“It’s full of bird shit up here,” she complained. “In position.”
We kept the van out of sight and ran just the bucket forward so we could see around the corner without exposing the van on the water side and still stay out of sight from the road.
We were 150 meters across the inlet from the Pierson Brothers building and dock for their salvage ship, the Esmeralda. It was newer than The Star and cleaner. She had a great fat, high bow and upper deck that sloped down to a wide, flat rear deck. Instead of several cranes like The Star, the Esmeralda had a single large crane that loomed over the rear deck. It was still a very nice ship.
While we were relatively close, the drop off point for Q and Amber was another half mile down the road; the closest water access from the road we could find. That was going to be a long swim and the main channel in between was deep but narrow. If they met any large ships in the channel, they would have nowhere to hide from being chopped into chum by tons of spinning steel. They would surface momentarily before crossing the channel so we could communicate any ship traffic to them through their earpieces, which didn’t work underwater. Crossing a tricky industrial waterway at night was dangerous under ideal conditions and I felt myself getting sweaty palms just thinking about it.
WILL BE OKAY Bobby wrote on a note so it didn’t go over the comm link.
THNX I wrote underneath.
Tonight the thermal cameras were a prize winner. The engine room of the Esmeralda still glowed warm compared to the rest of the ship and the night watch stood out in plain relief. One on the Esmeralda and another on a golf cart doing rounds through the office and dock area. I heard the drone buzz on the roof before lifting off.
“Get that thing away from me,” V complained to Deek over the comm link.
“Ah, it likes you,” Deek teased. “It recognizes another machine.”
“Can it, please,” I said a little more tersely than I intended.
“Divers away,” Jesse said over the comm link. He would stick around long enough for them to get in the water. That was actually the tricky part. Where they were the road bridge was built from large blocks of concrete, slippery with slime and speckled with barnacles that had edges sharp enough to leave a nasty cut. Bleeding in the water at night would not be a good thing.
Making their way over the rocks carrying gear was tricky and they didn’t dare waste any time. There was a lot of traffic on the road any time of day. Amber got in the water first.
“Goddamn current,” she sputtered over the comm link. “It’s running against us.”
“In the water,” Q said a long minute later.
“On their way,” Jesse confirmed, starting up the truck and getting down the road as quickly as possible.
Open-system rebreathers weren’t as stealthy as the high-tech closed system rebreathers used by the military and most commercial firms, but they weren’t as complicated or difficult to maintain. They would still pass a tiny stream of bubbles from the re-oxygenation gas but it was nothing compared to the churning bubbles from a compressed air scuba system.
The current was still against them but that would ease up after a while at high tide. Amber and Q had a heads up compass in their helmets that would give them a heading across the channel. It was a long, tense wait until they held short of the channel and Q came up to get a bearing and check in.
“Whew,” he said, puffing from the exertion. “How we looking?”
I scanned the waterway with the infrared cameras, just able to make out Q and Amber just 200 meters up the channel from where we were.
“Deek?”
“Clear traffic,” he said, panning the drone around.
Amber and Q disappeared under the water.
“Hold it! Shit, boat,” Deek said, just moments after Q and Amber disappeared.
“Abort!” I said automatically, but it was too later. Amber and Q were underwater and their comm wouldn’t pick up the signal.
“Goddamnit!” I swore.
“It was lost in the harbor lights,” Deek complained.
I panned around to discover a small survey ship making its way out of port. It didn’t have the deep draft of a freighter but it was still a big boat.
At times like this you realize how painfully slow swimming underwater really is. The survey ship wasn’t going fast but it was still going much faster than our team could swim. There was nothing to do but watch as the survey ship drifted quietly over the space between us and the Esmeralda. We all held our collective breath.
Just to the stern of the Esmeralda was a dock ladder that went down near the water. The wait was interminable before I saw Q, then Amber surface near the ladder.
“Thanks for the clear traffic, asshole,” Amber hissed. Q motioned to her to be quiet and the pair started tying off their gear to the dock.
“Sorry,” Deek apologized and, for a change, sounding like he actually meant it.
“V the lights,” I instructed. We never heard the soft PFFT! of the Val but the light at the end of the dark went dark in a shower of broken glass.
“I love this gun,” V said under her breath.
The guard on the boat must’ve heard something because he walked out to the upper deck rail and looked out over the dock. Not seeing anything he turned his back to the dock, leaning back against the railing and lit a cigarette.
“Vampire on the rail at your 11,” I told Q who was making his way up the ladder. He held short of dock.
The guard took a drag off his cigarette. “Go!” I said.
Q lifted himself silently up on the dock and moved quickly behind some equipment boxes in the shadows. Amber climbed up and stopped short of the dock, she had the tranq rifle bag slung over her shoulder.
