by Evan Graver
“I agree,” Ryan said. “Better safe than sorry. Now, did you bring that pump and hose?”
“Yeah, it’s in the cockpit,” Rick said.
The three men built a makeshift hoist and pulled the generator and water pump aboard the Galina. Ryan and Gary carried the water pump to the engine room while Rick shouldered the rolls of the firehose. He made a second trip for the two-inch plastic piping equipped with a strainer basket at one end to keep debris from being sucked into the pump. They dropped it into the bilge beside the cruise ship’s massive engine, connected the hose to the pump, and ran a second hose from the pump out a nearby porthole. Within minutes of starting the generator, water was pouring overboard.
Ryan wiped his hands on an old rag and said, “Now, maybe we won’t sink before the tug arrives.”
“I hope not,” Rick muttered. “This damned thing has been more trouble than she’s worth.”
They took two-hour shifts, standing on the Galina’s stern and watching for the pirates to return. When the sun rose, all three men were eager to leave the ghost ship and return to their daily lives. Ryan wasn’t sure if it was exhaustion, lack of decent food, or if his mind was playing tricks on him, but the ship seemed to have a life of her own, tugging at the anchor chain and trying to break free, even in placid waters. Even though he’d spent the last few days alone on the Galina, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he felt more creeped out with her at anchor than at any other time. He was glad Gary and Rick were close at hand.
When Ryan climbed off the Galina after his last watch, Rick had coffee brewing in the Hatteras’s saloon and was cooking bacon and eggs. Ryan greedily scooped the food into his mouth, having had nothing but canned goods since he’d eaten the last of the fresh fish Eddy had given him.
“Slow down there, cowboy,” Rick said. “I don’t wanna have to do the hind lick maneuver.”
Around a mouthful of eggs and toast, Ryan replied, “Gary’s a Marine, but even he won’t let you lick his butt.”
“Go ahead and choke, so I can point and laugh.” Rick stopped flipping eggs and held the spatula up. “You know, last night counts as saving your ass. Again.”
“Are you keeping score?”
Rick went back to pushing the scrambled eggs around the griddle. “Rick Hayes: four. Ryan Weller: zero.”
“That can’t be right.”
“Oh? Let me count the ways.” Rick turned to face Ryan and held up his hand to tick off the points he was about to make.
“All right,” Ryan said, cutting him off.
Gary opened the saloon door. “Got a tugboat inbound. They’re hailing you on the radio, squid.”
Ryan scrambled up the ladder to Dark Water’s bridge and snatched up the microphone. “Star of Galveston, this is Dark Water. Come in. Over.”
Captain Anders Mikkelsen’s voice came through the speaker. “We have you in sight and will be alongside in ten minutes, Ryan.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Standoff with your sportfisher and await further instructions.”
“Roger that. I’ll be aboard the Galina for the trip.”
Mikkelsen acknowledged Ryan’s last transmission, and Ryan hung the mic on the hook beside the radio. He turned to Gary, who’d accompanied him to the bridge. “I’m going aboard the Galina. You and Rick can haul ass for Bluefields.”
“You got it.” Gary started Dark Water’s diesels while Ryan went down the ladder to grab the M1A and to snatch a few boxes of ammunition to reload his pistol. He carried everything to the Galina’s bridge. The Star of Galveston’s crew launched their workboat, and by the time he’d finished cramming the nine-millimeter hollow points into the Glock’s magazines, the crew had arrived with the tow bridle.
Ryan walked down to the bow and asked the foreman, a squat man in blue coveralls and an orange survival vest with a walkie-talkie clipped to it, if he could help. The foreman held out his hand, introduced himself as James White, and told Ryan to stand fast while they ran the tow bridle through the hawseholes on both sides of the bow, crisscrossed the heavy chafing chains on the deck, and fastened them to the bollards on either side of the anchor windlass. They worked quickly and efficiently until they had the Y-bridle situated and returned to their workboat.
