The Wrong Man (Complete 3-Book International Thriller Box Set)

by Fritz Galt

  “I’ll take the risk,” Deke said. “Of course, I’d pay you for your trouble.”

  The captain shook it off. “I’m going to take a leak and grab a coffee. I’ll meet you back he-a in hahf an hou-a.”

  “Thanks,” Deke said with a grin.

  As the captain trudged down the wharf, Deke shouted up to the boy, “I’ll pay for the gas.”

  With three days on an island, he would need to stock up on food.

  He found a large grocery store a few blocks into town. The aisles were empty of people, but the shelves were well stocked. He picked out some bread, coffee, juice, summer sausage, Oreos and various fruits and vegetables.

  He had no idea what to expect in the way of a stove or cookware at Ferrar’s family cottage, so he mostly bought ready-to-eat food.

  A half hour went by quickly, and the captain was already waiting for him by the wheelhouse. He looked down skeptically at Deke’s suitcase and two grocery bags. “Three days at least,” he repeated with emphasis.

  “I know,” Deke said. He paid the boy for the fuel and climbed onboard.

  The boy set them free of their moorings, and Deke found himself staggering to keep his balance on the rolling deck.

  He perched on a fishy-smelling toolbox and stowed the bags under a canvas flap that lay over the engine.

  The trawler’s bow rose out of the cold, clear water and soon they were heading out of the harbor. The rollers at sea were considerably larger. Would al-Qaeda risk a voyage from Canada on such a day?

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his mobile phone. Even if it were ringing, he couldn’t hear it above the roaring surf.

  The phone’s LCD panel told him that he had no missed calls.

  Settling back, he tried to submit the littoral topography to memory.

  In the mist, he made out bluffs on the shoreline. The boat skirted several small islands just off the big island, Mt. Desert Island. They were rocky outcroppings covered with dense forests of pine and deciduous trees, currently barren of leaves.

  By the time they passed the fourth such island, he realized that no natural features could help him distinguish one island from the next.

  He rose warily to his feet and made his way against a strong gust into the wheelhouse. “How do you remember which island is which?” he asked the captain.

  The man squinted through the window. “You want Beav-a Tail? That’s Beav-a Tail.”

  Deke followed the captain’s gaze through the wet windscreen. Sure enough, ahead of them rose the large, pine-covered back of a beaver, complete with a snout facing out to sea and a long, rounded tail extending, wave-swept, toward the shore.

  “You mean I could have walked out there?” Deke asked.

  “It’s low tide now. But by the time you got the-a, the tide would cov-a it up. You’d be waiting in the rain for some six hou-as before you could get onto it.”

  “I get your point,” Deke said.

  The surrounding coastline was rocky, uninhabited forest several miles from the nearest dwelling. Bar Harbor was nowhere in sight.

  It was the perfect place to infiltrate the United States of America.

  Tray Bolton let his hand slide off the helm long enough to grab the mobile phone ringing on his belt.

  “Yes?” he answered, his voice deep and resonant.

  “We’ve acquired our ferry, sir,” came the accented response from the white van.

  “Good,” Bolton said, allowing himself a smile. He had seized his own ferry as well. “Head her south into American waters.”

  “These are rough seas today,” the voice complained.

  “So much the better for us.”

  He clicked the phone off. His timing had been perfect so far. The other ferry’s encroachment would alert the U.S. Coast Guard before his ship did. With luck, he and the bomb could slip undetected through the tight security net thrown around America.

  In any event, he would soon be entering busy shipping lanes where Coast Guard patrols had no chance of stopping and inspecting every vessel that passed into their waters.

  “Hey, what’s–?” a startled voice said from just outside the wheelhouse.

  Bolton heard the smack of a fist on skin, then a body thumping against a wall and dropping to the deck.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught his compatriot drawing a pistol and blasting away half the deckhand’s head.

  Messy, but it would have to do.

  He noted with approval that the body fell into the sea before too much blood had spurted onto the deck. Maybe a shark would smell the blood and devour the corpse before it washed ashore.

