by Evan Graver
Girard raised his eyebrows, and Smith motioned for him to follow as they walked to Smith’s cabin. Smith unlocked the door and they stepped inside the cramped room, equipped with a bunk, fold-down table, and two hanging lockers. Smith removed a red three-drawer toolbox from a locker. He’d bought it at a pawnshop, and it contained a wide assortment of mismatched tools covered in a fine patina of rust.
The Haitian’s eye widened when he opened the drawers, and he dropped to his knees to examine the tools. “It’s too much, Cap’n Darrell.”
“Don’t complain to me that you don’t have enough tools to fix your motorcycle anymore.”
“And if I complain that I don’t have any money?”
“We’ll work on that on the next load. I’ll have more mattresses ready.”
Girard grinned and hefted the toolbox. “And I’ll have more buyers.”
The two men emerged on deck and found the first mate, Charles Navard—a squat, thick man with forearms like Popeye—leaning over the open hold, shouting at the workers to sweep up the spilled rice and stuff it into bags. They could get a good price for the bag, even with the dust and rust from the hold mixed with the grain.
Navard turned when Smith and Girard approached. “Almost empty, Captain. All that’s left is your special merchandise.”
“Let’s load it into a sling and get it overboard. Then we need to make ready to move to the anchorage.”
A frown crossed Navard’s face.
“Don’t worry, Charlie,” Smith said. “You can party with your woman tonight. We’ll leave tomorrow.”
Navard rubbed his hands together and glanced aft to where, Smith guessed, she waited with a full bottle of booze.
An hour later, the crew had unloaded the unusually patterned bolts of cotton cloth that Smith had bought from a Miami wholesaler and had moved Everglades Explorer to the anchorage where the crew’s party kicked into high gear. Smith took the late watch, allowing Navard half the night to party with his whore. Not that it mattered much. The woman would keep him occupied during his watch, and thieves would probably try to rob them as they had before, but at least at anchor, there was less of a chance for them to do so.
With the ship riding easily on the placid waters, Smith went to the kitchen where Juan, his Honduran cook, had made beef and gravy over rice. Smith gobbled it down and retired to his cabin to fill out the ship’s log and to get some sleep before his watch.
The alarm clock brought Smith out of a dream and he struggled to wake up, sitting on the edge of his bunk and rubbing his face until he could keep his eyes open. He pulled on a pair of clean coveralls and slipped through the quiet passageways to the galley. He poured himself a cup of coffee and headed up the steps to make his rounds.
As he stepped onto the main deck, music from a nearby radio drifted on the breeze. He walked to the bow and back, checking the hatch covers to make sure that stowaways hadn’t disturbed them. He’d once had three men hide in the hold for the journey to the States and, when he had arrived, Immigration had forced him to keep the men under lock and key until he could return them to Haiti. Smith had felt so sorry for the pitiful-looking men. He hated keeping them locked up and vowed to never let a stowaway on his ship again, so he examined every space, locker, compartment, and hold before sailing, and he’d do it again tomorrow morning.
Smith walked aft to where his men partied on the stern. There were only a handful left on deck, and several were openly engaged in copulation. He snorted and turned away.
Eventually, the music stopped, and the ship swung silently on her anchor under a star-filled night sky. Smith liked these early morning watches, when the world was asleep, and the sky lightened in the east. He sat in the pilot’s seat with his feet propped on the console. His eyes grew heavy despite the multiple cups of hot coffee. Soon his eyelids fluttered, and his chin dropped to his chest, totally oblivious to the danger he and his men were soon to face.
Chapter Three
Captain Smith didn’t hear the wooden pangas ease alongside the Explorer, nor the pirates who clamored up the ladder and crept quietly through the darkened ship, zip tying the crew and their escorts. It wasn’t until the pirate leader thrust a gun barrel under Smith’s chin that he awoke, and Smith stared at the man holding the Colt 1911 pistol. He thought he was Latino from his light skin and dark hair, but there was something Eastern European about his features, making it hard for Smith to accurately judge which country the pirate was from. Rugged stubble grew on his cheeks and strong chin. He wasn’t much taller than Smith, and he had a determined look in his hooded eyes.
