by Chuck Dixon
“All we need is a skipper,” Caroline said. She’d done the spadework and arranged everything from her suite via the laptop. Even incorporating as an S Corp as Helen Martin-Freeborn was done in cyberspace. She closed the lid of the Alien and reclined back on the chaise in the dark of the veranda off her suite. Dwayne was here with her, with a paperback on his chest, and lulled into a half-doze by the pulse of the surf, and the dying light as the sun sank into the water.
“Good luck with that,” he said without opening his eyes.
“You don’t know anyone?”
“I was Army. We stayed off of boats.”
“There are agencies for hiring onboard personnel. I can pull resumes and see who’s available, I guess.” She opened the laptop again.
“You need someone who can keep their mouth shut.
That’s not going to be in their Facebook profile.”
“A crooked sea captain. We pay him to keep quiet.”
“No. Money’s not enough to cover what you have in mind. You need someone who can keep their mouth shut and someone you can trust. That means someone you know.”
“You don’t know anyone then?” she said, closing the lid again and setting the Alien aside. The veranda went dark, with the glow of the monitor gone.
“Hammond probably does.” He sighed.
She moved to Dwayne’s chaise and sat down on the edge. He shuffled over to allow her room. The paperback slid to the deck.
“Call him,” she said.
“Can it wait till later?”
“You promise? You promise. Promise me.”
“Yeah,” he said, and started to rise. “I’ll go to my room and get my cell. His burner number’s on it.”
She laid a hand on his chest and pressed him back down on the cushion.
“What’s your hurry?”
16
Boats
IT WAS JIMBO who remembered a guy he knew only as Boats.
Boats was a Navy SEAL that Jimbo met when they were both at SERE. They crossed paths again in sniper school at Pendleton. Boats wound up on SEAL Team 3, the outfit that specialized in everything waterborne from Zodiacs to the big ships. Unlike most SEALs, Boats actually spent most of his time, in or on the water. He worked his way up to O-2, lieutenant JG, before retiring at thirty-nine. His military experience driving boats in the Gator Fleet let him breeze through the Maritime Institute for a commercial skipper’s license.
Jimbo kept in touch with him after mustering out and knew that Boats was between gigs after two years as captain on a Liberian-registered cargo ship.
“How’d he lose that gig?” Dwayne wanted to know.
“He was dodgy on that when we spoke. But he still has his paper,” Jimbo said.
Dwayne was driving them in a rental along an unpaved road to what they’d been told was a marina a ways outside Freeport, Texas.
“Guess it couldn’t have been that bad, then,” Dwayne said.
“Or too embarrassing for the company to make public.” Jimbo shrugged.
“He’s that kind of guy, huh?”
“Unless he’s changed.”
“Sounds about right for us. So, Chaz is pussying out on us?”
“Appears that way,” Jimbo said. “It makes sense for him. I’m not gonna judge. He’s seen enough.”
“And you haven’t?” Dwayne said. “I want to see it all.” Jimbo grinned.
Dwayne pulled the rental to a stop on a sandy lot where the road dead-ended at the bank of a broad inlet. A row of masts was visible over the tree line that ran along one side of the lot. There were a couple of salt-faded pickups baking in the sun. Boat trailers rusted in the weeds.
They followed a wood-decked pier lined with anchored boats. Sea Rays and Esprits, and a couple of catamarans. At the end of the pier, a forty-foot pontoon boat with an enclosed cabin bobbed in the gentle swell. WOTTA PEACH was painted in fading letters across the bow.
“This is him,” Jimbo said.
“He takes that on the ocean?” Dwayne said. “Naw. He lives on it.”
A high feminine shriek coming from within the houseboat echoed over the water loud enough to startle a flock of terns from their roost on a sandbar.
“Yeah,” Jimbo said. “He hasn’t changed.”
The shriek turned to peals of laughter, then another shriek.
The two Rangers came to the end of the dock to find a very pretty Latina in a very small bikini being soaked by a laughing barrel-chested guy armed with a hose. He had a shock of red hair and a full beard. His chest and arms were covered in tattoos under a deep brown tan. Ropes of pale scar tissue encircled his forearms.
