Rising Water

by Wayne Stinnett

  “Sidney Every. Right here,” Sid said, from somewhere in the cockpit out of my sight.

  “I’m Lieutenant Harper. I’m here to take you all aboard my ship for a debriefing. I don’t normally join the boarding party, but… where’s your captain?”

  “Up here, Lieutenant,” I called down. “Permission to come aboard. Join me up top, if you would.”

  As he came up, I saw Emily start to follow. Boone stopped her and whispered something in her ear.

  “You’re Captain Buchannan?” Lieutenant Harper asked, as he came up to the flybridge.

  I motioned toward a chair behind the helm and he sat down. “No,” I replied quietly. “My name is Jesse McDermitt. You should be getting a call—”

  The microphone on Harper’s belt squawked. “Lieutenant Harper, bridge.”

  “Excuse me,” he said, reaching for the radio. “Harper.”

  “Yes, sir,” the voice said over the small radio. “We just received a high-priority message from Fleet Com, sir. We are not to detain one Jesse McDermitt any longer than necessary.”

  “Roger that,” Harper responded, as he looked over at me, and clipped the radio back to his belt. “You seem to have friends in high places, Captain McDermitt. Just who the hell are you?”

  “That’s classified,” I replied. “Suffice it to say that I need to be on my way. For the record, the captain of the first boat to respond to the sinking of the terrorist’s sub was Stretch Buchannan, no first name given. Captain Buchannan was fifteen miles away when the incident occurred and said that when he arrived on the scene, he saw nothing except debris in the water and the people who called the mayday.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’ll file an official report later and it will be forwarded to the commanding officer at Second Fleet Headquarters. His eyes only.”

  “Is there anything else we can do?”

  “No, thanks,” I replied, standing. I extended my hand and he took it. “Thanks for your service, Lieutenant Harper.”

  Glancing down, he noted the Force Recon tattoo on my forearm. “Yours, too, sir.”

  He descended to the deck and joined the others. “So, Captain Buchannan has been cleared.”

  Emily nudged Boone and he just shrugged. Harper continued, “You three will be joining us. The Dutch navy has been made aware and is letting us handle the debrief. Afterwards, we’ll return you to Saba.”

  After Boone, Emily, and Sid stepped over onto the tender, Boone turned and looked up to where I stood on the flybridge. “Stretch! Thanks for the assist. And good luck with the rest of your cruise.”

  I grinned. “Here’s hoping it’ll be smooth sailing for all of us. You kids try not to sink any more boats, ya hear?”

  My sat phone rang again. When I picked it up, I saw that it was John. I stabbed the Talk button as the launch pulled away and headed back toward the Tornado. “I’m on my way, John. Got delayed a couple of hours by a mayday call.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Did you blow it up?”

  “No,” I replied, sitting down and putting the boat in gear. “Believe it or not, a couple of divemasters and a Saban police cadet rammed it. The terrorists blew the explosives.”

  I could hear John laughing. Finally, he said, “You can stand down on Norman Island.”

  “Stand down?”

  “Now, son, I might be old and have zero depth perception,” John said, “but I ain’t dead yet.”

  “What’d you do, John?”

  “Just helped a young man on his quest to find seventy virgins. Guess that makes me a pimp.”

  The image of John Wilson taking out the handler of a terrorist cell brought a smile to my face. “So, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Mission accomplished, son. You’re free to move about the ocean, but I’d keep a weather eye to the east.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Might not be anything,” he replied. “But the NHC is watching a tropical wave building over western Africa this afternoon.”

  The National Hurricane Center doesn’t waste time and money. But that far away, even if it did become a hurricane, it would be a good ten days before it could reach the Caribbean.

  “It’ll be after dark before I can make it,” I said, as I watched the Tornado retrieving the fast boat. “But if you buy me a beer, I’ll tell you all about it, then you can bring me up to date on the storm that’s brewing.”

  “You’re on.”

  I ended the call and went down to the command bridge. The Tornado was three miles away and was soon making fifteen knots. I slowed and shifted the main engine to neutral. There was a metallic click as I pressed on a section of the dash and a panel popped up slightly. I raised it fully open, exposing the gauges and ignition switches for the compact Mercedes engines. After starting them, I shut down the main engine, then went down to the salon and opened the engine room hatch.

  Switching the transmission from one engine to two had to be done manually, by first disengaging the main engine’s output shaft through a manually operated clutch, then engaging the two engines mounted on either side of it. The main engine was a direct drive, with no gear reduction. If the engine turned at 1000 rpm, so did the propeller. The specially built transmission geared the auxiliary engines down by half, so if they were running at 1000 rpm, the prop was turning at 1500.

  Back on the bridge, I put the transmission in gear and slowly moved the single throttle to quarter speed. The twin Mercedes engines were linked through a computer controller to maintain equal engine speed using a single throttle control. Floridablanca’s speed quickly climbed to ten knots, and I again turned toward the northwest.

  Once the Tornado was out of sight, I slowly pushed the throttle up a little higher, until Floridablanca began to climb up on her own bow wave. Soon she was crashing through the light chop at twenty-five knots. That would allow me to make up a little time without looking too conspicuous.

