Steady As She Goes: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 21)

by Wayne Stinnett

  The cargo below the middle hold was always destined for Caracas, though. Not the busy Puerto Cabello, west of the sprawling city, but to the smaller Puerto Borburata. Mauricio knew that the cargo’s final destination would be the larger port, but they would go there in small delivery trucks. Once at Puerto Cabello, they would be put aboard a ship bound first for America, to unload their regular cargo, plus a few tons of cocaine, and then the ship would continue to the Middle East, with goods from America and the human cargo still aboard.

  What ship that was, he neither knew nor cared. The people in the hold thought Canopus was the ghost ship, but Mauricio knew this part of their voyage was nothing compared to what eventually awaited them.

  “Capitão,” the helmsman said, “we are nearing the outer markers.”

  Mauricio nodded to the man. “I will make the call.”

  He went out onto the side deck so his phone could reach the satellite in orbit thousands of miles overhead. His satellite phone had only one number stored in its memory; he tapped the Call button.

  “You are late,” the man on the other end of the call said.

  “Si, we stopped once more, near the border, for an unscheduled pickup. We are entering the channel now.”

  “What is your cargo?” the man asked.

  Mauricio didn’t know his name, nor did he know where the man was—either physically, or in the hierarchy of the cartel. But he thought that the man on the phone and the man who always met the ship at the dock, and only called himself Juan, were the same man.

  “Four steers and twenty heifers,” Mauricio began, speaking in code just in case someone was listening. “Plus, five strong bulls, and nine fine cows.”

  “That’s good,” the man said. “When will you reach the wharf?”

  “In less than two hours,” Mauricio replied.

  There was a click and when he looked down, he saw that the call was ended. The man never stayed on for more than a minute, usually half that. How many and when. That was all he wanted to know.

  Mauricio reentered the bridge, tallying the numbers in his head. The men and most of the boys were destined to be slave laborers. Few would last two years. He would be paid one hundred American dollars for each of them. The girls and most of the women were destined for some sheik’s harem and each would bring two hundred dollars.

  Some of them weren’t worth the agreed-upon rate. The younger boys and older women, he had to bargain over with the man at the wharf. The younger boys were useless as laborers, but Mauricio knew there was always an occasional Middle-Easterner who liked boys. He had become a sharp negotiator and knew which boys would be desirable to the customers overseas. If any of the women or girls were exceptional, they’d command a much higher price—some as much as five hundred.

  Cash in Mauricio’s pocket, just for picking them up and taking them to Caracas.

  The unscheduled stop had been worthwhile. He stood to make over $6,000 on this one run, on top of his pay as the ship’s captain. The extra money every month added up to nearly his annual salary.

  But Mauricio wanted more.

  He dreamed of owning his own, much larger ship, one that could cross the ocean. Then he could cut out the middleman and keep the best girls for himself, as Juan often bragged of doing.

  Soon, the ship entered the port and Captain Mauricio Gonzales moved her alongside the wharf, where lines were thrown to the dock workers. It was still dark, but the sun would be up soon.

  Once the ship was secure, he went down to the deck and ordered the crew to remove the containers from the middle hold first. They usually waited to do this last, but he wanted the human cargo off the ship before the sun came up. Then he went down to meet the man on the dock who would pay him.

  “I was told you have thirty-eight,” the man said. “The numbers I was given comes to 6,200 Yankee dollars.”

  Mauricio couldn’t tell if he was the same person he had spoken to on the satellite phone, or another cartel member. The phone distorted the man’s voice.

  “Let’s wait until they are brought up,” Mauricio said. “There may be a few you will want to discount.”

  He always allowed that Juan would want to save money on a few of the smaller boys and older women brought to him. That softened him up to pay more for the women.

  After ten minutes, the prisoners were led off the ship, their hands tied together in one long chain of human desperation.

  Juan counted them. “There are only thirty-six,” he said, as he stood at the end of the line.

