by Mack Maloney
When the police returned with this news, the only explanation they could give the women was that either professional pirates had kidnapped their men to work on a ship or a UFO had taken them away. The cops basically told them, “Take your pick.”
With the men gone and the women frantic, some of the elderly people on the island began telling stories they remembered from their youth, similar tales of large groups of people being led away by strange men in black — maybe pirates, maybe not. At the time, these were disappearances not considered unusual, because strange things were always happening in the Bahamas. The elderly people kept telling these stories over and over again, and at the end of the three weeks, half the people on the island believed a UFO had taken the men away — and the other half believed it was pirates.
The next day, using gas given to him by the women, Ramon found his way home. When he returned to the island a few days later to repay the women, it was deserted. The women and their families had all left for parts unknown.
This story took three rounds of beers and a couple smoke breaks for Ramon to complete. He spoke very slowly, with a deep Jamaican accent, and frequently lost track of where he was, which meant he had to go all the way back to the beginning and start over again.
But just a few minutes into the tale, Nolan was convinced that this was either a massive practical joke being played on them, or that the ONI was punishing them by putting them through some kind of weird security check. There just was no way they could take this guy, or his story, seriously.
That is, until he offered to show them the island where the woodcutters were really taken.
“It exists?” Nolan asked him. “You know where it is?”
“I can find it,” Ramon assured him. “Bring me out in a boat and I will sniff it out.”
Nolan and Batman just looked at each other. What all this had to do with some catastrophic pirate attack, they had no idea. Their mission was to find this guy, get the information he supposedly had in his irreversibly stoned brain, and then follow up on any usable intelligence. They weren’t sure if going on a search for the missing woodcutters really applied.
“But, hey, we get paid no matter what we do,” Batman said to Nolan as Ramon took another smoke break. “And believe me, I don’t mind taking the ONI for their money, especially after what they did to us a couple months ago.”
“I’m with you there,” Nolan agreed.
“So we kill the day by taking a little boat ride,” Batman went on. “What’s the big deal? We’ve got the perfect excuse for fucking off — the ONI’s nifty antenna fell overboard and we didn’t want to use an unsecured line to let them know. Plus, we need the rest. Plus, we’re in the islands — that’s how everyone does it out here. We’ll look for these missing guys, we’ll write up whatever we find, and then we’ll sail back to the Mothership. Unless you’re in a hurry to go back and deal with those guys right away.”
Nolan shook his head fiercely at that idea.
“Not me,” he said, draining his beer.
Batman did a fist bump with him.
“Good man,” he said, ordering two more beers. “Besides, by the time we get back, those SEALs will have probably caught the real bad guys anyway.”
23
Ten miles off Miami Beach
The Persian Breeze was bound for New Jersey.
The mid-size LNG carrier had 20,000 cubic yards of natural gas onboard. Loaded in Yemen, the LNG was due at a holding facility in Logan, New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia, in two days. At the moment, the ship was on schedule.
Though it was registered in Panama and licensed in Liberia, the Persian Breeze was actually owned by a Yemeni businessman. Its crew was comprised mostly of Iranians, but they all had fake visas that showed them to be Lebanese or Egyptian. They’d avoided any interference from NATO or American Navy ships during their trip to the U.S. East Coast, which was good, because the Persian Breeze was carrying more than just natural gas.
It was now 1100 hours and the captain, having finished his late-morning meal, came up on the bridge. He checked the ship’s course and scanned the long-range weather console. They would be moving through some rainsqualls for the next hour, but then they were promised calm seas and good weather up the Florida coast and all the way to New Jersey. The captain was hoping they would arrive in Logan sometime the following evening.
Returning to his quarters, he called for his first mate. The man arrived, and together they unpacked a sea bag the captain had secured under his bunk.
Inside was more than 100 pounds of pure, uncut morphine.
At present it was in the form of boulder-size blocks, brown and sticky. The blocks were the result of the first refining process from the poppy fields in Afghanistan. Cooked down to morphine, the opiate became highly transportable. Once the morphine reached New Jersey, an illicit lab in Camden would further refine it, eventually turning it into pure heroin. When this heroin hit the streets — after being cut with plain powdered sugar — it would be worth close to $100 million. For the trouble of moving the illegal cache to New Jersey, the captain and his crew would split $2 million.
Their task now was to break the blocks into one-pound bricks, then package the bricks in plastic wrapping and label them.
As this process began, the captain and the first mate smoked some hashish. Their scale was a simple bathroom scale — there was so much morphine in the shipment, weighing it was just a formality. After weighing a brick, the first mate would wrap it in bright red cellophane. Then their last job was to assign each brick a number.
It was so easy they could do it stoned.
* * *
The weighing and packaging took about an hour.
By the end of it, they were able to produce and package a total of 105 bricks.
The plan now was to secret the bricks in the ship’s NGC wash box. NGC stood for natural gas cleansing, a procedure performed every time an LNG carrier unloaded its cargo. The wash box, where the tools used for the cleaning were kept, was probably the dirtiest place on any LNG carrier. Usually covered with metal filings and gooey wax, it was the perfect spot to hide the morphine.
