The Target

by Roger Weston

  He ducked down low on a painting platform. Since the Gitano had called off the search for the intruder, whoever it was would soon emerge from their hiding spot if they were still on the ship. A ship offered many places for a man to hide, and a pro would find what they were after before it was too late. Given that the intruder Jake saw previously already knew where the platinum was, why would they be prowling around, breaking into cabins? He certainly couldn’t expect to single-handedly haul a cargo of platinum off a ship with more attack dogs than the pound. The other night, the man had opened several platinum boxes. Why do that? One box would verify the contents. Jake wondered the same thing the Gitano had asked: What was he after? Jake had to learn fast because time was spinning down. He had to get the facts and do something before the Gitano exterminated half of the passengers tomorrow. Jake waited in the dark on the painting platform, listening for guards and dog teams. It gave him a chance to think.

  How could the intruder know something was on board but not know where it was? He must have had some inside information. Perhaps the same person who told him of a secret cargo was also the same person who directed the search for him—or perhaps misdirected the search. If the intruder was working with a traitor in Alamar’s ranks, then who was the intruder? Was it the same person who sabotaged the Atlas? It was starting to look as if Jake had stumbled right into the middle of an elaborate double-cross.

  Who among the crew could the intruder be? There were the girls and Strom Pace. Jake doubted them. The intruder he saw moved like a man, but Ava also had a fairly masculine gait. Talia had been elusive and mysterious from the beginning, and she was a tough girl, too. Still, the intruder Jake had spotted was taller than her. Strom Pace lacked the physical prowess with all his health issues. Still, Strom could be working with someone else as a lookout. Len Jackson couldn’t be ruled out. The man had been a stress factory from the beginning. He was dealing with serious PTSD from his war and disaster photojournalist days. Now Jake wondered if his story about switching to nature photographer was credible. He said he wanted peaceful photography, but then he walked right into the middle of a new kind of disaster. Maybe he was creating his own disasters now. Red Mayo kept quiet mostly. He was a mountaineer and certainly had the physical prowess to get on and off a ship up—until he was stabbed, that is. There were a dozen sailors, all of whom would have had opportunities to stumble across inside information about cargoes and have seedy contacts among other criminals. Horace came to mind.

  The winds picked up and beat the tarp in the dark. Jake couldn’t hear anything, so he would have to take his chances boarding. The painting on this side of the hull was complete, and many of the hanging platforms were gone now—probably moved to the other side of the ship or dismantled. That explained why the Gitano was ready to downsize his painting crew. Jake feared they would get worse than pink slips. He had to find out what was going on and fast—and he had to stop the Gitano from mass murder.

  Careful not to let the platform swing too much, Jake stripped down to his paint splattered clothes and stashed his drysuit between the tarp and the heavy netting. As he climbed up toward the main deck, he heard the snarling and paw-scratching of dogs as a handler led his beasts down the companionway. After they’d moved on, Jake reached and pulled his way up the rope rungs until he could swing over the railing in the dim purple light where fumes were hung on the air. A dozen silent painters haunted the deck like drones. One of them noticed the new man in paint-splattered clothes, so Jake approached the man.

  “I’m tired of painting down on the platform,” Jake said. “Got an extra brush around here?”

  The man stiffened and shook his head vigorously. “Don’t talk to me. Get out of here.”

  Jake shuffled down the corridor along the rail and slid into the shadows by a door into a luxurious lounge. He looked in through a round window in a door and decided not to go in there. Four dog handlers with eight dogs were talking while sitting far apart and taking a break. Jake leaned back in the shadows.

  On the next deck up, he staggered into the accommodation, and like last time found the hallway empty.

  He figured that Alamar kept the people away because this is the deck where his valuable cargo of platinum was. Maybe he didn’t trust his own men. More likely, there were just no prisoners to watch over on this deck.

  Suddenly, the sounds of snarling dogs halted him. He reached into his bag, slowly opening the sealed plastic freezer bags he’d taken off the Atlas. He removed pieces of meat he’d cut from the seal that he’d killed. As the two Rottweilers approached him, he threw them each a couple pieces of seal meat. It was amazing. Suddenly, it was as if he was no longer an intruder. The meat suddenly became the dog’s only concern. To these dogs, meat was the only issue.