  Mauricio turned to his first mate, who’d shepherded them from the ship. Miguel was the leader of a gang of cutthroats he’d hired in Cartagena. He had the blackest heart of any man Mauricio had ever met.

  Miguel shrugged. “Murieron dos ancianas.”

  Mauricio turned back to Juan. “It is expected to lose a few of the older ones after two weeks in the hold. It toughens the others for the longer voyage to come.”

  “We will start the negotiation at six thousand then.”

  Mauricio nodded.

  Juan checked out the last person in the line, a young boy of about thirteen years. He looked him over a moment, then moved on up the line, discounting one small boy and another woman who looked to be over thirty. But ahead of her were three exceptionally beautiful young women.

  “Add one hundred for each,” Juan said, then turned to inspect the next person.

  “Add two-fifty for each,” Mauricio countered.

  Juan turned and regarded him, then stepped closer to the three girls, none of whom appeared to have reached twenty yet, but all ripe and full. He examined them more closely, groping the taller one. Her eyes flashed in defiance and she pulled away, a stifled scream coming from her gagged mouth.

  Juan backhanded her, nearly knocking her down.

  “Add two hundred each,” he said with a sadistic smile. “This one goes with me. Why should a Damascus sultan get the fiery ones?”

  We ate out on the small terrace aft our stateroom, where we could see the sun rising near a group of scattered clouds.

  “Know what those clouds mean, Alberto?”

  He was lost in the breathtaking dance of light and color but shifted his gaze thoughtfully.

  “Land,” he declared. “Aruba?”

  “Very good!” Savannah said, smiling brightly. “How did you know?”

  Alberto shrugged. “I dunno.” Then he paused and glanced over at me. “You said we were in the Gulf of Venezuela yesterday and I looked on a map to find it. We started moving before I woke up, so I guessed we were out of the gulf. And Aruba is the only island out there.”

  “Well, there’s also Curaçao and Bonaire,” I said.

  He nodded. “But they’re a lot farther away.”

  I ruffled his hair. “Alberto, the Navigator.”

  He smiled and broke a piece of bacon in half, handing a piece to each of the dogs. Neither snatched it from him, as most dogs would, but gently took the pieces from his fingers.

  “Can I come to the bridge with you?” he asked.

  “For a little while,” I replied. “And only if you can be quiet. We’re conducting a passive sonar search.”

  “Is Mr. Ross up there?”

  “And so is Val,” Savannah said, then turned to me. “Why passive sonar?”

  “Jack still thinks it’s a surface ship,” I replied. “Ross’s computer has the sound signature of just about every large ship in the world. We’re tracking and identifying each sound he finds and sending it to the analysts in Bimini.”

  “And you still think it’s a submarine?”

  I shrugged as I chewed a bite from my omelet. “An educated guess,” I said. “Every surface ship operating between South America and ports in the United States is searched fairly regularly, at embarkation, occasionally while at sea, and on arrival. It’s standard protocol since 9/11. The odds aren’t in the cartel’s favor to use regular cargo ships. And the recent drug seizures would indi
cate large shipments—more than what they can bring in using boats and stolen yachts like they’ve usually done.”

  “Like that submarine you told me about that was destroyed by a couple of divers?”

  I grinned and nodded, remembering the young couple, Boone and Emily. He’d been a lanky, easy-going young American and she was a feisty Brit with a penchant for wearing green. Both struck me as highly intelligent.

  “If that cartel could do it once,” I said, “they can do it again.”

  “How much would it cost to build one?” she asked.

  “A sub like the one Boone and Emily described? Millions, if not tens of millions.”

  She stared off toward the rising sun, its light bringing out the golden hues in her hair and giving her face a radiance that rivaled any of a woman half her age.

  “They have that kind of money?” she asked softly.

  “And then some,” I said. “Those two big seizures? Each was over ten tons—a street value of about a billion dollars.”