“Do you have power?” White asked Ryan when the crew boat left to retrieve the tow hawser, which floated behind the tugboat.
“No, but I have a generator running to pump out the hold.”
“Okay. We’ll retrieve the anchor another way.”
“I’m not sure the anchor winch works, anyway,” Ryan said. “When I let the chain out, it smoked the clutches.”
“Not a problem. We’ll cut the anchor and mark it for retrieval later.” He relayed the information through his radio to the Star’s captain.
When the workboat had the tow hawser hooked to the bridle, it retreated to the Star and came back with a set of portable cutting torches. The crewman attached an acoustical beacon to the chain, and the torch made quick work of the links. With a steaming hiss, the hot chain fell into the water, and the Galina drifted backward until the tow cable arrested her movement.
“We’re ready here,” White said into his radio, and he watched the bridle carefully as the Star of Galveston applied power and took the Galina Jovovich under tow.
A moment later, White radioed that everything looked good and removed his hardhat and rubbed a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Got anything to drink?”
“Yeah, up on the bridge,” Ryan answered, and the two men walked up the stairs.
As White sipped his water, he looked at the rifle on the console and the pistol on Ryan’s hip. “Expecting trouble?”
“We’ve had several pirate attacks.”
“Screw that. This piece of shit isn’t worth it.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Ryan said. “We’re only doing this because this thing ran over and sank our cable-laying barge.”
“I don’t envy you.”
“It hasn’t been a picnic. I’ve been eating canned stew and shitting over the railing.”
“Screw that,” White said again. He glanced at his watch. “Tomorrow, we’ll be at the breakers, if everything goes well.”
Ryan looked longingly at Dark Water, wishing he were on her and zipping back to Bluefields. He wasn’t because he had a job to finish and this ordeal would be over soon.
It took nearly eighteen hours for Star of Galveston to tow the Galina Jovovich through the channel between El Bluff and Casaba Cay, and another two to make their way up the Escondido River to a wide branch which ran to the Smokey Lane Lagoon. The branch forked at a small island where four old cargo vessels shifted restlessly on heavy anchor chains in water the color of chocolate milk. Carved out of the single canopy jungle on the muddy shores of the island was a bustling scrapyard where a bevy of workers used cutting torches and saws to strip another ship and load the steel on barges for transport.
Once they’d rafted the Galina to one of the defunct cargo vessels, Capt. Mikkelson turned the tug around and headed for El Bluff, where the Star took a barge in tow before continuing out to meet Peggy Lynn to provide support for the diving operations on El Paso City.
Ryan wished he could have spent the night in Bluefields, drinking beers and hanging out with Greg, but Travis needed him to supplement the diving rotation while they recovered gear from the sunken cable layer.
When he climbed aboard Peggy Lynn, Gary was suiting up for a dive.
“You don’t waste any time, do you?” Ryan asked.
Gary grinned. “I’m not a slacker like you.”
“Well, this slacker needs a shower and a nap before he can do anything else.”
“Come on, all you’ve done since going to the Galina was sit on your ass.”
“You’re right, and I’m worn out from doing it. Have a nice dive.” Ryan went down the steps to the stateroom he shared with Gary and stripped out of his clothes before taking a shower. The hot water pounding his
skin and washing away the salt and grime felt good. After pulling on clean clothes, he stepped to the galley and found Grandpa had made a pot of fish stew and left it to simmer on the stove. Unable to handle eating stew for yet another meal, he fixed a sandwich and washed it down with a beer before retiring to his bunk. He stretched out under the sheet, luxuriating in the air conditioning, and drifted off to sleep, hoping he wouldn’t have to worry about wrangling wayward ships any time soon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
South Beach
Miami, Florida
At six a.m., there were few people on South Beach and even fewer in the water, which was where Emily Hunt was now pushing herself through the smooth Atlantic in long strokes. She was almost to the seawall at South Pointe Pier and the end of her two-mile swim. The water was clear and flat, with the waves just breaking on the sand. Swimming made her happy, and her mind shut off everything but the robotic motions of her freestyle technique.
