Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  Chapter Five

  We were only in the dark about thirty seconds when there was a soft, metallic click and a bare bulb softly illuminated the room. Set in the ceiling, it was covered by iron bars. A long pull chain dangled from it, with the end held between Sylvia’s finger and thumb. “When entering a potentially dark location, always seek out an available light source,” she said. She winked with her good eye.

  “Thank you, Sylvia,” I said. It wasn’t a lot of light. The cargo hold was pretty big and filled with wooden crates in various sizes. The bulb really only illuminated the open work area. It didn’t take long for people to pull or carry over appropriate crates to use as chairs. We might be in here a long while.

  Roxy was sitting on a wooden crate, wringing water from her cornflower blue skirt. The Vikings had let them keep their useless CURDS vests, and Roxy shrugged her shoulders out of hers and set it aside. The clothing would dry faster unencumbered by another layer. The others followed suit. It was just as well. Vests of chain mail would be better. We didn’t need bullet proof. We needed axe proof.

  McGrone sat dejected, no doubt still mourning the loss of his hat. I turned to him. “What were you thinking?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You took the team out on open water without first securing basic protective equipment?”

  “There wasn’t time—.”

  He had, I assumed, several excuses in his proverbial chamber and was ready to fire them at me. I didn’t let him. “Did you know the twins couldn’t swim? Did you even ask? They could have both died! All of you could have drowned out there. It would have taken less than five minutes to get life vests if you knew where to look. They may have even been on the boat, but all you did was charge ahead like General Custer.”

  McGrone stood. While he was a few inches shorter than I, his uniform and its mass of medals were still somewhat intimidating. I was hoping all those medals would rust. “And in those five minutes the smugglers would have reached the mothership and would have escaped into the Atlantic. The twins should have told me they couldn’t swim. They could have stayed behind if they weren’t comfortable on the water.”

  “The twins are professionals,” I countered. “They were following orders without question, just as you would expect them to do.”

  Agnes and Avis both came forward. I saw them out of the corner of my eye, stepping from my blind spot to the outskirts of my field of vision. I extended my hand palm out to restrain them. “Billings! Please!” they both protested.

  “No. It’s about time someone stood up to him.” Placing myself between the twins and McGrone, I stared him down. “As of now, I’m taking command of this team.”

  His face, still smelling of saltwater and kelp, was an inch from my own. “You can’t do that. If you take command, your marriage is off!”

  “And if I don’t,” I shot back, “we’ll be dead. If you interfere again I’ll leave you behind and let them keelhaul you.”

  Badger raised one finger. “They’re Vikings. They don’t keelhaul.”

  I gave McGrone a wry smile. “Rape and pillage, then. Even better.”

  I felt a heated rush of rage and fury and balled my fists. I wanted to pummel him to a bloody pulp. In the back of my mind, I knew it was fueled by the relief of rescuing the twins from drowning, but I didn’t care. I pulled back my right fist, preparing for my first punch, but my arm wouldn’t come forward again. Sir Haughty had both of his hands tightly around my forearm. When I looked back at him, he said, “No, Billings. This is neither the time nor the place. If we fight amongst ourselves we’re doomed, mate.”

  I froze, chest heaving with anger, knowing he was right. With conscious effort, I relaxed my muscles and unclenched my fists. Sir Haughty let go, meeting my eyes firmly.

  But there was no one to hold back McGrone. “Do you know who you are talking to?” he asked imperially. I didn’t think it was possible, but he moved even closer.

  I had a bullet in my chamber, too, and I took great delight in delivering it. It wasn’t as satisfying as punching him, but it would have to do. “Yes, I do. You are Samuel J. McGrone, and the only reason you are a Major is because of your father-in-law, General Maxwell Thorpe.”

  There was a moment of silence. It seemed I was the only one who had this little bit of information.

  Then, quietly, Badger said, “His wife is General Thorpe’s daughter? Secretary of Defense Maxwell Thorpe?”

