her mind with malicious lies about me.
“I’ll get into specific assignments in a moment, but this is essentially a chaos-and-grab mission. Some of you have seen the fishing trawler tied up to our portside, out of view of the Coelacanth. There are a group of pirates aboard. Scum. Whom I have hired to attack the Coelacanth. That’s the chaos, and if another ship happens along at the wrong moment, the pirates will be our cover story. We’re going to make this look like a rescue mission. But our goals will remain the same. Needless to say, the pirates will also have to be killed, and we will scuttle their boat along with the Coelacanth.
“I’ve told their captain that the Coelacanth has salvaged a sunken payroll ship that was filled with gold and silver coins and headed from Britain to Australia back when it was a British colony. If we’re lucky, and his men are as good as he says, they might end up doing your work for you, but I doubt it. They’re well armed and experienced, but they are not professionals.
“And we have a little poetic justice here. The pirates’ leader was on the original crew that hijacked the Coelacanth before it became the Coelacanth. He managed to avoid conviction, which I suspect is how he became their leader. This time, though, he will be caught, convicted, and executed for the same crime on the same ship.”
Noah smiled and let the irony of the situation sink in; then he turned serious again.
“You’ll have to be very careful that none of the pirates harm Grace.”
“May I make a suggestion, Dr. Blackwood?” Pepper asked. “It seems to me that the best way to protect your granddaughter is for us to go aboard tonight, take her, then attack the ship.”
Noah had already thought of this, and so had Butch. They had both agreed that this wouldn’t work because Grace was not the only prize they were after. And the entrance to the Coelacanth wasn’t open yet. Noah trusted the men in front of him, but only to a point. He was not about to tell them that the other prize was two baby dinosaurs.
“Grace is under twenty-four-hour guard,” Noah said.
“We can get past her guards,” another man said.
“I’m sure you can,” Noah said, but he didn’t believe it. “If yo
u took Grace tonight, they would pull their anchor and head to the nearest port and we would lose our cover story. We need to have them and the pirates go down exactly where they are. The canyon we’re sitting over is one of the deepest in the world. Even if someone wanted to investigate, they’d never be able to reach the wreckage. It’s a good idea, but it won’t work.”
He moved on to another subject by showing schematics and photos of the Coelacanth and pointing out how the men would board and attack the ship. When he finished, he gave them the Blackwood smile.
“So, that’s our target,” he concluded. “Half of you will be securing the ship. The other half will be setting charges. With some luck we’ll be in and out in ten minutes, which is ten thousand dollars a minute for each of you. But remember, if things go sour, we’re the good guys. I want the headlines to read: Dr. Noah Blackwood Saves NZA from Pirates on the High Seas.”
* * *
Butch McCall was back on deck watching Blackwood’s chopper land on the helipad of Endangered One, and he knew the old man had just briefed the troops on Endangered Too.
It looked like Mitch Merton had made it and passed the Gizmo and Butch’s message to Blackwood, but tossing Mitch overboard hadn’t worked out as well as Butch would have liked. Al and his men were still looking for him aboard the Coelacanth.
Butch corrected himself. Al and his man were looking for him. He had just bumped into Roy. While Roy grilled “Dr. O’Connor” about who he was and what he was doing up on deck, Butch let his telescoping baton drop from his sleeve into his hand, extended it, and in one fluid motion hit Roy squarely on his left temple, dropping him to the deck like an anchor.
Butch took Roy’s gun and, more important, his encrypted military radio. He also discovered that Roy was not wearing a tracking tag around his neck. This told him that Wolfe might have deactivated the tags, which is exactly what Butch had wanted him to do. With the tags off, Butch could toss anyone he liked over the side and no one would know. He put the theory to the test by tossing Roy, then plugged the earpiece into his ear and listened. It wasn’t long before Al came on the radio and asked for Roy. When Roy didn’t answer, Joe cut in and said that Roy had gone to his cabin to get some shut-eye.
Permanent shut-eye, Butch thought. Or maybe his eyes are open. One thing was for sure: Opened or closed, Roy’s eyes were no longer capable of seeing.
“Why would he turn his radio off?” Al asked, irritated.
“Probably because he wanted to get some sleep,” Joe said. “Where are you?”
“Outside Lab Nine,” Al said. “I want you guys to keep your radios on at all times. I don’t care if the radio traffic bothers you or not.”
“We should have brought more people,” Joe said.
“I would have if Wolfe had let me,” Al said.
“Want me to go down and turn on his radio?” Joe asked.
Al thought about it for a moment. “Nah, let him sleep. One of us needs to be rested for tomorrow. I think that’s when Blackwood is going to make his move.”
The tags are off, Butch thought. If they were active, they would know that Roy was not in his bunk.
Through his free ear Butch heard a quiet footfall coming up behind him. The baton was back up his sleeve. He prided himself on his hearing ability. Years ago, in Tanzania, a leopard had skulked up behind him while he sat in front of a crackling campfire. The cat was dead before it felt the warmth of the flames. He judged the oncoming footfalls to be about fifteen paces away and debated whether he should drop the baton at three feet and hit a homer, or whether he should turn and play the befuddled and kindly Dr. O’Connor.
“It’s cold up here,” his partner said. “Couldn’t you have picked a better place to meet? And what about my tracking tag? They’ll know I’m up here.”
