Piranha Assignment

by Austin Camacho

  “I was wondering if there’s a back up system if anyone does get past the fence,” Felicity said. “Morgan mentioned mines, but I thought an electronic net of sensors would add a measure of confidence.”

  “I have taken care of the wooded area of the compound,” Herrera said. “There are animals. Big cats, wild boars, and the like. They pose no threat to us traveling in vehicles but anyone on foot would not last long. We have posted signs that say, in effect, that trespassers will be eaten.”

  Everyone at dinner chuckled at that. As the laughter died down, the door flew open. A man rushed in and stopped at the end of the table. Felicity took him in at a glance. His hair was a tousled brown mass. His tropical shirt’s sleeves were folded up over arms covered with thick tufts of the same hair that was bursting out of his shirt where the top two buttons were undone. His trousers were denim, his expression apologetic.

  “Sorry I’m late everybody. Got hung up in town.”

  “You’re just in time for desert,” Bastidas said with ice in his voice. “Mister Stark and Miss O’Brian, may I introduce Mister Charles Barton. He has connections with the local government which have saved me a great deal of trouble.”

  “Call me Chuck,” Barton said, plopping down beside Varilla. Felicity looked at his angular face and the pug nose that looked like it had been broken at least once. Then she stared into his dark brown eyes for a moment and without thinking, she licked her lips.

  “Down girl,” Morgan said out the corner of his mouth. “You’ll drool in your fruit cup.”

  Morgan seldom had the chance to see his partner blush, but she did at that moment. While Felicity made a point of regaining her composure, Morgan watched Bastidas slice into a wide piece of pineapple. Could this guy be the hero Roberts painted him to be? He had seemed a childish jerk in California, but in his own environment he was rather different. Dinner was good, and Bastidas was a good host with excellent manners. After his discussion with Morgan and Felicity about security, his dinner conversation touched on the areas of each of the others at the table. He showed amazing expertise in all areas, yet could express matters of physics or navigation in terms they could all understand.

  Despite himself, Morgan began to like the man. He was a born leader who dealt with all potential problems with confidence. Morgan decided to forget the affair at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He would deal with this man as the creator of an amazing scientific advance, and leader of an inspired project the Pentagon boys could have never pulled off on their own. If Bastidas was a bit eccentric, well, Morgan supposed that was the nature of genius.

  Coffee came, along with brandy and cigars. As expected, the coffee was excellent. Morgan picked up his cigar but watched his host. Bastidas held his gold lighter poised in front of his own cigar and looked at Felicity.

  “Excuse us, my dear,” he said. “Do you mind if we smoke?”

  “Not at all,” she said with obvious surprise. He smiled at her in a possessive way, but she made it clear she wasn’t intimidated. Morgan hoped she remembered what he had said about the macho image in that part of the world. After a small sip of brandy he lit and took a puff from the best cigar he had smoked in several years.

  “Well, my dear, you and your partner have seen everything of importance except the reason we are all here,” Bastidas said after lighting up. “Care to take a walk in the twilight? I wish to show you both the culmination of my genius. Soon, the deadliest thing in the water. The Piranha.”

  -11-

  Felicity was still a little disoriented. Standing on the docks she knew she was looking out at the Atlantic Ocean in front of her, yet the sun was half hidden by hills on her left. She whispered to Morgan standing beside her.

  “How far?”

  “We’re about five miles west of the main house,” he said.

  “It was a better location,” Bastidas said. “I’ve purchased much of the bay for my little private enterprise.”

  A stiff sea breeze blew her hair back and tickled her neck. They moved forward until she was standing on a loading ramp, leading to the hatch of what she saw as the world’s biggest shark. It had a sleek steel body, jet black, with a dorsal fin jutting six stories into the sky. Not the cigar shape she expected, its hull was more like a teardrop, with some odd concave styling near the front. It seemed quite streamlined and she wondered how fast it could go.

