Rising Force

by Wayne Stinnett

  Finally, the mailboat arrived. The captain looked like an old salt, his hair snowy white and deep wrinkles in the skin of his face, which was the same color as the mahogany rails on the old diesel-powered boat.

  “Got room for a few passengers to the next stop, Mick?” Brayden called to the skipper as he helped unload several large canvas bags. A young black man, no more than fifteen, handed them over the rail.

  “Sure,” the old man replied. “Five apiece.”

  “Five bucks for a ride across the TOTO?” I whispered to Kat. “That’s a helluva deal.”

  “None of which goes to the company that runs the boats. Mick’s a cool old guy.”

  Brayden carried the half-full mailbag and the empties aboard and placed them in a box on the starboard side.

  “You’ll be back before dark?” Macie asked Brayden, who looked over at me.

  “By mid-afternoon,” I said. “We’re going fishing, right?”

  Cory, who had been passing out packages and letters from one of the bags, laughed. “Friday is crab picking.”

  We said our goodbyes to the others. The Bourgeau brothers were nowhere around. Glancing out toward what I assumed was their Beneteau, I noticed the dinghy wasn’t there.

  The mailboat was an older vessel, about forty feet, but it looked clean and well maintained. It had a high bow, a fully-enclosed pilothouse, and a cabin that looked like it would have only a head and watch bunk. In another life, it had probably been someone’s fishing boat.

  The tiny pilothouse was big enough for two people to get out of the weather, and that was about it. On the foredeck were two large boxes, port and starboard—perhaps fish boxes in another time. Each was marked with the destination the mail bags inside it were bound for: Chub Cay and Fresh Creek.

  Brayden dropped the bags he’d brought aboard into the Chub Cay box and stretched out on it, his back against the pilothouse. Kat and I sat across from him on the Fresh Creek box, as the boat idled backward away from the dock.

  Mick expertly turned the single engine boat in the small confines of the marina and pointed the bow toward open sea. The younger man then stepped into the pilothouse and Mick joined us on the foredeck.

  “Get yuh legs off my box, boy,” he ordered Brayden, who quickly stood, grinning.

  Brayden and the old man shook hands. “Mick, you remember Kat, don’t you?”

  As the younger man throttled up to about ten knots, the skipper turned toward us, unaffected by the acceleration or the rocking motion of the slow boat.

  “Why yes,” he said, bowing slightly, and removing a salt-stained captain’s hat. “Dis girl get prettier every time I see her. How are yuh, Miss Kathleen?”

  Kat smiled, thanked him, and introduced me. I stood and offered the skipper my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Captain.”

  He took my hand. Though he was a slight man, probably no more than a buck-fifty in weight, his grip was deep and firm, his forefinger on my wrist.

  “Heard about yuh,” he said, his ebony eyes seeming to pierce my own. “Word in di islands is yuh were part of dem people dat busted up di druggie business over dere on Cat Island some time back. If yuh be dat mon, yuh have my thanks. If dat wasn’t, happy to meet any friend of Kathleen.”

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” I said by way of reply.

  “Dat so?” he asked, his eyes sparkling. I could tell he was the kind of man who rarely tipped his cards. “Den I am happy to meet you, Cap’n.”

  While the younger man piloted us out into the ocean, we all took seats on the boxes, Mick next to Brayden.

  “I let di boy drive di boat,” Mick explained. “He’s my grandson’s grandson. But di rules say dat I got to do di docking.”

  “Government rules?” I asked.

  “Mick’s rules,” he replied with a grin, exposing two rows of straight white teeth. “Yuh ain’t never seen dis boy try to dock a boat.”

  I looked back toward the young man at the helm. He seemed quite content to just be on the water. I knew that look.

  “Your great-great-grandson?” I asked, dubiously. “How old are you, Mick?”

  “I am ninety-two years in ’bout two months,” he said, with defiant conviction. And with good reason.

  He went on to tell us that he’d been running a mailboat in the islands since America’s prohibition, sometimes running rum into Palm Beach. In all those years, he’d never missed a run.

