Tripnee playfully thrust her chest out and her shoulders back. “Did you know two of Columbus’ boats—the Pinta and the Niña—were caravels?”
Adam pretended to doff his hat and bow. “Did not. I’m duly impressed by my lady’s vast knowledge.”
As Adam did this, he noticed a scowling face peering out of a porthole and, back behind the face, many, many sets of eyes. Sad, frightened eyes. An angry-looking dark-skinned man with straight black hair banged the porthole shut and closed the curtain. Quite a contrast from the warmth and good cheer of most everyone else in Finikas. And, also, odd because it was the heat of summer—that time of year when sailors kept hatches and portholes open for ventilation.
As he looked at the artfully-built, obviously expensive ship, Adam noted that it was neither a rough, working vessel, nor one dedicated to recreation. It had an austere, stripped-down quality. No commercial fishing or cargo-loading gear. No Bimini awnings, BBQs, paddle boards, windsurfers, jet skis, or bicycles. Not even any swim fins or snorkels—or any of the other toys or frills adorning virtually all the pleasure craft thereabouts.
Tripnee read the ship’s ornate name plate. “Interesting boat, the Al-Gazi. In Arabic, the name means ‘warrior.’”
Adam understood enough basic Arabic to get by, but Tripnee seemed to be forever showing off her superior grasp of the language. Okay, okay. Nothing new about that.
But the Al-Gazi. Adam was struck by how the handsome vessel stood out, not for what was happening upon it, but for what was not happening. In a harbor of boisterous boats, the Al-Gazi was quiet. Too quiet? It might be nothing, but after countless investigations, Adam had learned to pay attention to intuitive tremors, however faint, and made mental note of the Al-Gazi. Had he just glimpsed, through that porthole, hatred? Human trafficking?
As they moved on, Tripnee whispered, “Did you see what I saw?”
“Human trafficking, maybe?”
“Shall we do something?”
“Finding nukes comes first. But later, yes, let’s do something about Al-Gazi. And there may be a connection.”
After a while, thinking of Al-Gazi, Adam said, “Seaworthy trouble.”
Picking up on one of their favorite word games, Tripnee said, “Solid turmoil.”
“Steadfast torment,” he said.
“Stalwart tribulation,” she said.
“Steady turbulence.”
“Stouthearted tumult. Sound topsy-turviness. Sturdy tempestuousness.”
Adam laughed “Okay, okay. Once again I bow before my sharp cookie.”
As they continued on around the quays, Adam kept an eye peeled for Sophia’s drones. But only once did he notice one zip into the stern-most porthole of an elegant yacht. Even though he guessed it had to be a drone, it looked and sounded like an insect.
It was still early afternoon, when, on the other side of the marina from the Al-Gazi, Adam and Tripnee came upon Saadet, a spectacular 60-foot catamaran sitting low in the water. A wild party was in full swing. Loud, heavy metal blared and colorful drinks flowed. A bartender on the boat’s spacious rear patio steadily mixed big cocktails, which were immediately snatched up and gulped down by a gyrating, cavorting group of five muscular, swarthy men in Speedos and two shapely blond-haired women in string bikinis.
A third young bikini-clad blonde lounged, with a big Mojito in hand, on the catamaran’s stern a few feet from the quay. As Tripnee and Adam approached arm-in-arm, the woman shouted to Tripnee in a slurred voice, “You’ve got the hunk.”
Tripnee smiled playfully and yelled loudly enough to be heard over the music, “Hands off. He’s mine.”
The blonde collected herself somewhat and made an effort to reduce her slurring, “Seriously, you’re the cutest couple. Hi, I’m Barbie.”
Adam and Tripnee grinned, leaned close to be heard over the music and introduced themselves.
Adam asked, “Where are you sailing?”
“Oh, me and my girlfriends aren’t sailors. We’re just spending the summer working as cocktail waitresses on the other side of the island.” She gestured toward the men behind her. “These guys told us they have this big fancy boat and invited us over.”
One of the men came over, stood beside Barbie, and ogled Tripnee with his Speedo bulging.
Barbie said, “Masood, meet Adam and Tripnee. Adam and Tripnee meet—”
Without looking at Adam, the man grabbed Barbie’s arm and pulled her back into the oscillating knot of partiers. Instead of resisting, Barbie went willingly and jumped into bump-dancing with Masood to the primal, pounding music.