“Stop it, pendejo!” Her laughter was changing to anger. “I said to stop it!”
Redbeard kept laughing and training the hose on her with unerring accuracy. She stumbled around on the slick deck, sputtering in Spanglish. She reached a big plastic cooler at the stern, pulled a Dos Equis tallboy out of the ice, and flung it at her tormentor. It broke on the bulkhead behind him. He ducked a second bottle that missed his head by inches to plunk into the inlet.
“Not my beer, woman!” he bawled and threw down the hose to hold up his hands in surrender.
She stood with a bottle raised to throw. She glared at him, dripping.
“No more jokes?” she said warily.
“No mas, honey,” he cooed and stumbled toward her with arms out for an embrace. She lowered her weapon and smiled at him. When Redbeard got close enough, he gave her a shove that sent her tumbling overboard into the water with a fresh scream cut short by a plunking splash.
“She can swim, right?” Jimbo said, stepping onto the rear deck followed by Dwayne.
“That really you, Chief?” Boats said. His beard split into a broad grin. He was missing his center teeth top and bottom.
“Seriously, she can swim, right?” Dwayne said and crossed the deck to peer over the side toward the water.
“Your friend from the Peace Corps?” Boats said as he dug through the ice for a tallboy.
“He just has a soft spot in his heart for the ladies.” Jimbo caught a thrown bottle.
“That’s my problem. I got nothing but hard spots for the ladies.” Boats grinned and popped his beer with a church key slung around his neck on a chain along with a tiny gold crucifix.
Dwayne helped the drenched Latina up onto the poop. She shoved him aside. She gave Boats the finger and stormed off the boat and down the dock, unerringly aiming a middle finger back at them the whole way.
“Well, adios,” Boats said. “Babe.”
Beers were popped and introductions made. Dwayne made the pitch, and Boats leaned back on the rail and listened.
“A scientific experiment? Like a Jack Costello kind of thing?” Boats said.
Dwayne was at a loss.
“That French dude who sailed around looking at fish and shit,” Boats said.
“Jacques Cousteau.”
“Yeah, something like that,” Jimbo put in. “We need to keep it quiet. The research is kind of sensitive.” Boats came off the rail to look from one Ranger to the other with a sudden gravity.
“Don’t bullshit me. It’s not drugs, is it?” They assured him it wasn’t.
“’Cause I charge double for that!” Boats said and broke up laughing at himself.
“We’re going to need more than just a captain,” Dwayne said. “We’re just paying passengers here. We need a full crew. One that can keep quiet for the right pay.”
“You want a crew that doesn’t speak English. Better than a crew that can keep a secret is one that doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on in the first place,” Boats said.
“You can make the hires?” Dwayne said.
“The ship’s berthed at Alexandria?”
“Yes. And the owners are anxious to get it out of there.”
“Yeah. They would be, huh. We’ll need about a dozen hands. I can scrounge them up and have them meet us there. No problem.”
“Any welders in the bunch?” Dwayne
said.
“If you need them, I can make a few ironworkers part of the crew. That’s no problem.” Boats nodded. His mind was already in motion. “You have modifications in mind?”
“Most of it is work that can be done once we’re at sea,” Dwayne said.
“Away from prying eyes,” Boats said.
“You see any problems with departing Alexandria in two weeks?”
“This is strictly an expedition, so the paperwork is cut way down. If you were sailing from port to port with goods, we’d have a shitload of compliance on our hands.”
“We have a container en route to be loaded aboard, but it’s staying on board for the duration of the trip.”
“What’s the cargo?”
“This is where you stop asking questions,” Jimbo said.
Boats pressed a finger to his pursed lips and rolled his eyes heavenward.
“Can I ask about passengers?”
“Six unless someone changes their mind,” Dwayne said.
“Any females?” Boats said with a boozy leer. “One,” Dwayne said after a beat.