  I arrived in Bight Bay at 2130, after stopping a few miles offshore and switching back to the main engine. I motored toward the little restaurant and bar on the easternmost shore. Pirate’s Bight was lit up, and I could hear music. It was Saturday night, and the bar was in full swing.

  Pirate’s Bight is an upscale place right on the beach, with dozens of lounge chairs laid out in rows on the sand, each with its own blue umbrella for the sun-sensitive tourists. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I wasn’t planning to stay long. In fact, I hadn’t even cleared through customs. If I stayed through the next day, I would go up to one of the ports of entry on the northern islands.

  Norman Island is most noted for being the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Treasure Island. Outside of fiction, the island really did have a reputation for buried pirate treasure. After a mutiny, the crew of the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe buried dozens of chests of silver coins there. Some had been found over the years and people often came to the island to search for treasure. Like me, they didn’t always arrive legally.

  I anchored in twelve feet of water instead of grabbing a mooring ball. That seemed the logical thing to do when entering a country illegally. No sense giving my name and boat name to the harbormaster. There were at least ten other boats moored or anchored nearby. I backed down with seventy-five feet of rode, most of it being half-inch chain. There was no current in the bay, so all the boats were pointing to windward. Satisfied, I shut down the engine and within minutes had the dinghy in the water.

  Puttering up to the sandy shoreline, I pulled the dinghy up alongside a couple of others, then trudged up toward the blue-roofed bar at the far end. John was just coming down the steps to the sand.

  “Saw you when you entered the bay.” John stared wistfully out at Floridablanca.

  I shook his hand. “Having second thoughts?”

  “About you?” he said, turning toward me with a wry grin. “Not a one. Come on in. Let�
��s have that beer.”

  The room was raucous—the music loud and people shouting to be heard over it. More than a dozen couples were on the dance floor. Colored lights swept over them and flashing lights seemed to freeze them in wild gyrations.

  John had a table in the corner overlooking the beach, far from the stage and dance floor. Once seated, I could look over the whole bay.

  “So, a local cop and a coupla divers got it?” he asked, his voice raised enough to do battle with the music, but not so much anyone but me could hear.

  “Not yet a cop,” I replied, raising my voice slightly. “He was a trainee. The two divers were divemasters who just arrived from Bonaire. Apparently, they were the first to spot the sub during a shore dive off Bonaire a few days ago.”

  John raised his bottle. “Well, here’s to sharp-eyed divemasters.”

  A second beer was already sitting on the table, full, with condensation dripping down the sides. I picked it up and touched the neck of his bottle with it.

  “I thought you were retired.”

  John drank down the last of his beer and waved the empty toward a passing waiter. “Yeah, well, Jack thought a second pair of ears on Floridablanca wouldn’t hurt in the search.”

  During my submersible training, I’d learned John’s ear was so sharp he could tell the difference between different outboards.

  “And the handler?” I asked.

  “A bonus for being in the right place at the right time.” He sat back in his chair and fixed me with his one eye. “Jack has a person here, not really on the payroll, just someone he trusts who keeps their eyes and ears open. This person identified the guy, name of Omar Sarif Salib, from a list of known terrorists abroad. We had a man on his way to take care of it, but Salib just sort of fell into my lap, so to speak. He needed a boat to take him to Saint Thomas, and I had one.”

  “He might have killed you before you got him there.”

  “I was counting on him trying, son. Halfway over, Salib made his move against me, thinking I was a helpless, one-eyed old man. Came at me with a jambiya.”

  “What happened?”

  “Never bring a knife to a gunfight,” John replied, with a wry grin. “I put a 9mm round right between two of the most surprised eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  I appraised the old man under a new light. I knew that he’d once been an Air Force special operator, but that had been years ago. I knew little else about his service.

  The waiter placed another bottle on the table, and I waited until he turned away. “And the body?”

  “You ain’t squeamish, are you?”

  I raised an eyebrow in mock indignation.

  “I have a house here,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Right up there on the hill. Keep a little thirty-foot center-console here in the bay, for whenever someone wants to go out fishing. Sometimes they’ll want to display their catch for a picture at the docks. So, I have a special hook, a foot long, to hoist up the big ones. Sunk it into old Salib’s shoulder, just behind the collar bone, and worked it down under his rib cage until it came out below the sternum. Then I shackled it to a thirty-pound mushroom anchor. He’s at the bottom in 2000 feet of water, feeding those six-gill sharks and searching for his virgins.”

  “Sounds messy,” I said.

  “It’s a fishing boat, son. I probably pumped enough fish blood out of the bilge to fill a couple of barrels. What’s a little more? Nothing to worry about, though. The boat’s on its way to a marina in Puerto Rico to be hauled out and steam-cleaned inside and out.”

  From where we sat, I could also see along the side of the open-air bar to the front, where I knew there was a road of sorts. There were loud voices out there, but I couldn’t see anyone.

  John heard the racket too and leaned over the rail. “Something’s going on out there.”

  There was a high-pitched scream, and John and I both rose and leaped over the low railing.

  For his age, John moved surprisingly fast. We both sprinted along the side of the building, dodging several people who’d come out to see what the commotion was about.