The pirates walked Smith down to the aft deck where the other crewmen knelt beside the railing. Navard and his woman lay dead, killed by a single bullet to the back of their heads while intertwined in their lovemaking. Smith felt the vomit rise in his throat at the sight and staggered forward to the rail to throw up.
Under his feet, the deck began to vibrate as the engine started. The anchor chain rattled in the hawsepipe as it came aboard. Smith realized these men were stealing his ship, and there was nothing he could do about it. He glanced at the bodies on the deck and at the blood that had drained into the scupper. The vomit rose again.
The pirate leader said something to the other pirates in a language that Smith didn’t understand, but he recognized some words, and they struck fear in his heart. Allahu Akbar—God is greater. He thought of it as the call sign of Islamic terrorism. One by one, the pirates forced the crewmen to their knees and delivered a bullet from a suppressed pistol into the back of their heads.
Smith cringed with each wet splat the bullets made as they entered his crewmen’s heads. He prayed they would spare his life and that he would see his baby again. The gun cycled in the cool air, making a clack-clack as it ratcheted another round into the chamber after each shot.
Then, as the shooter took aim at Smith, the ship lurched. He knew the anchor had come off the seabed. Off balance, the pirate missed the captain’s head, and the bullet hit him between the right shoulder blade and the spine. Smith felt the hot lead tunnel through his flesh and explode out of his chest, just below his collar bone. He fell forward and passed out.
Several seconds later, the pain brought him back to reality. His right side felt like it was on fire. The ship hadn’t moved, still idling for some reason. He automatically wondered if they were adrift. He lifted his head and saw the lights of Miragoâne rocking gently back and forth.
With great effort, he pulled himself forward, over the edge of the ship, and fell into the water below. He wanted to keep falling and never go back up. The pain burned through him, and he pictured his baby. With every ounce of strength, he fought through the pain and swam up with his good arm.
The deep throb made by the turning of the Explorer’s propeller caused him to pause. His lungs screamed for air, and his ear drums pulsed with the sound of the giant blades that could chop his body into pieces with a single turn. When he couldn’t ignore his need for oxygen any longer, he fought upward.
His head broke the surface and he drew in a deep breath of air. Fire swept through his body at the sudden expansion of his rib cage, and he almost passed out again. He saw his ship heading out the channel to the Gulf of Gonâve.
Smith lay on his back, taking shallow breaths and doing scissor kicks toward land. The incoming tide had swept him away from the ship while he was underwater, saving him from certain death when the Explorer’s prop had started to spin. He was alive because the idiots running the ship hadn’t put her in gear when the anchor had stopped holding the ship in place.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the water, but when his feet touched the ground, he rolled over and tried to stand. His weary gaze fell on two men standing beside a wooden fishing boat. They stared right back at him. He waded forward, slipping in the muck and mud, falling face first into the water. This seemed to spur the men into action, and they raced to his aid.
They hooked the captain under the armpits and dragged him toward the sh
ore. Smith screamed in agony as one of the men put pressure on his wound.
Before he passed out, he croaked, “Find Robenson Girard.”
Darrell Smith awoke in a small room with tan walls and bright lights. A white man and woman hovered over him and spoke in hushed tones. The pain he was experiencing was now a dull ache. He saw the woman remove a bloody bandage as the man handed her a clean one to put in its place. When she’d finished smoothing the tape across his skin, she glanced at his face.
She nudged her co-worker and said, “He’s awake.”
The man leaned in closer. “How do you feel, Mr. Smith?”
“Bad,” Smith croaked. He licked his lips and swallowed, trying to clear the hoarseness from his throat. “Everything hurts.”
With a smile, the man said, “You’ve been shot, so that’s to be expected. I’m Dr. Murphy, and this is Sister Barb. You’re at the Catholic clinic.”
“Am I still in Haiti?” Smith asked.
“Yes. Your fixer brought you here. We patched you up and called for a medivac flight to take you back to Miami. It should be here in a few hours.”