“Oh,” Boats intoned. “Somebody you have a soft spot for.”
“And at least one hard one.” Jimbo smiled.
“All’s I need is an advance then to clear up a few debts here,” Boats said.
“Ten grand okay?” Jimbo asked, and tugged an envelope from his inside jacket pocket.
“Shit the bed,” Boats said. “Nothing like cash, is there?” He riffled the bills in the envelope.
“We’ll be taking off from Tampa,” Dwayne said. “First class? I like to fly with my legs straight,” Boats said.
“Charter jet. You’ll have all the room you need.”
“Better yet. I’ll get to work building a crew and update you as I go along.”
“Contact us on this,” Dwayne said and handed over a cell phone. “It’s a throwaway. Our numbers are already on it.”
“Real James Bond shit, huh?”
As Dwayne and Jimbo returned to their rental, an SUV pulled to a dusty stop in the lot. Two husky Hispanic dudes climbed out. Boat’s still-dripping bikinied passenger clambered from the rear seat. She led them down the dock toward the Wotta Peach, waving her arms and squeaking a stream of rapido Espanol the whole way.
“Is this something we should step into?” Dwayne said from behind the wheel.
“It’ll give Boats something to talk about on the long voyage,” Jimbo said.
They drove away from the marina back to the county airport.
17
Money Trouble
“LEE EDWARD HAMMOND?” said the larger of the two Armani-clad stiffs standing in front of the silver S600 blocking in Lee’s pickup in his own damned driveway.
“He’s in the house,” Lee lied, and jerked a thumb at the modest tract hacienda he was calling home these days.
The pair went to move past him. “You boys cops?” Lee said.
“FBI,” said the smaller one in Ray-Ban aviators. The bigger guy didn’t talk, it seemed.
“You know Tim Farrell at the Boise office?”
“I’ll bet you just made that name up,” Ray-Bans said. “That some trick to see if we’re who we say we–”
Lee snake-punched him in the throat and shouldered him back into his little pal. The bigger guy was stepping back, clawing for his gun. Lee jerked the stainless Sig from the pancake holster in Ray-Ban’s waistband. He held it on the big man. The big man showed hands, palms open. His eyes were hard. He started to speak. Lee slammed the butt of the Sig square between his eyes. Big man dropped.
Lee turned to Ray-Bans, who was wheezing on all fours in his driveway. A stroke at the base of the neck, and he was down. The shades skittered across the driveway. “Shit,” Lee said, standing over the Faux-bee-eye agents lying doggo on his asphalt. “What am I supposed to do with you two?”
“HOW MANY FEDS can afford Italian-tailored suits?” Lee said to Ray-Bans, now duct-taped into a folding chair in his garage.
Lee tore away the tape covering the man’s mouth. There were fingers of dried blood on his scalp where his head had struck the driveway.
“And real feds would have had a picture of me.”
“Where’s my partner?” Ray-Bans said. His eyes were still hard although they phased out of focus now and then.
Lee gestured toward the garage door. The big man was trussed and gagged with duct tape and seated on the floor of the garage against the door. He had a loop of clothesline run twice around his neck and secured to the frame of the garage door.
Lee touched the button of a garage door opener clipped to his belt. The door banged and ground and rose, lifting the big man to his feet by the noose. Lee tapped the button, and the door stopped at halfway open. The big man stood on tiptoes, making strangling noises through the duct-tape gag.
“You’ll be hanging with him if you don’t get chatty,” Lee said and leaned back on a stout wood tool-bench. The pegboard above it held a selection of files, awls, picks, hammers, and pliers.
“You’ll kill him.”
“I might. That’s up to you.”
“What did he tell you?”
“You ask a lot of questions for a guy duct-taped into a party chair in my garage.”
“You’re fucked, friend. You’re so fucked, and you don’t know it.”
“Then I have nothing to lose,” Lee said and selected an ice pick from the pegboard.
Ray-Bans went quiet except for breathing through his nose. His partner’s breath whistled, and his toes scraped the concrete floor.
