Off the Chart

by James W. Hall

  “I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur. An adventure capitalist.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “We’re simply skimming a little of the obscene corporate profits and letting the insurance conglomerates cover the shipping company losses. The daisy chain of high finance kicks in. The big boys passing around the big bucks.”

  “You’ve got it all rationalized.”

  “I have my morals,” Daniel said.

  “Most entrepreneurs don’t use automatic weapons.”

  “They’re just props,” Daniel said. “Have we fired one shot?”

  “But they’re loaded,” Anne said. “Guns have a way of going off.”

  “Are you having trouble with this, Anne? You want to go home, back to a safe routine? Say the word, I’ll take you back.”

  “It’s just the guns,” she said. “I told you about my parents. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, what can happen.”

  “I know,” he said. “But this is different. Your dad was skimming from redneck dopers. This is the other end of the spectrum.”

  “The sophisticated end,” Anne said.

  “The safe end,” said Daniel. “The smart end.”

  When Daniel hit a target, they usually outnumbered the crew, storming the ship in the dark, half from port, half from starboard, taking the bridge first, subduing the captain. Screaming, threatening, bashing defiant crew members with the butts of the Mac-10s, the AK-47s. In those four weeks they’d clubbed a few to their knees, left some heroes bleeding and broken, but nothing worse. Since she’d joined Daniel and his men, they’d taken everything from eighty thousand gallons of flaxseed oil to fourteen hundred new Toyota ATVs and a container ship full of refrigerators and microwaves, and in all that time they’d not fired a shot. The ships were never armed; the men were sailors, not fighters. Not a single chase at sea, not even a close call.

  Once they disabled the FROM, they handed off the ship, then one of Daniel’s Latin American accomplices piloted the vessel to a friendly port in Colombia or Venezuela, where the goods were unloaded. What happened to the vessel after that was up to his business partners. Sometimes they simply walked away from the unloaded vessel after pocketing their profit. Other times they turned the stolen craft into a phantom ship. Repainted and reflagged it, picked up another load from a legitimate shipping company, sailed away, and promptly docked at a nearby port where they unloaded the goods. Two loads with one ship.

  But Daniel wanted no stake in all that. Hit and run, that was his game. Skim the cream, leave the awkward problem of disposing of the cargo and the ships to others. Even with the camouflage of new papers and new paint, phantom ships were relatively easy targets for the Coast Guard or foreign navy patrols. For Daniel it simply wasn’t worth the risk of being caught aboard a stolen transport ship just to pilfer one bonus load of olive oil.

  It was during the first week in April while their group relaxed at the Gray Ghost Lodge that one afternoon Daniel handed Anne Bonny the latest stack of FROM printouts. In the next two weeks there were fifty-seven ships on their way toward the Caribbean Sea, most of them passing within a hundred miles of their location.

  “It’s time you chose,” he said. “You know what we’re looking for.”

  “I thought we didn’t hit ships in this part of the Gulf?”

  “Just this once,” he said. “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “Well, I’m not ready to pick the ship.”

  “Oh, you’re ready.”

  Daniel had already shown her the access codes to break into the FROM site, made her practice the steps till she could slip inside in less than ten minutes. Treating her with respect, a business partner on equal footing with him, not simply his lover. So Anne took the stack of papers and went out to the tiki hut beside the lagoon and for an hour she studied the printouts.

  “The Rainmaker,” she told Daniel later in their cabin.

  “And why that one?”

  “I liked the name.”

  Sal Gardino and Marty Messina looked on in silence.

  “You like the name. Oh, come on, Anne. Be serious.”

  “Four or five of these meet our conditions,” she said. “Cargo’s roughly equivalent in value, all headed through the Yucatán Channel to New Orleans or Galveston, an easy shot from here, all with about the same number of crew, so everything being equal, I picked a name I liked. The Rainmaker, like some old Indian chief chanting for the skies to open up. The end of a long drought.”

  Sal Gardino smiled, but Marty Messina, who’d been standing in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, grimaced and stalked away.

