They were under the freighter now. The crew held their collective breath.
“Drop speed another turn,” Ward ordered, his voice far more calm than he felt.
Spadefish was moving faster than the freighter and was directly underneath her keel. Ward could see the rays of bright sunlight penetrating the depths on either side of the ship.
Underneath, she looked normal. Nothing there.
Ward watched as they moved forward slowly. Not a whole lot to see. Just the smooth bottom of a boat fresh out of the shipyard. No barnacles or sea growth on her hull. There was nothing to see under here after all. This risky maneuver was for naught. He had put his boat and crew in danger for nothing.
“Helm, come left a tenth,” he said.
Cortez answered: “Come left a tenth, aye.”
Ward watched more intently as his view changed to the port side of the freighter. They had almost drifted out from under her.
“Come right a tenth,” he ordered. This slowly brought them back parallel with the freighter, but along her port side. Spadefish had advanced until they were now under the bow of the freighter. “Drop a turn.”
They slowed until the sub’s forward motion matched the speed of the Helena K.
They searched for some clue as to how the Helena K had taken on a heavy load of cocaine without making port or anybody seeing them take on the cargo. Everything looked normal under here.
“Ho! Skipper, as we were moving over, I thought I saw something,” Earl Beasley called out.
“What was it?”
“It looked like a dark line parallel to the keel but out a bit. It might just be a sloppy weld or a paint line. I don’t know. It was just a glimpse of something that didn’t look right.”
“Okay, Nav, we’ll drift back and take a look. Helm, drop a turn.” The freighter moved ahead. Ward strained his eyes, looking for the line the Nav had seen. Finally, there it was. Not paint or a sloppy weld. It was a mechanical feature of some kind. He couldn’t make it out. They would have to move closer for him to be able to tell what it was. “Dive, up six inches.”
“Up six, aye. Depth nine-one feet,” Laskowski answered, hoping the skipper didn’t see him swallow hard.
Ward still could not make it out.
“Up another six inches,” he ordered. Spadefish moved up even closer to the freighter. Perilously closer. There was now less than a foot between the freighter’s steel hull and the top of their periscope. “Nav, look at that. It’s a door that’s not fully shut. They must have a problem with it. If that thing were fully closed, we’d never have seen it. That flap you saw would cover the seam and look like just another hull weld.”
Still running slower than the ship, Spadefish continued to slowly drift back. Over two-thirds of the way aft, the door seam stopped.
Ward shook his head in disbelief.
“That thing is huge. I make it out as over a hundred feet long. I’m going to match speed and move over to the starboard side. Let’s see if they have the same thing over there. Helm, add a turn.” With the order, the sub increased speed just enough to once again match Helena K’s pace. “Helm, right a tenth.”
Ward and the team repeated the slow, careful maneuvering of the sub until they were under the freighter’s starboard side. Ward scrutinized every inch of the freighter’s underside as the sub hovered only a foot from the ship, even as both vessels continued moving forward. Intent on his search, Ward had forgotten how close to catastrophe they were.
“There it is!” he shouted. “We would never have seen it if we didn’t know what to look for. Beautiful work. The whole bottom of that thing opens up like a sardine can.”
It was time to go. They had seen what they needed to see.
“Dive, ease slowly down to nine-five feet,” Ward quietly ordered. “Helm, drop five turns. Right five degrees rudder.” This would ease them down, back, and away from underneath the freighter. “Lowering the scope.”
Ward slapped up the handles, reached over his head, and rotated the control ring to lower the scope. He was completely drained. He had not felt the crushing tension while they were maneuvering beneath the freighter. They were safely clear. The tension eased. He felt as if a ton of bricks had been lifted from his shoulders.
“Great work everyone. That was the best under-hull I have ever seen. You did good. MacNaughton gets to pick the pizza tonight!”
“I hope Cookie’s got some anchovies! I’m craving me some anchovies!” the happy sailor whooped to the groans of several little-salty-fish haters.