As she approached the boulders of the seawall, she turned west toward the beach and drove hard for the shallows. When her feet touched sand, she kicked off and lunged forward, then gathered them under her again and started to run. She came out of the water and made a right on the wet sand. Rather than fixate on where her feet hit the ground, she focused on the day ahead and tried to make sense of the hunt for the captured freighter. Unlike with swimming, her mind drifted while running. It turned to DWR’s work in Bluefields and the fact that the Caribbean’s largest shipbreaker was just up the river from the sleepy town. And she thought about seeing Ryan.
Emily bent forward and sprinted as fast as she could. Her muscles screamed and her lungs ached, but she kept going, willing herself through the last mile at top speed. Finished with her run, she slowed and walked a block to her rental car. She toweled off and drove back to her hotel, showered, and put on slacks and a blouse.
She had spent yesterday working on other cases in her hotel room and this morning she was meeting the freelance sketch artist at the hospital. She had also used a mapping program to determine the distance the Everglades Explorer would have traveled at her cruising speed of six knots. Smith had told her the old ship would make ten knots when unloaded and that Spataro had ordered him to always cruise at six to conserve fuel. She’d drew a circle on the map to show how far the Explorer could have traveled at six knots and another circle to account for the increased speed. The latter ring reached Jamaica and extended halfway through the Caribbean to Venezuela. Each day, the circles would get larger, and the ship would become harder to find.
She’d focused on extending the circles to the north, south, and west. While she doubted the hijackers would cross the Atlantic, she could discount nothing in the beginning, even though her gut told her they were taking it to the breakers.
According to her rudimentary charts, they could be in South America in two days, Central America in four, and the United States in three. Cuba was only a short run away. If they went to Cuba, she could call off the search, because Ward and Young would never approve an operation to recover the ship from there. They didn’t cover any ships doing business in Cuban waters because of the U.S. sanctions and travel bans.
On her way to the hospital, Emily stopped for coffee and a breakfast sandwich for the captain. She knew how terrible hospital food was and wanted him to have something tasty to eat.
At nine a.m., she met the sketch artist in the lobby. Steve was a heavyset man in his forties, with long red hair styled in what she called an Amish bowl cut. Together, they rode the elevator to Smith’s floor and found the captain picking at a tray of rubbery eggs and a brown gravy-looking substance over toast.
When Emily set the fast food bag on the table, the man’s eyes lit up, and he reached eagerly into it. While he ate, he talked to Steve and tried his best to give an accurate description of the pirate who had taken his ship.
Two hours later, Steve had completed his sketch and held it up for Smith to look at.
He nodded. “That’s the guy.”
Emily leaned over to look at the picture with him. The man looked unremarkable, with pale skin, black hair, and rough stubble forming a beard and mustache. The nose was the most distinguishing feature with a wide flare in the middle. Now all she needed was a name to go with the face.
Steve and Emily bid their farewells to Smith and left the hospital as the captain’s family came into the room. She drove north on I-95 and got off to follow surface streets along the Miami River. It was a longer trip than taking the freeways, but it was more scenic, and she liked to see the changes along the waterfront. She’d been here many times while investigating cargo theft or checking on ship repairs. High-priced condos sprawled west from downtown Miami, taking over the small industrial buildings until they would eventually displace the commercial fishing and crabbing docks, but they wouldn’t be able to move the shipping docks, wrecking yards, and scrap metal vendors farther upriver. The Miami River would always be a hub of trade, and the people paying for the view would have to watch rusty freighters and smoking tugs pass by their wide windows.
Spataro Shipping was one of the larger shipping concerns on the concrete-lined waterway. Their office was in an old two-story, tan building made of concrete block. High rusty chain-link fencing with four strands of barbed wire at the top surrounded the lot. Cargo containers in a variety of sizes and colors sat in stacks four and five high, waiting to be loaded onto ships along the quay. Semi-trucks entered and exited the dusty yard. She counted five massive cranes. Numerous reach stackers and forklifts barreled along the waterfront, busily moving cargo, and adding an element of chaos to the orderly-looking shipping yard.