  The Piranha’s sheer size overwhelmed her. It looked almost as long as a football field. It’s nose sloped into the black water more than a block away. On her right, even farther away, a tail fin thrust defiantly into the air like a silent steel observer. On top of the conning tower, a half dozen giant hypodermic needles glinted in the giant sun.

  “What’s all that plumbing on top?” she asked.

  “Nothing of importance,” Bastidas said with a flash of impatience.

  Morgan took her arm and pointed upward. “The usual stuff, Red. Exhaust mast, snorkel, masts for radar, antennae, electronic warfare and I’d guess a couple of periscopes.”

  “Yes, yes,” Bastidas said. “Come down this hatch into the control room and see something of important.”

  Bastidas directed Felicity to go down the ladder first. She wished she was not in heels as she climbed down and dropped into a well-lighted room. The control room was sixty feet of high tech gauges, lights and screens. The entire dinner party followed her down the steel ladder into a video game palace populated with grim faced players. Bastidas waved at them with pride.

  “These men are putting the controls through their final testing phase. Here we have the usual sonar controls. This is the missile console. And this…this is one of my personal masterpieces. This is the control center for the sonic image reconstruction phase adjuster.”

  “Can you say that in English?” Morgan asked.

  “I’m sure you know that submarines are most easily detected by noise,” Bastidas said. “A good sonar man can detect an enemy submarine by its acoustic signature. We have reduced this ship’s signature to a minimum through my own stealth technology. We added a Teflon skin to reduce sea turbulence, layered over anechoic tiling which, as its name implies, absorbs sonar pulses or echoes. And we use pump jets for propulsion.”

  “Pump jets?”

  “Yes, Mister Stark, We’ve replaced the traditional propellers with ducted multi-blade rotors turning against stator vanes. Much quieter. Most important is the exterior design of the hull. It muffles both engine sounds and any noise the crew makes. The phase adjuster adds the right sonic vibrations to the remaining signature to nearly negate it entirely, or when desirable, to alter it in such a way as to imitate perfectly the acoustic signature of a whale or a school of fish. It’s simply a matter of…”

  While Bastidas launched into a scientific explanation of his revolutionary device, Morgan leaned over to Felicity, standing at the back of the small group. “Just what were you laughing about at dinner?”

  “It’s his little team of yes men,” she whispered. “When I saw them sitting there at the table, from right to left, they made me think of the seven dwarves. You know, Doc, Happy, Sneezy, Bashful and Grumpy there on the end.”

  “So am I Dopey or Sleepy?” Chuck Barton asked, leaning over between them. Before either of them could give the obvious answer, the tour moved on.

  “By the way, which of you ended up on the third floor?” Barton asked. When Felicity raised her hand, he said “Oh, so you got Matthews’ old room.”

  “Great,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  With Bastidas as guide, they moved on through cramped and crowded crew accommodations, and the forward escape tower above the provisions store. Throughout the tour the air tasted stale and even in the biggest rooms Felicity felt cramped. She handled close quarters better than most, but she wondered if there were tests to make sure people send underwater in submarines could tolerate the close quarters. They moved toward the tail, or aft as everyone else said, to stop in an unremarkable room that looked to her just like the first one she had entered
on the sub except for an elevated catwalk on one side. If this was a library she would call their location the mezzanine.

  “We stand now in the engine and reactor control center,” Bastidas said, pointing over the edge of the catwalk. “Below us now is the most remarkable technical creation of the last hundred years, a practical, functional fusion reactor, whose fantastic energy release takes place at room temperature. Through inertial confinement I was able to control a cold fusion reaction. Very powerful laser beams compress pellets of deuterium to extremely high density.”

  “What keeps it from blowing up?” Felicity asked under her breath. Bastidas turned an indulgent eye toward her and continued as if he had not heard.

  “The reaction is contained within a magnetic field created by the diesel generator below,” he said. “The power is, within practical limits of usage, unlimited, and the only by-product is pure water which is of great use on a submarine on a long voyage. My Piranha can travel underwater indefinitely, limited only by the limits of her crew. This magnificent device can be the hidden, movable launch platform for undetectable nuclear weapons. The perfect, the ultimate deterrent to attack.”