Glass stepped over to where Ward and Beasley stood and slapped each man on the back. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a towel. Cookie Dotson appeared then with a stack of mugs and a pot of coffee.
“Here, Skipper. Figured you might be needing this right about now.”
“Thanks, Cookie.”
Ward grabbed the offered mug and took a swig. Glass looked over the rim of his own cup.
“Skipper, you were right. That was a balls move, but it paid off. What next?”
Ward leaned back against the sonar repeater and took another belt of the java before he spoke.
“Damn, my back is sore. I’m gettin’ too old for this kind of stuff.” He rubbed his lower back as he answered his XO’s question. “Way I see it, we run out ahead of that rust bucket up there. We’ll come up to periscope depth and tell Bethea what we found. We’ll just wait while it passes us by. We’ll fall in behind and trail it to wherever it’s going.”
Glass sipped from his cup.
“Think JDIA will buy that? Bethea was pretty pissed at you when you blew him off.”
Ward slumped down on the stool, still rubbing his solar plexus.
“Don’t see that he has much choice. We’re here, ready to go. We’re too far out for the patrol boat to intercept now. Nobody else’s anywhere close. He can’t easily track them any other way and we sure as hell can’t afford to lose a load of killer cocaine. If he’s calmed down, Bethea will see it our way. If he ain’t, we’ll just have to make him see it our way.” Ward turned to Beasley. “Nav, get us out ten miles ahead of that freighter and a mile off her track. Don’t lose sonar contact. She’s noisy enough; you should be able to get up to twenty knots and still track her easily. When we get in position, clear baffles for coming to periscope depth. Have radio set up to be ready to talk to the home office.”
Beasley nodded.
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, I think I’ve developed a powerful taste for some pizza myself…anchovies or not,” Ward said with a broad smile.
Serge Novstad proudly puffed on his third Cuban cigar of the day so far, toking until the fire at its end burned brightly and the smoke hid his face. Philippe Zurko snorted. This Hun didn’t even appreciate fine tobacco. No wonder he had no empathy for de Santiago, his revolution, his beloved people. It was the money. Nothing more, nothing less. To Zurko, anyone who didn’t share his zeal for freeing the people was a whore, a prostitute who thought only of the eventual payment once the act had been consummated.
”So, Senor Zurko,” the Swede said. “I assume your leader has not dispatched his famed assassin squad swimming after us to cut off our heads because our little door will not properly seal and we’ve had to go slower than we intended.”
“I have not told him yet,” Zurko whispered.
“What?”
“I have not yet told him of the problem.”
“You mean one of the architects of the revolution is too scared to deliver a bit of bad news to his leader? From eight hundred miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, no less? Hah!”
“I fear he has received more disturbing news. The Americans have destroyed his new factory. They managed to bring in enough explosives to bring production to a halt. That makes our cargo even more precious. We must not fail. Do you understand?”
Novstad, his face expressionless, strode to the far side of the bridge and gazed out over the vast, empty Pacific.
“No worries, my fri
end. We have brought the mini-sub aboard successfully. With such good weather, we should stay on schedule. We’ll fix the doors once the sub is away for its delivery.” He put the stub of the cigar back into his mouth and swept his arm grandly, taking in with his broad gesture the uninhabited surface of the sea all the way to the undisturbed horizon. “The ocean is all ours. We shall not fail, my revolutionary friend. We shall not fail.”
Juan de Santiago threw the cell phone across the room with enough force that it crashed into the marble mantle and shattered, bits and pieces of plastic and electronics raining down onto the priceless Persian rug.
So the Americanos had destroyed his new factory. The cocaine that was there was consumed by the fire. He could not imagine how they had been able to find the factory in the first place, much less destroy it so completely. He had taken every precaution.
First, the fields. Then the hidden factory.
El Falcone.