The packaging complete, the captain and first mate celebrated by drinking a cup of Syrah wine. The captain had just drained his and was pouring them a refill when he looked up to see a shadow cast against his cabin door. Someone was approaching, which made the captain angry, because he had standing orders that no one could disturb him during this phase of the smuggling operation.
He was about to yell something to the wayward crewman when the first mate grabbed his wrist and pointed to the porthole right above the captain’s head.
A person dressed entirely in black, wearing goggles and battle helmet, was looking in on them. Another figure appeared in a second porthole as well; he was similarly dressed in black.
“What’s going on here?” the captain cried out. These were definitely not his crewmen.
The next thing they knew, the cabin door flew wide open and both the captain and the first mate were looking into the barrels of two M4 assault rifles.
The shadow on his cabin door turned out to be a man in full combat array, soaking wet from top to bottom and holding a huge weapon.
“What is this?” the captain demanded. “Who are you?”
But the captain immediately knew the answer when he saw the patch on the man’s shoulder. It showed a U.S. flag and an eagle sitting atop an anchor.
The captain’s heart sank. “Navy SEALs?” he gasped.
“That’s right,” the man with the gun said. “Now hit the deck, both of you.”
Crash was the third man into the captain’s cabin after Commander Beaux and Ghost. Monkey and Smash were outside, looking in the portholes and making sure none of the other crew interfered. Once again, Crash was working the video camera.
He couldn’t believe they were actually on the LNG ship. They had come up in back of it during one of the rainsqualls, invisible on radar and to the naked eye as well. Exiting
the Sea Shadow by the top hatch, they hooked on to the tanker’s rear railing and climbed up even as the rain soaked them. Then they quickly skirted the bridge and found the captain’s cabin.
Commander Beaux had suspected the LNG carrier as being up to no good after carefully going over every ship transiting through the trouble zone. But though Beaux’s intuition appeared to be correct, the Iranians were apparently up to something other than pulling off a massive sea hijacking. Still, it had been another seamless operation by the 616.
Beaux now went through the stack of morphine bricks, breaking off a piece and placing it on his tongue.
“Figures,” he said, his image and words being picked up by the video camera. “These mooks think it’s easy cash taking this junk into our country. They’re giving the Mexican and Chinese cartels a run for their money”
What happened next Crash found very interesting. Had this been a Whiskey operation, he could see anything happening to this ship, from the crew being beaten, to the ship being sunk. That’s just how things went with Whiskey.
But Crash was sure Commander Beaux knew better. Such things would only interfere with their main mission of finding the phantom pirates before disaster hit. So in Crash’s eyes, Beaux did the most professional thing he could do.
He asked Crash to follow him as he picked up with ease the 100-pound bag containing the morphine bricks. Beaux carried it out of the cabin and out onto the deck, where Monkey and Smash were now holding the rest of the crew. Crash set up the video shot, and with a mighty heave, Beaux tossed the bag over the side. At least $100 million in dope now belonged to the sea.
Then they returned to the cabin and, camera still running, Commander Beaux picked the captain up off the deck.
“You’re a very lucky man,” Beaux growled at him. “I could have you and your men locked up for the rest of your lives. But there are more important things happening right now — so I’ll just leave you at the mercy of the people you were supposed to deliver that junk to.”
At that point, Commander Beaux had the rest of 616 search the ship for weapons. They found a few handguns and some ammunition, which also went over the side. Then he and the SEAL team ran back to the ship’s stern, intent on leaving the way they came.
They went down the access rope one at a time. Commander Beaux and Crash brought up the rear, covering their egress. Waiting their turn to climb back down to the Sea Shadow, Commander Beaux asked Crash: “So, how does it feel being a ghost?”
“Feels good,” Crash replied truthfully. “They say you can’t go home again. But I’ve just done that — or at least temporarily.”
“Why temporarily?” Beaux asked him.
“Because I’m an old man by your standards,” Crash replied. “Plus, I was drummed out of the military to the point where they won’t even let my ex-CO step foot on U.S. soil again. There’s no way the Navy would let me back in.”
Beaux slapped him on the back.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “I admire what you guys have done in this sea security business. Give me details on how you pulled off your missions, and when this is over, I’ll put in a good word for you to get back in to the SEALs.”
Crash nearly fell off the railing to the water below.
“Really?” he asked.
Beaux nodded. “Really.”
24
On the Dustboat
Nolan wondered if he needed some suntan lotion.
He was stretched out on a beach chair atop the Dustboat’s bridge roof, the sun beating down on him mercilessly. He had his shades on, and a wet cloth was covering his head. But he could still feel his skin getting a little burned — and this was a good thing.
He believed the last of the methoxsalen injected into him for the Shanghai adventure was finally leaving his system. The diluted nitric wash had already faded away. So if he was getting a sunburn, that might mean he was on his way back to being just another pale white guy again — at least on the outside.
