“See you next week, assuming you’re still here?”
“Of course. What choice do I have?”
“Not much, Mr. Wyatt, not much at all.”
He stood drinking his now cold coffee as the grumbling boat disappeared into the night.
He looked down at the water again and back at the long flight of stairs leading up to the Wyatt 1. He looked back at the water. And then back to the stairs. And then back to the water.
With a sigh, he took a deep breath and put his foot on the first step back toward the top.
13
Fanning Detritus
Ryan Bodean, or R.B. to his friends, was washing Gidget, the Tortuga Adventures seaplane, when he saw the green Honda pull into the parking lot.
Seaplane was actually a misnomer. Gidget wasn’t the kind of behemoth whose belly sat in the water like Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose. She was actually a Cessna Caravan with the landing gear replaced by pontoons. Much to R.B.’s annoyance, Troy said it looked like a Ford Expedition with huge tires and a lift kit… with one engine… one big ass engine.
She was sparkling white (when Troy remembered to wash her) with a broad orange stripe from nose to tail and a bright yellow cowl. Gidget was a beautiful plane.
As Troy exited the car, R.B. immediately knew something was up by the ear-to-ear grin he was sporting.
“Oh God,” he said as he rolled his eyes, “what is it this time?”
“I found it,” Troy said.
R.B. stepped down from the ladder he had propped up next to the plane. He wiped his hands on his blue coveralls and held one out to the girl who had stepped out of the passenger seat.
“Hi, I’m Ryan,” he said, smiling, “but you can call me R.B.”
“Pleasure to meet you, R.B.” She returned his smile. “I’m Megan.”
“Likewise.”
Troy put his hand on R.B.’s shoulder. “It’s out there; we found the wreck. She saw it with her own eyes.”
“Well, I saw something,” Megan chimed in.
Troy led them into the Tortuga Adventures sales trailer. He pointed roughly to the site of the wreck on the map hanging on the wall. “It’s just off the coral reef, here.”
R.B. nodded. “Okay, so… now what?”
Megan leaned forward. “We need to go back. We need to dive the site again with a proper boat and a team we can trust.”
“What kind of boat are we talking about here?”
“Well, something with a large platform deck and maybe a crane or heavy winch of some kind,” she said.
R.B. scratched his head thoughtfully for a moment. “We’re gonna need clearance for this kind of thing. The feds are gonna want to know everything about what you’re doing out there.”
“Can’t do that,” Troy said with a shake of his head, “not just yet anyway. Somehow, we have to get around that… at least for the first dive. I want to lay claim to this before anyone else knows it’s there.”
“Well, that’s the real trick, isn’t it?” R.B. picked up the ancient looking rotary dial phone on the desk. He rolled off a quick series of numbers and waited until the man answered. “George, old buddy, old pal,” —he winked at Troy and Megan— “whaddaya know? How’s the oil diggin’ business going?”
Megan motioned to the crumpled remains of the data recorder from the magnetometer. “Now, about that computer?”
“Sure, in my office.” Troy led her into the back office of the sales trailer.
She wasn’t too surprised to see random stacks of paper, half-empty beer bottles and crumpled candy bar wrappers strewn about his desk. He opened the semi-rusted filing cabinet behind him and pulled out a relatively new looking laptop.
Seeing her obvious surprise at his computer, Troy winked. “Won it in a card game.”
“Ahhh,” Megan said, nodding, “of course.”
She booted up the computer and waited for a moment. She unwound a USB cable and connected the two devices, then opened a browser and downloaded a program from the dolphin center’s website.
“You mind?” she asked.
“Not at all.” Troy looked at her blankly.
When the load was finished she double clicked and waited for the installer to complete the magnetometer program. Idly, she began cleaning his desk. She shuffled some papers into stacks and clinked a few beer bottles into the trash can beside his desk. As she did, she noticed a few more beer bottles rolling around under her chair. She opened a manila folder and began filing some of the papers into a somewhat ordered system. She found more beer bottles stuffed into the back of his file drawer.
She held one up and rolled her eyes at Troy.
“You really shouldn’t drink so much, you know,” she said, only half joking.
Troy shrugged his shoulders and flopped down onto the mid-eighties, deco-design recliner sofa with cup holders that he’d rescued from a nearby dumpster.
“I’m a pirate,” he said, “and pirates drink.”
She dunked the bottle into the trash. “Yeah, and the average life expectancy of a pirate was about thirty-five, which puts you well beyond your golden years, Mr. Bodean.”
“Look, I don’t really drink that much,” he protested weakly, “I just have a sip now and again to take the edge off.”
She opened the other file drawer and pulled out a half empty bottle of tequila. Shooting him a more serious look, she plopped it into his trash can as well.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa now,” he said and jumped up from the couch.
He pulled the bottle from the trash and shook it around.
“You can’t just toss Jose out like that,” he said through a grin, but it slowly dissipated when he realized she wasn’t joking.
With a great struggle, he let the bottle fall heavily back into the can.
She smiled and looked back at the computer screen.
