He climbed up the two teakwood steps from the hull and into the wide cockpit, to inspect the damage outside. The sun was blazing overhead, between the whip ends of storm clouds escaping north. The mast was gone from its familiar spot in the sky. Looking forward with a hand shading his eyes, he stared at the rusting bow of a steel fishing vessel or tugboat. Seabago’s twin hulls had straddled the tug’s bow on impact, and the immovable wedge of rusting iron had destroyed the cat’s forward crossbeam. His boat was finished. Seabago would never sail again, even if she could find saltwater to float upon.
When the crossbeam was destroyed upon impact, down had come the mast. Unsupported by its forestay wire, the aluminum mast fell straight back, and now it lay across the cockpit and far astern of the cat in a snarl of tangled stainless steel rigging wire. Other than the crushed forward crossbeam, the two hulls appeared to be intact. What really finished the boat was its location: it was buried deep in a debris field left by the receding storm surge, with no ocean or bay in sight. Smashed houses, telephone poles, overturned cars, shattered pine trees and random lumber and trash extended in all directions, even lapping over Seabago’s trapped hulls. Everywhere in between was sand and mud and rubbish, laced together with half-buried wires, cables and ropes.
Closer examination of the debris revealed an even more interesting fact: most of the surrounding destruction wasn’t new. The steel tugboat he’d challenged with the cat’s fragile forward crossbeam had not recently come to rest on this spot. It was a mass of rust—it had obviously lain in this place for many years. A small tree, recently stripped of leaves, grew from its windowless pilothouse. All around the catamaran, pieces of weathered gray plywood and other broken construction materials were stained by old dirt and mildew. Saplings grew from within half-buried cars, sprouting through missing windows. He was in a place that had been hurricane-blasted at least once before, and had not been cleaned up since. A new layer of trash had settled over the old when last night’s storm surge receded.
The catamaran was a total loss, but his cargo was not. There were a hundred Japanese solar panels he’d picked up in Recife; each was worth more than an ounce of gold in Texas. Packed over and around the panels were 700 two-kilo plastic containers of Brazilian coffee, a luxury currently unavailable in the United States at almost any price. Both cargos were worth a small fortune if they could be sold, but the boat was trapped in a labyrinth of storm wreckage.
His watch told him it was 11:50 a.m. on Tuesday, December 11. At least the cheap digital timepiece still worked. He removed his sextant from its mahogany case in the navigation station, and prepared to shoot a noon sun sight. GPS was gone, but the sun and the stars remained—at least when they were not hidden by thick clouds, as they had been during the storm. Low marshland provided an inexact horizon, but it would be enough to make a rough fix today.
Back in the navigation station, he sat at his desk and entered the sun’s mid-day height into his pocket-size celestial navigation calculator, and his numbers were quickly converted to latitude and longitude. A water-stained chart of the Gulf of Mexico lay unfolded on the small table. He ran his finger up the longitude line to where it intersected the coast: he was in Alabama, between the Mississippi state line and Mobile Bay.
This was much, much further east than he had hoped, and his spirits sank. His cargo was destined for Port Arthur in East Texas, the so-called Texas Republic…but here he was in Alabama. Alabama was under some kind of martial law or emergency rule, from what he’d heard. Even western Louisiana would have been better. He would be lucky to get himself out of Alabama, much less find a way to sell his cargo. Salvaging the cargo would require hundreds of trips on foot, across tricky broken terrain. Even if he could salvage it, selling the cargo in Alabama would be difficult to impossible without local contacts—contacts he didn’t have.
He had to face the new reality: his cargo was of no value to him if he couldn’t sell it, or even move it. What were his alternatives? He had enough food and water to remain aboard the trapped catamaran for a few weeks, but then what? Eventually he’d be discovered, and his cargo would be found and taken away, either stolen by bandits or confiscated by government officials.
If he couldn’t stay, and he couldn’t sell or salvage his cargo; if the Seabago was a total loss and would never float again…what then? Could he somehow find another boat and transfer the cargo? How far across the debris field and the marshes was it to deep water, and could this movement be made without discovery? Unlikely. No…impossible.
Sixty-four years old, and shipwrecked again. Sitting on a fortune in cargo that was useless to him. Like a homeless pauper resting on a solid gold park bench, as they said in Brazil. So what options remained? Could he make his way across the debris and marshland to the bay, and then find some craft to sail back down island while leaving his cargo behind? As quickly as he thought of this idea, he dismissed it as fantasy. What seaworthy craft would be left floating and intact after a hurricane, just waiting for a stranded sailor? Sailing back down island was not a realistic option.
And even if he could find a way to escape back down to the islands, he just didn’t have the heart for it. With his home in Panama confiscated, his remaining fortune consisted of the cargo beneath his feet; and without selling it, he had no means to fund another smuggling voyage. He had to face the fact that at age sixty-four and boatless, he was too old to start again at the bottom of the sailing-for-profit game.
