The Wrong Girl (John Taylor Book 3)

by Travis Starnes

  “Thank you, Guardsman,” she said, pulling the seat harness over her shoulders, and locking it in place.

  The cutter must have been moving faster than the pilot estimated or the chopper must have been slower because it took them almost thirty minutes before the sleek white ship came into view. As the helo circled the ship to land, Taylor saw the front of the ship curved, with a white dome sitting on a raised platform just along from the boat's tip, a long, thin gun tube protruding from it. He also noted a .50 caliber mounted ahead of that. It wasn’t up to the Navy warships Taylor had seen over his years in the service, but it wasn’t anything to sneeze at. Taylor also noticed the white foam that poured off either side of the cutter’s bow was subsiding as it slowed to allow the chopper to land safely.

  The center of the boat had two towers, both topped by radio antenna and radar domes, a long section connecting them Taylor assumed was where the crew worked while stationed on the boat. The helicopter finished its circular pattern, coming in at an angle to the flattened back area of the ship marked off as a landing pad.

  As soon as the helicopter landed, the back door was wrenched open by another guardsman, also sporting a white open-faced flight helmet, although he had added a bright yellow reflective vest on top of his uniform. Taylor and Whitaker clambered out of the helicopter and followed a waiting man in a smart blue uniform.

  “The skipper’s waiting for you,” the man said as the aircraft lifted off behind them, angling to head back toward the coast.

  Walking up the side of the boat, Taylor was forced to grip the steel gray railing as it began to rock sharply. They were ushered onto the ships small bridge where the captain sat in a chair behind a long bank of dials, knobs and screens showing data Taylor couldn’t make sense of. On either side of the captain, separated by a few feet of open space, were two crewmen busy doing whatever it is people do on boats.

  Through the row of small windows in front of the controls, Taylor could see the white foam pouring off either side of the cutter’s bow as it cut through the waves, picking up speed.

  “Agent Whitaker,” the captain said, reaching out a hand.

  “Thank you for helping us with this, Captain.”

  “No problem. We were just out of port when the call came in. The ship is only a few miles ahead. We should be there shortly. Once it heaves to, we will send a launch with armed men to secure the ship, followed by a second launch to help conduct the search once we’ve secured it. You will be allowed to go in with the second group.”

  Taylor would have preferred to go in with the group that secured the ship, but that was mostly his impatience showing. He understood this wasn’t his area of expertise, and knew it was best to leave this kind of thing to the experts.

  'Although,' he thought, 'looking at some of these guardsmen, the experts seem awfully young.'

  They stood next to the skipper, as he watched out the window and occasionally glanced at the radar or sonar screens, Taylor wasn’t sure which. Occasionally one of the two guardsmen manning the controls on either side said something in jargon Taylor didn’t recognize.

  “We should see it in just a minute. Jones, radio the ship, please.”

  “Yes, sir,” the guardsman at a third, much smaller set of controls against another bulkhead said.

  He was wearing a set of headphones with an attached mic stretched across his mouth. He tapped a few controls, and said, “RS Petrograd, this is the USCGC Stanton. Cut your engines and prepare to be boarded. I say again, RS Petrograd, this is the US Coast Guard Cutter Stanton. Heave to and prepare to be boarded for inspection.”

  The kid repeated his announcement a second time before stopping abruptly, listening.

  “Sir, the Petrograd has acknowledged and is complying.”

  “Thank you, son,” he said, standing from his chair. “Let's get to it.”

  They followed the captain through a series of tight corridors to an open bay with two small powered launches on hoists, ready to be lowered into the water as soon as the cutter got close enough to the Petrograd to come to a stop. Twenty young men and woman, some with sidearms strapped to their waists, others cradling assault rifles. Waiting in the bay, they came to attention when the captain slid down the railing of the few steps that dropped from the decking above to the small boat bay.

  “Ladies and gentleman. I want this to be a quick and, most importantly, safe operation. Get on board, isolate the crew, then call for the search team. They’ve cooperated so far, but I don't want any chances taken. Listen to your NCOs and keep your eyes open.”

  Taylor felt the motion of the cutter change under his feet noticeably. The captain seemed to know what that meant, however, since he headed to stand with two men slightly apart from the armed crew waiting to deploy. He said something to the two men, who then headed to the guardsmen that had gathered around, and got them separated into two groups.

  Taylor noticed that the guardsmen with the assault rifles were all in one group. Through the open bay, he could see the motion of the water slow down until it stopped entirely leaving the gently rolling ocean waves the only moving thing he could see outside.

  The winches got to work, with several unarmed guardsmen working the controls, swinging the boat out of the launch bay and lowering it to the side of the cutter. At a signal from what Taylor assumed was the officer in charge of one launch, the group with the assault rifles headed to a ladder at the side of the bay and began disappearing one at a time down the side of the ship and out of view. The captain stood watching for several minutes until the launch could be seen speeding away from the cutter and out of sight of the bay.