  She turned her gaze back to me. “They lost two billion in two DEA raids, and they can still afford to build a submarine?”

  “First,” I said, “the street value isn’t the same as what they sell it to an American distributor for. And those twenty tons cost the cartel a small fraction of that to produce and ship.”

  “And second?”

  “What they lost was a drop in the bucket,” I said. “The Coast Guard seizes over two hundred tons every year, just at sea. The DEA and other law enforcement, several hundred tons more. It’s estimated they don’t even catch a fourth of it and up to eight hundred billion dollars’ worth of it hits Main Street, U.S.A. every year.”

  “I knew it was big,” she said. “But I had no idea of the money involved.”

  “By comparison, a cartel building a sub like Boone and Emily’s would be like you or me building a toy boat with a paper sail.”

  “But it’s still a lot of money,” she said. “When they can just steal boats and use them once.”

  “They lose a lot of product that way,” I said. “Some get busted because they’re stupid, some toss a few kilos overboard out of paranoia, and some of it is just outright stolen by others. Larger shipments give the cartels more control.”

  “So, you’re convinced it’s a sub?”

  “Not completely,” I replied. “Jack has more intel than I do. So, we’re listening for surface ships, three hundred and sixty degrees, top to bottom.”

  She smiled. “A surface ship on the bottom?”

  “He didn’t say to not look for subs,” I replied. “The cartels can’t build a nuclear sub, at least not yet, so there will be some noise from an electric or diesel-powered one. And it’ll be a noise Ross’s computer can’t identify.”

  “Y’all go ahead,” Savannah said, rising and picking up the empty plates. “I’ll come get Alberto in a little while for his lessons.”

  “Aw, do I have to?” the youngster whined.

  “You know very well you do. Today’s Monday. Just because there’s something more interesting going on up on the bridge doesn’t get you out of your responsibilities.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he moaned, rising from the table.

  He and the dogs followed me back through our quarters and forward to the command bridge. I glanced into the op center as we passed and saw several of the tech people with headsets on and computer screens lighting their faces.

  “Good morning, Alberto,” Val said.

  “Hi, Miss Val.”

  The dogs split up and positioned themselves next to the two side deck hatches. They did a lot of things like that without having to be told. Woden had undergone months of intensive protection training, and part of that had been training him to be situationally aware—to always look for and block methods of entry. Finn had just picked up on what Woden did. Over the years I’d seen this same teaching and learning behavior in other animals, like dolphins.

  “Contact reports, Captain,” Val said, handing me the bridge Metis tablet.

  As I scanned the last hour of contacts and maneuvers, Alberto went over to where Ross was hunched over the sonar screen.

  Without a word, Ross picked up a second set of headphones and handed them to Alberto, who put them on and took a seat beside him.

  “Contact fourteen, bearing zero-four-seven degrees,” Ross said. “About two hundred nautical miles. Computer identified as a coastal freighter, the MV Canopus. It’s a Venezuelan-flagged merchant ship of four hundred feet, now leaving the Port of Borburata.”

  “It’s noisy,” Alberto added.

  I grinned and looked at the readout on the Metis. The Canopus had been built in the early 1960s and carried all kinds of goods back and forth along the coast from Brazil to Venezuela. A sixty-year-old diesel-powered ship would certainly be noisy.

  “Is that the fourteenth you’ve identified in the last hour?” I asked Ross.

  “Yes, sir. Monday mornings get pretty busy down here after sunrise.”

  Ross had been a part of Ambrosia’s crew for over ten years. He’d started as a deckhand, as most do, but John Wilson had seen something in the young man and had spent time teaching him the finer points of identifying underwater sound. Ross had taken over for another sonarman about the time I first encountered Ambrosia. Some ships, like the massive Maersk cargo ships, he didn’t even need the computer to identify. They ran regularly scheduled trips and he’d encountered them many times.

  “Helm, come right to course one-seven-zero true,” I ordered. “If it’s busy, let’s get in behind the ABC Islands.”

