“Hey, Irv.”
The old man turned around with his mouth open. Then he smiled. “Hello, Benny. How’d you find me?”
Benny shrugged. “That place back there. You really planning to freeze yourself, Irv?”
“Just looking at all my options, you know.”
“So, I guess you sold the Enterprise property. Not so smart, Irv.”
“Naw.” He waved his hand through the air. “I didn’t sell it. I loaned it to a friend.”
“Right.” Benny grabbed Irv by the forearm. “And now you’re going to help me get it back.”
“How you gonna find her?”
“Don’t worry. That’s my business. But Hawkes told me to be sure to bring you along. We’ve got a plane to catch.”
Changi International Airport
Singapore
November 23, 2012
Elijah sipped his scotch and surveyed the crowd that hurried through the terminal. Benny was late. Elijah had specifically told him Harry’s Bar in Terminal 3 at 2:00 p.m. It was now quarter past.
When Benny called a couple of days ago and explained his plan, Elijah decided it would be best if he accompanied Benny on this one. The old adage was proving to be true. If you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself.
Elijah had secured his reputation by doing things right. It had once been a survival mechanism but he had turned it into his brand. He had been born into a poor Quaker family, and one winter day when he was five years old and his sister was sixteen, his parents had gone to take food and old clothing to a struggling parish family that lived high up in the mountains. When Elijah and Sarah awoke the next morning, they were surprised to learn their parents hadn’t returned. They never knew for certain what happened, but they believed their parents’ car must have gone off a cliff on the icy roads. If the crash hadn’t killed them, they never would have survived the night’s freezing temperatures.
Sarah didn’t call the police. She was afraid they would take her brother away and put them in separate foster families. She was already working at a fast food place in the afternoons, and with their free school breakfast and lunch program, they survived and kept their status secret for the year and a half it took for his sister to turn eighteen. Then she filed to become his legal guardian. As his sister matured, she became more and more fanatically religious. Whenever he displeased her, he was forced to kneel in his bedroom and pray for hours. He learned to do things right the first time.
The men he worked with now expected it of him, and he would be reporting to them in three days. They were expecting good news on the Dragon’s Triangle project, and he’d better have something for them.
When he saw Benny and the old man approaching down the corridor, he didn’t like how memorable they looked. It was best in this business if you didn’t stand out. Benny was wearing some kind of motley-colored indigenous jacket over his blue jeans and carrying his tooled leather case for his blowpipe in addition to a fat old military-surplus green canvas rucksack. His long, thick hair was tied back in a ponytail held by a leather thong. The old man was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt with a string tie, green slacks that were pulled up almost to his armpits, and his old army garrison cap covered with medals and ribbons. They looked like a pair of costumed extras off a movie set.
Benny had a tight grip on the old man’s arm, and steered him over to an empty stool one seat over from Elijah. Benny sat between them.
The old man waved at the bartender, then leaned forward and pointed at Elijah’s glass. “I’ll have one of those,” he said in a too-loud voice.
“Tell him to keep it down,” Elijah said.
“Irv,” Benny said, and he raised his hand to his ear and made a twisting motion.
The old man bent down and, while working his lips over his teeth, concentrated on a small black box attached to his belt. Elijah flinched when the piercing squeal of electronic feedback erupted from the old man’s hearing aid.
“Irv,” Benny said again, but this time he dragged his finger across his neck in a chopping motion.
Surprise registered on the old guy’s face and he went back to fiddling with the box.
“He can’t hear a damn thing,” Benny said. “Not even when he makes it scream like that. The good part is we can talk freely. He can’t hear us.”
“Did you get us a boat?” Elijah asked.
“It’s all set. I’ve even got an ETA. My buddy got me a satellite photo of her boat entering the channel off Singapore yesterday. She should pass within ten to fifteen miles of Natuna Besar tomorrow.”
“It’s such a big ocean. How can you be so sure?”