  At first, McGrone thrust out his chest even further. “You are insubordinate, Mr. Montana. And I hardly think denigrating me in front of the team is the best use of our time right now.” But the information was out and a moment later, faced with the disapproving stares surrounding him, he shrunk several inches right before my eyes and fell limply backwards, dropping onto one of the many wooden crates in the hold with us. His eyes lowered and he stared at the metal deck below. It was like I had stripped him naked in front of his high school graduating class. For a brief second or two, I felt cruel, but it passed. At least he didn’t lack enough integrity to call me a liar.

  “That’s right,” I continued. “Thorpe made him a Major to keep his daughter happy. McGrone never even went through ROTC. His rank is supposed to be nothing more than honorary. It’s not impersonating an officer because it wasn’t his idea. It was bestowed on him. That was the deal. Even those medals are nothing but movie props. Miss Chiff gave him this job because General Thorpe pressured her into it. Thorpe told her he was a good military man and could handle a command. He lied. Because his daughter wants McGrone to be someone important. She wants him to be a hero. That’s why Sam keeps trying to act like military leaders he’s seen in the movies. He’s trying to be a hero.”

  McGrone said something, but I didn’t hear it. His voice was weak. He was broken.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I wanted to die a hero,” he said, sadly. “For her sake.”

  “Sir,” Nitro started to say. McGrone looked up at him, but Nitro couldn’t finish.

  McGrone waved him off. “Not suicidal. Don’t fuss. Just …” he searched for the right word, then found it. “Opportunistic.”

  Sir Haughty, who had been listening intently, asked, “Wait, I don’t understand how pressure from the DOD would influence Miss Chiff. We’re under HHS, aren’t we? Who’s Secretary of HHS? Wouldn’t they defend us?”

  “The point is it’s cabinet level,” I explained. “Any secretary can argue for a bigger piece of the pie. And the money has to come from somewhere.”

  Sir Haughty, having studied the government for his citizenship test, continued, “But we’re already getting extra funds to deal with the upcoming cheese ban. It’s only days away. They can’t change that.”

  “Not anymore. But it was on the block a month ago when Sam got this job.” I even enjoyed using his first name instead of the surname and fake rank. It kind of made up for him calling me ‘son.’ “I bet that’s why Miss Chiff kept assigning you to the counterfeiter. That type of case would be less likely to be life threatening than chasing after smugglers, but Mr. I Wanna Be a Hero didn’t like that.”

  He confessed. “You are correct, Mr. Montana. I pushed Miss Chiff, threatened to involve Secretary Thorpe if she didn’t comply.” His eyes made a brief sweep of the room. “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m a huge failure.” He spun on his butt and turned his back to us. I decided to let him wallow in self-pity for a while.

  Without taking my eyes off McGrone’s back, I said, “Roxy, this ship is heading out to the open Atlantic. Why would they store us below instead of killing us now?”

  Roxy, now extruding water awkwardly from the big bow at her lower back, said, “If they killed us here, International law would apply. We’re still in waters controlled by the U.S., Cuba, and the Bahamas and any of those countries could press charges and hold them accountable. While the open sea isn’t exactly lawless, the odds of someone pursuing retaliation against crimes committed there is minute. If they get caught, all they’ve committed here is kidnapping, a
nd once we’re dead and thrown overboard there will be no bodies to prove we were ever in their custody. They could easily escape that charge as well.”

  “So when we get far enough away, they are going to bring us up on deck to be executed.”

  “Most likely.”

  In The Princess Bride, the farm boy, despite the grandfather’s assertion that he’d been murdered by pirates, had actually escaped death by begging for his life. It had worked for the purposes of that plot, which had been broadly comedic and satirical. I didn’t think that tactic would work here, and I had no desire to even try it. “So we need a plan based on that.”

  Sylvia, one foot up on a crate while she did lunges, said, “one minor suggestion. As soon as we hear the hatch opening, everyone stare at the light bulb. Sunlight is going to be really bright after being in here. A few afterimages is better than blinding sunlight.”

  “It might not be daylight,” Roxy countered. “They would probably try to do it under cover of darkness. In which case we’d be better off turning the light off and having our eyes adjusted to the dark.”

