Dark Hunt: A Ryan Weller Thriller

by Evan Graver

  There had been much discussion between Sadiq and General Golnar about going to Venezuela, where Club-Ks had been stockpiled in case of a U.S. invasion. The trip would only add two days to their total sailing time, but Sadiq fretted about being stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard if they had a blockade in place or were searching every freighter coming and going from Caracas. The U.S. was adamant about their sanctions against President Maduro, which was why one of General Golnar’s proxies at the Egyptian embassy in Caracas had purchased the missiles and arranged for them to be transported via truck over the mountains into Colombia and shipped from Barranquilla to Puerto Cortés.

  The tugboat blasted its horn, signaling the bunkers were full and the ship was ready to move. A pilot came aboard the Explorer, and Sadiq and his captain stood on the bridge wing to watch as the tug took them out to the main channel. Once they had passed through the channel buoys, the pilot set them on a course for Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, then went down the ladder to the waiting pilot boat.

  “Set our course for Port Everglades,” Sadiq told his captain. “In six days, we will have a new world.”

  The captain smiled. “Inshallah.”

  God willing.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Bluefields International Airport

  Bluefields, Nicaragua

  Insurance investigator Emily Hunt stepped down from the Bell 407GPX behind Shelly Hughes, Dark Water Research’s chief operating officer. The jungle heat and humidity, even in the late Nicaraguan evening, felt almost oppressive. Her neck started to sweat under her long hair, and she pulled it aside to let out the trapped heat. Sometimes she thought about cutting off her bra-length mane, and this was one of them.

  Erica Opsal, the pilot, climbed out the helicopter, and the three women walked to a minivan. They rode across town to The Oasis Casino and Hotel, which was a block from the waterfront in what was considered the downtown. It was a three-story building with a tan-and-white stucco exterior and a tin roof. Thick ornate columns flanked the casino’s entrance and held up the overhanging second level, where guests lounged on the open-air patio, enjoying evening drinks.

  Emily and Shelly took the stairs to the third-floor presidential suite where Greg Olsen sat at the table, staring at a laptop, and drinking a beer.

  He grinned when the women entered. “I knew my favorite insurance investigator couldn’t stay away.”

  “I’m killing two birds with one stone,” Emily said by way of a greeting.

  “What do you mean?” Greg asked.

  Emily got a beer from the fridge and took a long drink. It felt refreshing to her parched throat. After getting the call from Lorenzo Spataro about the possible sighting of the Everglades Explorer, she had packed a bag and booked a flight to Managua. It had taken her eight hours and one stop in Atlanta to get to Augusto Cesar Sandino International Airport. When she was in Atlanta, she’d tried to book a flight from Managua to Bluefields, but she couldn’t find any. She would have to take a bus or rent a car, and neither option appealed to her. Eventually, she had called Greg, knowing he was in Bluefields, and asked if he could help her get from the capital city to the port on the eastern coast of the small country. He’d sent the helicopter and offered her a room in his suite.

  “I’m sure Emily would like to freshen up,” Shelly said. “She’s had a long day.”

  “I wouldn’t mind taking a shower. Then I’ll answer all your questions.”

  “All of them?” Greg asked, raising his eyebrows.

  Emily shook her head. “About why I’m here. Some subjects are off limits.”

  Shelly shot Greg a look that told him to behave and motioned toward the spare bedroom. “The shower is through there.”

  Emily showered and changed into shorts and a tank top, then joined her friends in the living area once more.

  Shelly handed her a glass of wine. “Now, other than looking at our wreck, why are you here?”

  “I’m looking for a stolen freighter, and we had a report that it was at the breakers.”

  “Here?” Greg asked.

  “Yes.”

  Greg rubbed his chin. “You said it came in yesterday?”

  “That’s what this guy told my client. Why?”

  “We were out on the bay all day yesterday and I never saw a ship head upriver.”

  Emily asked, “Could it have come in when it was dark?”

  He shook his head. “The channel is too narrow, and it would be tricky to navigate at night.”

  “So, you don’t think the ship is there?” Emily asked.

  “I’m not saying it didn’t slip past me, but I don’t think it is. How about this? Tomorrow, you go look at the EPC and then I’ll have someone drive you upriver to the breakers. You can look for your boat and take a look at the Galina Jovovich.”

  Emily stifled a yawn. “That sounds good. I think I’ll go to bed so I can get an early start.” She set the glass on the coffee table and stood. She was positive Greg would send Ryan with her, and she needed a good night’s sleep to face the man she’d tried to leave behind but thought about every day.

  Chapter Thirty

  Peggy Lynn

  Over the wreck of El Paso City

  The divers were in the middle of recovering as many items from the cable layer as they could to lighten the ship before they raised her. Dark Water Research’s fleet of recovery vessels had arrived on site, including Fort Stockton, another cable layer, Texas Ranger, a forty-meter crane ship capable of lifting eight hundred tons, and Liberty, a sleek-looking coastal survey vessel built by Damen Shipyards, which Ryan and Travis had both agreed would make a great salvage vessel.

