by Chris Thrall
“Mother of God!” His eyes widened.
“No.” Carlos began shaking, and no more words would come.
From an emaciated and bearded face stared the eyes of a dying man.
Virgilio dropped the flap of the sleeping bag, his own eyes pleading with Carlos for direction. Both deeply superstitious, they were tempted to peel away and return to the Kimberley II, but here was a fellow mariner in the direst of need, and the law of the sea saw them put their own concerns aside and jump into action.
The man was in no fit state for them to transfer him to the launch. They would have to hoist him on deck in situ. Besides, if he died, the raft might hold clues as to his identity or the vessel he had abandoned.
Clipped to three anchor points on the launch was a triad of straps that attached to the davit’s cable. In seconds Carlos had unclipped them and reattached the hook fasteners at equidistant points around the raft’s exterior handline. Then they towed the stinking, sagging capsule back to the ship, radioing ahead with a sit-rep.
With the Kimberley II hove to, Jens joined Juan on the boat deck.
“Stretcher and medical kit,” he hollered, slamming the davit’s gear lever forward.
The life raft crimped inwards like a trawler’s net, emptying out a torrent of filthy seawater as Jens maneuvered it up and over the rail. Juan dropped the stretcher and medical kit and rushed to release the webbing straps, then hauled the raft out of the way to make space for the launch, a dying stranger not a priority when two crew members remained at the mercy of the ocean.
With Carlos and Virgilio safely back on board, Jens ran over to help Juan, who had punctured the raft’s tubes with a boatswain’s knife and cut away the canopy to get to the survivor and lay him on the stretcher. Juan had taken a drip out of the medical pack but was struggling to find a vein in the man’s wasted arms. When Jens knelt down beside his chief engineer, the stench wafting from the corpse-like figure forced him to turn his head away for a moment. He could tell the deep gash in the man’s temple was gangrenous, and the infection had spread throughout his scrawny body.
“Give! Give!”
Jens took the saline pack from Juan. He knew the man’s blood pressure was too low to get a vein up but had a better idea – another trick learned while fighting in the bush in Rhodesia.
“If we don’t get fluid inside him fast, he will die. We’ll shove it straight into his backside,” the grizzled sea captain informed his crew with a lack of ceremony they’d long gotten used to.
Then he whipped out his sheath knife and lopped the hypodermic needle connection off the drip tube. Dignity not an option, they removed the man’s soiled, shredded shorts and maneuvered him into a suitable position for Jens to insert the tube carrying the life-giving liquid.
“Okay, put two vials of antibiotics into his butt cheek, and keep the drip in place until it’s empty,” Jens ordered, then hefted himself back up to the bridge to send a distress call.
As the saline passed through the sensitive lining of the man’s colon and into his bloodstream, the change in his condition startled them. The infected wound had swollen one eyelid shut, but the other, now lubricated with tears, began to flicker, the eye itself morphing from dry and drab, like that of a dead fish, into a bloodshot piercing blue. Color returned to his pallid skin, and he started to move, slowly at first but becoming increasingly agitated.
“Blanket!” Juan looked to Virgilio, who passed him one, but as Juan draped it over the rescued man, he thrust a hand out and grabbed his shirt.
“Jessica!” he rasped.
The three Filipinos jumped back in surprise.
“Jessica!” the man pleaded, his gaze unsteady as he tried to fix on Juan.
“Jessica?” Juan repeated, screwing up his eyes.
The man released his grip, and his arm fell backwards, pointing in the direction of the raft.
Virgilio walked over to the slashed-up craft and lifted out the teddy bear. “Does he mean this one?”
Juan and Carlos looked at each other and shrugged. Virgilio held the bear up in front of the man’s face. He let out a despondent gurgle and collapsed into unconsciousness.