“The South China Sea is full of rocks and reefs. This is the route that’s recommended to avoid ending up on those reefs. Don’t worry. We’ll find her. I’ve got two boats. They will be out searching for her starting at dawn. She won’t get by us.”
“Okay. Our flight’s in a little over an hour. We should head out to the gate.”
Aboard Bonefish
South China Sea
November 24, 2012
Riley climbed up into the cockpit, sat on the high seat, and braced her bare feet on the fiberglass seat opposite. She leaned her head back and looked up past her dodger at the graceful curve of her mainsail’s leech, the brilliant white sail contrasting against the cloudless sky. At the top of her mast, the black wind vane pointed at a slight angle back over her shoulders.
“Sweet,” she said aloud as a wave lifted the aft quarter of her hull and she heard the whooosh as the white water broke around her, and her boat surfed on a diagonal down the wave. The south-southeast wind had her sailing on a broad reach, and it was her favorite point of sail. The Caliber 40 was not designed to be a racing boat, and her boat wasn’t ever going to break any speed records, but she was fast enough and especially comfortable. Riley reckoned Bonefish had been averaging seven knots since she’d left the Middle Channel, and yet she was only heeled over about fifteen degrees, if that.
Riley patted the teak-topped coaming she was leaning against. “You go girl,” she said aloud.
It was great to be sailing again after the windless trip down from Phuket to Singapore. She’d motorsailed the majority of those first three or four days, meeting many fishing boats and dodging ships in the straits off Singapore. The flat water and dry cockpit had allowed her to work long hours and she’d been able to get her draft proposal sent off that morning.
Now it was pure bliss with the engine off and a relatively empty ocean. No more noise and heat from the engine room or worried calculations as to whether or not her fuel would last. She could hear the creaking of the lines stretching in the puffs of wind, the rushing sound of the water sliding past her hull. In the distance, she saw three or four white birds circling over a spot in the ocean, and occasionally she could even hear the sound of their cries. They were hunting fish, no doubt.
Birds, fish, all were signs she was approaching land.
She slid back behind the wheel and checked her instruments. The chart plotter told her she had twenty-one miles to go to her waypoint off Natuna Besar, an island that belonged to Indonesia. The plotter showed an ETA of two o’clock. She would pass within eleven miles of the island, and since it had a mountain over three thousand feet high, she should be able to see it in the next hour or two. She’d read in one of her cruising guides that lots of sailors broke up their trip by stopping here, but that there wasn’t much on the island. The people fished and farmed, and the capital city, Ranai, had some stores, fuel, and provisions. Stopping wasn’t in her plans, though.
Riley checked the other instruments. Her autopilot was humming right along, doing a great job of keeping the boat on course. The boat did tend to slew around a bit in these long six- to eight-foot swells, making her compass do a drunken dance under the plastic dome, but the course averaged out. She knew she couldn’t steer any straighter. The wind-speed indicator showed the wind was maintaining the steady sixteen to twenty knots. And the sea beneath the boat w
as so deep it did not register any depth on her fathometer.
For the moment, the conditions couldn’t be better, and she hoped to sight land soon to confirm her position. In the meantime, she should rustle up something to eat. She slid across the seat toward the companionway stairs.
Riley moved around her boat with ease, often not even aware of the fact that she was holding on in a bouncing, swaying environment. It usually took her a day or two to get her sea legs, but once she got over that initial queasiness, she got her appetite back.
She checked her sprouting jar. The alfalfa sprouts were bright green. She’d have her salad for lunch. She groped her way to her canned-food locker behind the port settee and dug around inside. Water chestnuts, black olives, and a jar of artichoke hearts. Add to that a slice of the bread she’d baked two days ago and a bottle of cold water and she would be set.
Thirty minutes later Riley had plugged her iPhone into the stereo, and she had some tunes playing from a CD that Billy had given her. It was by a bluegrass group called the Mountain Girls and Riley appreciated the intimate voice of the lead singer. She climbed into the cockpit with her food and settled on the low seat to enjoy her meal.
