by Sandra Moore
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Athena Force
Without a Trace
Sandra K Moore
U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Nikki Bustillo has tracked her target to the bowels of a phantom ship--and she refuses to lose the scent now. But when her overseas contact is brutally murdered on the streets of Hong Kong, Nikki's manhunt is compromised. The mission came from the higher-ups at her alma mater, Athena Academy, and failure isn't an option. Her only hope: the help of a maverick, martial arts expert, police detective. Nikki and her new partner will follow the enemy's shadowy trail out of the ocean and to the ends of the earth--even after their invisible foe turns the skilled trackers into vulnerable prey.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-1423-5
Copyright © 2008 by Harlequin Books S.A.
To all sisters—by blood and by choice— in a challenging world.
Acknowledgements
This book could never have existed without the help so generously given by many people:
My thanks and my admiration go out to Petty Officer 3rd Class Sondra-Kay Kneen, who serves her country in the U.S. Coast Guard and has climbed through a bilge or two in her time.
Thanks to Elena Torres-Jovel, for her help with the Spanish.
I’m especially grateful for my patient editor, Stacy Boyd, who never fails to see what I’m trying— and failing—to get on the page, and who is so gracious when pointing me in the right direction.
And many thanks to Sharron McClellan, who gave Nikki such a wonderful big-sister-of-choice in Jess Whitaker.
Chapter 1
L ieutenant Nikki Bustillo knew the shrimp boat her Coast Guard crew had just boarded for inspection was hiding something. It was as plain, she thought wryly, as the nose on her face.
She peered through the boat’s rear pilothouse door at the ragged Hispanic crew members lined up in the vessel’s stern. Yep. Definitely something wrong. Beneath the stench of day-old shrimp lay the almost overwhelming musk of fear. It emanated from the deckhands as strongly as the diesel fumes off the hot engines. This wasn’t about having a net with its turtle extraction devices sewn shut, which was an illegal technique that caught more fish but threatened endangered sea turtles.
No, these crewmen were scared to death.
“Problem?” Ensign Rich Mansfield, the boarding team’s rookie member, joined her in the trawler’s pilothouse.
“The Montoya is carrying more than dinner.”
Mansfield gave her a measured look. “How do you know?”
Nikki nodded at the fidgeting shrimper crew. “They look nervous to you?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
The truth was, these men didn’t look any more nervous than any other crew Nikki’s command had stopped in the past three weeks along Florida’s coastline. But to put it mildly, they reeked of fear. Literally. The vessel was definitely carrying something besides shrimp. Cocaine was a good guess.
Mansfield hovered at her elbow as she thumbed through the vessel’s shoddily kept logs. She would’ve had the fresh-out-of-cadet-training ensign pegged merely as a nuisance, except back in February she’d received an encrypted e-mail message from someone called Delphi warning her to watch her back: somebody called Arachne was getting her jollies kidnapping Athena Academy students and alumnae, and Nikki’s name was on the wish list.
This Delphi had never contacted her before, but had known too many students—too many facts about too many of Nikki’s friends—for Nikki to doubt she knew what she was talking about. Behind that e-mail had come a visit from a former classmate, Dana Velasco, confirming Delphi’s assertion. Nikki had gotten the impression she—Nikki could only think of Delphi as “she”—was never wrong.
And Mansfield had a habit of pestering Nikki with a lot of questions she preferred not to answer.
He’d been particularly intrigued by her schooling. The Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women was unusual and he’d wanted to hear all about it. Fair enough. She’d given him the Cliff’s Notes version and moved on to her rapid-fire years at Florida State University studying literature, then to her decision to join the Coast Guard.
The truth was, the Athena Academy was the first place where she’d felt like she belonged. After an early childhood filled with seven raucous older brothers, she’d felt like an all-girls school was somehow coming home. Her orientation group, the Hecates, had consisted of four other girls, each unique, each talented and gutsy and strong. How could she possibly explain her sense of sistership with these women? Especially to someone she didn’t know. It didn’t seem…right…to share that with a stranger.
