Open Source

by Matthew Frick

  “Okay. Hell, it ain’t gonna be any fun anyway,” Mike said. “We got a crew of Boy Scouts and four retired teachers coming out. I don’t think I can handle it if there aren’t any hotties out there to flirt with.”

  The three men laughed at the thought of Mike stuck on Wassaw Island all week with a bunch of pre-pubescent boys and old ladies. Even Mike saw the humor in it.

  “Well, since you’re not coming out, would you still be able to drive one of the boats out there and drop us off?” Mike asked.

  “Sure, what’s the catch?” Whenever Mike asked Casey for a favor, there was almost always a catch.

  “Well, for one, I would need you to come get some of the group next Saturday and bring them back. Fred Anders is driving the other boat, but I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind checking out the choke setting on the Honda before then. It kept stalling on me last week when I put it in idle. I tried to adjust it myself and now it’s running at about four thousand rpm. Constantly. It’ll make it out there and back but I don’t think it’s good for the engine to be running that high all the time. You’re better at that engine shit than I am.”

  “You’re right about that,” Casey laughed. “I mean the engine shouldn’t rev that high at idle.” One of the things the Navy taught Casey was how to rebuild, repair, and maintain boat engines. Inboard and outboard. Aside from the many benefits he gained from his time as an Engineman in terms of growing up, learning responsibility and leadership, and all the rest of the standard-issue recruiting hooks, Casey walked away with one of the best educations in small boat maintenance in the country. “Sure, I’ll take you.”

  “Thanks, dude. I asked this numb-nuts over here,” Mike threw a handful of peanuts at Chip who was enraptured with a comely brunette belting out Melissa Etheridge in a raspy, seductive voice on the karaoke stage, “but he’s gotta take the kids to tee-ball camp.”

  Chip turned back to the others and said, by way of explanation to Casey and excuse to Mike, “Laura’s gotta work. She’s showing four houses tomorrow. Two at Modena on Skidaway. Do you know what kind of commission she could pull in? Hell yeah, I’m watching the kids.” He emptied the last of his beer and picked up the glass of water next to it and took a sip. He didn’t even notice the faucet of condensation that poured from the glass to his lap as he drank while shifting his focus back to Melissa Etheridge.

  Casey and Mike looked at each other and laughed. They were three completely different people. But the phrase “opposites attract” applies to friends as much as it does to lovers. At least it did in their case.

  When Melissa was finished, Casey asked, “Did either of y’all hear about the ship that got hijacked last week?”

  “In Savannah?” Chip asked.

  “No, in the Baltic Sea.”

  “That’s more like a lake than a sea, isn’t it?” Mike asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “That’s the Black Sea, dumb-ass. And you’re right. The Black Sea is more of a big lake, if you ask me. No, the Baltic is up between Sweden and Germany—that area.”

  “Didn’t hear a damn thing, Mr. Wizard,” Mike said as he drank some more of his beer. “So what happened?”

  “Well, it got hijacked,” Casey said. “That’s no big deal. What’s strange though, is that nobody gets hijacked up there. Not since like, the Vikings.”

  “Was it al Qa’ida?” Chip asked, enthusiastically interested now that the stage was occupied by a homely coed in a sun dress that was two decades out of date singing an old Tammy Wynette tune.

  “No,” Casey answered. “Those guys aren’t subtle enough to pull off a hijacking on the open ocean. The media gives them too much credit. I don’t know who did it, but the Russians just sent five Navy ships to go find it.”

  “Find it?” Chip asked.

  “Yeah. Nobody knows where it is.”

  “That’s kinda strange, isn’t it?” Chip asked. “You would think the people that took the boat would be asking for a ransom. With all the technology stuff the government has, they could just triangulate the position of where the call came from and figure out where it is, right?”

  Casey chuckled at Chip’s simplistic view of the way the world operated. Not that Casey was a suave man of the world, but Chip had never lived out of Savannah. In fact, the farthest he had ever been from the city was when his parents took him and his sister to Six Flags in Atlanta one weekend. Most of what he knew of the world beyond the Georgia border came from movies he occasionally rented from Blockbuster.