The guard took out his phone and started looking through something. Q waved Amber across. She came up over the top of the ladder and made her way quiet as a shadow to the cover of the gear boxes. She quietly unpacked the tranq rifle and took aim at the guard.
“Ready,” she whispered.
“Execute,” I answered, after checking the location of the second guard.
I could hear the tranq rifle puff through the earpiece and the guard jerked, dropping his phone which clattered on the deck. He started to reach for his radio but never got there before the paralytic caught up with his muscles. He slumped down on the rail and then dropped to the deck with a thump.
“At the gate,” Jesse informed us that they had arrived at our location. Bobby and his team slipped out of the van and sprinted to the truck, careful to secure the gate again after they were through.
“Target 2 at the warehouse,” I informed Q. He moved from shadow to shadow until he got to the door with the golf cart parked out front.
Amber took the tranq rifle and moved silently up the steps of the Esmeralda and disappeared over the side.
We all waited 10 minutes for the guard in the warehouse. I was about to send Q in after him when he finally came out the door and Q came out of the shadows to dose him with a syringe.
“Gate first, then the gear,” I told him. “Go, Jesse.”
Jesse had parked the truck down the street and wheeled up to the Pierson Brother’s gate. Q went through the keys on the guard’s belt until he found the right one, unlocking the big metal gate and pulling it open.
Jesse parked the van around the corner on the inside and waited.
“Clear,” Deek announced.
“Clear,” V concurred.
“Clear on Objective 1,” Amber confirmed. “Starting Phase II.”
“Okay, go,” I said.
Jesse got out of the van and Q passed him the keys. His objective was getting the security DVRs from the office. Dugger had the job of searching the warehouse. Bobby and Mat drove down the dock to the Esmeralda and slipped out the back, each carrying an ax. I did note that our fire axes were getting quite the workout on this job. Bobby would go up to the bridge and Mat would take the bay where they ran salvage operations.
“Commencing Operation Rewire,”
Bobby said, a loud CRASH! in the background.
Q ran the golf cart over to the ladder and tied a line on the back. He took the line down the ladder and bundled the two rebreathers and the rest of their gear then climbed back up the ladder and used the golf cart to carefully raise the gear bundle up to where he could grab it and then haul the gear to the truck.
“Phase 2 ready,” Amber said quietly. “Red lights.” That meant she had turned the wireless triggers on the demolition charges to the ARMED setting. They would blink for 2 minutes giving the operator time to get clear and then go solid red.
“DVRs secure,” Jesse announced, which meant he had smashed the units open and retrieved the hard drives and crushed the solid state memory modules. “Dugger’s at the warehouse,” he informed us.
There was a loud crashing sound from Amber’s earpiece. “We’re having some fun here.”
“My arms are getting tired,” Mat complained. “You want a shot?”
“Sure,” Amber said, followed by more crashing, this time preceded by a girl grunts as she wielded the heavy instrument.
“Patrol,” Deek announced. “Local PD, just cruising.”
Everyone froze while the patrol car rolled slowly by outside the gate but there was nothing obviously amiss and he didn’t even slow down.
“Clear,” Deek said after a minute, briefly following the car on the drone cameras.
“Objective 2 is a no-go,” Jesse announced after Dugger got back from the warehouse. “It’s not here.”
I didn’t really expect it to be but that would have been a nice bonus. Jesse just told us the Pierson Brothers were just smart enough not to store the stolen low-alpha lead in their own warehouse.
“Alright, pack it in,” I instructed. “We’re done here.”
“V?”
“I need help down,” she said. That meant she couldn’t find an attachment for her zip line or, more likely, she didn’t want to walk on the roof to look for one.
“One minute,” I said. I was going to wait until the team was clear to move the bucket.
I didn’t have to wait long. Amber, Mateo and Bobby came down the steps from the boat, Bobby dragging the security guard and dumping him on the dock. Q confirmed he had all the gear and Jesse and Dugger came jogging back from the office. The total elapsed time from when Q and Amber got to the dock had been less than 20 minutes.
They all piled in the truck and headed out, carefully closing and locking the gate on the way out. It would take a few minutes to drive back so I used the time to run the bucket up and get V off the roof. About the same time I got her down the truck pulled up to the fence and V drove the van to the gate and Bobby secured it behind us. Mat came back to take over driving the van and we moved to a spot down the road where we could just see the Esmeralda between two buildings.
Amber joined us from the truck and handed me the transmitter.
I gave it back to her. “You catch ‘em, you clean ‘em,” I smiled.