After graduation, she’d hoped to put her unique strengths to good use: her eidetic memory, her particularly fine eye-hand coordination and her martial arts skills. Those strengths and a late-blooming love of the sea had led her inevitably to the Coast Guard, where she’d screamed up the command ladder, making lieutenant at twenty-three.
Her ability to unerringly locate the bags of cocaine, heroin bricks and pot stashes? Well, that was just a little something extra given to her when her mom’s IVF doctor took a few liberties with her genetic material. It was why she could smell trouble in a man’s sweat, and why she’d chosen drug interdiction as her Coast Guard career of choice.
When Delphi told her back in February that she’d been targeted for kidnapping because of her special ability, Nikki had had to take a few days to get adjusted to that reality. Her parents, who’d simply wanted a daughter instead of an eighth son, had applied to the Zuni, New Mexico, fertility lab in an attempt to have one. As far as Nikki knew, the only special order her parents had placed was for gender. And nothing else.
But with the warning from Delphi concerning Athena students with “abilities,” Nikki had set about methodically reviewing the files of her fellow crew members, just to cover her bases. Then Mansfield had arrived a month ago and started hanging around her like a bad high school crush.
She regarded him now as he shuffled through greasy work orders and pay slips in a console drawer. Maybe he was just an Anglo with a fascination for Cuban women. Okay, so she was second-generation Cuban-American, born and bred in Arizona, but she knew her way around Spanish—vocabulary was a helluva lot simpler when you had a photographic memory—even if her pronunciation left a little something to be desired.
With Mansfield still at her elbow, she radioed her captain aboard the cutter Undaunted and let him know what was going down.
“Another hunch?” Captain Pickens’s voice growled in response.
“Yes, sir.”
“Go with it.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to Mansfield. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the hold.”
She set two members of her boarding team to stand guard over the trawler’s captain and crew while the rest fanned out and started a search for drugs.
It had begun as a more or less routine stop. The ancient trawler, common to this part of the south Florida coastline, had looked a bit light as the Undaunted cruised into visual range. Normally the bottom paint of a fully loaded shrimp boat lay underwater. This trawler’s bottom paint showed a clear six inches out of the water, suggesting that the concrete ballast used to steady the trawler in rough seas had been replaced with som
ething much lighter. Like cocaine.
When Mansfield yanked open the main hatch, fear musk—a cross between burnt coffee and battery acid—surged from the general vicinity of the shrimper captain.
“Got a problem?” Nikki asked the captain in Spanish.
He shrugged, looking sullen, though his gaze kept darting at the guardsmen disappearing into the hold.
“How long have you been piloting this vessel?”
Nikki asked the usual questions while her squad members poked through the compartments where the shrimp were stored. The captain muttered his answers, which she jotted down in a small notebook. The Montoya rolled gently as fat waves slid beneath her, and the sun glared off the water and steel.
After a few minutes, Mansfield was back, wiping sweat from his face and looking queasy.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You’ve been thorough.” She made it a statement, so he’d understand thoroughness was expected, no matter how bad the job stank.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Nikki narrowed her eyes at the shrimp boat captain. Burnt coffee assaulted her nostrils. The man was scared, and the strength of the scent couldn’t be just because he had more than his allowed catch aboard.
“Look again,” she told Mansfield.
“But—” He caught himself before protesting a direct order.
She leveled a measuring gaze at him. Maybe that was why she didn’t trust him. Because he couldn’t stomach the job. Hell, she knew what that was like, but it didn’t mean she’d cut him any more slack than her CO had ever cut her. “You’ll get used to it. Come on.”