  “One-seven-zero true, aye,” Axel replied and turned the wheel to starboard.

  After a moment, Axel straightened the wheel and said, “Course is one-seven-zero, Captain.

  “Following a hunch?” I heard Savannah say from behind me.

  I turned and smiled at her. “Just being prudent. Ross says shipping traffic gets busy in these parts on Mondays. We don’t want to miss something behind an island.”

  Sound travels great distances underwater. If the sound is noisy enough, like the big diesel engines in large cargo ships, a land mass is the only thing that can block it, whether that be the relatively tiny island of Curaçao to the east of our position, or the continent of Africa far beyond the eastern horizon.

  A submarine operating on electric power underwater wasn’t a noisy freighter, but even a rudimentary electric sub’s sound would get lost in the background noise of the ocean. We’d have to be within a few miles for Ross to pick its sound out of the clutter. So, if my idea was right, it was like looking for a needle in a field full of haystacks.

  “Contact fifteen,” Ross reported. “Vessel identified as E Pioneer, a Cyprus-flagged tanker, bound for Port La Cruz.”

  “Puerto La Cruz,” I corrected him. “You wouldn’t call the U.S. island in the northern Caribbean Port Rico, would you?”

  “Sorry, Captain,” Ross said. “There ain’t a lot of Spanish spoken back home in Oklahoma.”

  Savannah touched Alberto’s arm, startling him. “It’s time for your lessons,” Savannah said, after he’d removed his headset. “But you need to walk the dogs first.”

  He looked up at me and I only nodded.

  “I’m off duty in two hours,” Val said to Savannah. “How about I drop in and help Alberto with his math?”

  Savannah was an intelligent woman, but math had always been her weakness. She’d struggled to teach Flo, until the advent of online learning.

  “Thank you,” Savannah replied. “I’ll make some tea.”

  Alberto smiled up at Savannah. “I’ll take ’em out now and be back in a few minutes.”

  He left the bridge by the port hatch, both dogs following dutifully behind him. Having dogs on a boat created a lot of small problems, not the least of which was waste management.

  Woden couldn’t be bothered about it. He’d grown up on Savannah’s big Grand Banks trawler and since he was a pup, his only
option had been the swim platform, where Savannah would just wash it down with a hose.

  But Finn preferred something more natural. On the aft end of the side deck was a patch of real grass, often the only grass for hundreds of miles.

  Growing grass on a boat wasn’t easy, but Jack also had a dog, a golden retriever, and assigned one of the crew to maintain the turf patch to the same standards as most golf courses. The large tub it was built in drained overboard through a hull fitting below the waterline or into the ship’s holding tank.

  We continued south-southeast for another three hours, and the monotony began to set in. Val left the bridge. The sea flowed past. The never-ending blanket of blue reflected the sunlight, sparkling at times. I had Axel turn east-southeast, to follow the coast a little closer.

  I’d had men under my command in the past. Before retiring from the Marine Corps, I’d been a scout/sniper instructor. After that I’d worked with Homeland Security on occasion, and for several years now, Armstrong Research. But the crew of Ambrosia was exceptional. Jack Armstrong had hand-picked nearly every man and woman on board. They were mostly college-educated, intelligent, and well-paid.

  They seemed to revel in the technical abilities of Ambrosia and worked tirelessly through long, monotonous periods. Many of the crew were scientists, perfectly suited to conducting slow, methodical searches.

  This wasn’t the kind of action I enjoyed, though. It was tedious work. Fifteen knots covered less than four hundred miles of ocean a day and we’d been on assignment for a long time already—searching and listening. I was more of a kick-in-the-door-and-bust-some-heads kinda guy. I had a methodical mind, but monotony got under my skin. Long periods of repetitive work made me edgy—unless it was mindless work with my hands.

  “Contact thirty-one,” Ross’s voice droned, describing the ship I instantly saw on my Metis, another container ship hundreds of miles away to the east.