Inside, the building was lit with fluorescent tube lights that provided a reflective sheen to the cracked and worn laminate floor tiles. Lorenzo’s office was on the second floor, and Emily introduced herself to the secretary and asked if Mr. Spataro was available. She told Emily that he was expecting her and to go on in. The corner office’s single-pane windows overlooked the shipping yard and the river. A small pleasure boat was passing by, the driver and passengers gawking openly at the massive cargo vessels.
Lorenzo Spataro greeted her by rising from his desk. She refrained from shaking his hand because of the sweat-soaked handkerchief that he held and sat across from him.
“How is Captain Smith?” he asked.
“He says he’ll be good as new soon and ready to go to sea.”
Spataro nodded. “I may not have a ship for him to captain if we don’t get the Explorer back.”
“Have you begun looking for another ship to buy?” she asked.
With a sigh, he said, “No, but I suppose I’ll have to. No luck with the captain, then?”
Emily removed the color sketch of the mystery man and showed it to him.
He shook his head. “I’ve never seen him before.”
She replaced the sketch in her briefcase. “Do you have a file on the Explorer?”
“Certainly. I had Maria put it in the conference room for you.”
“Before I look at it, can I ask you a few questions?”
Spataro nodded and wiped his forehead.
“Do you have any enemies?”
“Not that I know of.”
“What about disputes with workers or customers?”
“I always have some sort of dispute brewing. We’re dealing with sailors, Ms. Hunt. They’re a temperamental breed. You know the saying: ‘A bitching sailor is a happy sailor.’”
“I’ve never heard that before.”
“Sailors never seem happy unless they’re complaining about something, like working conditions, pay, et cetera.”
“I see. Have any of these unhappy sailors filed complaints or sabotaged one of your ships?”
Spataro leaned back in his chair and adjusted the antique wire fan to blow on his face. “Years ago, I had trouble paying a crew because my client didn’t pay me. He promised to pay after one more voyage, and I agreed. We made a run to the DR, and, once in port, the crew complained to
the union and the government seized my ship. They auctioned it off and the buyer had her taken straight to the breaker.”
“I’ve heard of that happening, but usually it’s a lengthy process from seizure to auction.”
“Someone bribed the judge and he issued an order for seizure,” Spataro explained. “The police have to enforce it, and they were probably greased as well. Once a ship is sold at a maritime auction, the auction eliminates a ship’s history, including debts and prior ownership. It’s like we never existed, and I had no rights.”
“I don’t remember that happening,” Emily said.
“I wasn’t with Ward and Young then. That incident was the reason I started using your company. The premiums are more, but the coverage is much better.”
Emily nodded. She knew Ward and Young had some of the highest premiums in the business. She changed the subject, and asked, “The Haitians didn’t seize the Explorer, did they?”
He gestured to her briefcase. “That man doesn’t look like a Haitian to me.”
“Maybe they hired someone to steal it. Have you had any problems down there?”
“Never, and I’m sure if my fixer had heard about the ship being in a Haitian port, he would have called me.”
“Could he have been in on it?”
“No,” Spataro said flatly. “He and Capt. Smith are good friends, and I look the other way when Smith takes extra goods to sell down there. He and the fixer split the profits. Money buys loyalty in Haiti, and Robenson Girard is as loyal as any man can get.”
“What about the charterer who holds the Haitian contract?”
“Again, no.” Spataro leaned forward. “Ms. Hunt, the men who took my ship are pirates, plain and simple. They have no connection to me or to my charter parties.”
“But why your ship?”
“I don’t know, and I ask myself that every day. Those men deserved better than to be shot to death.”
Emily stood and said she would like to examine the ship’s file. Spataro nodded, and said he’d had his secretary, Maria, place it in the conference room. As she closed the office door behind her, he picked up the phone.