He grabbed up the nearest cut-crystal goblet he could reach and flung it after the cell phone. That was the only way the Americano bastards could have accomplished what they had. He suspected that the soldier he had watched in the ambush had had something to do with it. He had led his men to the factory. He had called in the rain of rockets.
He figured the loss to the people of his country to be over two hundred million dollars. That would have been enough money to fund his revolution for several years. To give him, his mistress, his children the safety and accommodations the leader of the revolution deserved.
Juan de Santiago looked at the broader perspective through his red rage. The first shipment was safely loaded inside the submarine that was now resting in the womb of Helena K. Once it reached America, his enemies would learn they could not trifle with him. They would learn that lesson very painfully indeed. Destroy his factories, cut off his fields, and he would still get product to the hungry American consumers. Customers who would soon be all the hungrier for his blend. They would soon be aware that even though their best punches had solidly landed, El Jefe was not staggered at all. There was no way they could see his next counter-punch coming.
The follow-up shipment of doctored heroin from Sui Kia Shun would be the coup-de-grace.
He still owned the sea. And the sea was still the key to the lands he would soon conquer.
De Santiago almost smiled now as he sauntered into his bedroom and grabbed the bedside phone, the only one in the house that still worked after all the recent bad news. Don Holbrooke answered on the second ring. De Santiago started right in with no wasted pleasantries.
“Senor Holbrooke, we have suffered a setback. The Americano’s have destroyed our new factory. We will need immediate capital to rebuild it, and to do so even better and more securely than before. That will be expensive. Contact Ramirez and tell him to demand a fifty-percent cash advance for this delivery.”
Holbrooke smiled as he tightly cupped the breast of his mistress in his free hand. He would demand sixty percent in advance. He thumbed her nipple and felt it respond to his touch. The extra ten percent would be over thirty million dollars, enough to bring his bank balance to better than a hundred million total. The woman groaned slightly and moved her hand beneath the covers to stroke him. It would soon be time to disappear. Time to retire to some far more civilized place than these stinking, fetid jungles.
De Santiago was not finished.
“And Senor Holbrooke, you will return the ten million to me that you stole from Senor Shun, from me, from our people who struggle so valiantly for their freedom. Your greed has become too great for me to continue to turn a blind eye. If you try to steal anymore, you will be feeding the piranhas.”
Holbrooke roughly shoved the woman’s hand away, sat up in the bed, and began to scream a sincere denial into the mouthpiece. There was only an irritating dial tone on the other end of the phone line.
De Santiago dialed another number. He was too primed to initiate action to worry about whether or not the telephone line he was about to use was secure.
Jorge Ortiez had stepped away from the shack that hid the lab to take a piss in the nearby jungle. He tried to get outside, away from the smelly foreigners in the cramped laboratory, as often as he could. He had to cut off the stream to answer the buzz of his satellite phone. It could only be one person and he would not tolerate a man daring to complete a piss before answering.
“Si, Senor de Santiago. It is Ortiez. What can I do for you?”
“Jorge, I will be visiting you in three days. I want you to have the procedures for the additive all documented and recorded on a computer diskette. I will require enough of the compound to doctor a thousand kilos of heroin all ready and packaged. I will bring it back with me.”
De Santiago knew now that he had to spread the risk. This lab was the only place where the additive was being manufactured. It was the one place that had the formula, technology, and the people to do it. If the gringo bastards could locate and destroy his most hidden fields and his most highly guarded secret factory, they could find this place and throw a real kink in his grand design. He could not afford to have to notify Sui that there was no more of the additive for the treatment of his future shiploads of heroin. No, that was not an option. There would be no more alliance if the additive were not part of the deal. He had to make sure the whole operation was viable, even if the location of the lab was discovered and the American rockets fell on it, too.
He did not mention the reasons for this order to Ortiez. Better the man not know that he and the lab might be in danger. De Santiago couldn’t afford for Ortiez and his chemists to go running into the jungle, screaming like frightened women at the first rustle of some nocturnal animal in the jungle underbrush.