  “Anyone’s watch still working?” I looked at mine, but the LCD screen had gone blank.

  “Mine’s good, I think,” said Sylvia. “I have 2:17 pm,” then she winced. “I think that may be Central Time. The last time I remember setting it was in New Orleans. Just a second.” She tapped a fingernail on the dial a few times, and shook her head. “It won’t connect to the satellite. The hold must be shielded.” She was probably right about that. Smugglers wouldn’t want anyone using sonar or radar to detect their cargo.

  “Close enough. That makes it 3:17 pm here. Sylvia, you’re time keeper. After 7pm, we turn off the light.”

  “Got it.”

  “So what do we do once we get out on deck?” asked Badger. “Just stand there and let them shoot us?”

  “Oh, they won’t shoot us,” I said automatically.

  Badger was skeptical. “They won’t?”

  I filled them in on the identity of these pirates. Badger was the only one who had heard of VAVAVA but he hadn’t made the connection. “I thought these guys were just Norwegians. I was going to use my phone to find out if there’d been a breakdown in foreign policy somewhere when I realized I didn’t have it.”

  I could see that the reminder of his loss was difficult for him. “You’ll get a new one when we get back.” I was thankful that no one insisted on changing my ‘when’ to an ‘if.’

  Avis and Agnes had their heads together, whispering to each other. “What is it, girls?”

  “Don’t mind us. We’re just going over strategy for an axe fight. There are a lot of moves we can’t do in that situation.”

  My mind, in a dark place already, grew darker with the image of them being sliced apart hundreds of miles from sufficient medical help. “It’s not much of an axe fight when one side has all the axes.” We had to find a way to get the upper hand as soon as possible, before hand-to-hand combat would begin. “Unless one of these crates has extra axes,” I added.

  Everyone but McGrone, who seemed not to hear me, got up and started examining the crates they were sitting on. Hope springs eternal. Sir Haughty, Badger and Nitro even went further into the darkness to drag more crates into the light, turning them to see the labeling. I looked at one near me. The labeling said it was Havarti, which was the only word on the label that I recognized. The rest was in Norwegian. Great, I thought. At least there’s a chance they are Uber smugglers. We can feel like we’re doing our jobs. I was actually fairly close to the outer hull, but tucked between the wooden crates and the wall was a stack of heavy canvas bags. I couldn’t read anything on those labels, though it had some nice pictures of flowers and vegetables. “It’s all in Norwegian,” I said. “It’ll waste a lot of time opening everything up to find out what’s inside.”

  From across the room, there was the sound of wood scraping against metal as the others continued moving crates around. When I turned, I saw that Sir Haughty and Badger had started lining up crates next to each other. “Did you find something, guys?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Badger. He walked over to where Roxy and Sylvia were team-lifting crates and bags around some wooden barrels. He bent over, squinting, to see the labeling. “This is weird.”

  “What’s weird?” I asked. I hated it when someone started going off on a tangent and didn’t share their thought process right away. I understood they wanted to be sure before saying anything, but it was annoying to have one’s curiosity piqued and not satisfied. Still not explaining, he maneuvered a crate from behind the girls and slid it out into the open, and across to where he was forming the line.

  “Wait.” With an energetic spurt, he literally jumped around the cargo hold, into the darkness, shoving crates left and right as he looked. There was a humongous commotion as he moved things around again and I was worried the Norwegians would hear and suspect us of being up to something. Once he had five crates lined up he went back and traded the third crate with the first crate, then the fifth one with the second, all the labels facing out where he could see them. They were still in Norwegian and meant nothing to any of us.

  Sir Haughty must have recognized a bit of it, however, as he, too, leaned in to examine the labels. He pointed at each one in turn as if counting things off. “Badger, are you thinking what I’m thinking, mate?”

  “Probably,” said Badger, still intent on his train of thought. “But without the accent.”

  “Would one of you please fill in the rest of us before I knock your heads together?”