It was almost 3 P.M. They’d been cruising around the astonishingly clear waters of the outer Abaco island chain since before 10 A.M. Ramon, their stoned informant, was in the ship’s control room below, studying maps, looking at GPS readouts and having intense discussions with the Senegals — who he was convinced were from Jamaica, despite their repeated denials. This was all in an effort to find the island he believed the missing woodcutters were actually taken to, maybe by pirates, maybe by a UFO.
But at the moment, Nolan really didn’t care. The sun felt warm and healing. The flashbacks of Shanghai were finally dissolving, along with his fake stitches, and all thoughts of the weird events from the night before. He’d spotted a number of U.S. military aircraft flying off in the distance. Navy P-3 Orions and Air Force C-130s, they seemed to be doing crisscrossing patterns as part of the overall search for the phantom pirates, he guessed. So at least someone was doing something constructive. But if, as Batman believed, Whiskey had been sent out here on a fool’s mission, then for $5 million, fools they would be.
He just wished they’d brought some Coppertone.
* * *
There were very few islands in the Bahamas that had anything taller than palm or black mangrove trees growing on them.
A few, though, were dotted with the juniperus barbadensis, a type of conifer, or the ficus aurea, better known as the strangler fig. Both trees could grow to substantial size.
By Ramon’s distorted thinking, the native Bahamian women who’d lost their menfolk had probably gotten the name of the work island wrong. That’s why the cops had found a cay with no trees on it. Only islands where juniperus barbadensis or ficus aurea grew would be logical places for anyone wanting to cut down a “forest of trees.” And Ramon was sure he knew of just such an island close by North Gin Cay. It all sounded good — but they’d been going around in circles ever since he’d come aboard.
Nolan could hear everything being said on the bridge right below him — and Ramon truly was trying to find the island he had in mind. But he kept saying that he was lacking in “inspiration,” as he called it, and that was making the search more difficult.
Half asleep and pleasantly disengaged, Nolan wasn’t sure just what Ramon meant until one of the Senegals finally poked his head up over the roof and, in a slightly exasperated voice, told Nolan, “Son inspiration est l’herbe.”
His inspiration is in the herb.
Without moving an inch, Nolan replied: “Informer l’homme Chauve-souris.”
Tell the Batman.
Within a few minutes, Batman had passed a little inspiration on to Ramon. Ramon lit it up, indulged in it, and instantly had them going at full speed toward the northeast.
* * *
Not ten minutes later, they were approaching an isolated cay at the end of the outer Abaco chain.
It was an odd-looking place, flat, oval-shaped and maybe a half-mile around. There were no buildings or any other sign of habitation on it. A huge lake in the middle was fed by a long channel running through it from the sea. The lake was 100 yards wide at some points, narrower at others, and was roughly rectangular in shape. Judging from its blue water, it ran fairly deep.
The island was also home to some “blue holes,” the underwater cave systems found on many Bahamian islands. And just as Ramon had said, the place was thick with patches of tall overhanging trees that didn’t seem particularly Bahamian. There were so many of them, they practically hid the lake from view in some places
Appropriately, the island’s name was Big Hole Cay.
* * *
They lowered a boat, and Nolan, Batman and Ramon motored toward shore.
The closer they got to the island, the more deserted and lifeless it seemed. So when they finally arrived on the beach, they were surprised to discover a lot of tools scattered about the sand. There were some axes and saws and ropes, and dozens of shovels, rusting in the sun.
“Looks like the equipment made it here,” Batman said. “But was anything ever done with it?”
It was hard to tell. They could see no felled trees, no stumps, no piles of sawdust. And no evidence that any wood had left the island.
“This is a good sign,” Ramon told them. “There is supposedly a creature that lives on islands such as this. It’s called a chickcarnie. It has three toes, red eyes and the body of a bird. Anyone who disturbs its nest gets very fucked up, as in nothing is left of them but a few bones.”
“Charming,” Nolan said.
They left Ramon with the boat and walked deeper into the forest. That’s when they came upon something very odd.
The channel that fed the island’s big lake had a fairly narrow opening coming in from the sea. On reaching its banks, Nolan and Batman discovered what looked to be a recent effort to widen this opening. On both sides, they could see substantial portions of sand, mud and vegetation had been freshly removed, enlarging the relatively slight gap from about fifty feet to 100 feet or more.
It was only a small area where this work had been done, maybe 200 feet along each bank until the channel widened out on its own before emptying into the big, tree-shrouded lake. But it must have been arduous work for whoever did the labor, because all of it would have had to have been done by hand.
So, had the missing woodcutters actually been hired to widen this channel’s opening? Was that the reason for all the rusty shovels?
“This channel’s mouth was already fifty feet wide,” Nolan said, looking at a year-old Google photo of the place. “Why would anyone want it to be a hundred feet across? No one’s building anything here. This place is about as isolated as you can get. It’s hardly been touched by civilization at all.”