Ortiez reached into his pocket, pulled out his note pad, and wrote down his leader’s instructions.
“It shall happen as you order, El Jefe. That is only ten kilos. We will have it ready for you.”
He had to wonder what had brought on this sudden change in the plan. He finished his piss, buttoned his trousers, and headed back for the lab.
Margarita slipped quietly back into the bedroom. Juan de Santiago was gone, off to eat and carouse with his lackeys and gloat over the latest brilliant move he was making to counter the setbacks he had recently suffered.
She eased the door shut behind her. She locked it. She reached underneath the bed and removed the miniature recorder. Juan had been using the bedside phone. He had destroyed all his cell phones, had ripped all the wall phones away from their cables in his fits of anger.
Everything he had said would be on the tape.
She looked at her face in the mirror, at her eyes. The hate she felt for the man with whom she slept smoldered in her eyes. It would be so easy to end his life now. To one night interrupt his grunting with the blade of her stiletto while he was on top of her, bragging of those he had killed even as he pushed and shoved himself into her. It was not the time. He would only become a martyr and his organization would be even stronger.
It would be better to help destroy all he had built first. Then, when the time was right, she could end his reign in a second.
That would be such a sweet day.
It was time for El Falcone to once again send more information to the JDIA, to drive one more nail into Juan de Santiago’s coffin.
26
“You did what?” John Bethea was having trouble understanding what Jon Ward was trying to tell him. “You drove under that ship and took pictures? Isn’t that a damn fool thing to do?”
“It has a few risks, but it’s not that bad,” Ward answered quietly. “We’re trained for it. Besides, it was the only way of proving what I believed without boarding her again and looking in the hold.”
Bethea was scrutinizing the picture on the computer screen in front of him. Ward had only sent the images to him a few minutes before and he wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
“Jon, I’m no expert, so help me here. All I see is a picture of the underside of some ship. What shou
ld I be looking for?”
Ward stood on the periscope stand on Spadefish, holding a half dozen photos in his hand, prints of the same pictures he had radioed to Bethea. He pulled one from the group and laid it on the top of the sonar repeater.
The bait was on the hook. He needed Bethea to take a nibble.
“Okay, first look at the image marked ‘port side, outboard.’ Got it?”
Bethea found the right file on his computer and opened it. He was seeing a dark, red hull with a long black line slashed down it.
“Yep, have it up now. So?”
“See that black line? Zoom in on it.”
Bethea zoomed in to times-three power. The black line took shape. He gazed at it intently.
“It looks like some kind of flap hanging down. Seems to be a hinge or something under it.”
“Good, you’re starting to get it,” Ward answered. It was time to give Bethea another sniff at the rest of the bait. “Now look at the one that’s labeled ‘aft mid-ships.’ Should be the next one in the file.”
Bethea opened that one. Same red hull, but taken lower down on the ship. The keel was clearly visible.
“Okay, I have it, but I don’t see any hinges.”
“I know you won’t. But see that faint line running across the hull, perpendicular to the keel, just forward of where the hull starts to taper in again?”
Bethea looked carefully. He zoomed in to the maximum capability of his powerful computer. He could just make out the bump that Ward was telling him about.
“Okay, I see it what you’re talking about. Not much there.”
“Right. Just remember what it looked like and where it was in relation to the hull. Now let’s look at the ‘starboard side outboard’ one. You’ll see the same faint line. And on the ‘bow mid-ships’ one. I calculate those lines are approximately thirty-two feet across and one-hundred-twenty feet long. It’s one big underwater door, John.” Ward knew Bethea had swallowed the bait now. It was time to set the hook. “The reason you didn’t see the Helena K take on her cargo is because she was loaded by submarine. Or more precisely, a mini-sub. I’m betting that sub is in there, right there in the hold of the ship. No real reason to use one at this end. They had plenty of places they could have put the stuff on board. But there will be a use for the mini-sub when she gets to where she’s going.”
Final Bearing Page 32