- 6 -
Awaking in the Grande Verde’s penthouse suite, Penny threw off the Italian linen on the emperor-size bed and padded barefoot across the marble tiles to the state-of-the-art kitchen. She hit the double espresso button on the fancy drinks maker and took the freshly ground cup of coffee out onto the veranda, sipping it gently while scanning the great ocean. Penny knew there was no chance of Future simply sailing back into port over a month after going missing but stuck to her morning ritual nonetheless to acknowledge the possibility of Hans and Jessica fighting for their lives in a life raft.
Penny had fallen for Hans the moment they met in the marina in England, making the decision to accept his offer to crew for them an easy one. Athletic, good looking, intelligent, thoughtful, nonjudgmental – the list went on – Hans possessed a deep understanding of the world and blazed a path through life guided by his own moral compass, circumventing intimidation, convention and others’ self-serving rules. He made her laugh with his wry observations, self-effacing humor and subtle wit but occasionally flashed a more serious side, resulting from his tough childhood, horrors witnessed in the special forces and the murder of his wife and son.
Although an affectionate father, Hans was afraid of nothing and no one and would do whatever was necessary to protect those close to him. Penny witnessed this firsthand when two police officers tried to arrest them for no apparent reason during a riot in Portugal. Hans had gone easy on the men, resulting in a short stay in hospital for them, but a gang of pirates attempting to hijack Future offshore one night was not so fortunate.
Born to somewhat bohemian parents, Penny grew up on yachts and, other than practicing as a veterinary nurse for a year in London after graduation, had spent most of her life at sea. In recent times she’d made a comfortable living skippering rich folk to exotic locations around the globe and teaching them to scuba dive.
Because of the nomadic nature of the job, Penny hadn’t been in a serious relationship before Hans, apart from a whirlwind romance with a playboy millionaire who’d hired her to captain his yacht around the Caribbean. Only, after parting company, Penny found out he was married with three children . . . and that she was pregnant. Alone with no support a long way from home, she’d opted for an abortion, a decision that still haunted her. It was impossible not to think of the adorable Jessica as the child she never had.
When Hans invited Penny to spend time with them in Portland, she knew it was time to leave the past behind and had looked forward to testing her land legs and finding work in a local sailing or scuba school.
In the penthouse’s wet room, Penny turned the matrix of jets spurting from the gold-flecked charcoal tiles to full and stood amid the powerful spray. Another of her morning rituals, it was as if cleansing herself of the previous day’s grime would somehow open the way for fresh fortune.
- 7 -
“Coffee?” Penny handed Phipps a mug.
“Thanks, honey.”
The Concern’s special operative set it down next to his laptop and took a welcome break, having been awake since 3:00 a.m. contacting vessels crossing the North Atlantic on a bearing intercepting the possible predicted drift of Future’s life raft.
They were on the floor below the penthouse in a guest suite originally used as a command center by the Concern, who’d flown a team of special operatives to Cape Verde following the yacht’s disappearance. Hans – code name “Orion” – was one of the organization’s foremost agents.
All they knew of the missing yacht were the coordinates, ten miles offshore, that Hans had radioed through to the local marina as he swung Future about to return to port. With no Mayday broadcast or a signal from Future’s emergency beacon picked up by satellite or aircraft, the coastguard believed the yacht must have collided with an object – possibly a whale or shipping container – and sank imme
diately.
“But there’s still hope if they took to the raft,” Phipps maintained.
Yet after overseeing an extensive air-and-sea search involving multiple parties, the team’s coordinator – Hans’ handler, Innes Edridge, code name “Muttley” – had no choice but to ramp down the expensive operation, leaving only Phipps behind on Cape Verde to support Penny and liaise with the authorities and shipping.
A group of disenfranchised patriots and aggrieved special ops veterans formed the Concern after the Vietnam War, seeking to bring to justice individuals who had used the conflict for private gain. The list included politicians who spun the war so their cronies in the military-industrial complex made enormous profits, CIA operatives illicitly trading in weapons and drugs under the cover of the supply chain, and company directors and financiers doing business with both sides.
