Tracie lifted the box out and placed it on the deck.
Opened it and began pawing through it.
She was making more noise than she would have liked, clanking the metal tools together and against the sides of the toolbox, but was acutely aware that her window for catching up with the Iraqis was closing fast. It might already have slammed shut.
After a few seconds, she smiled. At the bottom of the toolbox, covered by a greasy set of adjustable wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, and other tools, was a magnetized key case. Just large enough to hold a single key.
Tracie plucked the case out of the toolbox and slid it open. Inside was a brass key that looked exactly like a car key. She pumped her fist in silent triumph and closed the toolbox, dropping it back inside the storage area and lowering the bench seat. Now all she had to do was make sure it wasn’t the owner’s spare house key.
She crossed the deck and climbed down inside the boat’s small cabin. Slid the key into the ignition. Perfect fit.
She left the key in the ignition and climbed out of the boat’s cabin. Stepped off the boat and onto the dock to untie the mooring. Looked up at the small building built into a slight incline in the distance.
And froze.
Walking out the door in mid-stretch, travel mug in hand, was a middle-aged man.
She had been wrong. The cabin wasn’t empty. Maybe the man’s car was parked somewhere else, or maybe he had been dropped off by a wife or a girlfriend or a buddy. Her assumption that the lack of a car in the driveway meant the cabin was unoccupied had been off the mark.
After a split-second of indecision, Tracie kept moving. The man hadn’t noticed her yet and was walking slowly, his attention on the murky sky, apparently trying to decipher the upcoming day’s weather conditions. With luck, she might be able to fire up the boat and accelerate away from the dock before he could react. She had no doubt she could disable the man, but doing so would take valuable time—time she simply could not afford.
She bent and lifted the mooring line off a dock post, tossing the rope onto the boat. It landed with a soft thud that went unnoticed by the owner, who was still too far away to have heard it.
Tracie bent as low as she could and hurried along the dock, watching the man the entire time. He had covered almost half the distance to the dock.
She stepped quietly down onto the Tequila Sunset’s deck.
And slipped.
She crashed down in a heap and heard a startled, “Hey!” from the direction of the cabin.
Scrambling to her feet, Tracie ducked into the cabin. The man had dropped his coffee mug and was now running toward the dock. In another five seconds he would be on it, and maybe two seconds after that he would be able to leap into the boat.
She cursed her untimely slip and turned the ignition key. The engine fired on the first try, sputtering and coughing for a moment and then settling into a throaty burble. Tracie cut the wheel away from the dock and shoved the throttle forward, hoping the engine wouldn’t die because it hadn’t warmed up properly.
The throaty burble became a throaty roar and the Tequila Sunset reared up like a wild stallion. It began moving away from the dock, slowly at first and then faster as the outboard engine churned the water.
Tracie glanced back and her eyes widened in surprise. The boat’s owner hadn’t slowed. He was sprinting along the dock and when he reached the end, he launched himself in an all-out dive at the left rear corner of his boat.
For one horrible second, she thought he might fall short, dropping into the water at the stern and getting chewed to pieces by the relentlessly churning propeller. But then he crashed into the side, half in and half out of the boat, and tumbled forward, landing on the deck in a misshapen heap.
Tracie straightened the wheel, aiming as best she could at the mouth of the inlet. Then she exited the cabin to deal with the boat owner. He was lifting himself heavily off the deck, apparently not seriously injured but definitely bruised and battered. He was muttering curses as she climbed out of the cabin, and when he looked at her, his shock was evident. He had expected the boat thief to be a man, not a petite, beautiful young woman.
Tracie didn’t hesitate. She took advantage of his surprise, moving forward quickly, closing the distance between them so he could not extend his arms, which were much longer—and more powerful—than her own.
“Sorry about this,” she said, “but I promise you’ll get your boat back safely.”
“You’re damn right I will,” he said, recovering from his surprise and beginning to stand. “Right now.”
“Not yet,” she said. “I need to borrow it. It’s a matter of national security.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, and began shoving her backward, apparently planning to pin her against the enclosed cabin’s exterior wall.
It was obvious he had no intention of listening to her excuses, not that she blamed him. She was sure she would have reacted the same way had the boat been hers. Still, she couldn’t afford to waste any more time dealing with him.
She allowed herself to be pushed, backpedaling in a slight semicircle to avoid crashing into the cabin. When the man suddenly stopped pushing, she used his momentum against him, grabbing his forearms and tugging. His feet scrabbled on the deck. He was off-balance and now nearly defenseless.
At the side of the still-moving boat, Tracie ducked her head and pulled with her arms and flipped him over the side. He hit the water with a splash and sank out of sight. Seconds later he surfaced, sputtering and spitting salt water, but by now the boat had churned forward twenty feet and was out of reach.
The unfortunate man screamed in the direction of the receding boat, lifting one arm out of the water and shaking his fist. His words were drowned out by the engine’s roar, but Tracie had a pretty good idea what he was saying. She promised herself that she would return his property to him in person, complete with an apology, when this was all over.
Assuming she survived.