  Bastidas went on about the aft turbo generators, and explained in some detail how the nuclear power plant powered the huge undersea ship. Felicity faded out on that part, concentrating on just looking as if she was paying attention. When they moved forward through more crew accommodations and the galley, Felicity bumped Morgan and whispered, “No ego problems here.”

  “The best of men have their weaknesses,” Morgan said. “A lot of what he does is childish, including the con game in California, but look at the responsibility he has. The pressure must be intense, and he needs an outlet. None of these guys can share any of it, that’s for sure. He must need to be proving he’s a winner all the time, at least to himself. How can you blame him when you look at the financial and personal risk he must be taking with this?”

  Amidships, they viewed a map room and navigational area. While Bastidas droned on, Franciscus pulled a small black book from an inside jacket pocket and made small notations.

  “What are you doing?” Bastidas asked.

  Franciscus looked like a boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar. “Just double check some figures.”

  “Checking?” Bastidas stood very close to Franciscus and his voice dropped to a lower register. “Checking? Are you not sure?”

  “Of course, Captain. I was just being cautious,” Franciscus said.

  “Don’t be cautious,” Bastidas said. “Be sure.”

  Then his smile returned and he signaled his tour group to continue. Forward on the lowest deck, Bastidas showed his guests the storage racks and tubes for the twenty-one inch torpedoes. They moved on but by the time they reached the transducer array apparatus in the nose, even their host was growing bored. They had passed his personal triumphs.

  On the way out Felicity took a quick head count of the long haired workers and wondered how late into the night they labored. Although the Pentagon sanctioned the submarine’s creation under contract, Bastidas still handled the payroll. How did he instill such loyalty in his employees? And why was her admiration of Bastidas not growing like Morgan’s?

  When the small group climbed out of The Piranha a canopy of stars greeted them. Without clouds, the sky was a vast emptiness, and only a line where the stars ended separated it from the sea. These constellations were unfamiliar to Felicity, increasing her feeling of isolation. She noted a similar look on Morgan’s face. She took his arm and they stood for a moment on the narrow deck while the others came up out of the belly of the man made whale. Holding him close, she recited an old sailor’s prayer.

  “Oh Lord, your ocean is so vast…”

  “And my ship is so small,” Morgan said, completing the line. Morgan was the bravest man she had ever met, but Felicity briefly wondered if the courage of sailors exceeded that of soldiers in some ways. The group crossed the narrow ramp to shore in silence. She heard Bastidas whisper to Herrera.

  “They are in awe of my achievements.”

  -12-

  In public, modern men and women laugh at superstition because in the twenty-first century, all humans are reasoning, thinking beings. Unfortunately, superstitions are rooted in emotions, not reason, and in their most private moments, many do not laugh.

  Felicity O’Brian knew about superstitions. She was born in Ireland, to a mother who taught her about banshees and elves. Even after unpacking, stripping and bathing, she remained reluctant to stretch out on the murdered spy’s bed. True, he was not murdered in bed or even in this room. But, he had died a violent death and this was his last place of rest, before his final resting place.

  She reached for a piece of the fruit left in her room. She had not touched her fruit when she first arrived, but she could tell it had been removed and replaced. With the fruit knife provided she removed a slice from a large ripe mango. While enjoying her favorite tropical fruit’s sweet, juicy pulp, she examined the curtain across her window, which faced the door. She hoped it was not too sheer. To some men, she knew, a naked woman sitting cross legged on a desk chair eating a juicy mango would look like an invitation.

  Soon after entering the room, she had scanned for listening devices with a Transtec bug detector, just as she knew Morgan would do. The little tool was just over three inches long, two inches wide and less than an inch thick, but its light would blink at the slightest hint of any radio frequency transmissions. She found no bugs, but still was not sure she could not be seen.