As she munched her salad, Riley thought about Cole. Once she got past Natuna Besar, she’d have about a thousand miles left to go. If she kept winds like this, she’d make it in a week.
When she finished her lunch, Riley stood in the companionway and examined the horizon through the window of her dodger. There were some low clouds ahead, but she was pretty sure she could make out the hard shape of the island. She was only fifteen miles off now.
She descended the steps, dropped her dishes in the sink, grabbed the binoculars off the chart table, and headed back topsides. She stood on the top step with her elbows resting on either side of the hatch and searched off her port bow. It was definitely the sloping sides of the island with the mountaintop shrouded in clouds. She lowered the binoculars and scanned the horizon for ships.
That was when she saw it. A small fishing boat appeared on the top of a swell and then disappeared into the trough. For a minute or so she had trouble spotting it again, but when she did find it, the boat was quite a bit closer. It wasn’t as small a boat as she had originally thought. When she’d first sighted it, the boat looked like it would cross her bow, but then they changed back onto a converging course. The boat had the high bow typical of all the boats she’d seen in Southeast Asia, and it was painted with bright yellow, blue, and red stripes. Set back toward the stern there was a small deckhouse.
Undoubtedly this was going to be another attempted shakedown for booze and cigarettes or anything else she might have to share. Through the binoculars, she saw at least two men standing out on deck. There was probably at least one more in the deckhouse at the steering station. Though she had been approached by half a dozen boats already on this trip, and none of them had proved menacing, her training wouldn’t permit her to do nothing as they approached.
Riley went below and collected her dive knife, the Geco flare gun, and the can of wasp and hornet spray. The steel flare gun shot twenty-five-millimeter flares that would probably kill a man if shot within a certain range. It was beefier and more accurate than the American plastic-variety flare gun. The insect spray was designed to take out a whole nest, and it shot a stream up to twenty-two feet away. She’d never had to use it, and she hoped today wouldn’t be the first time. As a last precaution, she pulled her crossbow out of the forward hanging locker and nocked an arrow into it and cocked it. She slipped it under the covers on the forward cabin bunk.
When she emerged back on deck, she was surprised to see how close the boat had drawn. It was approaching at ten o’clock off her port bow and only a thousand yards separated them. One of the two men standing on the foredeck had a line coiled in his hand. It was attached to a grappling hook that he held ready to throw in the other hand. This was no ordinary fishing expedition. The sea was too rough for them to pull alongside her boat. One or both of the boats would be damaged. These guys were pirates.
She had to prevent them from boarding her, to scare them off. It was the first time she had ever fired the flare gun. She’d intended to put one across their bow, but the orange ball of fire passed very close to Mr. Grappling Hook. He dodged it and shouted something, and then motioned to the boat’s driver. Riley could see the man through the windows on the front of the cabin. He wore a red bandana as a headband and he was shoving the wheel over as their boat passed hers going in the opposite direction. Then they slowed, turned across her wake, and then began to overtake and move up alongside her boat.
She reloaded and raised the flare gun to fire again. This time she would aim more carefully. There were no more than fifty feet separating the two boats as the pirates matched her speed. It was a wooden boat and from the sound of the engine, it sounded like an old gasoline one-cylinder. She wanted to scare them, not kill them. She was sighting down the barrel of the flare gun when she felt a sting in her upper arm. She looked at her bicep and saw the feather tail of a dart. The grappling hook thudded aboard and caught on one of her turnbuckles. The flare gun dropped out of her hand, and her arm dropped to her side, numb, lifeless. She felt dizzy.
Then she saw him step out of the deckhouse. Black hair streaked with gray, Fu Manchu mustache, the blue ink of tattoos on his forearms. He was holding the blowpipe in one hand and smiling at her.
With her good arm, she lifted the can of insect spray, aimed it at the grappling hook man pulling the line attached to her boat, and sprayed. She heard him scream just before she passed out.