As they moved on, Tripnee said, “Not to be too know-it-all, but in Turkish, saadet means happy.”
“Darned ironic. That’s one unhappy boat,” Adam said, feeling uneasy for Barbie and her friends. Should he have intervened on their behalf? Probably. But they were adults presumably able to make their own choices. And in today’s world, for him to take protective action would be guaranteed to appear chauvinistic and even racist. Including in the eyes of his own girlfriend.
Back aboard Dream Voyager, and as Adam and Tripnee came down the companionway into the main salon, Sophia burst from her cabin. “I’ve found one of their boats.”
“Great,” Adam said, as Tripnee crossed her arms and looked skeptical.
“Watch this,” Sophia said, placing a laptop on the salon table. As she tapped a few keys, the screen showed a familiar figure.
“Hey, we just met that guy,” Adam said. “Name’s Masood.”
“Wow, you’re good,” Sophia said. “My Interpol facial recognition software identifies him as an al Qaeda operative. I flew a tiny drone into his catamaran.”
“Good going. You’re good,” Adam gushed.
Tripnee did her eye roll, opened a closet, pulled out her massive M82, and began cleaning it for the umpteenth time.
As the scene unfolded on the laptop screen, Adam, Sophia and eventually even Tripnee leaned forward, intent on hearing every word, seeing every detail.
A deep, angry male voice, probably from a cell phone speaker, boomed in Arabic, “Partying. Dancing, music, alcohol. What are you thinking?”
“Hey,” Masood said, “if Allah gives me these desires, they can’t be all bad.”
“If Cyclops finds out, you’re dead. You dirty yourselves and blaspheme the Holy Prophet.”
“The girls are infidels. Kafirs. Of no importance.”
“Clean and purify yourselves. Your glorious time is upon you. Inshallah.”
“Yes, I beg Allah for forgiveness.”
Interestingly, the drone camera angle showed that, as he said this, Masood had his fingers crossed behind his back.
“The meeting is set for tomorrow morning at first light. You know the place. Go tonight.”
“Yes, praise be to Allah.”
“You and your team are our top echelon. We are counting on you.”
“Yes, glory be to Allah.”
“Allahu Akbar.”
Masood put down his phone and the clip ended.
Adam said, “Great work. I knew Masood was a scoundrel. You think these guys will lead us to the nukes?”
“I’m sure of it,” Sophia said, arching her back ever so slightly.
Smoldering silently, Tripnee returned to polishing her semi-automatic rifle, while shooting occasional dagger glances at Adam and Sophia.
Chapter 6
Rinia
A chime prompted Sophia to check her computer. “Saadet’s on the move.”
Through a porthole, Adam glimpsed the 60-foot catamaran moving sluggishly out of Finikas Harbor with its party in full swing, music blaring, and bodies gyrating.
“What’s the range of that drone’s transmissions?” Adam asked.
“Video range is ten miles. Tracking range is about thirty.”
“Okay. We’ll follow with lights out at a distance of about twelve miles. It’s crucial we not lose them, but we can’t let ’em see us, either.”
When the big catamaran was about
twelve miles out, Adam, Tripnee, and Sophia brought in their mooring lines, weighed anchor, and followed, motoring with all lights doused, matching speed with Masood’s boat.
The meltemi wind the Greek coast guardsman had warned about burst to life. Famous for the mayhem it had caused throughout history, the meltemi is a regional phenomenon generated by the temperature and pressure differentials between the steppes of Russia to the north and the Sahara to the south. Meltemis typically blast across the Aegean out of the north or northeast during July and August, often reaching thirty knots and sometimes accelerating to even sixty knots. And it was July.
For the time being, the meltemi blew at fifteen knots, or about seventeen miles per hour. Excellent. Adam power-winched the main sail up the hundred-foot mast, unfurled the genoa, and killed the engine. The boat’s quiet, deep humming soul sang forth. Leaning slightly, it glided gracefully forward. There was nothing like being under sail, nuclear catastrophes be damned.