So, where else could he go? He had an address book, a list of a few friends and old military buddies that he might be able to use, but it had not been updated in a decade or more. The person he had been closest to in recent years was Ranya Bardiwell. They had been fugitives together in South America, when their misadventures in Virginia had forced them to flee from the United States. After she had flown out of Colombia, headed back to the States to have her baby, Ranya had dropped off the face of the earth. None of their plans to reestablish communications had come off, especially not since the internet had been put under tight censorship and control. She might be alive or dead, a fugitive or a prisoner. He had no way of knowing. He hoped that she had found a new life for herself. It hurt that he had lost contact with Ranya, his onetime surrogate daughter. For a time they had even shared last names, on their false Canadian passports. She was the closest thing he had to kin, and she had disappeared without a trace.
Ranya. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since those days, whole oceans, but he had never forgotten. Who else remembered their wild adventures? Did their sacrifice amount to anything if nobody else remembered? Good men had died on that crazy night up the Potomac River, and for what? He placed his sextant back into its mahogany case and closed its lid, then turned his eyes back to the chart showing the Gulf Coast.
Where could he go? The entire Southeast was under martial law, according to the shortwave radio. The Northeast and Great Lakes states were a socialist nightmare. California and the Southwest weren’t even states anymore. That left the Northwest, a region he’d visited a few times, decades before.
Back in Colombia, he had constantly discussed the future of America with Ranya, and they agreed that this region was probably the most freedom-oriented part of the country. If she was alive and free in the States, that’s where she would have gone. Sitting at his chart table, Phil Carson pondered his options and plotted strategies. Looking through a plastic file box of random charts and maps, he found a well-worn highway map of the United States, more than ten years old. He unfolded it across his table and traced his finger along possible routes. He wasn’t completely broke, he still had a few ounces of gold not tied up in cargo. He could carry enough carefully hidden coins to pay his way.
Carson had often thought of traveling back to the Northwest someday, but the distance and the obstacles were formidable, and now it was winter. From occasional shortwave radio news reports, he knew that Colorado was in a state of perpetual turmoil bordering on civil war, torn between “Aztlan” and what remained of the
United States. Phil Carson had already experienced enough ethnic and social turmoil in Panama: he would have to make it beyond Colorado. Maybe to Wyoming, which was the closest of the so-called free states. He might even travel further, perhaps to Montana or Idaho, but for now he would set Wyoming as his goal, even though it suffered fearsome winters.
Wyoming. It was what, over a thousand miles away from the Gulf of Mexico? That should be possible for a sneaky old bastard, a smuggler and a onetime Special Forces snake eater, he told himself without enthusiasm or conviction. He’d done harder things—but as a younger man. Still, he was in good shape for his age. He would prepare today and start out tomorrow. What else could he do? Stay, and wait for a miracle? Miracles didn’t happen. Only fools waited for miracles to save them.
****
Phil Carson spent a considerable part of the first day considering the question of his future identity, which was intertwined with the choice of his travel strategy. He wasn’t naïve. He understood that it would be impossible simply to walk from the Gulf Coast and across the South, all the while evading official detection. He already knew from listening to the shortwave that much of the South was under martial law, and travel restrictions were severe.
His Virginia driver’s license was expired, and his old U.S. passport not only was out of date, it also was a paper artifact, a relic of simpler times gone by. Technologically it was several generations out of date. Worse, he was unsure whether he was on any official government watch lists. On the plus side, he had not been fingerprinted since his induction into the Army over four decades earlier. He hoped that those ancient paper fingerprint records had never been scanned into a modern computer database.
He had a Ziploc bag full of false identity papers and foreign passports on the catamaran, none of which would stand up to serious scrutiny, not in the USA. Careful, serious identity checks were rare in the Caribbean and South American ports that he frequented. Gold was the universal door opener when his paper documents were put to question. In the end, he decided to carry no identity papers or ID cards at all, settling upon a different stratagem.
More difficult to decide was the question of weaponry. He realized that in the new America, harsh penalties were handed down for a long list of “gun crimes.” Still, he hesitated to go completely unarmed. Eventually he decided to take his tiny Kel-Tec .380 caliber pistol. It was only three-quarters of an inch thick, and concealable in a pocket or even in the palm of his hand.
Next, he had to decide whether to conceal the pistol on his body or in his pack. If he kept it on his body it would be ready for self-defense, but it also was more likely to be found in a close search. After changing his mind several times, he broke it down into its components and hid them within the seams and bottom padding of his old brown backpack. If he were ambushed by bandits on the way out, he’d be done. That was a calculated risk he would have to take. There were no perfect solutions that covered every possible contingency.
Financing his travels would be less of a problem. For that, he would carry the currency that was accepted worldwide: gold. Full one-ounce coins were too large and difficult to conceal, so he limited himself to those of one-quarter and one-tenth ounce. He concealed a total of ten ounces of gold within his leather smuggling belt, his old running shoes, his pack and other places. In his experience, negotiations with police and public officials always went more smoothly with the timely application of gold to greedy palms.