  He liked to cover his tracks.

  The United States Coast Guard Cutter Reliance was patrolling the northern edge of America’s territorial waters off Maine when a strained voice crackled over the emergency frequency.

  “Mayday. Mayday,” the voice said with a heavy accent. “This is the Harry Bassett, NB2403. Heavy seas are swamping our ship. Need assistance urgently.”

  Commander Doug Fuller swiveled in his dark blue windbreaker and visored cap to look at his radioman. “Coordinates?”

  The radioman, also in winter dress blues, leaned over his microphone and spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. “Harry Bassett, this is U.S. Coast Guard Reliance. Please state your coordinates.”

  The voice came back immediately with a precise location.

  Commander Fuller calculated quickly. “She’s in American waters.” He turned to his quartermaster, a chief petty officer, at the helm. “How soon before we can reach her?”

  The quartermaster checked his map. “Fifteen minutes, sir.”

  Fuller turned to his radioman. “And what kind of ship is she?” The call letters told him that the ship was from New Brunswick, but he had never heard the name Harry Bassett before.

  The radioman clicked on his microphone, “Harry Bassett, please describe your kind of vessel.”

  The voice came back at once. “Twenty-ton car ferry. Two hundred feet long.”

  Fuller frowned. The Canadian car ferry had drifted far off course. But his cutter could handle the incident without backup, not that there were any other cutters available in that Coast Guard district. And the situation didn’t warrant his other option, a helicopter search and rescue squad.

  The Coast Guard was being stretched thin, even with the reservist and auxiliary troops fully mobilized. The service was part of the Department of Transportation during peacetime, but due to the recent terrorist attacks, it was on wartime footing and he reported to the Department of Defense. Thank God this sounded like a routine shipping incident and he wouldn’t have to call in the Navy.

  “Tell ’em to hang on. We’ll be there in fifteen.”

  He trained his eyes on the heaving bow of his fine patrol-and-rescue boat. Waves crashed against her hull, masking the dull roar of her twin engines at full power. It would not be an easy rescue.

  Just as his quartermaster predicted, within fifteen minutes they reached the crippled ship. But, what a strange sight. Sure, the Harry Bassett sat floating like a cork in the water, but the heavy seas certainly weren’t “swamping the ship” as her crewman had reported on the radio. Her engine might be out of commission, but she certainly wasn’t listing or visibly taking on water.

  “Be on your guard, men,” Fuller shouted over his intercom. “Something’s not right with this picture.”

  On the top deck of the Harry Bassett, two men dressed as passengers with knit winter caps waved their arms frantically.

  Fuller stepped into the cold, salty spray and lifted a bullhorn to his lips.

  “State your problem.”

  There seemed to be no other passengers onboard, no vehicles and no captain or crew. Aside from the two nuts running about on deck flailing their arms, the Harry Bassett was a ghost ship.

  The two men seemed unable to hear or interpret his words, and they had already left the wheelhouse, so he had no chance of reaching them by radio.

  “Okay,” he
said decisively. “We’ll have to send out the motor surf boat. But I want our men fully armed.”

  The designated boarding team consisted of a petty officer second class and a seaman first class. Highly trained and experienced in drug interdiction and stopping illegal migrants on the high seas, the two men had seen their fair share of hostile action all around U.S. territorial waters.

  They donned cold weather caps, bulletproof Kevlar vests and fifteen-pound weapons belts and began to insert rounds into their rifles and handguns.

  Clad in their dark blue winter uniforms and body armor, they clambered down into a buoyant speedboat that had been lowered over the side, and started the powerful motor.

  As the team approached the Harry Bassett, the crazies disappeared below deck.

  “I want your rifles ready,” he murmured to his crew as he eyed the silent ship.

  An expert marksman, the quartermaster took up a sniper’s rifle and trained it on the ferry bobbing just sixty feet off the Reliance’s port bow.