  Peggy Lynn was nearly fifty years old and, despite her retrofits and upgrades, she was showing her age. It wouldn’t be long before they’d need to find another boat to replace her. That was a prospect that none of the crew wanted to think about, and they’d agreed that they’d use the old gal until she could no longer reliably take them to sea. Ryan had a feeling that when that day arrived, Capt. Dennis and Grandpa would finally retire, too.

  In the meantime, they had work to do, and Ryan now stood in Peggy Lynn’s diver Launch and Recovery System, or LARS, basically a large metal cage raised and lowered by the boat’s crane, with his Kirby Morgan helmet on, ready to make his second dive of the day. The new cable-laying ship, Fort Stockton, had an empty cable reel, and it was Ryan’s job to unbolt the basket so the Texas Ranger could lift it aboard the waiting barge.

  Out of the corner of the helmet’s faceplate, he saw DWR’s Bell 407GPX helicopter come into view. It had made the trip from the States on the landing pad mounted on the bow of Texas Ranger. Rick and Erica used it to make daily flights between Bluefields and the DWR fleet. Ryan figured they were bringing supplies, or one of the endless official government visitors, or engineers working on either the wreck recovery or repairing the fiber-optic cable Ryan had cut before the EPC sank.

  “Ready to dive?” Stacey asked over the intercom, acting as tender.

  Ryan took one last look at the descending helicopter. How had Rick and Erica gotten together? The two had made no bones about their dislike for each other last year, when they’d all been together on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. If Rick could land a good-looking woman like Erica, Ryan wondered, why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?

  “Focus, Weller,” Stacey slapped him hard on the back of the helmet.

  Ryan gave her an okay sign with his fingers, and she pushed the button on the crane controller, sending the LARS plunging into the water.

  Several minutes later, he was on the bottom, looking at the wrecked ship. He made his way through the muck to the cable basket, where miles of carefully wound cable lay partially in the mud and partially in the basket.

  Travis, Gary, Ryan, and Anthony had spent all the previous day using a suction tube to dig channels under the fiber-optic cable. Stacey’s job had been to run one-inch-thick steel cables encased in a heavy layer of plastic under the fiber-optic
cable, forming a spiderweb around it and the carousel. With the subsea cable contained, they’d unbolted all but four of the bolts securing the carousel to the deck of El Paso City and used more cables to rig an attachment point for the crane hook.

  Now, Ryan swam to the center of the spiderweb and instructed the crane operator on the Texas Ranger to lower the crane hook. When Ryan told the operator to halt, the hook hovered just above his head. He slipped the ends of the steel cables connected to the carousel over the hook.

  “All right, Hugo,” Ryan said. “Raise the hook.”

  The lifting block slowly rose, putting tension on the carousel’s cables. Ryan told Hugo to hold, squeezed beneath the carousel and the EPC’s deck, and used a pneumatic impact wrench to loosen the four bolts holding the carousel to the deck. As the last bolt came free, the carousel shifted, swinging away from the ship. Ryan dropped the impact wrench and pushed himself out of the way, barely missing being struck by the carousel as it swung back and smacked the deck.

  “You okay, Ryan?” Stacey asked.

  Ryan took a moment to shake off the near miss before scrambling out from under the swinging carousel. “I’m good. Slack up my umbilical and we’ll be ready to hoist the carousel.”

  He climbed the railing to stand on the port side of the cable-laying barge as she took in the umbilical’s slack. “All clear, Stacey?”

  “Roger that,” she replied.

  Ryan ordered Hugo to commence lifting operations, giving him a running commentary of everything happening with the lift, painting a verbal picture for the crane operator. As the crane lifted the subsea cable and carousel, clouds of particulate billowed up, obscuring Ryan’s view, and he called the lift to a halt.

  When the water had cleared, Ryan gave Hugo the command to lift. Once the cable cleared the water, it was no longer Ryan’s operation, and he climbed back into the LARS. Stacey hoisted him straight to the surface and helped him strip off his gear as he walked to the recompression chamber, passing Gary, who was acting as the backup diver. They high-fived, and Ryan jumped into the chamber for his extended recompression stops. Grandpa blew him back down to eighty feet and started slowly bringing him back up.

  As Ryan lay on the thin pad over the hard steel bench, he put his arm over his eyes and asked Grandpa to shut off the lights. The old man did so, and Ryan slid his arm down to his chest. His thoughts drifted to his conversation with Travis. He needed to figure out whether he was an operator or a diver. How could he pick just one when he loved both?

  What did his future hold, and how could he expect a woman to live the same life he did unless she enjoyed it? Stacey loved diving and being a captain, and it had worked for her and Travis. Now Rick was dating Erica. Greg had asked Shelly to move into his house, and Ryan had accepted an invitation to be a groomsman for Don Williams, a DWR engineer, at the end of May.

  Ryan rolled onto his side and punched the pad. His knuckles ached, but he slammed them into the pad again. Most of the people he knew were in committed relationships. He’d always been a bit of a loner, preferring casual dating. Most of his relationships had an end date from the very beginning, like a piece of fruit gone rotten.