  Marty was a beefy man in his late thirties who only a few months before had been released from prison after serving a six-year term for running drugs for Daniel. Before Marty went to trial, the DEA offered him full immunity, witness protection, a lifetime pension, if he’d inform on the Salbones. But he hung tough, served his time, and came home to Miami expecting, by God, to be Daniel’s chief lieutenant, a role Anne was already filling.

  From their first meeting, when he realized the situation, Marty was bitterly polite, all smiles, “yes, ma’am, no, ma’am,” but he was a lousy actor. He damn well wanted to claim his rightful place. To appease Marty, Daniel had assigned Messina the role of maintaining their foreign contacts and cultivating new ones. Though it was a crucial part of the operation, Marty didn’t seem particularly satisfied.

  Daniel studied the data on the Rainmaker, humming to himself.

  “She’s a quick study,” said Sal.

  “Crude oil,” Daniel said. “We’ll have to find a buyer right away.”

  “Guy in Buenos Aires,” said Sal. “With the new refinery. Or the Texan.”

  “You want to make the call, Anne? Negotiate the numbers?”

  “That’s Marty’s job.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell Marty, have him look around, see who’s thirsty. We’ll have to off-load at sea.”

  “Still, it should be easier to get rid of than that damn flaxseed oil.”

  He paged through the printouts a moment more, then smiled at her.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s the one. Excellent choice, Anne. The Rainmaker. Now, you know how it’s done. If something ever happens to me.”

  Daniel smiled, but there was a shadow lurking in the depths of his blue eyes as if he’d sensed already what no one else had, the gleaming missile on its downward arc.

  “Oh, come on,” Anne said. “This is safer than waitressing. Restaurant work, there’s a truly perilous career. Never know what dangerous characters you’re going to run across.”

  Sal Gardino stood up, nodded his approval, and left.

  “One more year,” Daniel said when Sal was gone. “Six months if we’re lucky. Then we call it a day.”

  “You’re worried about something?”

  “Not worried, no. It’s just that my perspective on risk and danger has changed lately. Having someone I care about.”

  “If you’re really worried, we could stop now.”

  “Do you want that, Anne?”

  “What do you want?”

  He looked at her for a moment, then turned back to the stack of papers.

  “Six more months, we’ll never have to dirty our hands again.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we can retire to this lovely spot.”

  “Live in the jungle.”

  “Build your dream house, a tropical bungalow, whatever you want. It’s perfect here. Wild parrots, fantastic fishing. Like the Keys, only more pristine. Not to mention excellent tax advantages.”

  “Live here and do what?”

  “You know what.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “All right,” Daniel said. “Raise our children in the Garden of Eden, start over, get it right.”

  “Keep them isolated? No cartoons, no computer games.”

  “We’d be great parents,” he said.

  “What makes you think t
hat?”

  “Because we love each other.”

  “That’s all it takes?”

  “It’s a damn good start,” he said.

  For the next ten days, they followed the ship’s progress on the laptop.

  After taking on 840,000 barrels of North Slope crude, the Rainmaker departed from Berth 5 of the Alyeska Marine Terminal across the bay from Valdez, Alaska, on a blustery afternoon. All eleven of the Rainmaker’s tanks were full and she rode low and slow in the heavy seas of the northern Pacific. The ship was owned by TransOcean Shipping Lines, an American corporation based in San Francisco, although for tax purposes the Rainmaker was registered in Panama and flew the Panamanian flag of convenience. For the first few hundred miles the ship was battered by gales. She took eight days to steam down the coast of California and around the Baja Peninsula and across the eastern Pacific to the Panama Canal. For their purposes, the canal was an ideal choke point, funneling a huge percentage of the hemisphere’s traffic through a narrow band of sea.

  When the tanker passed through the Miraflores Lock on the Pacific side at four-thirty in the afternoon, the ship’s image was captured by a Web camera and a few seconds later the image was broadcast on the Internet Web site operated by the Panama Canal Authority. The Web camera was updated every few seconds and showed the constant stream of ships through the first Pacific lock. Sal monitored the Web site to double-check the data coming from the FROM system.