Smith nodded, and his eyes fluttered before he passed out again.
He was going home.
Chapter Four
Caribbean Sea
Bluefields, Nicaragua
The only sounds Ryan Weller could hear in the ink-black water were the hiss of the regulator as he breathed in, the rumble of bubbles as he breathed out, and the thrusters of the cable-laying barge, El Paso City, as she labored to stay in place ninety feet above him.
Rafted to the side of the barge was the salvage vessel Peggy Lynn, where a compressor and blending station provided him with a constant supply of nitrox—oxygen-enriched air—which flowed through the umbilical hose that connected the compressor to his yellow Kirby Morgan dive helmet. Affixed to the helmet were powerful lights that illuminated the dark seabed and the thick submarine cable he was inspecting after being rousted from bed in the dead of night.
Ryan threw the control valve forward on a water-jet trenching tool and immediately cut his visibility to zero as the water jet blasted a deep grove in the rock, sand, and mud, throwing up a thick cloud of particulate. The lights on his helmet barely cut through the gloom.
Ryan was investigating the reason why the subsea cable trencher had stopped dead in its tracks. The trencher was a twenty-five-ton, sled-like device fitted with a single nine-foot-long plowshare, which, together with a multitude of high-pressure water jets, carved a furrow in the seabed for the cable to lie in. The sled now hung suspended from the EPC’s crane cable, with just a foot of the plow share still in the trench as Ryan worked underneath it. It was an older model on skis and sled runners instead of the newer robotic trenchers that ran on treads, like an underwater combat tank.
In the early 2000s, New World Network had laid ARCOS, the Americas Region Caribbean Optical-Ring System, a fiber-optic cable which circled the Caribbean, touching twenty-three ports in sixteen countries between its start and end in southern Florida. Technology had rapidly evolved in the twenty years since NWN had first laid the cable.
As traffic on the ARCOS had increased and slowed the capacity of the aging line, NWN decided to run a newer, larger cable capable of accommodating hundreds of terabytes. The Cloud wasn’t in the sky with satellite networks, but on millions of miles of subsea cables that crisscrossed the oceans, often at depths over eight thousand feet and under pressure so great it was like holding up a car with only a thumb.
It was the job of divers like Ryan to not only install new cables, but to inspect the old ones to ensure they remained operational. On occasions where they did fail, the divers fixed them as rapidly as possible to limit Internet blackouts.
He worked with a group of free spirits, operating from the Peggy Lynn, a ninety-foot-long converted fishing trawler. Their primary employer was Dark Water Research, a world-wide commercial dive and salvage conglomerate. Because of Peggy Lynn’s size, they often found themselves in tiny foreign ports doing jobs a larger DWR crew and vessel could not. They also took on bigger roles like this one, trenching a new branch of the ARCOS trunk line to Big Corn Island off the coast of Nicaragua.
Satisfied with his work, Ryan shut off the water and the current carried away the silt, allowing him to see the hole he had dug. Once he had an unobstructed view, he stepped down into it, asking for slack in the umbilical from his tender.
The umbilical was the life support system of a commercial diver. Not only did it deliver life-sustaining air, it also consisted of a synthetic line, acting as a strength member and attached to his dive harness by a D-ring just behind his head, a pneumofathometer hose, used for measuring depth, and fiber-optic video and communication lines, allowing topside control to maintain comms and view and record everything the diver did. They had wrapped those four lines together at short intervals with colored tape to mark the depth.
With his tender handling everything topside, all Ryan had to do was concentrate on the dive and uncover the mystery of the stalled trencher. He blasted away again with the jet and found an enormous boulder that had damaged the trencher’s plow teeth and water jets.
After adjusting the nozzle on the trenching tool, he used the power of high-pressure water to slice through the boulder, clearing the way for the trencher to resume operations.
“Well, shit,” Ryan said, after letting the silt clear again.
“What?” Stacey Wisnewski asked. She was sitting at a computer station on Peggy Lynn’s bridge, watching his helmet cam footage on a large monitor.
“I just cut through another cable. I thought we were supposed to be paralleling the old one.”