  Everyone seemed to be moving ahead with life, except him. Maybe it was time for him to leave the salvage boat and do something else, but it wouldn’t be returning to Wilmington and working for his father’s construction company. His Lafitte 44 sailboat was sitting on the hard at Five Islands Yacht Club in Chaguaramas, Trinidad. He could catch a ride to Bluefields, drive across Nicaragua to Managua, and hop a flight to Trinidad. Once there, he could refit his sailboat and disappear into the endless blue, but would it make him happy? Would he just be in a different place with the same problems? There was a saying for that: no matter where you go, there you are.

  Was he really ready for a wife and kids and a house, or was he just restless, or jealous? Those were questions he couldn’t answer while lying inside a steel tube, or even outside of it. They had plagued him for a while now and, with the added pressure to figure out his next move, he felt like the walls were closing in.

  A rapping on the outside of the recompression chamber interrupted his thoughts. He sat up, careful not to smack his head on the sides or roof like he’d done so many times in the past, and looked out the small porthole at the back of a head of purple hair. He pressed the button on the squawk box. “What’s up, Stace?”

  She turned and, with a smile, said, “You’re not going to believe who just showed up.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Everglades Explorer

  Straits of Yucatán

  Sadiq stood on the bridge, his hands clasped behind his back, as his crewmen stretched massive tarps across the ship’s cargo deck, making her look like a covered grain hauler instead of a general cargo vessel. Once the tarp was up, the men welded a scaffolding of pipes to the aft section of the superstructure. They strung more tarps over the piping to add bulk to the rear.

  He knew satellites could track them, but there was usually a gap in coverage, anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. During this gap, they would change the ship’s outline, throwing off anyone using a search program based on the ship’s previous profile. Sadiq didn’t think a stolen freighter would be worth the time and expense, but he carried out his orders just the same.

  Sadiq no reason to worry, and he did. He should have kept the captain alive to report to the shipowner. The man’s disappearance from the aft deck worried him as well. Where had he gone? Had he died in the waters off Miragoâne? Had someone found him and reported his murder? What if there was someone looking for the Explorer right now because he had been careless?

  He recounted their travels from Lebanon to the Dominican Republic via jetliner using British visas. From there, they had snuck across the border into Haiti and met their contact, a ruthless warlord who provided them with weapons and a vehicle. The ride to the port had been fraught with danger, with rebel checkpoints, looters in the streets, and men who had followed them until Sadiq had exited the truck, dispatched the driver with several well-placed shots, and disabled the truck with more rounds to the radiator and tires.

  When they’d reached Miragoâne, Sadiq and his men had waited until dark in a stinking room above a tiny restaurant. They had feasted on goat, beans, and rice before slipping into the streets and making their way to the docks. After commandeering a boat, Sadiq and his men rowed to the freighter, caught everyone sleeping, and shot them on the aft deck with their suppressed pistols. They’d weighed down the bodies with scraps of steel and dumped them in the Jamaican Channel.

  With the canopy in place over the deck, the missile technician opened the container and began testing the system. Sadiq walked down to the container and stuck his head inside the open door. The control panels were a complex series of buttons, knobs, dials, and screens.

  “Ah, Brother Sadiq, come. I will show you how this works,” the technician said in Arabic.

  Sadiq stepped inside. A generator hummed deeper in the container, providing power and air conditioning for the electronics.

  “Press this button here,” the tech said, and Sadiq complied.

  A series of tests began running, flashing numbers and strings of code in Russian across the screens.

  “It is running the function test. Once it is complete, we will link to the satellites. You have the coordinates, do you not?”

  “Of course.” Sadiq patted his pocket. “And the launch codes.”

  Five minutes later, a beep from the console drew their attention to a screen. “There, you see. Everything works perfectly. Now I will turn on the GPS.”

  “Will that broadcast our signal?” Sadiq asked.

  “No. I have masked the outgoing signal for the test, but we will not have that luxury when we launch the missiles.” He pressed a button and the computer system set about connecting with Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System.

  The two men watched in silence as each of the four missiles began a digital handshake to confi
rm and test the system.

  “We are set, Sadiq. Would you like to put in the coordinates now?”

  The terrorist leader sat on a rolling stool in front of the keyboard. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and input the strings of numbers showing the latitude and longitude of each missile strike.

  “If you don’t mind, brother, what are the targets?”

  Sadiq finished entering the last set of numbers and pointed at the screen. “The first is Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The missile strike will bring the first responders to the scene shortly before we drive the ship into the port and detonate our bomb. The next two are aimed at the American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the last is a special surprise for the Russians. They have a frigate in Havana called the Admiral Golovko. We will destroy it to show our displeasure with the Russians for helping the Americans to fight against us.”

  The technician nodded and stroked his beard. “It is a splendid plan, Sadiq. We will be martyrs for the cause. Inshallah.”

  “Inshallah, brother.” Sadiq’s watch beeped. “Come. We must pray.”

  The two men retrieved their prayer rugs and assembled with the rest of the crew on the main deck, facing east and praying for the successful completion of their mission.

  Chapter Thirty-Two