“Your big asshole-buddy told me you traced me through the deal I had in Gainesville. He told me I’m kind of a dead end. I’m a cut-out. You need me to talk to find out who else was in the deal on my side. And when I talked, I was no more use to you or your people.”
It was all lies; the big guy told Lee nada. He didn’t wake up until after Lee had him rigged up in the garage door gallows. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out these guys were connected to Dwayne and his egghead girlfriend somehow.
Ray-Bans glared into Lee’s eyes. His breathing became shallow. He was trying hard to not look at the five-inch spike in Lee’s fist.
“You even know who you work for? His name is Neal Harnesh, right? Some English prick, right? Think he cares about you?”
Lee dragged the point of the pick across Ray-Ban’s knee.
“It’s the money, isn’t it? It’s marked somehow. Maybe not all of it, but enough of it. No one’s spent the marked ones yet, and your boss is losing his patience. And I’m the key.”
Lee balanced the point ever so gently over the place where the knee joint joins at the meniscus.
“You tell them I was gone. Tell them I wasn’t here.”
Ray-Bans stiffened, eyes locked on Lee’s. He stank. Greasy sweat popped from every pore and ran down his face, his throat and stained his suit at the crotch and armpits.
“Tell them your buddy ran off on you.”
Lee kicked Ray-Bans in the chest and the folding chair went over hard. The little man let out a grunt. Lee held the point of the ice pick to the bent knee. He turned the handle just enough, so the needle point parted the silk stretched over the joint.
“Only first you’re going to tell me how the money was marked.”
Ray-Bans talked.
THEY FOUND THE two phony agents parked on the long-term lot, at the Boise airport. An elderly couple returning from a week in Las Vegas heard squealing and kicking coming from a car parked two slots from their Wagoneer. They investigated and were shocked to find two naked men, one wearing only sunglasses, wrapped in duct tape in the back seat of a Mercedes. They dialed 911, then took pictures of the two wide-eyed men with their cellphone and tweeted it to their friends while waiting for the cops.
#uwontbelievethis
“SOME OF THE money is bad.”
Dwayne knew it was trouble when the burner issued to him by Hammond buzzed on his nightstand.
“What’s that mean?”
“Some of the bundles were painted with UV ink. I found about five percent of my stash is marked.”
“We run it under a light, and we’re good.”
“Unless you and your girlfriend spent some of it.”
“Haven’t touched it. But we paid out everyone’s shares.” No names. Even on a throwaway.
“Call them. They can pick up a UV lamp at Walmart.”
“Then we burn it.”
“Get rid of it any way you like. Just so it doesn’t tie back to you.”
“You want to tell me where you came across this?”
“Not on the phone. We’ll talk soon.”
The line went dead.
Dwayne had two calls to make.
FOUR DAYS LATER, the offices of Wounded Warriors in Franklin, Tennessee received a large Federal Express delivery containing close to six million dollars in hundreds and fifties. No note. No name on the return address in Clermont, Florida that turned out to be a shuttered Dairy Queen on 98. The sender paid at FedEx in cash, and no one could remember what he looked like.
18
The Raj
THE OCEAN RAJ was never going to be mistaken for the Calypso.
It was an ugly hulk, painted pumpkin orange above the waterline. It resembled nothing more than a skateboard with a blunt prow and a long, flat foredeck. The bridge and crew quarters squatted aft over the engines. The main deck was empty, and the holds were battened down, making it ride high in the water where it was anchored in the middle of the inner harbor off the piers along the Kasr Raes Al Tin.
Dwayne and Boats arrived early in the morning at the harbor master’s office in the Port of Alexandria. They wanted the Raj brought into a quayside berth for the next two weeks. The harbormaster explained that he had a very big family of ungrateful children and many problems to deal with and his mother was ill, and there were no open berths available for a month or more. A discreet envelope packed with Yankee greenbacks revealed an empty mooring along a pier that the harbormaster had apparently missed, what with all the personal problems he was currently dealing with. One misses details like that when one is preoccupied. His mother was very ill, you understand?