Operating below the radar of society and government, the Concern functioned on a need-to-know basis, recruiting highly skilled and accomplished individuals of all occupations – former special ops and intelligence types, medical professionals, airline owners, bankers, immigration and embassy officials, weapons specialists – through a system of sponsorship and rigorous background checks. The Concern had blossomed into a formidable force for good, its private contractors involved in all manner of operations, from exposing corporate wrongdoings and supporting humanitarian projects and persecuted political parties, to hostage rescue and generally sticking up for the dispossessed.
Proposed operations surfaced when a member of the Concern felt an individual or community needed support in the face of adversity or injustice. Funding came by way of financial donations from “enablers” – corporate directors looking to offset enormous profits to assuage their capitalist guilt. By playing John Wayne cum Mother Teresa from the comfort of an office chair, these folks got the honor of being in on one of the world’s best-kept secrets and could take credit for its benevolent work.
Although not-for-profit, the group had a substantial investment portfolio and a network of agents spanning the globe. Hans held the position of special operative, as did Phipps, a former Navy SEAL buddy.
Hans hadn’t divulged much information about the organization to Penny, nor his role in it. When Future went missing, she’d taken a calculated risk and contacted Innes Edridge – Muttley – knowing the elderly Scot worked in Goldman Sachs’ Boston office.
Calm, methodical and with the clinical detachment required of true leadership, the former paratrooper, who went on to become colonel of the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, quickly debriefed Penny, then put together a rapid-response team and accompanied them to Cape Verde to oversee the search operation. Through their contacts in the Concern, the team acquired the services of a leading public relations firm to raise awareness of the plight of the lost crew. Flyers went out to ports and marinas on both sides of the Atlantic for distribution to commercial shipping and yachts traversing an area where a think tank of experts from the fields of meteorology, oceanography and maritime rescue predicted the trade winds and currents would carry a life raft or a dismasted yacht. In addition to setting up searchforfuture.com, the PR firm targeted “missing” adverts to thousands of maritime-related webpages browsed by transatlantic crews.
At significant expense the Concern team hired every available skipper in the region. A veritable flotilla sailed for Future’s last-known position, along with a flight of twenty light aircraft, all coordinated by Phipps, who liaised with the Cape Verde coastguard and the crew of a Lynx helicopter dispatched from a British Royal Navy warship on exercise in the area.
Through a third party, the Concern’s team offered a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to Hans and Jessica’s rescue, and a million for a rescue itself. The promotion attracted all manner of concerned parties to the searchforfuture.com website – amateur radio enthusiasts, skippers of yachts and cargo ships suggesting possible sightings, along with well-wishers with messages of support – but a fair amount of cranks and kooks too.
“Anything new?” Penny sat down next to Phipps, turning the laptop to view the hit counter on searchforfuture.com.
“The usual contributions,” said Phipps, stretching his huge black arms above his head. “Another clairvoyant, a Brazilian guy, reckons they might be in the Philippines of all places.”
From dawn until way past midnight, Phipps had worked tirelessly, sieving through possible sightings of the yacht, the life raft or debris, triaging them accordingly and communicating the information via satellite phone and offshore radio to shipping in the location to request support.
“It’s not looking good, is it?” Penny ran a fingertip down her coffee cup, knowing she was stating the obvious.
“I’m not gonna lie. It’s been a month now. If they did take to the life raft, that’s quite some time to be adrift. But it has been done. And if there’s one man who could survive . . .”
“I know.” Penny managed an appreciative smile. “But that’s if they took to the life raft.”
The two of them fell silent, having discussed every permutation and outcome many times over, even the theory Hans might have sailed off with Jessica for reasons known only to him. Without evidence it was impossible to favor any one scenario. The Concern had invested a substantial amount of money into the search thus far, the bill for the penthouse alone reaching ninety thousand dollars. Penny worried that on the balance of probabilities they would pull the plug on the operation.