  “A lot of folks got rich in dese islands runnin’ rum,” Mick said. “I was still a boy for most dat time, but I took some barrels to Florida when I was no older dan dat boy at di wheel.”

  Mick entertained us with stories of the islands as they were in years and decades past. He talked about old boats and old friends, and the occasional odd character or celebrity that rode his mailboat. The crossing took two hours, but it didn’t seem so.

  When we arrived at the dock in Fresh Creek, Brayden and I helped unload the port box. At eight feet long and three wide, it was packed nearly full of Bahamas Postal Service mail bags.

  Mick pulled the driver of the small mail truck aside once he’d loaded the outgoing mail bags, and said something to him.

  “Where yuh be goin’?” Mick asked Brayden.

  “Gonna catch a cab to the airport, mate.”

  “Dis man will take you dere,” Mick said.

  Fishing my money clip from my pocket. I handed Mick a twenty. “Thanks for the ride. And the entertainment.”

  He pocketed the bill and grinned. “A pleasure, Cap’n.” He tipped his hat to Kat. “Miss Kathleen.”

  The three of us, along with the driver, carried the bags to his truck and tossed them in the back, climbing in and sitting on the sides of the truck’s bed.

  The ride to the airport took nearly an hour, with a stop at the post office, just a few blocks from the dock. We helped the driver unload and climbed back into the beat-up old truck. I could have called a friend who lived up above Nichol’s Town to pick us up, but that would’ve been several hours out of his day.

  When we arrived at the airport just after noon, a young Bahamian man was at the counter. He wore coveralls with a name tag that said he was Derrick.

  “My name’s Jesse McDermitt,” I said, when he looked up. “My friend, Gabriella Fleming, called you?”

  “Ah, yes suh, Mister McDermitt,” the man said, smiling brightly. “I have Miss Fleming’s helicopter out on di tarmac. I checked her over real good and spooled up di turbine for ten minutes dis morning. No problems at all.”

  “You’re a pilot as well as maintenance chief?” I asked. He seemed young, but lately most of the people I’d met had seemed young.

  “Yes, suh, rotary and fixed wing,” he replied, handing me a set of keys. “Please follow me.”

  He walked us out through the back of the building. Charity’s bird had a new paint job since the last time I’d seen it. It was solid black now, with a logo proclaiming it to belong to Tropical Luxury Magazine.

  Derrick left us by the bird, and I unlocked and opened the doors, then walked all the way around the chopper, inspecting everything.

  “Kat, you ride in back and help me look off our starboard side, and Brayden can watch the port side.”

  A few minutes later, I had the turbine running and went through the pre-flight checklist. Contacting air traffic control in Nassau, I requested a VFR flight plan, touring the Berry Islands, and stopping for the night at Chub Cay. Once I received clearance, I brought the helo up a few feet off the ground and taxied to the runway.

  Minutes later, we flew over my friend Henry’s little marina on the northeast shore of Andros, then out over open water. I leveled off at thirty-five hundred feet with a heading of twenty-five degrees. Chub Cay and the turquoise waters around the southern Berry Islands were just visible ahead.

  As we crossed the northern edge of the dark blue waters of
the TOTO, and the islands became more visible, I turned a little more easterly, heading toward the southernmost of the small island cluster, Whale Cay.

  I adjusted my microphone and pointed down at the pale-blue shallow waters to the left. “That’s where we saw it yesterday,” I said. “It was headed northeast, up there just north of Whale Cay. We’ll circle around all the Berries counter-clockwise and have a look at each island.”

  “Can you go lower?” Brayden asked.

  “No,” I replied. “We’re at the limit now. Once we turn more westerly, we can drop down to twenty-five hundred feet to avoid IFR traffic.”

  “What traffic?” he asked, looking over at me.

  I shrugged. “Rules are rules.”

  I flew slow, following the string of islands on the east that border deep water. There were quite a few boats, both traveling and at anchor, on the lee side of Bond’s Cay.