  Jake faltered on. He was physically weak and exhausted, but he believed in another kind of strength, a kind that rose on albatross wings amidst adversity and preferred death to half-measures. His belief sent surges through his nerves and his limbs. Adrenaline overcame his pain. He’d been searching reading rooms and empty cabins for five minutes when an attacker leaped out of a shadowed area behind a bar in an event lounge. Jake dodged the thrust, and the knife whispered past his neck. He stepped back and drew his Glock, but the gun’s silencer caught on his sweatshirt and slowed down his draw, and the attacker executed a flying kick at his hand. The gun flew into the darkness. In the same moment, Jake delivered a sharp blow to the femoral nerve of the upper thigh.

  The attacker groaned in pain as he staggered backwards, barely able to stay on his feet. He waved his knife back and forth as Jake stepped toward him

  “Who are you?” Jake said.

  In answer, another flying kicked pounded his chest like a battering ram. He flew backwards and hit the wall. The knife fighter flew after him. Jake dodged a stab, and the blade stuck in the wood paneling for a moment. Pressed against the wall, Jake hooked his leg under the attacker’s leg and pulled it out from under him. As the assassin fell, Jake dove on top of him, but his adversary executed a stunning reversal, thrusting Jake to the side, using his own momentum against him.

  Jake found himself on the bottom. A fist clinging to a knife plunged downward toward his eye, but he dodged left and the point stuck in the floor. Jake delivered a sharp knuckle jab to the man’s funny bone, just above the elbow. The man grunted and lost his grip on the knife. Jake threw him off balance. The assassin rolled away.

  Jake gained his feet, but the man sprung up and launched himself at him, pinning him against the wall. As the man tried to strangle him, Jake’s knee shot like a rocket into the attacker’s ribs—three times in a row.

  The man slammed Jake to the floor and dove onto him, throttling his throat. Jake wrapped his legs around the man’s head and twisted him sideways. The hands came off Jake’s throat as the assassin’s shoulder hit the ground.

  The man drove forward with his feet, climbing the floor. As his buttocks rose, he spilled Jake onto his face. Twisting onto his back, Jake tried to get into a position to kick, but couldn’t.

  Above him, a shoulder shifted. A palm exploded downward toward his neck. Jake deflected the blow and threw him off.

  As Jake got up, he was grabbed from behind. Holding him around the waist, the man slammed him into the wall. After a moment’s shock, Jake bent down, grasped the attacker’s ankle, jerked it upward, and spilled the killer onto his back. Jake dropped his whole weight onto the man’s chest, crushing his ribcage.

  All fight drained out of the assassin. He gasped for air and seemed unable to breath. Jake feared that the killer’s lungs had been punctured by broken ribs.

  Jake stripped off the killer’s facemask and switched on his pin-light.

  Shock rattled his brain.

  “An—” Strom Pace was trying to speak, but his unspeakable pain got in the way.

  “I had an idea it was you,” Jake said, although it had been only a suspicion. “Your cripple act was convincing, but you disappeared too much.”

 
Pace was gasping in agony. “Antidote,” he said.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  Fighting through the pain, Pace struggled to speak. He spit out bits and pieces of sentences until Jake put it all together.

  Pace had recovered a secret treasure from the Gitano—an antidote, which was recently stolen from the Lansing Laboratory in Atlanta. Pace was now stealing it from a professional thief among the passengers because a sick, dying millionaire had agreed to pay $10 million for the antidote, which was to combat an insidious viral infection taxing his body.

  “Get it,” Pace said, groaning in agony. “Save me or I’ll die.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Fif—“” He winced and grit his teeth as a shutter ran through his body. “Fifty-eight.”

  “You mean room fifty-eight?”

  “Hurry.” He started coughing and blood ran from the corner of his mouth.

  “First you tell me where the jamming device is at the whaling station.”

  “B—between the… tanks.”

  “Which ones?”

  “The b—big ones. Hurry.”

