kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller)

by Chesler, Rick

  After passing beneath the channel’s bridges, however, the ride was smooth. With plenty of water on either side of them, they sped through what looked like a flat wetlands area, with acres of the same green, leafy plants growing in all directions outside of the river. Tara stood up and steadied herself on the console. Their speed was slow enough that she could be heard without having to shout over the rumbling of the twenty-five horsepower outboard.

  “What are all these plants?” she asked, waving an arm at the expanse of broad-leafed vegetation.

  “Taro,” Dave answered from behind the wheel. “This is all cultivated. They grow it in flooded areas like this. The leaves are edible, and also the root part. You can even get taro pie at the McDonald’s in Hawaii,” he finished, banking the boat around a gentle curve which took them out of sight of the ocean. This factoid was meant for Lance and Kristen's benefit, as visitors to the islands, but it was news to Tara as well, since she never ate fast-food and rarely watched television.

  They motored on in silence for a few minutes. Soon they had passed all of the paddled vessels near the river’s mouth, as well as a slow moving riverboat filled with sightseers. Tara felt the morning sunlight stabbing her face and pulled her sunglasses tighter. Kristen adjusted the wide-brimmed palm frond hat she’d picked up the night before in an ABC convenience store. Even this early in the morning it was hot and muggy, but so far, blessedly free of mosquitoes.

  They saw no vessels larger than their own, certainly nothing the size of the R/V Tropic Sequence. Tara asked Dave if he thought William Archer's yacht could have made the journey this far up the river.

  “So far, yes,” Dave answered without hesitation. “The river is plenty wide enough, and I don’t know how deep it is here, but if they pulled up the keel and motored, they’d have no trouble getting this far. But things are changing up ahead,” Dave finished, pointing at a bend in the river that marked the beginning of a low-grade hill. They saw that the taro had thinned out and were now largely replaced by tall grasses and scrubby trees.

  Their boat continued up the river, which narrowed somewhat as they made their way inland. The vegetation also grew denser, and before long they had ventured into a true forest. On either side of the river, creeping vines and lianas hung to the ground from tropical hardwoods. Wild orchids dotted the landscape, and the sound of birds—shrieking, twittering and warbling birds—could be heard whenever Dave eased back on the throttle to negotiate a bend in the waterway.

  Other than the stunning natural setting in which they now found themselves, they saw nothing of interest. No other humans since leaving the wide river mouth area. There was nothing to suggest any connection to Dr. William Archer.

  Ahead of them on their left, a narrow waterfall cascaded down a steep slope into the river. Kristen began to get uncomfortable sitting on the pontoon, but the majestic scenery forced her to remain at attention. Lance had slumped onto the Avon’s floorboards, where he half-dozed from beneath a hooded sweatshirt he’d worn for the early morning boat ride. Tara calmly observed the surroundings, marveling at how different this part of the state was from where she lived.

  As grandiose as their surroundings were, Kristen could not help but feel let down. She—and Tara, she noted bitterly —had so far detected no clue whatsoever of her father or his yacht. Her brother seemed either not to care or to feel they were on a wild goose chase, while Dave was here only because she was paying him to be their aquatic chauffeur. The FBI agent was only keeping tabs on the three of them, she suspected, and would soon lose interest when no new developments occurred.

  As she looked around at the wild river and deep jungle, Kirsten thought she was glad she had not attempted this sojourn with Lance as her only companion.

  Her brother’s mood seemed darker lately, she thought, like something bothered him deep inside. She supposed it must be the disappearance of their father. Everyone had their own way of confronting grief, after all.

  They motored on for another half an hour, the river gradually winding itself narrower as they ascended the rainforest covered foothills . Low-hanging bushes overhung the river banks. Dave cut the engine and the Avon gradually drifted back downstream as he addressed his passengers.

  “We can’t go too much further,” he said, pointing upstream. Patches of whitewater were visible up ahead, and here and there boulders protruded. “No possible way a ninety-foot yacht could get up there, either.”