  “Headed our way,” Sal said. “Right on schedule.”

  With Anne looking over his shoulder, Sal sat at their tiny desk and tapped out the code to slip into the FROM. From this point on, they’d camp inside the Web site for the moment-by-moment updates on the ship’s position.

  “Shit,” Sal said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Daniel set aside the Mac-10 he was cleaning and came over.

  “What?”

  “There’s a lag,” Sal said. “Look.”

  Anne and Daniel leaned close to the computer. The stream of data that had always flowed smoothly across the screen, updated every two or three seconds, had slowed to a crawl.

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Sal said. “But it’s not right.”

  “Have they fingered us? They know we’re inside?”

  “Could be the satellite. Some kind of weather interference. But it’s never been this slow.”

  As they watched, the screen blinked as if the laptop were losing power; then the stream of numbers and coded letters resumed its normal flow.

  Daniel stepped back.

  “A hiccup in the transmission,” Daniel said. “Nothing to worry about. A thunderstorm over the Pacific. Lightning in Guam. No big deal.”

  “Yeah,” Sal said. “Could be.”

  Anne said, “They could do that, know we’re watching? Figure our location?”

  “If they had reason to be suspicious, yeah, top security people might be able to discover we’ve hacked the site,” Sal said. “But track us back here? Not unless they’ve got the Pentagon in on it, a supercomputer doing the work. Not some piddling corporate security system. Or it could be the mercs.”

  Daniel shook his head at Sal, but Anne said, “Mercs? What’s that?”

  Turning away from her, Daniel said, “Mercenaries. Hired guns.”

  “First I’ve heard of that,” she said.

  “There’ve been a couple of cases,” said Daniel. “Both times in the China Sea. A gang of ex-soldiers hired by the shipping companies.”

  “And what? They arrested some pirates?”

  “Took them out is more like it,” Sal said.

  “Took them out? Murdered them?”

  Daniel flashed a look at Sal and said to Anne, “The details are sketchy.”

  “But they’re out there,” Anne said. “And that’s who this is?”

  “It’s the weather,” Sal said. “Just some damn lightning storm.”

  They watched for a while longer as the data scrolled at a steady pace.

  Daniel tapped Sal on the shoulder and asked him to step outside. Sal rose, took another look at the screen, then shrugged and left. Daniel shut the door behind him.

  “Anne,” he said. “I think you should stay ashore for this one.”

  His eyes showed her nothing. A depthless smile.

  “What? You’re having a premonition? This computer thing?”

  “Just do me this favor, one time. Okay?”

  “We don’t need to hit it at all,” she said. “There’s nothing special about this one. Something doesn’t feel right, let’s bail.”

  Daniel came over to her and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “You won’t do this for me? Just this once. Stay home.”

  “What’s going on? You’re phasing me out? I’m supposed to start training to be the happy homemaker?”

  He drew his hands away as if they’d been stung. She hadn’t meant to lash out like that. But she couldn’t bring herself to apologize. He had a different look. Unsure, lost. It unnerved her, seeing him like that. The ground beneath her growing unsteady.

  He swept both hands back through his glossy hair and turned his eyes to a window in the cabin.

  “If I died,” he said, “or we got separated, what would you do, Anne?”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  He turned to her then, his eyes as harsh as she’d ever seen them.

  “I asked you what you’d do.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’d probably go home.”

  “Back to Key Largo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Back to your brother and your boyfriend?”

  His blue eyes were full of twisting light.

  “You asked me a question, Daniel, I’m trying to be honest. I’d go home, try to resume my life. There is no boyfriend. And I have no desire to see Vic.”

  “Key Largo,” he said. “Okay, that’s good. Something ever happens, I’ll find you there. That’s where I’ll come.”

  “Daniel? What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  He stared at her for several moments, then said, “I’m sorry, Anne. I’m tensed up, that’s all. I’m sorry I bullied you. Forgive me.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Of course.”