  We continued northward, flying a slow arc toward the west. Off Little Harbor Cay, the chopper’s compass showed that we’d turned past magnetic north and I descended to three thousand feet.

  Ahead lay Hoffman’s Cay, where Charity had said that she and Savannah had dumped the bodies of four would-be robbers into an inshore blue hole. We could see the blue hole, along with several boats anchored just to the west of Hoffman’s. I saw people jumping into the water there. They had no idea there were bodies several hundred feet below them.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary there,” Kat’s voice said over the intercom.

  If she only knew.

  “The heading they were on?” Brayden said. “Do you think a barge could cross the deep to the Abacos?”

  “I guess it’d be possible,” I said. “It wasn’t built here. That’s what? Fifty miles?”

  “And then some,” he replied.

  “With a flat-bottomed barge, they’d have to choose a good weather day. But they might have.”

  Continuing northwestward, we flew along the eastern shore of Great Harbor Cay, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Reaching the northern tip of the archipelago, I looped the Huey around Stirrup Cay and Coco Cay and lined up due south to maintain our current altitude. Flying a magnetic heading between zero and one hundred seventy-nine degrees, we’d have to climb to thirty-five hundred.

  “What’s that?” Brayden said, pointing ahead and slightly east.

  Climbing slightly, I turned southeast toward what looked like a platform of some sort.

  “It’s a power cat,” I said, as we got closer.

  Kat leaned forward in her harness to look out the forward windshield. “Weird looking.”

  She was right. It had nothing but flat open deck forward of a tall pilothouse where the cockpit would normally be. Power catamarans aren’t uncommon in the Bahamas. They have a shallow draft, just like their sailing counterparts, but aside from no sails, the basic layout of the boat is the same: an expansive salon forward of a wide cockpit, with staterooms tucked down inside the twin hulls.

  “There’s your cat tug,” I said, looking back at Kat.

  “But where’s the barge?” Brayden said.

  “There isn’t one,” I replied, studying the boat. She was lying at anchor in the middle of a vast expanse of light blue, very shallow water. “What I thought was a barge and tug was just the flat foredeck and raised aft pilothouse.”

  Brayden was looking down at the boat through binoculars. “Uh, Jesse, there are two people watching us through field glasses.”

  Still half a mile due north of the odd-looking boat, I dropped a location pin on the GPS, then turned southwest, away from it.

  “Describe the two men,” I said.

  “They ain’t men, mate,” he said lowering the binos and looking over at me. “A coupla Sheilas, one a blonde and the other with dark auburn hair, all big and poofy.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, craning my neck to look back at the boat, now falling away behind us. “You didn’t see a man? Tall, with dark hair?”

  “Didn’t see anyone else. You know who those ladies are?”

  “No idea,” I lied. Could it be Yvette Pence and her skank sidekick Rayna Haywood?

  The odds were extremely small. The Bahamas covered more than five thousand square miles of ocean, and that boat only about fifteen hundred square feet. A virtual needle in a haystack.

  “Why’d you turn away?” Kat asked from behind.

  “I don’t like having people watching me when I’m watching them,” I said, slowly moving the stick back and forth, hoping my passengers didn’t notice the evasive action I was taking. I’ve been shot at in the past for approaching a boat that I knew was conducting criminal activity. A mile away, I stopped zigging and zagging, and flew a direct course back to Chub.

  The barge type catamaran was definitely the boat I’d seen out on the water yesterday, and the way it was set up, it could easily carry a lot of live rock and coral in partially flooded forward compartments. And it would still be able to get over the shallows, an important thing in these waters. They were hiding in plain sight in an area where few boaters ever went.

  Or maybe not. I had to find out more about the people aboard.

  “What’s the plan?” Brayden asked.

  “Feel like taking your little boat out tonight?”

  “You want a closer look, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Your boat’s pretty quiet; we can get to within a mile without being noticed.”

  “Got a pole and a pair of telescoping paddles, too,” he said, with a grin. “For sneaking up on bonefish.”

  “The moon’s waxing,” I said, thinking aloud. “Nearly full. It’ll be directly overhead around midnight.”