  While she gnawed at the big mango seed, she stared at her desk. The head of the bed was against the opposite wall, next to the bathroom door. An oval hand loomed rug with a diamond shaped design lay in front of the bed. A dresser stood beside the door.

  The desk was the only furniture in the room of interest. A big old roll top, it had cubbyholes and drawers galore. The main surface held writing paper, pencils and other usual desk items, neatly laid out. She tugged at one drawer and found it locked.

  Was it possible they had not searched his desk?

  Felicity washed her hands in her bathroom and hurried back to the oak desk. A little quick work with a piece of spring steel opened all five locked drawers. Maybe no one suspected Matthews of being a spy, in which case they had no reason to check his effects. But she wondered if the CIA plant had turned up anything interesting. In any case, her natural curiosity would not let her leave a drawer locked in any room she slept in.

  The small drawer in the top row told her something about the man whose room she had taken. She found a pack of cigarettes, a couple of disposable lighters, a little currency and a key ring. One of the keys was identical to her own room key, but the other was a different cut on the same key blank. Her professional eye told her it was a pass key.

  The second drawer she opened revealed a small handgun. If it was there, the natural implication was that when Matthews left with his buddies to go drinking he went unarmed.

  The next two drawers were medium sized. One contained maps and charts showing Panama and the adjacent Atlantic Ocean. The other yielded a device that looked like the type of compass used to draw circles, except it had no pencil at either end, just two steel points.

  The big drawer at the bottom right held the most interesting prize. One hundred file folders stood in neat alphabetical order. They appeared to be dossiers on Bastidas’ employees. Each contained a photo, a description, and a short biography.

  Now fascinated, Felicity gathered the folders into her arms and plopped them onto the bed. Then, she poured herself a glass of the Evian spring water and placed it on the headboard. Sitting on the cool cotton sheets, she started going through the folders.

  She sat with one foot under her, the other on the floor. She sipped from her water as she flipped papers with her right hand. It was a warm night, and a sheen of perspiration stood out on her brow. File after file marched across her mind. The group was all male. All were either Panamanian or Americans of Panamanian
descent. All the photographs showed men in their present long hair. There was a set of fingerprints for each man. And every one of them had a life history beyond reproach.

  After looking at the same story told a hundred times, Felicity felt she needed to consult with her partner. She pulled on the black leotard and tights she had brought for exercise. She laced a pair of custom-made black boots over soft cotton socks. The boots were very soft and as flexible as a ninja’s tabi. Then she grabbed the compass-like tool, turned off her room light, and threw open her window.

  The jungle’s pungent scent blew into her room. A slight breeze sent a chill through her as the perspiration dried. She sensed no movement below and saw no sign of patrols. The sky was bright with stars, but moonless. The only sounds carried on the wind were animal cries. She felt confident there was no danger of detection.

  When she stepped out onto the wide ledge, Felicity turned toward the darkness of the room. She relaxed, placed the double pointed tool between her teeth, and reached to her right. Fingers that had scaled dozens of walls for illegal purposes gripped the spaces between bricks. She began climbing toward the roof, her fingers and booted toes clinging to the wall. She held her body away from the bricks, like a spider would.

  Morgan’s room was one floor above Felicity’s but she did not know which room it was. No one seemed to be awake, even this early in the evening. No lights shone across the entire back of the house. Undaunted, she climbed to the roof’s edge and waited.

  She hung there less than two minutes before a light came on to her right and that room’s window opened. Smiling, she edged toward it. It was very slow going, and before she reached her destination, Felicity was taking air in ragged gasps. She breathed with her mouth open, minimizing the sound she made. Twice one of her feet slipped away from the wall, but her aching fingers held fast.

  When she was directly above the lighted window, she let her legs hang free in space, and lowered herself with her hands alone. When her waist was level with the top of the window, a pair of strong arms wrapped around her thighs and lowered her easily to the floor. She smiled up at her partner’s face.