The Saadet sailed erratically with numerous course changes, but overall seemed to be headed for Rinia, a small island adjacent to Delos and Mykonos. Adam, sitting at his navigation desk, opened Rod Heikell’s Greek Waters Pilot. The definitive sailor’s guide to Greece, the hefty volume described and mapped every coastline, island, anchorage, and navigation hazard. Turning to the pages on Rinia, he learned that the roughly five-mile-long by two-mile-wide island, which lay about twenty-six miles due east from Syros, was the legendary birthplace of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, fertility, and wholesome, life-affirming sensuality.
He also noted that it was apparently uninhabited and riddled with numerous deep, multi-fingered bays and inlets.
As Dream Voyager followed Saadet east toward Rinia, the meltemi gradually built to twenty knots, corrugating the Aegean with five-foot, tightly spaced, white-capped rollers. Curiously for a big catamaran, Saadet was making only seven to eight knots on a broad reach, forcing Adam to reduce sail to match the slow speed. Thank God for the tracking device built into that little drone, because Saadet had turned off all lights, and it would have been impossible to follow otherwise.
Saadet headed around the north end of Rinia.
Hmmm? A key to this type of work, Adam knew, was to put himself in his enemies’ shoes and think like them. As he studied the maps and write-up on Rinia, he realized its isolation and many bays and inlets were ideal places for a clandestine rendezvous away from prying eyes. But why go to the windward, exposed side of Rinia, where finding a sheltered anchorage would be far more difficult?
Of course. It was for the same reason. Especially in this building meltemi, virtually any captain with half a brain looking to anchor in the area would seek shelter elsewhere, ensuring the windward side of the island would be all the more isolated—and perfect for their purposes.
Sure enough, Adam’s screen showed Saadet rounding the northern end of Rinia and turning south along the far eastern, windward side of the island, heading for an anchorage in Skhinou Bay. Whatever was going to go down, whoever Saadet was going to meet, Adam wanted to get into position early. So, instead of following around to the north, Adam steered for the opposite, west side of Rinia, for Miso Bay on its leeward side.
Before entering the bay, he started the engine, rolled the genoa and dropped the main into its stack pack. Then, guided by his glowing computer, chart plotter, and depth meter, he motored deep into the sheltered bay to drop anchor far up an inlet.
He found Tripnee in the main salon again cleaning and polishing her sniper rifle, and roused Sophia from deep sleep with a few loud knocks on her cabin door. The three of them gathered around a map of the island at the nav table.
“Saadet is right now dropping anchor on the eastern side of Rinia in Skhinou Bay, here,” Adam said. “We’re tucked away on the west side of the island, here. Separating us is a two hundred-foot-high ridge running along this narrow isthmus, which is maybe three- or four-hundred yards across.”
He proposed a plan; they liked it; and the three of them got busy packing. Within minutes, the trio set off through the night, rowing for shore in the dinghy. Maybe, after all, this team could come together in the pinch.
Upon reaching shore, they pulled the skiff up onto the beach. Using the latest night-vision goggles, they began picking their way up a rock-strewn slope. Twenty minutes later, they entered an ancient, half-collapsed stone hut on the crest of the steep, rocky ridge. Looking down through their night-vision scopes, they saw Saadet bucking and tossing at anchor in a place only partially protected from what had become a twenty-five-knot meltemi.
There was activity aboard Saadet. Adam’s heart sank as he looked for but saw no sign of Barbie or her friends. Instead, he saw the men were carrying bags up from below and dropping them into the water. The bags looked small, but based on how the men struggled with them, they were dense and heavy, like sacks of cement.
“I’ve got to get down there,” he said to Tripnee and Sophia. “You know the plan.”
The women nodded. Sophia pulled drones from her pack and began sending them off through the night down to the Saadet. Most were no larger than wasps and almost invisible.
Tripnee set up her sniper rifle on its bipod stand and laid out extra ten-round magazines. Known worldwide by the nick names “Surgeon” and “Light Fifty,” the Barrett M82 was unmatched for its long-range accuracy and fifty-caliber, brick-wall-penetrating firepower. Its rounds were so fast, big, and powerful they made bones explode—turning them into tiny shards which scattered and cut like buckshot inside the body.