39
Thursday, September 10, 1987
6:15 a.m.
Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the U.S. East Coast
The Iraqi boat cruised steadily northeast in the open ocean, gradually angling away from the shoreline until eventually the land disappeared entirely. Tracie had to fight the fear that the Iraqis’ real plan was simply to motor far into the Atlantic and then weight Humphries’s body down and toss him over the side.
After stealing the Tequila Sunset and leaving the secluded Maryland cove, she had pushed her stolen boat hard, assuming the kidnappers would have turned north to avoid the route their “helicopter” was supposedly taking. For several nerve-wracking miles there was no sign of the Iraqis—no sign of marine activity at all—but then, while scanning the vast expanse of ocean with a pair of binoculars she found stashed in the cabin, Tracie had spotted a tiny speck outlined against the clouds of the dirty grey horizon.
It was the Iraqis.
She throttled back to a more reasonable cruising speed and maintained a distance that would allow her to keep her prey in sight while minimizing the possibility of being spotted herself.
Tracie recalled her uncle telling her once, when she was eight years old and spending the day aboard his twenty foot Chris Craft, that people rarely did more than glance behind them while in a power boat. The tendency was to focus on what was ahead.
She hoped his theory was right, though she seriously doubted foreign nationals in the process of smuggling the world’s highest-profile kidnapping victim out of the country would act like typical pleasure boaters. On the plus side, it was a struggle just to keep the Iraqis’ boat in view even with binoculars, so she felt it was unlikely they would spot her trailing along far behind.
Unless they had marine radar.
That was her main concern. If their boat was equipped with it there was no way to avoid discovery, no matter how much distance she left between them. She tried to recall whether she had seen the distinctive rectangular radar sensor mounte
d atop their boat’s cabin when she had burst out of the woods back in Ocean City.
She didn’t think so but couldn’t be sure. She had been in shock and had only seen the boat for a few seconds before it had sped away.
Ultimately it didn’t matter. She wasn’t giving up now.
Time passed slowly, exhaustingly, as the process of maintaining constant visual contact with the Iraqis required all of her concentration. If she looked away, even for a moment, reacquiring the boat in her binocs was maddeningly difficult. The still-healing bullet wounds in her shoulders throbbed and her eyes burned from strain and exhaustion.
To help ease the suffocating boredom, she tried to calculate how far the Iraqis might be able to take Humphries without refueling and what their ultimate plan might be. They clearly weren’t taking a twenty-five-or-so-foot powerboat across the Atlantic, and if they wanted to kill the secretary of state and dump his body overboard, it seemed as though they had long ago gone far enough out to sea to accomplish that task.
* * *
Two hours passed, and then three, and Tracie began to eye her fuel gauge with concern. The Iraqi boat had followed an arrow-straight course virtually since leaving the inlet back in Ocean City, and she knew that if they continued for too much longer, she would be in danger of running out of gas. She wondered if their boat had been modified in some way, maybe with extra fuel tanks.
She glanced toward the stern of the Tequila Sunset, where two five-gallon gas cans had been lashed to the deck. Presumably they contained fuel. If necessary, she could hurry back there and add those ten gallons to her rapidly decreasing supply, but the fact of the matter was that if the situation didn’t change soon, she was going to run out of gas.
And she would lose J. Robert Humphries again, probably for good.
She glanced at her radio. Considered calling for help. Decided against it, as she had dozens of times over the last few hours. If she called on a frequency the Iraqis were monitoring, she would seal the fate of J. Robert Humphries.
She cursed and scanned the horizon, sweeping her binoculars from side to side while keeping an eye on the tiny speck that represented the fleeing Iraqis. She had observed little other marine traffic during her pursuit, and the few times she had seen other boats they had been massive freighters far off in the distance, steaming their loads toward unknown destinations.
Tracie narrowed her eyes and focused her attention on what appeared through the glasses as little more than a faint smudge coloring the sky just above the horizon, a smear of dark color barely visible against the grey water and greyer skies.
The image blurred and she blinked her tired eyes in an effort to clear them. Looked again.
It was a tiny spit of land.
And the boat containing J. Robert Humphries and his captors was heading straight toward it.
Tracie knew they were now well clear of the U.S. coastline. The compass told her they had been moving steadily north-northeast, which meant that somewhere far behind would be Long Island, protruding jaggedly into the Atlantic. But by now they were dozens of miles out to sea, far from the coast.
She wracked her brain, trying to recall her knowledge of U.S. geography. Were there any inhabited islands this far out in the Atlantic Ocean east of the D.C./New York corridor?
She didn’t think so.
She maintained her speed until she was absolutely certain the Iraqis were heading toward the island, which was gradually resolving from a barely-identifiable slash of color into a clearly recognizable outcropping of land. Tracie shook her head. The tiny tree-covered rock had seemingly sprouted from the ocean utterly at random.
Convinced the island was the Iraqis’ destination, Tracie slowed the Tequila Sunset, her previous concern about fuel now forgotten. Within twenty minutes, the contours of the island became clear. The spit of land was lush and green and small and featured a rocky shoreline but an interior bristling with trees and vegetation.