  Kristen frowned as her gaze turned to Lance, who was rubbing his good eye, awakening.

  “They could have launched a tender vessel,” she said weakly.

  “I’ll take us a little bit further,” Dave acquiesced, casting a doubting glance at the precarious stretch of water up ahead. Kristen knew that it was she who was on the hook for the bill should they damage the boat, but their entire trip to Hawaii had only one purpose.

  Dave maneuvered the Avon with care up the bubbling narrows—now more a stream than a river. Tara pointed out hazardous rocks as she saw them. Even Lance kept watch over the side for hidden obstacles.

  After twenty minutes of this, they came to a thick log which had fallen across the stream, blocking their progress. A small tributary branched off to their right, but it was so small as to be unnavigable even for their inflatable craft. Then they heard a rasping sound as the Avon’s hull scraped over a barely-submerged flat rock. Looking over the pontoon’s side, Tara saw a clutch of red shrimp clustered on the bottom of a shallow depression in the mud.

  “That’s it,” Dave said, killing the motor. “No way anybody got past this, and judging by all the hanging mosses and vines on it, this log’s been here a long time.” Tara agreed with his assessment that the fallen tree had not recently been dragged into position.

  Dave grabbed a paddle and used it to turn the craft around. He started the motor, but needed it now only for bursts of steering power, relying on gravity to carry the boat back downstream. After riding with the constant whine of the outboard, the resulting silence fell heavily upon them as they drifted.

  Watching the jungle pass by and the water deepen again, Kristen reflected on the series of events which had led her to this place. The scuba dive and the flash-drive. The sequenced bacteria. The coded message deciphered. This wild river trip. And now it would all come to nothing. Could ‘Wailua R’ mean something else besides this river?

  She didn’t see what. Frustration welling up inside her, Kristen felt a tear slip from beneath her sunglasses to trace the contour of her cheek. Would she ever see her father again? Dave was trying without success to think of some way to console her when Tara pointed to a spot on the right bank. “Something’s there,” she said.

  Happy to have something to focus on besides Kristen’s worsening mood, Dave flicked the throttle for a moment to skirt around a moss covered stone. Tara's gaze burned into the foliage tumbling over the side of the river bank. Dave examined the same spot as he maneuvered the boat closer. There was something there.

  A snatch of white, hidden in the green.

  …TTTG26TTCC...

  10:55 AM

  “Probably some trash that washed under there,” Lance said. Kristen and Dave shot him a doubting glance.

  “Haven’t seen any other junk so far,” Kristen pointed out.

  Without warning, it began to rain. First a patter of drops drumming on their boat’s pontoons, then a steady downpour while sunlight still filtered through the canopy.

  “Kauai isn’t the wettest place on Earth for nothing,” Dave said, raising his voice above the crushing precipitation. He used the oar to try and pole their raft toward the bank, but found that it could not reach the bottom. They had moved back into deep water. He put the motor into low. An egret took flight as they neared the tangled undergrowth.

  There was a rasping noise as the nose of the inflatable slipped beneath the curtain of shrubbery. Dave parted branches with the paddle, and soon they glided through the floral gate. They found themselves in a green grotto that afforded protection from the
rain, with placid water beneath and an emerald shroud all around. The actual bank of the river could not be seen through the dense wall of vegetation, a veritable explosion of chlorophyll. A small fish splashed nearby, and they could hear the rain hammering the canopy above them.

  It took a moment to reorient themselves to the white object they’d seen from the middle of the river, but after Dave paddled them a few yards to the left, parallel to the river bank, they saw it.

  “Wow, it’s huge!” Dave said, ducking under a leafy branch.

  Then he maneuvered their raft around a fallen log. But when he put a hand on it to shove it away, he knew at once that it was not a log. Its lines were much too straight, its surface too smooth.

  “People, this is a sailboat mast,” Dave said.

  And then their eyes followed the mast back to the partially obscured white object, and they knew.