  “I’m with ya,” Brayden said. “It’s a big boat, easy to spot.”

  “I have something that’ll make that even easier.”

  “What are you planning to do?” Kat asked.

  “I just want to get close and see if we can find out anything,” I said. “Those folks might be completely legit, but they might not be.”

  “Why not just call the police?”

  Brayden looked back at Kat. “Our new friend here isn’t real popular with the local constabulary.”

  Two nights ago, when I’d gone in search of tongs to turn the clams, I remembered seeing a high dune with no trees or shrubs, about a quarter mile east of the point. I flew over the area, slowly checking it out, and saw no obstructions. Turning, I brought us in low over the water and into the prevailing wind. The Huey bounced a couple of feet and came to rest on the dune, well above the high water.

  The main rotor was nearly stopped when Macie and the McKays came toward us from the beach.

  “You’re back a lot earlier than we thought,” Cory said as they approached. “Wow, that’s a beautiful old helicopter. Tropical Luxury Magazine, huh?”

  “Belongs to a friend,” I replied. “She’s cruising to the South Seas right now.”

  “See anything?” Macie asked.

  “An odd-looking power cat,” Brayden said. “Might be capable of hauling out live rock.”

  “We went ahead with an early roundup,” Lea said.

  My expression must have given away my bewilderment. Brayden explained. “Friday is claws night, mate. We catch blue land crabs using a rather ingenious method.”

  “Do tell,” I said, walking with the others back toward the fire pit.

  “Simple,” Kat said. “We took some old sail cloth and made two fences a foot high and a hundred yards long. It’s got short nylon stakes sewn into the cloth that make it stand up in the sand. We stake it out in the shape of a funnel, with a big bucket buried at the end, then make a lot of noise to get them moving into it.”

  “How many did you catch?” Brayden asked.

  “Nearly two hundred,” Lea replied. “But half were already missing the big claw.”

  I’d heard of ma
ny people who ate land crabs, but usually the whole thing, just like a blue crab in the water. “You only take the claws?”

  “Just the big one,” Kat said. “It’s the best part and it’s renewable. They grow back when they molt.”

  “So,” Cory said, sitting on a log, “what do we do now? About the poachers, I mean.”

  I took a seat on the log across from him. “You’re jumping ahead. We found a boat that looks like it can do what it’d have to do to remove that much live rock and coral from the reefs and still be able to get across the flats.” I glanced at both Kat and Brayden. “But let’s wait until we have everyone together before we make any kind of plans or call the cops.”

  “Meet back here just before sunset?” Macie asked.

  “Right now,” Kat said, looking toward the docks, “I want a shower and to get out of these hot clothes. I thought you said it’d be cold, riding in the helicopter.”

  “I said it’d be cooler. About ten degrees cooler.”

  “Seventy-five is still bikini weather in my book.”

  We left the group then and walked toward the docks, Finn and Bill running toward us. The two dogs never even slowed down. Finn barked once as they passed us, and I waved to him. He’d been cooped up so long on the Revenge; I could tell he was happy to get back to doing what dogs do.

  Kat looked up at me once we were out of earshot of the others. “I could see your reflection in the windshield, when Brayden said the two women had blond and auburn hair. You know who they are, don’t you?”

  “I have a pretty good idea,” I replied. “But they’d be in the company of a tall, dark-haired man.”

  “Who are they?”

  I wondered just how much I should tell her. The couple whose Hatteras the Pences had most likely taken were probably dead. If it was them Brayden had seen on the cat barge, the same was likely true for whoever had been aboard it, whether they were poachers or just innocent cruisers on a weird boat. The trio didn’t look dangerous, but I knew for a fact that they were.

  I let out a sigh and looked down at Kat. “I was the anonymous tipster that saw the Hatteras heading north last week. The Bahamas Defence Force has a pretty good idea who it was who stole it, another tip I provided. An auburn-haired woman and a younger blonde, in the company of a tall Englishman by the name of Clive Pence. The redhead is his wife, Yvette.”