Aparri, Luzon
The Philippines
November 24, 2012
Cole watched the depth sounder as he brought his boat up the Cagayan River so as to avoid the shoal patch in the center just inside the river mouth. It was late in the evening, and he was losing the last of the day’s light. The river water was a dark muddy brown, though, so even with good light he wouldn’t have been able to spot any shallows. He dropped the anchor in sixteen feet and felt satisfied when he backed the boat down and the anchor set well. He was ready for a good meal and some rest after the 350-mile trip up from Subic Bay.
The town of Aparri advertised itself as a jumping-off spot for trips out to the Babuyan Islands, which lay some thirty to fifty miles offshore, but considering what Cole could see from the river—wood shacks, unpainted cinderblock buildings, trash, and stray dogs—the place didn’t look like a tourist mecca to him. Cole wasn’t getting a good vibe about the place. But after having no luck whatsoever with figuring out the map and key on their own, Brian had suggested they visit an old friend of his in Aparri, so here they were. They’d head ashore in the morning and locate the man Brian referred to as the Norwegian Psychic.
After making certain they were securely anchored, Cole shut down the engine and went to the galley to find Theo. He found him sitting on one of the settee bench seats with Leia asleep at his side. The table was covered with papers, Theo’s laptop, and his special Braille machine. Theo had designed a machine that embossed raised areas of the page like Braille writers do, but he made his dots much sharper pixels. He said it took four of his pins to create one Braille dot. The end result was that he was able to emboss papers with two-dimensional designs. This enabled him to read maps and charts, to read schematic diagrams, and to work on the map and code key that Cole had sent him while Riley was sleeping. He was able to connect his embossing graphics machine to his laptop via USB and then he could print out a copy he could read with his fingers.
“So what do you say, Theo? Tell me you’ve had a breakthrough.”
“Not really. This thing we’re calling a map—it’s more like a children’s drawing. I’ve graphed it and run it through a program that is trying to match it to the nautical charts of the Babuyan Islands, but one of the problems is that we don’t know what the scale is. And, of course, it is hand-drawn so it’s bound to be inaccurate. Even the computer’s drawing a blank. There are five major islands
and dozens of smaller ones out there. That’s way too big an area to search.”
“We’ll go ashore in the morning. Hopefully this friend of Brian’s will be able to help us out.”
“I don’t know,” Theo said as he started to clear off the table. “Brian didn’t exactly effuse with his recommendation.”
The next morning Cole used the crane to lower the Boston Whaler dinghy into the water. When they rebuilt Shadow Chaser and turned her into the Bonhomme Richard, Cole designed the transom so that it could fold down and create a swim platform and workdeck aft. It was easier for getting in and out of the dinghy and for loading and off-loading gear. He and Theo climbed in. Leia followed and lay down at Theo’s feet. She was the only dog Cole had ever seen who didn’t insist on riding up on the bow.
It had rained hard earlier that morning, but the day remained overcast and so humid Cole’s shirt was soaked through before he even started the outboard engine. Theo wore a small messenger bag with the strap crossing his chest, and he put his arms over the bag to shield it from any rain or spray.
The way to the town was up a smaller tributary river. The buildings were pretty sparse at first, but about half a mile in they got to the downtown marketplace and there the riverbanks were solid with buildings. They saw lots of boat traffic around them and most of the people smiled and waved. Cole tied up the Whaler at the market where concrete steps led from the water up to the busy marketplace. He got out the cable and lock and secured the dinghy to a rusty iron ring set into the concrete wall.
As they passed through the food vendors in the market, Cole kept up a running commentary describing what he was seeing to Theo, who kept one hand on Cole’s arm, the other on Leia’s handle.
“The ground is muddy and there are puddles everywhere. Can’t avoid them; try not to slip. We’re passing through the local fruit and vegetable market. It’s inside a courtyard of sorts. There’s no roof overhead, but each vendor has slung some sort of plastic tarp over his or her space with another tarp on the ground that marks the outline of the stall. Some of the produce is stacked in little pyramids, like the potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and garlic. Several women have flats of fresh eggs, too. Now we’re heading through an entrance gate and out to the street.”
Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2) Page 20