  Rather than saying it right out, Badger pointed to the first crate. “According to the label, that contains Sage Derby.” He pointed to the second crate in the line, pointing to each in turn as he spoke. “Little Ypsi, Parmesano-Reggiano, Lancashire Cheddar, and Bianca. Sound familiar?”

  The rest of the team said it a second before the answer formed in my mind. “The counterfeiters!”

  Roxy took a pass by the line of crates as if she could read the labels, her long cornflower blue skirt brushing the steel deck. The alternating toes of her matching pumps peeked out in turn as she walked. “So the smugglers and the counterfeiters are the same people? I don’t get it.”

  “Not necessarily the same people,” said Sylvia. “But connected. These guys could be supplying the counterfeiters as well as Uber dealers. Multi-tasking. That’s not the only stuff in the hold. Some of this is probably Uber. And I doubt the bags and barrels contain cheese at all. Must be other stuff. Whatever there was demand for, I imagine. In any case, they know who we’re looking for. We have to interrogate them.”

  Badger was only partly impressed. “I left my spotlight and my thumbscrews in my other suit,” he said. “We’re in no position to negotiate with them. What are we going to do, tattle?”

  I saw Roxy processing legal ramifications in her head, her brow furrowed and her gaze focused on the middle distance as she concentrated. “At least we have a viable connection. It’s more evidence than we had before,” she said, conceding on our ability to pressure them.

  I saw McGrone look over his shoulder at us, curious, but still sulking. “That will please Miss Chiff no end,” he conceded. “Assuming we get a chance to tell her.” Absently, he leaned over to try to see the label on his crate, and leaned forward to check out the barrel in front of him, and other crates and bags nearby. I doubted he read Norwegian any more than I did, but curiosity is always a good thing.

  “We’re getting out of this,” I insisted. Though I had no idea how.

  Just to make things abundantly clear, Nitro, as naked without his field kit as Badger was without his phone, said, “Even if they let us out of the hold, there are at least fifty of them. With axes and arrows.”

  He curled his fingers to look at his nails. “And my fingernails aren’t long enough to scratch dirt.” With a shrug he added, “They stay cleaner that way, but they’re not much of a defense.”

  I stared at the floor. It was steel. An old-fashion
ed pirate ship would be made out of wood, and it might be possible to breach the hull and sink the ship, but we’d go down as well. This was a modern day cargo ship with a steel hull. And yet, it had sails deployed on the tall metal masts. I could feel the low thrumming of the powerful engine, but they had sails. I filed that away for a moment. We wouldn’t be able to breach this hull, even if that was a feasible idea. “Back to basics.” My mind went all the way back to CURDS Academy, to a course requirement called Weaponizing Common Objects 101, that Sylvia took first place in by breaking a donated ulna with two cotton swabs and a pencil eraser. “This is a cargo hold, and it’s more than half full. There must be something we can use as a weapon.”

  “There isn’t even anything to use to open the crates,” said Sylvia, looking around. “It’s like buying your first pair of scissors.” She suddenly remembered her knife and pulled it out of her leg holster. “Okay, a pry bar? Or do I stab a few of the bags?” She picked a crate at random and tried using her knife on one of the nails. She didn’t seem very successful, but she kept at it while we brainstormed some more.

  Badger harrumphed his disapproval. “Doesn’t matter. It’s mostly cheese. What are we going to do, make them eat the Uber? If we can tell which cheese is which?”

  “Look around and think.” I followed my own orders, looking where I could see and feeling where I couldn’t to try to find something useful. I found a dead, emaciated rat, shivered a little, and tossed it aside. There was more shuffling and scraping noises, and disappointed grumbling for several minutes. I supposed the crew must keep their crowbars, hammers and other tools up on the deck. I examined the crates, which came in a variety of sizes and shades of wood from pale pine to deep mahogany, mostly square and rectangular, most with brass corners and edge pieces. They all appeared to be nailed shut. Some of the labeling was done with plastic coated stickers, while others had information stenciled on them in red or black ink. The sides had diagonal bracing and some of the larger ones had short squat feet on the bottom corners.