  Fuller tipped his cap back and raised a pair of high-powered binoculars. “Do you see anybody?” he asked, studying the dark ship.

  “Nobody now,” the quartermaster said, peering through his sniper scope.

  “Strange. Very strange. It’s like some sort of decoy.”

  The two-man boarding team tied up to the Harry Bassett and cautiously climbed aboard. Weapons drawn, they crouched low to the afterdeck and approached the wheelhouse. Not finding anyone there, they slipped into the passenger cabin, their shadowy forms disappearing from view.

  Fuller’s knees nearly buckling under the heavy rollers, he strained to peer into the gloom of the unlit ship.

  Suddenly, a gunshot rang from the Harry Bassett. Then a second report.

  That was all. No damage to the Reliance. No further firing. No word from the boarding party. No activity onboard the Harry Bassett.

  Fuller dropped to one knee behind his bulwark and picked up his bullhorn. “Heave to and prepare to be boarded. We are taking command of your vessel.”

  A minute passed, and no response.

  The boarding team might have been shot, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could think of to break the impasse.

  “Should we sink the ship?” the quartermaster asked, setting down his rifle and reaching for a shoulder-mount rocket launcher.

  “No. Put that away. I don’t want to sink her.”

  “She isn’t heaving to. Maybe we should launch our rigid inflatable.”

  “There is no such thing as should,” Fuller said. “This is way beyond standard operating procedure.”

  The quartermaster nodded.

  “We’ve got to draw up to her and board her directly,” Fuller said. “I’ll take the helm.”

  He rushed up into the bridge and announced over the cutter’s internal intercom, “We’re going to approach and board the Harry Bassett. Prepare to tie her fast.”

  Below his window, two of his seamen in orange U.S. Coast Guard life vests crouched with heaving lines, ready to tie the ships fast once he drew near.

  He eased the throttle forward and guided the Reliance closer, wave by wave, then yard by yard.

  Suddenly a rogue wave hit from astern. His ship pitched up on her prow.

  “Hold on,” he screamed down at his men. The entire world seemed tipped up on end. The Reliance would ram the Bassett.

  Peering straight down at the other ship’s quarterdeck, he wanted to steer his cutter clear. But with his rudder high in the air, the ship was subject only to the control of gravity.

  Then the prow of his cutter slashed down, glancing off the Bassett’s stern. The impact threw him forward, his ribs bashing against the helm. Gasping to regain his breath, he watched an orange and blue ball of seamen sprawling down the deck toward the bow.

  He had no time to take a second breath. On the next wave, the two ships heaved upward again. Outlined against the sky, the Bassett had sustained a sizeable gash in her stern. Aside from some mangled chrome work, the Reliance’s bow seemed relatively intact.

  Their chance had come.

  “Board her now,” he cried into the intercom, and cut back on the throttle. He pulled his cap down low over his eyes and whipped out an automatic pistol. Then, clutching his sore ribs with his gun hand, he climbed down from the bridge.

  Two seamen managed to snare the Bassett by her lifeboat davits and drew her close. Fuller vaulted over his gunwale onto the eerily quiet Bassett. His quartermaster and radioman followed close behind with weapons drawn.

  He crossed the open deck and flattened himself against the wheelhouse, then peered inside it.

  A uniformed skipper lay dead, his head blown off by a single shot.

  “Jesus,” Fuller muttered, letting out his breath. From the looks of the dark, thick pool of blood, the skipper wasn’t killed by one of the recent shots.

  “Look here,” the quartermaster shouted. He was nudging another body with his rifle.

  Fuller gasped. It was a deckhand tied to a post in the passenger cabin. The poor victim seemed to have been bound and deliberately mutilated by a sharp blade before his throat was slit.

  “Sadists,” he muttered.

  He and his men crept farther back into the passenger area. There, behind a row of benches, he found the bodies of his two servicemen, their faces ripped off by bullets to reveal a gory view of their facial bones.