Nikki gripped the edges of the storage hatch, took a deep breath, held it and leaned into the hold. Something hard touched her shoulder; Ensign Artie Jackson held out a heavy-duty flashlight, which she took. Light splashed over the dead shrimp and rusting steel hull. The plastic liner that held the shrimp was cracked and stained from years of use. Stifling heat pressed in on her, bringing a quick burst of sweat to her face and neck. From the looks of it, this shrimp wasn’t a fresh catch.
She let go the breath she was holding and sniffed.
The musk of coffee bored past the acrid, salty smell of dead sea creatures and washed over her in a hot wave. Nikki grit her teeth against nausea. Terror. Terror like nothing she’d ever smelled before. Terror and…grief?
She leaned away from the hatch and squinted into the afternoon sun. “Get me a rake or shovel or something!” The wind lifting over the trawler’s rail cooled her face.
Jackson handed her a shrimp rake. Nikki coughed hard a few times, then shook herself mentally. Get a grip. It’s just rotting critters.
The days-old dead sea life she could handle. It was what lay beneath that had her reeling.
She reached the rake down and scraped a bare spot inside the storage unit, then dropped through the deck hatch. A few minutes of hard work had cleared a broad swath, revealing another hinged hatch immediately beneath her feet. It was roughly two feet by two feet, with a pull handle. She would have smiled at her success, but the bitter scent of fear ratcheted her nerves another notch tighter.
Nikki stepped aside, pulled her sidearm, grabbed the handle and yanked the hatch open.
It was like looking into a mass grave. People in ragged, stained clothing lay piled on each other, huddled, clutching pillowcases or battered backpacks. One, a boy no more than thirteen, stirred and opened his eyes, squinting against the flashlight’s beam but too weak to hold up a hand for shade. The rest were still.
“Shit.” Nikki raised her head. “We’ve got refugees! Jackson! Take the captain and crew into custody. Mansfield, radio the captain. We’ll need a chopper.”
Nikki leaned in and grasped the boy’s hand. “I’m here to get you out,” she said in Spanish.
The boy struggled to keep his eyes open. “America?”
“Sí. ¿Cuál es tu nombre?”
“Eduardo.”
“Come on, Eduardo.”
Nikki tugged the boy through the hidden hatch. The child was weak and thin, as if he’d spent days in the boat’s bowels with no food or water. He could barely move and his skin felt like parchment. Nikki handed him up to Mansfield, who’d called in the mission and was ready to haul refugees onto the deck.
“Ninety miles isn’t that long,” Mansfield muttered, referring to the nautical distance from Cuba to Miami.
“No,” Nikki replied grimly as anger flash-fired in her stomach, “but I’m guessing these passengers weren’t meant to arrive.”
She kept count as they pulled out man after woman after child. Her boarding crew, in full-out rescue mode, worked quickly. Still, it was well over an hour to move the refugees out and give them water.
“One last check.” Nikki held the flashlight out to Mansfield, who blanched, green around the gills. “There may be more people down there. Are you going to do your job or not?”
Mansfield shook his head.
Nikki tamped down her anger-fueled disgust at his cowardice. “Never mind.”
She lowered herself back into the hold and played the flashlight beam over the paint-peeling sides.
“How’s it look, boss?” Jackson’s voice echoed hollowly in the now-empty hold.
“Gotta do it right.”
He grunted as she crawled methodically through the wretched space, which was only three feet high. No wonder the terror had been so great. The shrimper was a death trap—no air circulation, hotter ’n hell, with over a hundred and forty people crammed inside. Toward the stern, the shrimper’s internal bulkheads provided too many shadows and too much cover for Nikki to assume they’d found everyone.
The coffee scent still lingered, as it would for several more days. If the emotion was strong enough—the rage or terror or love—it made sort of an imprint, and the stronger the emotion, the clearer and more lasting it was. She concentrated on that smell rather than what was wafting off the floor she crawled across, avoiding puddles and slicks of human bodily fluids. The detritus of desperation.
And to starboard, deep in the stern, Nikki found the girl.