Glad he had both a drone fanatic and a top sharpshooter backing him up, Adam threaded his way through the night down the steep rocky slope toward Skhinou Bay. He strapped on fins, battle knife, headlamp, waterproof fanny pack, and his Poseidon underwater rebreather at water’s edge, already wearing his wet suit. Lighter and more compact than regular scuba gear, the rebreather was silent, bubble-free and had a much better chance of allowing him to approach the terrorist’s boat undetected. Before submerging, he checked in via his encrypted waterproof radio headset.
“They’re still dumping,” Tripnee said. “Over two hundred bags so far, and counting.”
He slid into the water. When he was close, about a hundred feet from Saadet, he surfaced to reconnoiter. Abruptly the dumping of the small, heavy bags stopped. Then, after an interval, three larger, elongated bags were tossed overboard. Adam felt sick, guessing their contents.
Saadet then hoisted anchor and motored away, not out to sea, but toward another inlet of the bay. Adam submerged and swam out to the dump site, which was about fifty feet deep. Dreading what he would find, he descended and cut open one of the long bags with his combat knife. There, white as a ghost in the light of his headlamp, was Barbie, a look of horror distorting her lovely face. Grief and anger surged through him. This sweet, naive girl dead for no good reason.
At the hands of animals.
Adam fought down blinding rage. Then he cut open one of the smaller bags and found dozens of gold bars. The bags themselves were made of a durable, high-tech synthetic material that was no doubt impervious to seawater and would probably last for decades.
Adam surfaced. He looked around with his night-vision goggles and saw no sign of the enemy.
Sophia’s urgent voice yelped in his earpiece. “What was down there?”
“Just as we feared, the three girls. Also, tons of gold.”
“Son of a bitch,” Sophia exclaimed.
Tripnee let out a cry.
Recovering, Sophia said, “Saadet dropped anchor behind the rocky point just south of you, and a second boat just rafted up alongside them.”
Tripnee, no doubt sighting through her sniper scope, said, “The second boat is the Deniz. Means ‘sea’ in Turkish.”
Adam swam for the rocky point. To make better time and stay in communication with his team, he stayed more-or-less on the surface, braving the big rollers, stroking up the advancing faces, punching the crests, and body surfing down into the troughs.
Sophia’s voice sounded in his earpiece. “Adam, my drones are in the Deniz, and I’ll patch the audio through to you.”
Tripnee, right next to Sophia, blurted out, “Your goddamned drones better be hidden. Don’t spook ’em.”
“They’re very well hidden, thank you. I know what I’m doing. Do you?” Sophia bristled. “We wouldn’t have even found Saadet or this rendezvous if it weren’t for my drones.”
“Bullshit. Adam and I spotted Saadet first.”
Adam groaned. “Focus. Focus. We’ve got to save the world, remember?”
As he labored through the black, turbulent water, Adam felt rather than heard a murderous silence between the women.
Then the drone audio feed crackled with the sounds of tramping and an occasional loud thump.
“That,” Sophia said, “is people carrying bags—probably more gold—from Saadet to the new boat, Deniz. Okay, back to the drone audio feed.”
Abruptly the sounds stopped, and a woman on the catamaran said, “Where’s the rest?”
“That’s all of it,” said a male voice.
“That sounds like Masood,” Tripnee whispered.
“Habibi, my dear brother, are you certain?” the woman asked.
“Absolutely.”
“What a liar,” Sophia whispered.
“The gold is a gift from Allah. As is the money from Iran. All of it is needed to take Allah’s fight to the unbelievers,” the woman stated.
“Yes, absolutely. Inshallah.”
“Allahu Akbar. Tell me where the gold came from.”
“A bunch of Athenians,” Masood said, “including some World War II historians, searched through classified Nazi records and figured out that both a shipment of gold and a U-boat on a secret mission disappeared at the same time near the end of that war. They searched for years and finally found the sunken sub and the gold right here in the Aegean. To stop Greece or the EU bureaucracy from seizing it, they kept their salvage operation secret.”
A double-sized wave crashed over Adam’s head, drowning out the audio feed. After several shakes of his head, his waterproof headset kicked back in. “…one of their crew was a devout Muslim named Ibrahim whose prayers told him the gold was a gift from Allah, meant to finance Allah’s warriors.”
Cyclops Conspiracy: An Adam Weldon Thriller Page 3