The charting program had pulled up a graph-like grid and had begun to plot points out in what appeared to be a completely random order. To Troy, it looked like a seismograph gone haywire.
As the screen began to fill with more and more points, Megan’s jaw dropped slightly and then continued to drop even more.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Troy looked at her and then back to the screen. “What? What is it?” He gazed at the computer, clearly puzzled.
“It’s everywhere,” she said, pointing at the screen.
“What do you mean?”
“Look,” she said, and traced her finger from dot to dot, “each one of these is a hit.”
He grabbed her arm and gently shook her.
“A hit? What does that mean? English please.”
She snapped out of it a bit. “A hit means we found something; something that doesn’t belong on the ocean floor. It’s even more than I originally thought.”
Troy looked back at the darkening cluster of dots. There had to be over a hundred now. It dawned on him what he was looking at… the fan-shaped scattered remains of a shipwreck.
Suddenly R.B. jerked open Troy’s office door. “C’mon let’s fire up Gidget.”
“Why, what’s up? Where’re we going?” Troy asked.
“We gotta go see a man about a boat.”
14
Stingray
Natasha Wainwright sipped a cup of steaming hot Cuban coffee and tapped out a few notes on her laptop. The clicking of the keys echoed softly down the halls of historic Fort Jefferson, her current assigned location.
The weather had been getting rougher the last few days and the tourist flights had all been cancelled, so she had a lot of free time to catch up on her real mission.
For all anyone else knew, she was a new park ranger stationed in Key West, but in reality, she was under cover for the C.I.A. Two weeks prior to her assignment here, a classified unmanned recon drone had gone down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was being sent on test missions over Cuba and a glitch or something in its computer systems had flown it straight down into the water. If the plane survived the impact, the data
on board wouldn’t be serious enough to warrant a national security emergency, but tensions with the new Cuban regime would escalate exponentially.
In a rush, her boss at the agency had pulled some strings and placed her at the island fort to begin the staging process for recovering the spy plane. So far, she’d been unable to locate the crash site; she thought it ironic that a reconnaissance plane hadn’t been fitted with a locator beacon.
She’d been studying the maps and ocean current forecasts and had come up with about a square mile area she felt pretty sure would turn up the sunken plane. Unfortunately, that was still like trying to find a needle in a haystack the size of a football field, with the added bonus of the needle moving around with the currents every day.
Natasha stood up from the desk and walked over to a nearby window. The lightest mist of rain was dripping down the glass. Three days. That was her best guess as to how long she had to recover the plane before the hurricane hit.
She felt pretty confident she could find and raise the plane, or worst-case scenario, destroy it. Just recently, she discovered that her old friend Troy Bodean had been flying around a lot out there. Rumor had it that he’d found something… something he thought was an old shipwreck from the sixteen hundreds.
She glanced back at her desk to the silver aluminum briefcase next to the computer and wondered how much it would take to buy off Troy, or better yet, hire him to help. The second offer would be harder for him to swallow, as he would have to relocate and most likely would be under government surveillance for several years afterward. But he wasn’t exactly raking in the dough with his crappy little tourist flights.
It hadn’t taken them very long to grow apart after her transfer. They rarely if ever communicated, and even then it was short, one line e-mails. She had learned later that a completely random I.E.D. explosion had ruined his knee back in Afghanistan, ending his military career as an Apache pilot.
She did feel a little pity for him and thought she’d offer to buy his help with the wreck first. If that didn’t succeed the options grew very slim, but she had a job to do and she would do it… no matter what it cost. The agency would show great favor for her service.
Troy had told her he was flying today, but she supposed the coming weather would keep him grounded. She pulled her radio from her belt.
“James, is the boat still in the water?”
“Uh, yeah, I think so… why?”
“Thought I might make a quick trip into the gulf.”
“Okay, sure. Where are we going?”
Oops. She didn’t mean to make it an invite. “Oh, well, I figured I’d get some more readings for the weather service… you don’t have to go if you don’t want.”
“Nah, it’s cool. I got nothin’ better to do.”
Damn, she thought. She’d been hoping he’d be too happy getting stoned to want to go with her. She walked over to her desk and opened the center drawer. She pulled out a small black bottle and removed a little green pill. Carefully, she slipped the pill into her shirt pocket and replaced the bottle.
“How ‘bout a quick shot of that Patron before we head out?” she said into the radio.
“I’ll have it cooled before you get down here.”
She closed her laptop and poured the rest of her Cuban coffee down the drain. Damn, that stuff was strong. She unlocked and opened her footlocker and took out a large black duffle bag, shouldered it, relocked the box and headed for the door.
Her cellphone beeped.
-REPORT
Ugh, God. Now was not a good time. She clicked it open and tapped out a quick message.
-Checking site number one today. Have info and possible first contact with stingray.
Stingray was the codename for the downed drone plane. She liked the name and had used it as her own codename recently.
-What is status on the Cuban?
Dammit, she didn’t have time for this. She considered Hector Martinez as an annoying divergence from her real mission. She glanced over at the stack of DVDs on her desk next to her laptop. They were still unopened.