  Jake found his pistol and then ran down the hall. When he turned the door handle to room fifty-eight, he stood aside and moved super slowly in case the assassin had a trap laid for him rather than a treasure. He spent a few minutes opening the door a centimeter at a time, checking for trip wires or grenades. He gave the room a quick search, but found nothing. On his second pass-over, he found a cardboard box under the bed. He cut through the tape and shined his pin light inside.

  “It’s true,” he said, amazed. Slowly, he stretched out his arm. His shaking fingers touched three vials of clear liquid.

  Jake limped back to Pace and found that he was too late. As Jake put the veil / “vaccine” in his waterproof bag, he felt gloom crawling all over him.

  This concern was interrupted by growling dogs. In the darkness, he could just make out the outlines of the two vicious attack dogs. He reached into his waterproof bag and removed more seal meat, throwing it to them. This time, however, they ignored the meat. Jake switched on his light and saw bared teeth with raw meat hanging off. The dogs approached slowly, viciously, their big shoulder muscles rippling.

  Jake drew his silenced Glock and shot both dogs, dropping them where they stood.

  A bright light switched on down the corridor, blinding him. “Don’t move.”

  “Right,” Jake said. He lunged down a crosswise hallway as shots rang out and a new set of barking dogs raced after him.

  He slipped out the exit hatchway and ran aft. He started up a stairwell, but heard dogs on their way down, so he whipped around and raced down a hallway past a boutique and an internet cafe. Two dog handlers came into view. They turned fast, then followed their leashed dogs in pursuit. Jake did an about face and raced up another stairwell to the Deck 5. He bolted through the ship’s library and took a different stairwell up to the Sun deck, two dog handlers hot on his tail. As he flashed across an elegant lounge, a dog handler released his pit bulls and shouted “Atacar!” Attack!

  Jake lunged through a glass door and shut it behind him just as the vicious dogs leapt at the glass, shaking the entire pane. Claws scratched. Gums and teeth rubbed and bit at the glass with ferocious intensity. Saliva was smeared around the clear barrier between them. They barked and growled with a viciousness that almost made Jake’s hair stand up. His skin pulled tight around of his neck.

  He made up to the top deck and was about to throw his rope when he was shot at. Feet clambered up the side stairs, and Jake abandoned his rope on the deck and flew down the stairs. A dog team coming his way forced him out of the stairwell to where another pair of jaw-snapping killers backed him up against a wall. Jake had a pistol pointed at him at point blank range, but he ignored it. The dogs were rippling with steroid-pumped muscles, and one of them lunged at his leg, snapping his jaws and biting his bullet wound, drawing fresh blood before the handler managed to pull him off.

  Jake was disarmed.

  At gunpoint, he was taken back into the lounge, a carpeted affair with bolted down observation chairs. The windows offered a panoramic view of a steep, snow-covered mountain off to starboard; off to port, the view was too familiar—a pulsating, wind-ravaged tarp attached to and weighed down by a vast net and sandbags.

  The lights flashing on bright, almost blinding Jake. He shielded his eyes with his hand.

  “Get your hands up!” A big, black-bearded man with pitbull eyes gave the order and backed it up with the double barrels of a Stoeger Coach sawed-off shotgun. Jake recognized the model right away because he kept an identical gun in his fishing boat. He didn’t like being on the wrong end of it.

  Dogs leapt at Jake, but their leashes held, and their handlers pulled them back. Jake breathed heavy from adrenaline. It crossed his mind that at least the vials were safe for the moment. Beneath his shirt, the strap of his waterproof bag hung over his shoulder. Fortunately, they hadn’t noticed this yet, and Jake was glad because he figured that things might go worse for him if they knew what he had just stolen.

  “Like any whale, Alamar has to deal with another barnacle on his back from time to time. You are no different, just another barnacle.” The Gitano looked over at the thug on his left, a man whose assault rifle was aimed at Jake’s belly. Take him out on deck. Gather the painters around. I want them to see him flogged before he joins them in hard labor—if he can still stand that is.”

  Jake was grabbed by his arms and hustled for the door.

  “Hold on a minute,” the Gitano said. “I want to ask him about how many guns they have over at the station. What is your name , sir?”

  “Jake Sands.”