As if reading her mind, “Listen, Penny,” said Phipps. “I’m going to ask Muttley for more time – another month. At least then we can be sure we’ve allowed for the maximum window . . .” His words trailed off as he realized how this sounded.
“Tony” – Penny used Phipps’ Christian name – “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all you’ve done. Another month would be . . . I mean it would let me . . .” Penny fought back tears.
Phipps placed his hand on hers.
“And I don’t have to stay here – the Grande Verde, I mean.”
The Grande was the island group’s most prestigious hotel, an impressive combination of pastel-cream stone, stainless steel and glass, tiered back against the hillside like an Aztec pyramid. Surrounded by lush green scrub and with a stunning ocean vista, the ultramodern retreat was popular with the rich and famous.
“I don’t need an en suite cinema or a conference room,” she continued. “Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Ha.” Phipps smiled, having gotten used to the organization’s no-expenses-spared approach. “Seems kinda weird, don’t it?”
“Well, when you’ve shared bunks in a cramped cabin with strangers most of your life, waking up on a bed that’s bigger than a yacht itself does seem a little excessive.”
Phipps chuckled, relieved the mood had lightened. “Don’t you worry about the Concern’s finances, honey. With the money some of our funders make on a daily basis, you could buy fifty of these hotels and still have change.”
Penny knew it to be true, also that the treatment she’d received was a token of the respect the organization had for Orion.
“Tony, can I ask you something?”
“How did I end up working for the Concern?”
“Yes.”
“Whoa, where to begin? I loved being a Navy SEAL, everything about it – the tough training, being the best of the best, surrounded by a band of brothers who would willingly lay down their lives for each other. Got to see some serious stuff – some tough ol’ fights. But after a while . . .” Phipps pulled down the screen of his laptop, as if shutting out the world to give himself the freedom to think.
“You began to question your motives?”
“You’ve been talking to Hans.” Phipps grinned.
“He said a similar thing.”
Phipps rubbed a fingertip over the laptop’s silver logo. “I didn’t think too deep about that stuff as a kid. Was just hooked by the lifestyle – the diving, the fitness, the travel, drinking beer with m
y buddies, and laying down as much firepower on an enemy as possible.”
“But you started wondering who the enemy was.”
“Penny, when you’ve been ordered to invade someone else’s country by gutless suits in Washington and you’ve got a twelve-year-old boy armed with a Kalashnikov standing side by side with his father, his uncles, his brothers, doing what anybody would do, defending their homeland . . .”
Penny saw the same dark look come over Phipps’ face she’d seen on Hans’ when he talked about this. She was about to change subject, but Phipps continued.
“When you join the military, it don’t matter who you are – high school or graduate – you might know all kinda stuff, but you ain’t been on the planet long enough to put the jigsaw together, to see things in the context of time. Everything seems black and white, good versus evil, and God bless America.”
“And now we’ve got the Internet.”
“Exactly. You’d have to be some kinda idiot to have that information at your fingertips and not realize something ain’t right. You know, when they opened the first McDonald’s in Kabul, folks back home actually cheered.” Phipps took a gulp of his coffee and slowly shook his head.
“So you got out?”
“I got out before I did something in combat I would live to regret. It’s one thing to take a life when you’re young and naïve and believe you’re doing the right thing, but . . .”
“So you saw the Concern as a way of putting things right?”
“Not exactly. When I left the navy, I worked in investment – hedge funds, real estate, corporate finance, that kinda thing. Married my girlfriend, commuted two hours back and forth every day wearing a suit, ‘did lunch,’ even took up golf.”
“Something tells me that life didn’t suit you.” Penny smiled.
“It wasn’t so much the life. I enjoyed spending more time with my girl.” Phipps pulled out his wallet and slid a snap across the desk. “That’s Jainee, and my boy, Anthony Jr. Hell, my golf swing sure improved, and I could handle the work. But I got to thinking, is this all there is?”