  Once the launch was out of sight, he waved Taylor and Whitaker over to join him and what seemed to be the other junior officer, in charge of the search team.

  “This is Lieutenant Bailey,” he said, indicating the man. “We are happy to have you join the team for the search, but I want to make one thing very clear. This is a Coast Guard operation, and while you are on that ship, Lieutenant Bailey is in command, and you will follow his instructions to the letter. Are we clear on that?”

  “Crystal, sir,” Taylor said.

  “Yes, Captain,” Whitaker echoed.

  “Excellent. Lieutenant?”

  “The skipper told me we are looking for possible abductees?” The lieutenant asked, looking at them.

  “Yes,” Whitaker said. “We have intel to indicate multiple women were kidnapped and loaded on this ship, headed for Russia. We do not know where on the ship they might be.”

  “Probably in a container,” the captain said. “While I’ve never heard of people being smuggled out of the country, we all too often catch people being smuggled into the country aboard cargo ships. Mostly from Asia. They are usually loaded in a container that is sealed and locked, and not unlocked until the container is offloaded on the other side. But we’ll also have to check all the crew areas of the ship as well, just to be sure. I’ll leave you in the hands of Lieutenant Bailey now. I want to be on the bridge when they begin boarding.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Whitaker said.

  They milled about for almost ten minutes, the guardsmen chatting among themselves while Taylor tried to get a peek of the ship out of the launch bay doors, with no success. Finally, a voice came over the radio at the lieutenant’s waist.

  “Search team is cleared to proceed.”

  “OK, let's go, people. Lower the boat,” the lieutenant said to the man manning the crane.

  As before, the man pulled a series of levers, moving the smaller boat out of the bay and lowering it into the ocean. Once he gave the thumbs up, the lieutenant waved the guardsmen over to the ladder but held up a hand for Whitaker and Taylor to wait. The guardsmen lowered themselves down the ladder one at a time.

  Once the last one was over the side, he turned and said, “OK, you can go ahead. Be careful going from the ladder to the boat. It will be moving, so keep your eyes on where you are stepping. Sometimes the boat will move away from where it was a
moment before as the ocean moves under it. Let the people in the boat assist you down.”

  Taylor nodded and headed down in front of Whitaker. It wasn’t far, and he was at the launch in seconds. Just like the lieutenant had said, the boat was moving independently of the cutter. The gap between the ship and the launch grew and shrank in size as it moved away and toward the ship, held only nominally in place by the hoist.

  Hands reached up and helped Taylor get safely in the launch, for which he was thankful. These guys may have practiced moving from one ship to another, but Taylor certainly hadn’t. Whitaker followed right behind him with the lieutenant bringing up the rear.

  The launch roared around the cutter, bringing the Petrograd into view. Taylor wasn’t sure what he’d expected when he finally saw the ship, but the behemoth that loomed out of the sea wasn’t it. The side of the ship towered above them, with containers seeming to reach into the sky. Taylor realized some of that was because they were right next to the ship and were very near the water, but it still seemed unbelievably tall.

  It took them a few minutes to secure the launch next to the one used by the boarding party and get on deck. They found one crewman stationed by the ladder to the small Coast Guard boats, making sure they were still there when the guardsmen wanted to go back. They found most of the rest of the boarding party, with the crew of the Petrograd, in the ship's small galley and connected mess.

  “We’ve made a sweep of the whole ship,” the other team leader said, coming up to join Taylor, Whitaker, and Lieutenant Bailey when they entered the ship's mess. “We think we have everyone; if the captain’s logs are up to date, although you know how that goes. We didn’t see anything that looked obviously like people who were being kept hostage, though.”

  “Skipper suggested we look through the containers.”

  “Yeah, that was what I was thinking. You go ahead and start. I have half my team doing a second sweep of the boat. When they finish, I’ll send them to help you in the search.”

  “Sounds good,” Bailey said and left the mess with Taylor and Whitaker in tow.

  Saying you’re going to search a cargo ship with hundreds of large cargo containers sounds a lot easier than actually doing it. They were stacked high, and ladders the crew kept in case of emergency to access the containers had to be often used. Even broken into four teams, and joined by guardsmen from the first launch to make another two teams, after two hours they had covered less than ten percent of all the containers.

  Taylor was just coming down the ladder from another container filled with exactly what the manifest said it was filled with, when the radio of the guardsman he was with sounded.

  “We have something. Fourth-row, starboard,” an unknown voice said over the radio.

  Taylor and the two guardsmen he was with hurried over to the indicated section, where they were joined by Whitaker and Lieutenant Bailey a few minutes later.

  One of the guardsmen, on the team that called it in, indicated a partially opened container and said, “This was sealed with a customs tag, but if you look at it, there was another one here, and this one was laid on top of it.”