  “I don’t know, man. I just caught a little bit about it on the news over there,” he said, motioning to the TV by the bar. “I was just seeing if y’all knew anything else about it.”

  Casey’s inquiry was cut short by the loud, off-key singing of a dozen people about their age in flower-print shirts and sandals, some with leis, some with straw hats, some with both, who barged in the door belting out the chorus to Todd Snyder’s “My Generation (Part 2).” The young lady on stage was visibly upset with the interruption of her spotlight performance and was pleading with Rosie, the bar’s KJ, to restart the song.

  “Now we’re talking!” said Mike. “Time to find me a drunk beach girl who wants to take me to her car tonight.”

  Casey laughed at his friend, but was still thinking about the Baltic Venture. “Well, good luck, sir,” he said as he got up to leave. “I’m gonna pack it in.”

  “What are you leaving for, dude? The party’s just starting,” Mike protested.

  “I’m not in the mood tonight, man. Plus I think I’m gonna go home and do some looking into that hijacked ship. Maybe it’ll make a good post.”

  “Yeah, you haven’t posted anything in a couple of weeks, man,” Chip noted.

  “You and that blog, dude. You’re wasting your life with that computer, I’m telling you,” Mike said, smiling because he finally got a chance to rib Casey for the same thing he was scolded for earlier. Mike had his marijuana, Casey had his blog. Mike didn’t see a difference.

  “Alright, Mike. You got me. Well, you kids don’t stay out too late, now. Gotta get up early tomorrow. Chip, tell Laura and the kids I said hi. And Mike, I’ll see you at the Landings at seven-thirty?”

  “I’ll be there. And thanks for helping out, Casey.”

  “No problem. Later, guys.” Casey wormed his way through the now-crowded tavern to the door and began the five minute hike to his house.

  Chapter 4

  Once Casey left the parking lot of the Sunset Tavern, he couldn’t keep his mind off of the Baltic Venture story. He wasn’t sure why it intrigued him so much, but he thought there were too many questions that weren’t answered, or even asked, by the news reporters. Casey figured the fact that “pirates” were mentioned in the story drew him to the incident in the first place. They weren’t talking about Blackbeard or even Jack Sparrow, but they weren’t talking about Somalia either. This was a case of The Pirates of the North Sea. Casey looked at it that way—like it was a mystery. A mystery that was current and real, and he enjoyed a good puzzle to solve. He smiled at the thought that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

  “You just can’t make this shit up,” he said to himself as he climbed the four steps to his front porch and found the keyhole to open the door to the house. He turned on the lamp by the doorway and made his rounds, turning on the three lamps in the living room and the two in his bedroom. The only overhead lights he used in the house were in the kitchen and the bathroom. Casey thought they made the other rooms too bright and preferred the homey feeling that lamps gave out.

  Casey opened the refrigerator and removed a Diet Coke from a shelf on the door. He closed the fridge and retrieved a half-eaten box of Triscuits from the counter by the sink, mentally scolding himself for leaving the box open and hoping they weren’t stale. He sat in the folding lawn chair in front of his laptop computer and moved the mouse to wake it from its hibernation. He checked his e-mail and studiously deleted the thirty or so unwanted solicitations. That left him with only two. One
was from his mom, telling him all about the trouble she was having with the neighborhood landscaping committee who was pressuring her to remove the skeleton and styrofoam gravestones from her front yard. She argued that there were no real holidays between the 4th of July and Halloween, so why should they care if she was getting a head start by putting out decorations in August? Casey laughed and opened the next message. This one was from The Lover’s Guide, providing him with a weekly tip on how to satisfy his partner for a more meaningful and lasting relationship. Casey moved the e-mail to a designated folder on the computer desktop. He figured he would be able to put that advice to use just as soon as he found a partner to have a more meaningful and lasting relationship with. Someday, God willing. Tonight he was interested in something else.