  But when he came to her and held her, for the first time since they’d met, the fusion of their bodies, that disappearance of their separate selves she’d come to expect and depend on, did not occur.

  On that steamy April afternoon, the Rainmaker passed through the Pedro Miguel Locks, Gatun Lake, and finally the Gatun Locks, then out of the Panama Canal and into the Caribbean Sea, where she went north on her last leg, following the busiest of several shipping lanes that would take her through the Yucatán Straits, up into the Gulf, then into the Mississippi, headed to the Marathon Oil refinery in Garyville, Louisiana, which was midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. She carried a crew of fourteen.

  Using two of the fishing boats from the Gray Ghost Lodge, Daniel and Anne and their crew shoved off three hours after the Rainmaker passed through the last lock of the Panama Canal. Earlier in the day, Marty Messina had set up the rendezvous with two small tankers based in Barranquilla, providing them a GPS location out in the Colombian Basin where they would converge near dawn tomorrow to off-load the crude before scuttling the ship.

  Their crew was a mixed lot. Five former Sandinista guerrillas, well-armed, quiet men who doubled as Gray Ghost fishing guides in the winter. And there were Pedro and Manuel Cruz, two Cuban brothers from Miami who’d assisted Daniel with various rip-offs at the Port of Miami before he strayed from the family business. Two others had peeled off from Vincent Salbone’s Miami crew: Sal Gardino, the young computer guy, and Marty Messina.

  Two hours after departing the Gray Ghost, they spotted the oil tanker a mile to the east, and for the next hour Daniel in the lead boat and Anne Bonny following with Sal Gardino and three of the Nicaraguans shadowed the Rainmaker as it moved north a hundred miles off the Central American coast. At that distanc
e in their high-powered craft, they could seize the ship, tie up the crew, take her to the designated meeting spot, off-load the crude, and still be back in the maze of estuaries of the Barra de Colorado by the day after tomorrow. Long enough for a watchful owner to become alarmed at losing touch with one of his vessels, but too quick to send help.

  When the sea was clear in every direction, Daniel signaled, and the boats came along opposite sides of the Rainmaker. Hull to hull with the tanker, the men readied the grappling hooks. That part hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, same four-pronged steel hooks. Only difference was that theirs were coated with a rubberized layer to soften the clang when they caught the rail.

  In recent years, as piracy had boomed, shipping companies had begun to install laser devices that sensed boarders climbing over the side. Alarms sounded, decks were flooded with light, and usually the pirates fled. If they didn’t, the tanker’s crew was usually ready with powered-up fire hoses to blow them back over the side.

  But Sal Gardino had researched the Rainmaker’s specs and her recent maintenance history and was certain she wasn’t equipped with alarms. Once aboard, Sal would only have to locate and disable the FROM system and the ship would simply vanish from computer screens.

  At Daniel’s signal, the hooks were heaved and they caught to the rails of the big ship and the rope ladders uncoiled beneath them. The Rainmaker was a midsize tanker, just under a thousand feet long and 166 feet wide. At that hour of night, with most sailors customarily spending their free time in quarters and only a skeleton crew working the bridge, it was highly unlikely a boarder would encounter one of the tanker’s crewmen when coming over the side.

  But this night was different from any before.

  Anne Bonny was halfway up the ladder, Pedro, one of the Nicaraguans, and Sal Gardino ahead of her, when she heard the first sharp pops. Her breath seized in her lungs and her hands fumbled for a grip.

  She’d practiced with the Mac-10 at the Gray Ghost Lodge target range and recognized the quick burst. And those first few shots were answered by a duller noise, the suppressed puffs of what surely were silenced weapons.

  At the railing, Pedro hesitated, gripping the rope with one hand while he struggled to unsling the AK-40 from his back. Then there was another round of firing, this one longer. Panicked shouts from the deck, and the metallic chime of slugs flattening against the ship’s iron sides. She heard Daniel’s voice, strangely calm, commanding Marty Messina to take cover.