“Charge 1, selecting” she said out loud, selecting Number 1 on the transmitter control. The light turned from green to red. “Good connection, firing.” She flipped up the button cover and hit the fire button. We opened the back van door so we could hear but there wasn’t much noise, just a distant and barely audible thump from the general direction of the dock. No smoke, no fire, no nothing.
“You sure about the placement?” I asked.
“I put it right where Fred told me,” she said defensively. “Charge 2, selecting,” she continued.
“Hold, harbor patrol,“ Deek announced.
Possibly drawn by the noise, the harbor patrol cruised by in the main channel but didn’t slow down. We gave them a couple minutes to get clear.
“All clear,” Deek announced.
“Charge 2, selecting. Good connection. Firing,” Amber said immediately, followed by another distant thump. This time smoke curled up out of the stern of the Esmeralda. It started out thin and quickly grew thick and black. Due to the atmospherics the smoke didn’t rise quickly but clung to the back of the boat and the dock, the wind tearing off wispy tendrils.
“It’s burning now,” Mat observed.
The harbor patrol would be back when the smoke became visible and we could already smell it being carried on the evening breeze. We would let it burn a couple minutes more and then flood the engine room to put out the fire for the same reason we didn’t burn the club. We weren’t going to endanger firefighters in a confined space fire. Another billow of smoke rolled out and Deek informed us the security guard next door had called 911.
“Okay, group fire 3 and 4,” I said to Amber.
She set the switches and there was a double thump, this time followed by a great billow of black smoke as overpressure from the charges pushed a huge rolling cloud out of the engine room. The last two charges were water intake lines and seawater poured into the engine compartment. Almost immediately the smoke started to change from black to white, the sign of a dying fire. The Esmeralda started settling the stern lines stretching tight until the bollard on the dock snapped like a rifle shot, taking a chunk of the dock with it and the stern settled into the mud, the nose of the ship still hanging from the bow line. And that’s how she settled.
As sirens approached the dock white smoke continued to billow up from below decks but it was just smoke. The flooded engine room, now completely underwater, would be inaccessible until she was raised out of the mud.
That would about do it for using Pierson Brothers to skip out of town.
Chapter 28
Instead of going back to the warehouse in Miami we drove all the way back to West Palm. This time the truck would have shown up on video cameras of the neighboring offices and we had used the van on three jobs and couldn’t let it keep showing up. That’s how you meet an untimely end in our business or end up dealing with the police. Bobby and his crew already had a plan in case we needed to use the van again, but that was unlikely.
V and I nodded off on the drive to West Palm and our original warehouse was waiting for us with fresh clothes, a late night buffet and, of course, beer. Our vagabond existence had another advantage in that we weren’t turning up in groups at restaurants or nightclubs, places where we would show up on video cameras and in the background of selfies. We rarely went to the store for anything. That was time we saved and, again, lowered our exposure. None of this group seemed to mind.
Q and Amber excused themselves to go shower and change. The rest dove into the buffet, which was quite an impressive spread this time. There was a smoked turkey, a giant bowl of shrimp, and a slab of prime rib, mashed potatoes and a steam table pan full of lobster tails. It had been a long night and we were all hungry.
Amber had turned in another excellent performance tonight, even when the inevitable unexpected event arrived in the form of the survey ship. She came down fresh out of the shower and pulled a beer for herself.
“That was scary as fuck,” she said, talking about the ship going over them. “It was like pulling me off the bottom.”
Q joined us a minute later. “It was a little tight,” he agreed. “Plus there’s some creepy shit down there.”
Amber shuddered. “Something wrapped itself around my legs.”
“It was an octopus,” Q insisted. “He was just looking for a date.”
“I have a firm rule about dating outside my species,” Amber joked.
“The shark was kinda big, though,” he added.
“Holy shit and it was like right there,” she reenacted the shark encounter with the coffee table.
“That reminds me,” Bobby said, handing Amber the used tranq dart. “A little souvenir for you.”
“Ah, my first tranq dart,” she gushed. “I’ll have it bronzed.”
It was more than a souvenir for Amber, it would also make sure that there was nothing that could trace back to us or an organization with our capabilities. We’d pulled off three major ops in just over 24 hours in Miami without killing anyone, without endangering any civi
lians, stirring up local law enforcement or any of our team ending up in jail. The trace evidence we did leave behind would serve only to confuse anyone looking for answers. I hated to apply the word “brilliant” because it seemed vain, but it was something close to that. Sergei now had a much better clearer idea of who he was fucking with, although I was more convinced than ever that he was not behind all this.
Bobby, Mat, Jesse and Dugger all went to work on the van, peeling off the phone company wraps and giving the van a cable company makeover, including a cable spool on the front. Cable was better in some ways because it was less unusual for them to run service calls at night.
The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series Page 31