  Casey closed his e-mail and opened up the Google main page. He typed in the words “MV Baltic Venture” to see what came up. As expected, the top entries were reports from CNN, the Associated Press, FOX News—all the regulars. He read each of the articles to see what information was the same, which was most of it, and what editorial twist, if any, the various news outlets took on the story. The standard facts were identical: cargo ship, Maltese flag, Finnish owned, heading for Algeria with a load of timber from Finland, 20 crewmembers who were mostly Russian citizens. Nothing breaking here that he hadn’t gotten from the TV at the Sunset. He skimmed over the headlines of the next five pages of search results. Nothing else caught his eye. Casey let out an exasperated breath as he looked at the top of the computer screen and saw there were over 253,000 results for his search. He moved his cursor over the link to page 20 and skipped ahead. He noticed an overabundance of links to Baltic vacation packages and was beginning to feel frustrated. Maybe it was too early in the story development to expect anything more. After all, the media just found out about the reported hijacking today.

  Casey stopped when he realized he had reached the bottom of the Triscuits box, the contents of which were only slightly stale, and licked his fingers clean. He stood up and drained the rest of his soda, wondering how drinking a Coke at almost midnight was even remotely going to help him get a good night’s sleep. He threw away the can and empty box in the kitchen and went to the bathroom. When he returned, he sat down and modified his search criteria.

  “ITAR-TASS Russia Baltic Venture.” Casey hoped maybe he would get some better information from one of the countries with a direct stake in the hijacked vessel. This meant he needed to bypass the American news channels and go right for the source. While the computer searched for results, Casey quickly went to the kitchen and got another Diet Coke. He knew he shouldn’t drink as many Cokes as he did, but he justified his addiction to himself by saying it wasn’t as bad as smoking. He had kicked that habit shortly after he was discharged from the Navy. That was a tough battle. He knew giving up Diet Cokes would be infinitely harder.

  “Bingo.” Casey found what he had been looking for. Well more of what he was looking for, anyway. Luckily the Russians, and most foreign websites for that matter, provided an English translation of the entire site, which he accessed with one click of the British flag near the top of the browser window. He knew that with some sites, particularly the official government ones, you took a risk in being presented a different set of reports than those posted in the mother-tongue version. Casey didn’t blame anyone. He figured some countries wanted to control what the rest of the world, at least those that didn’t speak the native language, could read about their internal affairs. Those that needed to know would find out anyway, but why let Joe Shit the Ragman have more ammunition to use in his protests over their government.

  The Russian media published the same basic information as the American reports about the MV Baltic Venture, but they included the fact that the ship was carrying various containers onboard, as well as the wood from Finland. None of the reports specified what was in the containers, but then again, there was nothing out of the ordinary about that either. Casey came across an interesting fact in one of the smaller, independent Russian papers, a product of the death of Soviet Communism. Apparently the Baltic Venture stopped in some place called Kaliningrad between leaving Finland and being hijacked off of Denmark. Casey opened another tab on his internet browser and did a search for Kaliningrad to get the geography and basic demographics in his head. He went back to the other articles.

  The only time he found Kaliningrad mentioned was in the one report from Novaya Gazeta. And even then there were only two sentences that stated the ship stopped there for scheduled repairs, and that the ship was there for three weeks before continuing on its voyage to Algiers. After that extra information, Casey’s mind kicked into gear. He began asking himself the obvious questions that perplexed him. Some were asked by the media reports, particularly the American “experts” on the nightly news talk shows, but others were either overlooked or ignored.

  First off, why was the ship hijacked to begin with? Second, who hijacked it? Also, most vessels were pirated for money, the Achille Lauro notwithstanding. The pirates want money either for the return of the cargo, the crew, or even the ship itself—usually for all three, although in this case the ship was over twenty years old and not likely going to fetch a large sum. So where was the ransom demand? According to the news reports, the ship had been missing, or last contact made, for almost a week. That’s plenty of time for a ransom demand to be made. Even if the hijackers wanted to get to a safe place to wait, meaning away from the easy reach of the coast guards or other law enforcement agencies in the Baltic Sea, what could be safer than underway in the North Atlantic? Besides, with demands come negotiations, and those would take days to start. What if the hijackers anticipated a military response? It would still take time to mobilize that response. Again, time wasted for negotiations to avert such an option.