  The Gitano pierced Jake with the needles of his pit-bull eyes. “You mean Professor Jake Sands, the maritime historian.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  The Gitano smiled. “Well, it will take more than you to bring down the Gitano. Do you know who I am?”

  “A killer of innocent, unarmed sailors.” Jake’s said this in a contemptuous voice, but he was all too aware of the sawed-off shotgun aimed at him.

  All smile drained off the Gitano’s face, leaving a picture of anger. “You should show me proper respect on my ship. I suppose you know something of the law of the sea. On this boat, I am the law, and your trial is almost over. Tell me, Professor Sands, I suppose you know something of Vasco Nunez de Balboa.”

  Jake nodded. “Now there was a vermin-ridden bastard if I ever I heard of one.”

  The Gitano raised the shotgun so that it was aimed at Jake’s face. He stared at Jake for a moment, but then he lowered it a little. “He is my ancestor, and you will pay dearly for insulting him.”

  Jake shrugged indifferently. He figured he was probably doomed, regardless of what he said. The Gitano didn’t have a reputation for showing mercy. Jake said, “Ancestor. I didn’t think he had any the likes of you. You sure about that?”

  The Gitano’s face darkened. “Suddenly I don’t need another painter. You will hang from the railing before I eat dinner.”

  Jake felt a rush of nausea flood through him. He didn’t want to go like that. He would do anything to avoid a fate like that. He said, “I’m sure I’d have ended up that way sooner or later. I guess that’s the best one of your guests can hope for. Bad things can happen to you too, you know? Today, tomorrow, anytime—you get what you deserve. You can count on it.”

  The Gitano advanced toward Jake and delivered a blow that sent him to the floor after falling over a bolted-down chair. Two thugs hauled Jake back up onto his feet and brought him back for more, but the Gitano was in no hurry.

  He said, “Before I kill you, I will tell you the kind of man that you are dealing with. Then you will know what a foolish mistake you have made. You will see that you have stepped into a world where you are a minnow in the ocean of a very big fish.”

  “I’ve heard all about you.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I have my
sources.”

  “Okay, Professor Sands. What have you heard about the Gitano?”

  Jake decided to tell him what he learned from Ashley, his loyal assistant back in Seattle. He had nothing to lose at this point, and he might buy himself a little time. Suddenly, every minute he could buy seemed precious because it could very well be his last minute. “Major distributor of heroine back in the day. On one occasion, customs agents who searched your bags on the train in Morocco said that you were carrying $290,000 in cash.”

  “A man needs a little pocket money.” He said this in a contemptuous tone.

  “Those same custom agents also admitted to accepting bribes of $10,000 each to let you go.”

  The Gitano shrugged as if it was irrelevant.

  “You weren’t satisfied just to run drugs. You bought a small coastal tramp ship and began working with the Moroccan mafias who smuggle human cargo. You snuck illegal immigrants of all nationalities into Spain via Morocco. The price per immigrant was between $7,000 and $40,000, and the package included advice on how to exploit Spain’s legal system after arrival. In most cases, though, the legal advice was irrelevant because your immigrants rarely survived the boat ride. One of them was fished out of the Strait of Gibraltar by a fisherman. According to him, you dumped your human cargo at sea, shot most of them, then turned around and went back to Morocco for more.

  “Hundreds of souls simply disappeared, but as illegals, nobody could say they had ever existed. There were certainly no records that they ever boarded any ship.”

  Jake slowly paced as he talked, watching the Gitano on the corner of his eye, well aware that the Gitano’s pitiless gaze followed him without emotion—and so did his sawed-off shotgun. At that moment, Jake was well aware of something, that when a man is followed by a twelve-gauge shotgun, it holds his attention. Every breath he takes strikes him as more significant because he is suddenly aware that it could be his last. He doesn’t make sudden moves because he knows that the slightest pressure on that trigger could bring about his sudden doom. Reminded about how fragile life was, Jake decided that if by some miracle he lived, he would take small steps every day to be a better person and live the way a man should live. He realized that he had certain ideals that he had not lived up to, and maybe he never would. There were things he should have done, but didn’t. The future was uncertain. He learned too late that the present moment was a gift from heaven.