She cut the power completely and examined the island’s shoreline through the glasses. As she looked, the Iraqis’ boat disappeared into a sheltered cove that appeared to provide access to a small cabin built atop the rocks right at water’s edge.
She played the binoculars over the remainder of the island that was visible from her position and could find no evidence of inhabitation. No other homes, no activity, nothing that would indicate the presence of other people.
The small cabin, which had all of the characteristics of a makeshift lookout, had been the Iraqis’ destination. But why? What was the plan from there?
Tracie thought hard, rolling her shoulders in an unsuccessful attempt to loosen them and stop the dull throb of pain that beat in time with her heart. The damp ocean air was wreaking havoc on the surgically repaired tissue. When the effort went unrewarded, she sighed. She would have to ignore the pain. She’d done it before, plenty of times.
The Tequila Sunset bobbed in the choppy water, drifting slowly away from the island as Tracie pondered her next move.
Were the Iraqis planning to kill Secretary of State Humphries on this nearly invisible speck of land? If so, would they do it immediately? If not, what was their endgame?
She had no ready answers, but she knew she could not afford to take the chance of sacrificing her only advantage—surprise. She was outnumbered and alone, armed with only two handguns and limited ammunition.
And she was running out of time. The minute the Iraqis entered their strange-looking little shack they would likely scan the empty ocean for pursuers. The Tequila Sunset couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, she was too far away for that, but their hideaway was undoubtedly equipped with binoculars, if not a telescope, and once they accessed either of those she would be discovered.
She pictured the shack’s location, built at the edge of the water, on top of the rocks on one of the highest elevations of the island, and knew immediately that an armed assault would be difficult even under ideal circumstances: plenty of assets, equipment, intel, and a carefully constructed plan.
Her current situation offered none of those advantages. And there was no margin for error. One wrong move would result in the death of J. Robert Humphries—and probably herself—on a remote, apparently uninhabited island miles out to sea. No one would ever know what had happened. Humphries’s body would likely never be found.
She studied the interior of the powerboat, not sure what she was looking for. She needed something she could use to go on the offensive, she just didn’t know what.
A moment later she saw it and smiled grimly. The seeds of a plan began to take shape.
Tracie applied power to the throttle and turned the wheel and the boat began moving slowly west, giving the island a wide berth. After ten minutes the cabin disappeared behind the dense island foliage. After fifteen more minutes she guessed she had traveled far enough that the Iraqis would not be able to detect the sound of the Tequila Sunset’s engine.
There was still no evidence of any other presence on the island.
She turned straight at the shoreline. It was time to take action.
40
Thursday, September 10, 1987
10:20 a.m.
Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the U.S. East Coast
It only took a few minutes to find a small stretch of rocky sand on which to bring the Tequila Sunset ashore. The little strip of beach was about forty feet long, sandwiched between two massive, ancient stone ledges giving just enough room to access the island.
Once she had secured the boat, she unlashed one of the Tequila Sunset’s spare five-gallon gas cans, hefting it and hauling it off the boat. Then she began walking.
Tracie hiked counterclockwise along the little island’s shoreline, being careful to stay hidden and move quietly—she had no way of knowing what sort of security the Iraqis might maintain—while working her way steadily to the shack she had seen from the boat.
For the better part of an hour she lugged the heavy container through the island’s wooded interior, fighting her way th
rough the trees and underbrush. During that time, Tracie saw no sign of any security presence—no patrolling guards, no cameras, no tripwires. Nothing.
Finally, she caught a glimpse through the trees of the small building and stopped moving, hunkering down in the brush and observing the shack for activity. Fifteen minutes turned into twenty, and then thirty, with no sign of movement around the shack.
After forty-five minutes of utter inactivity, Tracie concluded that the kidnappers must have decided to hole up inside, waiting for whatever was to come next. She knew they hadn’t loaded Humphries back into their boat and headed out to sea while she was finding entry onto the island, because she could see the boat bobbing gently in the distance, tied up to a makeshift dock in the small cove roughly a hundred feet from the shack.
Without knowing what the Iraqis had planned for Humphries, she had no way of calculating how much prep time she had. She didn’t want to act rashly, but if she waited too long to launch her assault, things could once again spiral out of control. When an hour had passed with no sign of life coming from the shack, Tracie reluctantly decided to break off her surveillance.
She needed to act decisively. She was sick and tired of being on the defensive.
She backtracked quietly until the weathered structure disappeared from sight. Then she angled behind the building in the general direction of the cove containing the Iraqis’ boat. When she guessed she had traveled far enough, she turned sharply right and within minutes emerged from the trees almost directly in front of their moored boat.
Again she stopped and observed.
She was facing the cabin’s only door, which was closed tightly. Still there was no sign of activity.
She broke cover, keeping the bulk of the boat between herself and the cabin windows, which had all been covered with what looked like ancient, unmatched curtains. She climbed aboard, crouching as low as possible, and slipped silently onto the deck. The boat the Iraqis had used to transport J. Robert Humphries was ironically named the Freedom. It appeared well maintained.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 47