“Did you just say you cut another cable?” Stacey asked, with hope in her voice that she had heard wrong.
“Sorry, Purple, but you heard right. I cut through another submarine cable.” Stacey had dyed her brunette hair purple long before Ryan had met her at a dive shop in Key Largo where they’d both worked as dive instructors. Now she was a jack-of-all-trades on the salvage vessel. “It was on the back side of this boulder. Can’t you see it?” He moved his helmet nearer to the cable, so the camera had a close view of the frayed fiber-optic strands.
“I see it,” she said with annoyance.
“I hope your insurance is paid in full,” Capt. Dennis Law said into the topside microphone. It didn’t surprise Ryan to hear him. He was always on the bridge during diving operations, even during the long decompression stops. Dennis was in his seventies, with a thick head of white hair and a trimmed white beard. Ryan had never seen the old man in anything other than khaki pants, tennis shoes, and a faded red T-shirt with the name Peggy Lynn arched above the left breast pocket. He was owner and master of the vessel, named in memory of his late wife.
“Hey, I just work here,” Ryan said. “You need to ask Travis about the insurance.”
Travis Wisnewski had stepped into Ryan’s old role as the salvage crew’s leader while Ryan often worked on other projects for DWR.
“Hold on. I’ll ask EPC what they want to do,” Dennis said.
Ryan sat on the edge of the pit and let out a lengthy sigh. He hoped this was the old branch line, or they would have a long night pulling the cut cable out of the dirt so EPC could haul the severed ends aboard and have her engineers splice the cable back together.
If it was the cable they were replacing, he figured they’d leave it alone and finish running the new one. The islanders could live without Internet for a few days. Well, he smiled ruefully as he thought to himself, they’ll have to, no matter what.
He propped his elbows on his knees and let the heavy helmet sag onto his balled fists. “How much bottom time do I have, Anthony?”
“Ten minutes,” the skinny black youth replied. Anthony had become a part of the crew eight months ago when they’d needed help to recover shipping containers that had spilled from a freighter in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
It’s only been five minutes since the last time check? It seemed l
ike forever. Ryan stared at the groove in the boulder and the frayed cable, watching a fish swim into his light to search through the debris he had stirred up while cutting the boulder. Both the light and the swirling silt attracted fish which the divers sometimes speared for food. Mostly, the fish were curious about what the intruders were doing in their natural environment. On occasions, larger predators like sharks and goliath groupers swooped in to investigate.
Stacey’s voice came back through the speaker. “EPC wants you to mark the cable ends with locator beacons. They’re not sure which cable you cut, but we’ll find out soon. Anthony will drop the beacons to you.”
The acoustical beacons dropped down a line to his position. Anthony had rigged them with short lengths of cord, and Ryan tied one to each end of the severed cable. Next, he covered them with an inch of dirt to keep them in place. The beacons would emit a ping for thirty days, allowing the repair crew to use a sonar locator to find the break in the cable.
This was one of the most boring dives Ryan had made in a long time, and he wanted a little action to liven it up.
Later, he’d realize that that was a thought he wished he’d never had.
Chapter Five
As Ryan rigged the acoustical beacons on the seabed, Capt. Law stood on the bridge of the Peggy Lynn, holding a cup of coffee. He peered out the window into the heavy fog that reflected the bright glare of the overhead work lights as they shone from both EPC and his own vessel. He hated being rafted to the barge, but it saved them fuel and they could take advantage of the larger vessel’s stability as his divers worked in the mist. Despite the EPC’s heavy fenders and the massive tires chained to Peggy Lynn’s rails, the waves still slammed the two boats together, sending shudders through the smaller vessel.
The wind had picked up to increase the wave height, as predicted by the weather service. Rain squalls tore through the area, decreasing visibility and slowing their work. A tropical storm was moving in on the tail of the earlier hurricane, which had stalled in the middle of the Caribbean before churning northward over Cuba and eventually flooding Louisiana. The weather hypothesizers hadn’t forecasted that the storm would become a hurricane, and Dennis had no illusions that this coming storm would do as they claimed.