  Casey sat back from the computer and reclined as much as he could in the metal and plastic-weave chair. He understood the motivation for people off of the Horn of Africa to pirate vessels. Those guys had the business end of ransom negotiations down to an art by now. But why the Baltic Venture? Casey stared at a file photo of the vessel that was open on his computer screen. How did all the pieces of this puzzle fit together?

  Casey sat up, opened the report of the Russian warship deployment and re-sized the window to place it next to the ship’s photo. His eyes went back and forth between the two, and his mind groped for the meaning of it all. A small spark of inspiration was attempting to fire his imagination. For two full minutes Casey sat in silence, his attention focused unwaveringly on the computer screen. “What if...?” kept repeating over and over again in his brain.

  Ignition.

  Casey minimized the windows on the computer and opened another web browser. He entered the address to access his personal blog space and logged in. Stranger than fiction, he thought as he began typing.

  Chapter 5

  Atlantic Ocean, east of Nouakchott, Mauritania

  Four thousand miles to the east, a new day was beginning. With each passing minute, the sun’s rays heated the equatorial waters of the Mauritanian coastline and generated an oppressive blanket of steam that covered everything. The only relief was the relative breeze created solely by the forward motion of the fishing boat. Sofiane Belmokhtari, an Algerian and ethnic Moor, stood at the bow of the vessel looking aft toward the pilot house. He was not a fisherman, and he was thankful of that fact the more he observed the condition of the boat he was on. The boat was an even blend of white and rust. Sofiane was keenly aware of the smell of hake that permeated the entire boat. The fishing nets, lines and floats reeked of fish. It was evident that this boat was used often and recently, though today the lines remained coiled, the nets neatly piled on the fantail. They were not fishing today.

  Sofiane turned around and saw the anchored ship just ahead looming larger and larger as the fishing boat approached. The ship was much bigger, but equally rusted. He did not recognize the symbol painted on the stack and noticed there was no flag to identify the ship’s natio
nality. Only the name on the back of the vessel informed the Moor they were in the right place. He moved toward the rear of the fishing boat, but made sure to stay out of the way of the men who really were a part of the crew.

  Bodies moved quickly about the deck as the fishing boat approached the Baltic Venture’s port side where an orange pilot’s ladder had been rigged. One of the fishermen threw a line to a man in black trousers and white t-shirt who was waiting for the fishing boat’s arrival. Two fishermen ascended the ladder and went onboard the ship. Sofiane followed behind them with a black, rugged plastic briefcase. The two fishermen were shouting over the ship’s railing back to their crewmates who were busy moving crates of vegetables and fish packed in ice on deck to hoist up to the larger vessel.

  Sofiane saw another man dressed identical to the one who had helped tie the fishing boat to the ship. Both men were Caucasian and carried automatic weapons. Sofiane tried not to let his nervousness show, even as sweat began to soak the soiled turban that covered his head. He slowly approached the first man, the one with dark hair, and held up the briefcase for his inspection. The man swung the rifle around from his side and held it as if he were ready to use it. He motioned with the weapon for Sofiane to put the case on the deck. He gave instructions to Sofiane in a strange language. The thin Moor responded in French that he did not know what the man was asking him to do. The man with the rifle repeated the unintelligible instructions louder, but Sofiane still did not understand. He took a chance and bent down to open the briefcase.

  The men with the black pants moved back. Sofiane revealed four bottles of pepper vodka and looked up at the men. He smiled as both of the Europeans, Sofiane guessed they were from Europe, began laughing. The dark haired man moved his rifle back to his side and retrieved the bottles. He showed them approvingly to his friend who spoke into a hand-held radio, presumably informing someone on the other end of the gifts the Moor had brought.