Looks like I get to play myself, Butch thought. He turned around. “The best place to hide is in the open or in a crowd,” he said. “When you lurk around like you were just doing, people notice. You and I can’t afford to be noticed. And the tracking tags are offline, which means no one knows where you are or anyone else is.”
His partner was a little inexperienced but a lot smarter than Mitch Merton, always thinking, and asked the right questions. He was glad he had chosen Mitch for the swim team.
“What have you learned?” Butch asked.
“Wolfe is on the bridge with Cap and Al. Laurel Lee is in Lab Nine, and I think Phil is with her, which is why they don’t have anyone manning the door. The kids are in their cabins, sleeping, with Bertha standing guard outside their doors like the Rock of Gibraltar.”
“Is Bertha alone?”
“Yep.”
“How’d they take the loss of Marty?”
“What?”
“Marty,” Butch repeated. “Grace’s obnoxious cousin.”
“Marty’s in the cabin with Luther.”
“That’s impossible!”
“I saw him walk into the cabin myself.”
“That kid has nine lives,” Butch said in disgust.
He was tempted to march down there and put that theory to the test. But he would have to get through Bertha, and that could be a problem. She was one of the few people on board who might recognize him from a distance by the way he moved, because of her Ranger training. Her brain would go into high alert no matter who she saw walking past the kids’ cabins, especially now after he had tried, and obviously failed, to get rid of Marty O’Hara.
Butch discarded the idea. The only thing that made it easier was knowing that in a few hours he’d get another shot at the little brat, and this time he wouldn’t fail.
“What’s going on, Butch?”
“Never mind,” Butch growled. “Did you find out any more about how and when they’re going after the giant squid?”
“I still don’t know how, but I do have an idea when. I think they’re going to release the dolphins tomorrow at dawn.”
“That means the Moon Pool will be opened then.”
“Right.”
“What else?”
“Something strange is going on down at the Moon Pool. They changed the entrance code. Wolfe said they were doing some kind of maintenance.”
“And?”
“I walked right down there to see what they were doing. Someone was inside, but I couldn’t see through the door. I hid in a mop closet and watched, hoping Al or one of his men wouldn’t show up to ask me what I was doing in there. But with the tags off I —”
“Whatever,” Butch interrupted impatiently. “Get to the point.”
“About a half hour passed and Ana walked by dressed like she was going to a cocktail party. She punched in the code and walked right through. I couldn’t believe it and thought maybe I’d punched in the code wrong. So I left the closet and put in the old code slowly. The doors didn’t open.”
“Back up a second,” Butch said. “Who’s Ana?”
“That reporter who showed up on the sailboat.”
Liar, liar, Butch thought, and wondered if Blackwood had found out who the woman really was.
“Why would they give a reporter the code?” Butch asked. “And why would she be down at the Moon Pool?”
“I have no idea. She came back out after about fifteen minutes, smiling. I tried the old code again. No luck.”
“Who was in there with her?”
“That’s the strangest part. I stayed in the closet for at least another hour. Finally, the Moon Pool doors slid open and out walked Theo Sonborn and Marty O’Hara.”
“You’re kidding me,” Butch said. “I heard they hated each other.”
“I heard the same thing. They weren’t talking when they walked by, but they looked like they were getting along just fine.”
Marty again, Butch thought. The kid seemed to be everywhere and involved in everything. “Did you follow them?”
“I was going to, but I wanted to check the code one last time. It worked. The doors opened.”
“What’d you find inside?”
“W
inkin, Blinkin, and Nod swimming around the Moon Pool.”
“There’s something we don’t know,” Butch said.
“I think there are a lot of things we don’t know.”
“As soon as you let the dolphins go, cut the power like I showed you. I’ll jam the two-ways, the satellite phones, and the ship-to-shore radio. They’ll still have their secure radios and Gizmos, but there are only a few of those.”
“What’s the plan after that?”
Butch had no idea what he was going to do after that. All he knew was that out of chaos came opportunity and that he and his partner would have to be ready to exploit any and every opening. “We wing it,” he said. “Our job is to create as much confusion as we can.”
“I have just the thing for that,” his partner said, smiling.
“Good,” Butch continued. “We wait for our chance, grab Grace and the dinosaurs, and get them to Blackwood. I’ll try to get you a radio so we can stay in touch. Do you know how to use one of these things?”
“No.”
Butch demonstrated all the components. “It’s not going to be easy getting ahold of another one of these until Blackwood’s people get onboard. Have you ever killed anyone?”
“No.”
“Knocked anyone out?”
“No.”
“You may have to.” Butch flipped out his collapsible baton. “Stick this up your sleeve. If you see someone with a radio by themselves, hit ’em in the head as hard as you can, but don’t let them see who you are in case you don’t kill them with the whack. You’re my secret weapon and I want to keep it that way.” He pulled a green armband out of his pocket. “When it all starts, put this on your left arm and don’t take it off.”
“What’s it for?”
“It’s your bulletproof vest.”
* * *
Butch got back to the squid lab just as Dr. Lepod was leaving.
“Big day tomorrow, Dr. O’Connor!” Lepod said enthusiastically. “Perhaps a giant day! I just talked with Dr. Wolfe. Tomorrow morning they go after Architeuthis.”
“That is wonderful news,” Butch said. “But who are they?”