  Taylor looked where he was pointing. The seal was essentially a giant sticker with a bar code and information about the port and customs official who cleared the container. The guardsmen had been careful in removing it, and you could still see what looked like a second sticker underneath it, although it was impossible to tell what that one said, as it was now obscured by the replacement tag.

  “They do this sometimes. Open a container, steal a bunch of stuff to sell on the black market or whatever, then slap a new, fake one on top of it. It’s a lot more common for ships headed out of the US than into it,” Bailey said, taking the tag from Taylor. “Some countries are a lot more relaxed than others in their customs procedures and either ignore things like this or let it slide.”

  “Look what we found inside,” the guardsman said.

  They pulled open the large, metal door of the container. Inside were several mattresses, a bucket at the far back, and scattered bottles of water and stacks of junk food. Taylor had a strong guess what the bucket was for, but he went to it anyway. As suspected, this was for the waste of whoever was in here. It might not have been a surprise to Taylor, but the fact the contents of the bucket were still liquid, and not evaporated, said this container had been occupied relatively recently.

  Since the ship left the same day, Taylor couldn’t imagine they’d loaded an empty container like this. At some point, they either realized someone would be coming after the Petrograd, or the Coast Guard had already dispatched a boat. It would have had to be someone at the port, who noticed people being interested in the ship and letting whoever was in control of the smuggling know they needed to offload the girls.

  He found a bunch of random trash lying on the floor of the container, but one thing jumped out at Taylor. It was an orange paper wristband. He only noticed it because it triggered a memory of the video he had seen where Mary Jane had been abducted. Taylor remembered seeing most of the people on the video with a similar wristband, probably indicating something like if they were old enough to drink or if they’d paid a cover.

  Picking up the orange paper, Taylor turned it over in his hand. It had been ripped apart at one end. Maybe on purpose or maybe she’d just snagged it on something. She’d worn it for a week already, so it was surprising she’d managed to hold onto it as long as she did. But, seeing the logo of the club stamped on what would have been the outer facing side of the wristband, it seemed to confirm Mary Jane had been in this container.

  What it didn’t help with, was finding out where she was now.

  CHAPTER 6

  They couldn't just assume after finding the one container, that the girls had been offloaded. Taylor thought it was the most likely answer, since just shuffling them from one container to another made no sense, but they still had to check the entire ship.

  They were checking yet another container, this one also matching the manifest, when Taylor felt the deck vibrate as the ship’s powerful engine put the vessel into motion.

  “Are we moving?” he asked the guardsman nearest him.

  “Yeah. Daniel's team found a container full of what looks like stolen electronics. We can’t be sure until we check, but there’d been a BOLO on a missing shipment of electronics that was hijacked near Jacksonville. It and the signs of smuggling were enough for the Skipper to order the ship turned around. The exec came over twenty minutes ago with a small crew to get the boat headed back to port.”

  “Ohh,” Taylor said. It hadn't occurred to him the Coast Guard got law enforcement notices, but it made sense.

  “It also means once we hit port we’ll have a lot more people to help us search this thing. It would take us days to search this thing, even if we emptied the cutter of everyone who currently isn’t on duty to help.”

  “Excellent point,” Taylor said.

  He had been considering that very thing before the ship had started moving. In his gut, Taylor was positive Mary Jane wasn’t on the boat anymore, but he had to be sure. And yet, every minute he spent checking the containers on this vessel, the farther away whoever took her could get.

  Taylor kept searching until they got back to port.

  As they passed the artificial breakwaters and into the docks Taylor made his way over to the side railing. The sun was just cresting over the horizon, bathing the sky in a dizzying array of colors. In the early morning light, he could make out a virtual army of various law enforcement agencies waiting where the Ship would be berthed. As they got closer Taylor could make out FBI, more of the Coast Guard and even ICE.

  “This is going to be a big haul,” Whitaker said from behind him, startling Taylor.

  “So far, we’ve found a container full of what looks like stolen weapons, another of electronics, and even one full of weird plush toys. Some of it is stuff that’s illegal, both here in the US and to import into Russia, while other stuff looks like the owners were
trying to avoid paying duties.”

  “Any sign . . .” Taylor said, the question left unspoken.

  “No. Both the Coasties and the Bureau are sending in more manpower to search, but I don’t think we’ll find anything. However, this is going to be a decent sized bust, once the powers that be decide who gets to claim it. We’ve found ten containers of contraband so far, and we’ve got a lot more to look for. And hopefully, once we get the crew in for questioning, we can find the person in the port who helped them. Because it’d be hard to load this much crap and have no one notice unless you had help on the inside.”

  “If she’s not here, we've got to keep going. Waiting to make sure she isn’t here hurts our chances.”

  “I know, but we have to do things in steps. Don’t worry, we'll have enough manpower to clear the ship in a few hours.”