She might have been eleven years old, maybe twelve, huddled against the boat’s bulkhead, her jeans stained and her shirt torn. As the light splashed across the girl’s face, Nikki was struck by a sense of familiarity. But there was no way she could know this child. She touched the girl’s sweat-slickened hand, glad to find her alive. Barely alive.
“Got another one!” Nikki shouted back at the hatch. “She needs a medic!”
Nikki quickly pulled the child into her arms and started the laborious journey to the hatch. Ignoring the wetness seeping through her uniform, she concentrated instead on speed. The girl’s breathing was extremely shallow and her cold skin said she was in shock.
It took only a few more moments to lift the child—she weighed so little—into Jackson’s arms, then follow him into the pilothouse. Jackson’s bulging forearm looked obscenely strong next to the girl’s skinny limbs as he laid her carefully on a workbench Mansfield had cleared of clutter.
“Where’s the doc?”
“He’s got his hands full on deck.”
“He needs to be in here,” Nikki snapped. “Mansfield! Get the doc in here, now!” And when he hesitated, she shouted, “Don’t hang around, ensign!”
Mansfield jerked into gear and headed out onto the deck. Nikki dug through a gear bag for a space blanket, frustrated by the piles of supplies that got in her way. There! Shaking the blanket out, she turned to cover the girl, but Jackson cursed suddenly and started CPR.
“We’re gonna lose her!”
Nikki poked her head out of the pilothouse. “Doc! Get your ass in here now!”
She spotted the physician and Mansfield in the stern, bent over a woman whose arms flailed in some kind of delirious panic. Dammit.
“Lieutenant.” The desperate edge in Jackson’s voice brought her back. “She’s not going to make it.”
“She will. Keep working.”
“No, she won’t. Her c
hest is too damaged.” Jackson pressed two thick fingers to the girl’s carotid artery. “She’s gone.”
Nikki said nothing. How could she? There was nothing to say. She simply straightened the girl’s flimsy, once-white shirt and folded her arms over her stomach. Only then did Nikki see the bruises that necklaced her throat, spread across her collarbone and shoulders and blossomed beneath the blouse.
“Crushed,” Jackson murmured. “Internal damage mostly.”
“Wave action probably aggravated it,” Nikki said. “All that banging around down there. All the people.”
Do I know this kid? she wondered. The shape of the brow, the high cheekbones, the soft, full lower lip. The sense of near recognition was strong but Nikki couldn’t quite make the connection.
She mentally shook herself and held a tight rein on her frustration. She had work to do. She snapped her own jumpsuit straight and, leaving Jackson with the girl, headed out on deck.
“How many?” Captain Pickens barked as he came aboard. Undaunted had been lashed alongside the trawler and now nodded serenely, her boarding bridge deployed.
“One hundred and forty-one living.” Nikki’s throat tightened. “Three dead.”
“How long have they been at sea?”
Anger came to a sudden boil in her stomach. “A man I questioned said three days.” Nikki was about to scrub her face with her hand, then caught a whiff of her fingers and stopped. “The fatalities were caused by the crush. Rough seas.”
Captain Pickens swore eloquently before saying, “Chopper’s on its way for the deceased.”
Nikki nodded.
Only the poorest chanced the ninety-mile crossing from Cuba to Florida in an open boat. Anyone who could scrape together a few hundred dollars bought transport aboard fishing trawlers like the Montoya or, if they had enough cash, in cargo planes that touched down on small private landing strips near the Everglades. No matter how the journey was made, it was always dangerous.
Nikki glanced around. On the shrimp boat’s deck, the refugees who hadn’t been escorted to the Undaunted sat crammed together in little groups, their clothing matted and sweat-darkened. The fear stench on deck had waned but beneath it lay the thicker musk of dread. They’d been caught at the edge of United States territorial waters. After processing, they’d likely be sent back, their life savings forfeited on a failed chance at a better life.