  He tried to choke back his revulsion and focus on the remaining members of his crew. He had been drawn as far into the Bassett as he could go. Now he was leaving his own ship vulnerable.

  “Back to the Reliance,” he whispered hoarsely.

  His two compatriots scrambled out of the enclosed passenger area and headed toward the stern where the Reliance was tied up to the Bassett.

  At the Bassett’s stern, they discovered the two assailants attempting to release the slipknots that held the two ships fast.

  There was no resistance from the last two members of Fuller’s crew that were still over on the Reliance. Then he saw why. A pistol with a smoking silencer lay by one of the terrorist’s feet, and the crumpled forms of two coast guardsmen slid limply down the Bassett’s slanting deck. He had lost two more men.

  “Freeze right there,” he shouted, crouching with a quick, sweeping motion of his automatic pistol.

  The men ceased their feverish work on the ropes, straightened upright and turned around to face him.

  Their wide-open eyes were white against the dark of their skin, and their lips curled back in spontaneous grins.

  Fuller was incredulous. Terrorists?

  If it weren’t for the blood and bones, his crew might have been part of some training exercise, an unannounced preparedness drill.

  His quartermaster and radioman were fanning out behind him.

  “Should we shoot these bastards?” the quartermaster asked.

  With the lurch of another powerful wave hitting them broadside, one of his dead crewmembers rolled against him, the dead hand brushing against his boot like a child petting a small pet.

  “No. Check it out below,” he said coolly to his men, while keeping the two assassins in full view.

  His men disappeared below deck in the Bassett.

  Now was he chance. He could put an end to these bastards’ reign of terror. Put them in a court room and the terror would linger in the news for months. Kill them, and nobody would suspect he killed them in cold blood. No board of inquiry. No recriminations.

  And no regrets.

  But they probably had a bigger story to tell. They were worth more alive than dead.

  “One false move,” he said, vowing to blow their heads off at the slightest provocation.

  A moment later, his men came back.

  “All clear below deck,” the quartermaster reported. “But there’s a complete weapons arsenal in a white van.”

  “What kind of weapons?” he demanded.

  “Mostly submachine guns and rounds of ammunition, sir.”

  Yes, there was a
s bigger story.

  “Well, we won’t be needing your guns any longer, will we, boys?” he said to his two captives. “All right, you scum. I want both of you flat on your stomachs with your hands behind your heads.”

  He had heard of suicide bombers. Maybe they would try to cover their tracks by throwing themselves overboard, self-detonating, or refusing to obey his commands.

  Either way they were dead.

  Instead, the two men obliged and were soon clasped in handcuffs while the quartermaster read them their rights. Meanwhile, Fuller frisked their bodies carefully for side arms, knives and explosives, and their teeth for cyanide capsules. They were clean.

  “Get on the radio,” he ordered his radioman. “Call in support. I think we may have stumbled upon something important here.”

  “Sir,” the radioman called a minute later as he returned from the Reliance. “I just checked the radar. There’s a second ship entering our waters to the east. Should we go after her?”

  Fuller looked around at all the carnage and his two captured trophies. “Let her go. I believe this is the catch of the day.”

  The captain of Deke Houston’s fishing trawler steered the ship toward Beaver Tail Island. He had no problem locating the small dock belonging to Boat House.

  Once Deke unloaded his suitcase and plastic grocery bags onto firm ground, he threw the captain a salute. The trawler backed away into the storm, leaving him behind.

  He glanced warily around his new surroundings.

  He was down a short stretch of beach from the white clapboard Boat House. Approaching it, he tried the door handle. It opened easily. Ferrar wasn’t joking; people didn’t use keys in Maine.

  Finally out of the wind, he dropped his groceries in a corner of the single, large room. It served as a kitchen, dining room, living room and bedroom. Beside the bunk bed in another corner, he carefully set his suitcase that was loaded with weapons and several rounds of ammunition.

  The room was dark, and he was surprised to find no light switch. The cottage could only be illuminated by oil lamps set on various surfaces.

  Fair enough.