  A sailboat.

  Kristen saw another splash of white about forty feet from the first. “It’s a big boat, alright,” she said, not wanting to believe this could be her father’s yacht. But she knew that the Tropic Sequence was indeed white.

  Tara knew that there was one way to confirm it.

  “Dave, let’s find the stern so we can see the name,” the detective said. She felt goosebumps just thinking about the possibility of locating the yacht which had eluded authorities for months.

  Dave nodded, already paddling them toward the sailboat. As they drew nearer to it, it became obvious that the vessel was no longer seaworthy. The boat was largely underwater, only part of its top decks exposed to the air.

  Unable to determine with certainty which was the stern end of the boat, Dave opted to paddle for the end that was closer to them. The raft glided up to the section of white they first saw. Dave took hold of a chrome-plated railing and pulled them along the white hull, until the form sunk into the gloom. The stern of the boat was a foot underwater, but they could still make out the lettering inscribed in gold leaf on the transom:

  R/V Tropic Sequence.

  …TTTC27TTCC...

  11:12 AM

  Kristen stood in the Avon, mouth agape in an expression of incomprehension as she stared into the water. So this was the final resting place of the mighty Tropic Sequence, the vessel her esteemed father had commissioned for what had been hailed as the most important voyage of scientific discovery since Darwin’s?

  Dave looked downriver at the other exposed parts of the wrecked ship, then back to the submerged nameplate on the transom. “This is it,” he said with finality. As if in agreement, an unseen bird squawked somewhere above. Even Lance had no arguments as he stared silently out from his hooded sweatshirt. Tara pulled out a digital camera and snapped a few shots of the yacht’s resting place.

  Far up a tropical river, they had found the most searched-for vessel in the Pacific.

  Tara put the camera away and produced her cell-phone, deciding that her boss needed to hear this development, but soon a frown crossed her face. “No signal.”

  “Cell-phones won’t work up here,” Dave said. He threw a line over the yacht’s railing and tied them off. “Should we check it out?” he said, pulling a backpack out from under the Avon’s steering console.

  Lance looked at the broken boat, its deck covered with leaf litter, the bulk of its form underwater. “It could be dangerous going on it.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Tara said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Dave said, shouldering his pack.

  “I’m going too,” Kristen declared.

  “Kristen,” Lance said. “That’s crazy.”

  “It probably is better for only one of us to step foot on it at first, to test the deck, make sure it supports weight,” Dave said. “It’s resting on that loose muck on the bottom.” Lance gave a hearty nod of approval.

  “Someone needs to stay with our boat,” Tara said.

  Lance raised his hand. “I can handle that.”

  Tara turned to Kristen and Dave. “I’ll board first. Give me a minute, then Dave, then you—Kristen—one at a time. Got it?”

  Dave and Kristen said they understood. Tara grabbed the line tied to the yacht and pulled the Avon next to it. She stepped onto the Avon’s pontoons and grabbed the yacht’s railing, Ducking her head to avoid low-hanging branches, she jumped, swinging her legs over the metalwork. Her feet landed with a thud on teak deck planks.

  Tara stood there a moment, one hand still on the rail as if the whole boat might fall out from under her. But it didn’t, and so she took a few tentative steps away from the rail toward the middle of the deck.

  “It’s covered with cut branches,” Tara said.

  “Somebody tried to hide this boat,” Kristen said.

  “Deck looks like it’s in pretty good shape, though, except for the broken mast, and I don’t see any sails. But there’s plenty of boat gear that anybody could sell easily—there’s a big brass compass mounted right over there,” Tara said.

  Just then Tara lost her footing on the slick deck, but caught her balance. “Deck’s at a pretty steep angle,” she said, allowing herself to slip and slide down toward the river bank. She stopped when she reached the captain’s wheel, grabbing onto its wooden spokes to halt her descent.

  The rear deck of the vessel, on which she was now perched, was smaller than the expansive bow deck. The two decks were separated by the cabin superstructure, which was itself draped in plant life.