-Have made contact. Researching obtained materials now. Will report ASAP.
What the hell the US government was doing still watching Cuba was beyond her.
-Will expect your report on both situations at 0700.
She flipped her phone closed and quickly reopened it.
-Coming to the island today, would like to get together for lunch.
She hoped Troy would agree so she could get him out of the picture quickly. Three days wasn’t much time for this sort of thing.
-Sorry, busy today, how’s tomorrow?
Dammit, this was becoming much harder than she wanted.
-Ok, tomorrow. I’ll call you.
-You bet.
She closed the phone and once again hefted the duffle bag over her shoulder. As she approached James’ room, she could already hear the blaring of steel drum music and his screechy voice wailing above Bob Marley’s.
Good, he’d already started without her. She slid her bag off to the side before she entered and jerked open his door.
“Sorry I’m late!”
“Heyyyyy, where ya been?” he drawled, with his Patron tequila bottle in one hand and a shot glass in the other.
Several shots and one tiny green pill later, he was lying face down on the ground, out like a light. God, she wished everything was as easy as incapacitating this guy.
She turned to the door and heard her cellphone beep again.
“Crap, not again,” she muttered and yanked the phone from her pocket.
She opened it, but there was no message. She heard the beep again. It wasn’t her phone. The beep was coming from James’ pocket. Not a big deal; she was sure he had the same Government Issue sat phone.
She walked toward the door, but something made her pause. She turned back toward him. With a heave, she rolled him over and reached into his pocket. He groaned, but did not wake up; the green pill would have him out until morning.
She pulled out his phone and clicked it open. What she saw on the screen sent a chill up her spine. In digital green and gray she read the newest text message.
-REPORT
15
Location, Location, Location
Steve Haney handed his partner the Northstar 952DW Chartplotter. “He wasn’t very happy about giving that thing up.”
“Yeah, well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it?” Joe Bond replied as he took the black box. “Let’s get down to the lab and get that old data card put into this thing.” He picked up his file and the G.P.S. unit and led Steve down the hall to the crime lab. “Maybe I can finally tell Skipper what happened to his boys.”
“Ha, and maybe he’ll stop calling every day,” Steve said and chuckled.
“Not likely.”
Lisa Carlson, the FSU crime lab intern, was predictably hunched over a microscope as they entered through two stainless steel swinging doors. A cute girl, with strawberry blonde hair and freckles on her nose, she was peering through oversized brown-framed glasses. She had her hair pulled into a loose ponytail and under her lab coat she wore a shirt that said, Chemists do it Periodically on a Table.
She looked up and smiled. “Well, there’s good news and bad news… which do you want first.”
Joe shrugged. “Let’s have the bad news.”
She stood up and walked over to a flat screen monitor sitting on a countertop that was carefully and meticulously littered with evidence envelopes and slides of at least a dozen current investigations. She clicked her mouse and a grainy picture of a lifted fingerprint appeared on the screen.
“Apparently there wasn’t enough of a print here to match to anyone in the local database,” she said, and enlarged the print and circled three separate points with her cursor, “but with these particular areas we were able to exclude Captain Mark and both of the Johnson boys.”
Joe figured they must’ve appeared puzzled because she continued as if speaking to a third grader.
“Which means this print belongs to someone else.”
“Okay, sure, got that much,” Joe said, “but whose is it?”
“I sent the print to the C.I.A. and we’ll have something by tonight… if the print is in their database and if it’s complete enough to find a match.”
Steve had picked up and was peering at a spent bullet in a tiny Ziploc bag. “And the good news?” he asked.
Lisa snatched the bag from his fingers and placed it carefully back into its place on the countertop. “The good news,” she said, giving him a reprimanding look, “is that this still works as far as I can tell.”
She tapped a cardboard box on the counter and handed both Joe and Steve a pair of latex surgical gloves. “Put these on.”
As they pulled on their gloves, she opened the box and removed the newly discovered G.P.S. unit. She placed it on the counter and plugged it into a generic four-pronged power source.
“I opened it up and dried out the inside as well as I could, and it really wasn’t as bad as I thought,” she said. “I guess it is supposed to be water resistant to a certain degree. The manufacturer just didn’t expect it to stand up to complete underwater submersion.”
She pushed the power button and the screen blinked to life. A small readout slowly came into focus and a flashing dot appeared on a latitude and longitude grid, the bottom information line of which read 24.57 LAT by 81.68 LON, their current location. Suddenly, the screen shut off.
“Oh, and I forgot about that bad news,” she said somewhat smugly. “It only stays on for about ten seconds.”
“Nice!” Steve added sarcastically.
“It’s okay,” Joe said. “Think this might help?” he asked, and handed her the newly confiscated Northstar unit from Captain Mark’s fleet.
“Ahh, yes, that should do the trick.” She took the G.P.S. machine and quickly began disassembling it. “Gimme fifteen and I’ll have her up and running.”
Joe winked at her and patted Steve’s belly. “Tell you what, we’ll grab a quick bite and be back in an hour.”
The Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Series Boxset Page 28