  When I reached the front, I saw three men and a woman, all dressed in pale blue, pulling away in one of those off-road electric golf carts. The cart went up the road to my right, and I sprinted after them, while John fell back.

  The vehicle was moving uphill, so I leaned into it, my legs carrying me slightly faster than the cart. Catching them would be the easy part; stopping them would be a little trickier. I angled into the right-hand rut of the trail, my feet kicking stones loose as I ran. My intention was to stop the cart by yanking the driver out of the seat.

  The taillights illuminated the two in the back, both facing aft. A man held the woman tightly against him. He reached under his shirt and pulled a gun out. I immediately dove to the left, landing behind a large rock.

  No shot rang out.

  “Where’s this road go?” I asked John as he reached me. The lights of the cart had disappeared over a rise.

  “It loops back around to the beach,” he said, breathing heavily. “But other trails branch off to go down to the caves on the south side and out to the cliffs on the windward side.”

  “Recognize them?”

  “Not exactly,” John replied, as we trotted up to the rise.

  The cart was gone.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, standing there in near total darkness.

  “There’s a group out on the east end, sort of a commune. They all wear light blue clothes, sometimes just a T-shirt, but usually a toga-like thing.”

  “A commune? Like in the ’60s?”

  “They have a small one here, but the main camp is up on Tortola.”

  There was nothing we could do, so we started down the hill.

  “I don’t think that girl was with them of her own accord,” I said, as we neared the main entrance to the restaurant.

  “She was wearing the shirt,” John said. “They’re a weird bunch up there. Talking love and peace all the time, drug-addled smiles on their faces, but sometimes at night it sounds like a crazy orgy. There’s a fence and sentries around the property, so you can’t get close, not that you need to, with all the noise they make. Harmless hippies, mostly.”

  “The guy on the back of that thing pointed a gun at me.”

  “You sure?” he asked, as we reached Pirate’s Bight.

  There were a number of people milling around outside. Some were obvious locals, but most were visitors—all of them were young.

  “I’ve had a gun pointed at me before, John. It was a Glock, either a 9mm or .40 caliber.”

  “Got that good a look, huh?”

  “John,” a young black woman called out, moving toward us. “What is going on out dere?”

  “Nothing, Mitzi,” John said. “Just that group from up on the cliffs.”

  Mitzi wore a black apron around her narrow waist, and a crisp white linen shirt over a black skirt, both amply filled. I assumed she was one of the bar or restaurant staff. Her skin was nearly as dark as her apron, smooth as polished obsidian. But her eyes were what caught my attention. Big, light-brown eyes, almost orange, with sort of a cat-like quality.

  “What was di scream about?” she asked. “It sound like a child.”

  “You know how they get sometimes,” John said, holding the door and motioning the others inside. “Screams, moans, laughs, all kinda noise.”

  “If you ask me,” she said, following the others in and talking over her shoulder, “those people are possessed by di devil hisself.”

  Back at our table, I leaned over and asked John, “What about the gun?” The band hadn’t started back up yet.

  “There aren’t any cops on Norman Island to call,” he replied. “And just a handful up on Tortola. Guns aren’t permitted anywhere in the BVI.”

  “Not permitted is a lo
t different than not found. I know of two people on this island who have guns.”

  Mitzi came over from the bar with two more beers. “Try dis, gentlemen.” She pulled out a chair and joined us.

  I looked at the bottle. It had a colorful label proclaiming it to be Island Hoppin’ IPA, from St. John Brewers. The label showed a deHavilland Beaver similar to my own Island Hopper flying over the bay.

  “I don’t like those Onayan people up dere, John,” she said. Then she turned and smiled at me. “I am Mitzi Lettsome, di manager.”

  “Where are my manners?” John said. “Mitzi, this is my friend Jesse McDermitt, out of the Florida Keys. We work together sometimes.”

  Her smile diminished slightly but was still bright. “You are a fisherman, too?”

  “Only when I have to,” I replied, taking a tentative sip of the cold beer. “Very pleased to meet you.”

  “Likewise.”

  “Why don’t you like those people?”

  “Gilbert Mashonay came here about three years ago,” John said. “Bought a defunct tree farm. A self-proclaimed spiritual teacher.”

  “At first, he liked to throw money around,” Mitzi added. “Handsome man, but he know it. It is not good for a good-looking man to know dat he is pretty. He bought a tract of land up on di bluff right away, and within a month dey start buildin’. One big house at first, den many small ones.”

  “Is that why you don’t like them? Over-developing?”

  “Dey just weird, I tell you,” she said. “Strange people start to arrive soon after dat. Mostly young people, but a few older ones, too. Dey all have dat same far-away gaze as di Myoo.”

  “Myoo?” I asked.

  “That’s what they call him,” John said. “I’ve heard some call him Onay; the last four letters of his name. I guess those are the ones closest to him.”

  Mitzi shrugged. “I looked on di internet. A myoo is a teacher. It means enlightened one in Zen Buddhism cultures. I think dey growing ganja up dere.”

  I chuckled. “Wouldn’t be the first time somebody on one of these islands turned to that.”