  Tara looked around at as much of the deck as she could see. “Both masts have been snapped off, to conceal it, I guess,” she said, clinging to the wheel. “But other than that, it all looks pretty normal. I’m going to take a look inside the cabin. Dave, you coming?”

  Tara wanted at least one other person with her for safety’s sake. Also, whenever possible she kept within sight of those who accompanied her into the field. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Dave, Kristen and Lance, but she felt better being able to account for as much as possible with her own eyes.

  “I’m going with you.” Kristen said, pulling the Avon back over to the yacht. Both men protested, but there was no stopping her. After telling her brother to stay with the Avon, she leapt onto the wrecked ship.

  Soon she was clinging to Dave’s arm in the center of the deck, rainwater sluicing past her feet down the varnished teak. Dave and Kristen tiptoed their way to Tara at the cabin entrance. Tara produced a mini mag-light and aimed it at the door to the cabin.

  One of the double doors had fallen open, due to the angle of the listing deck. Tara shined the powerful beam through, playing the light off the walls of the once luxurious main salon. They could hear water sloshing somewhere deep inside. Even more disconcerting, a foul odor wafted out from within. They took a few moments to let their eyes adjust to the dim interior.

  Then they descended the ladder-like steps into the dank cabin.

  …TTAG28TTGC …

  11:30 A.M.

  Tara gasped as the birds flew past them, towards the light. A flutter of feathers brushed against her skin as her arm went to cover her face. Then they were gone, and she felt the floor shake as Dave and Kristen dropped off the ladder into the cabin. Tara registered the smell before she uncovered her eyes.

  A rank mixture of mold—and something else. She wasn’t sure what, but the mold dominated. When she opened her eyes, after orienting herself to the odd angle of the floor, what surprised her most was the sheer size of the room they were in.

  A large table and seating area occupied the right side of the salon, whose former opulence was testimony to Dr. William Archer’s success. Behind them and to the right was the galley. Framed paintings and photographs—seascapes and island scenes—still graced the walls. Tara found it odd that they still hung perfectly straight, but then realized it was because on a boat, everything was bolted into place.

  It became apparent as Tara played the light beam across the salon that the boat had been here for some time. Green, mossy growth covered much of the walls and ceiling. Leafy tendrils invaded through
broken skylights. Bird droppings were everywhere. The yacht was being claimed by the jungle, from above...and from below, the trio realized as they heard water splashing from the far end of the salon.

  Slowly, cautiously, they walked deeper into the room. Kristen looked back to the galley and wondered if the rank odor could be rotting food. Whatever was in the refrigerator must still be in there. The cabinets were neatly shut, as was the microwave. No dishes occupied the sink. The only thing even slightly out of order, Kristen noticed, was a knife block which had been overturned, some of its cutlery toppling onto the counter.

  Dave shouted something incomprehensible as a dark, slender form scurried over his feet and disappeared into a dim corner. Tara followed it with the light. Dave shook his head, laughing.

  “Mongoose,” he said. “One of Hawaii’s worst invasive pest species. Brought here on ships in the 1800’s to control rats, but they ended up eating everything, including rats, but also bird eggs, insects, rare plants, you name it.”

  They continued through the salon. Kristen called their attention to the table. The only thing on it was a chessboard, once a diversion to pass long stretches at sea. Due to the sailboat’s resting angle, all of its pieces had slid onto the floor. Tara shone her light underneath the table and they saw the white king, marred by bird droppings.

  Staring at the pieces, Kristen knew that she’d seen them before. Their elaborate pewter forms were unmistakable. She recalled how her father had taught her the game as a child on this very set. Never bring your queen out early. For some reason this piece of wisdom came to her now. She felt a pang of sadness at seeing the pieces in such disarray.

  They continued on, reaching the passageway which led down into the belly of the yacht to the staterooms. The sound of gurgling water was loud here. Tara shone the light down the passageway, illuminating a hallway below with staterooms off to either side.