He studied the digital atlas on the laptop computer in his navigation station, planning his route. It had not been connected to the boat’s electrical system, and so it had been spared the lightning surge. The computer atlas also provided some overhead imagery, a few years old. The sky photos indicated that the Seabago had landed in a marshy estuary between Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Mobile Bay. He figured he could walk north to a coastal state road in only a few hours or a day, depending on the terrain and water obstacles.
He studied maps and satellite photos and planned his possible escape routes for an hour, until the computer’s battery died. For navigation on the march, he would take only his folding road map of the United States; reading glasses, for studying the smallest details on the map; and an innocuous miniature compass on his watchband, to keep him aimed northwest. Everything he carried had to be something credibly in the possession of a destitute hurricane survivor. He had no individual state maps on the boat anyway; he’d had no need of them for years.
In the afternoon, he camouflaged the catamaran’s decks with a covering of random debris. Old pieces of plywood, tattered and faded blue plastic tarps, tree branches and other wreckage broke up its outline as it might be seen from the air. The best hiding place for his cargo of solar panels and coffee was within Seabago’s twin hulls. When he was finished covering the cat’s decks with flotsam and trash, he was satisfied that even a low-altitude aerial reconnaissance would not lead observers to examine the area more closely. The dismasted ocean-sailing catamaran was now just more storm wreckage, lost and forgotten among miles of ruined coastline and marshland.
Without GPS, it would be difficult even for him to find it again, so Carson carefully plotted fixed landmarks with the boat’s cockpit-mounted compass, and marked their azimuths on his own cryptic treasure map. He left the rusty eighty-foot stranded tugboat off his hand-drawn map. It would be the unerring final marker, should he ever return for his cargo. The tug also concealed his other guns and five one-ounce gold coins deep within its corroded hull. He had learned the hard way not to carry all of his eggs in one basket. Someday he might return for the weapons and the gold, and with luck, even the cargo if it went undiscovered.
****
Sidney Krantz guessed what President Tambor wanted the instant he was summoned from his small office in the Old Executive Office Building. It had to be about Tennessee. Meyer Ignacio, the president’s young special assistant, intercepted him before he reached the Oval Office waiting room. As usual, Krantz would not be signing in at the Oval Office secretary’s desk. No record of Krantz’s visit would appear on the president’s calendar. Instead, Ignacio guided him via a narrow private corridor to the rear entrance of the president’s special reading room. On the way, Krantz handed Ignacio his cell phone and BlackBerry.
To the few persons who knew of the place’s existence, President Tambor referred to it as his “reading room.” Sidney Krantz understood the truth: the president had had the private room specially constructed to be utterly soundproof and bug-proof. Two heavy airtight doors sealed the rear entrance, one opening outward and one inward. A separate entrance permitted the president to access this room from the Oval Office via a tiny “service corridor.” This allowed meetings in total secrecy, without third-party witnesses even to the fact that the meetings had ever taken place. Ironically, some of the same White House floor space had once been used to contain President Nixon’s taping equipment.
No kind of eavesdropping or recording device, no matter how sophisticated, could be brought into the president’s reading room undetected, much less be made to function without immediate discovery. There were no phones, no computers and no cameras of any kind. Nothing electronic was in the room except for the built-in bug detection system. Even the climate control unit was separate from the ventilation system of the rest of the White House, with its own power supply. Anything said by the president in this room could later be denied. A disgruntled visitor could not even prove that a meeting had ever taken place.
President Tambor was justifiably paranoid. Sidney Krantz understood the value of creating audiotapes of questionable conversations, for blackmail and for insurance. He had made such recordings for both reasons, and he knew of other blackmail tapes, including some unimaginably damning ones. But he also understood that if Jamal Tambor suspected that Krantz might be taping him today, he could become another “assisted suicide” victim like Vince Foster, a presidential adviser in an earlier administration.
This possibility didn’t concern him, because Jamal Tambor and Sidne
y Krantz were longtime allies and confidants, and they understood each other perfectly. He didn’t need or desire to tape their private conversations. Politically, they were of one mind. Despite their utopian public vocabularies, power was their shared private creed. And the truth was that his close access to the president was the sole source of Krantz’s current power in Washington. How else could a short, fat, balding former political science professor wield so much influence? Politics had always been Sidney’s forte, but with his squeaky voice and lack of manly charisma, he had always understood that his position would be in the background, shaping events.
This public distance was satisfactory to him. The people who mattered to Krantz knew of his closeness to the president. Now the decades of his cultivating Jamal Tambor’s trust and friendship were finally paying off. His offshore accounts were swollen with Swiss francs and gold bars, all due to his close contact with the President of the United States. When Tambor’s term in office was finally over, Sidney would be ready to enjoy the life of wealth and ease that he had earned.
President Tambor was already in the windowless walnut-paneled room when Krantz entered. The president’s special assistant closed the two doors behind Krantz, and left them alone. Not even the Secret Service entered this private space during one-on-one meetings. They objected strenuously that this was a dangerous security risk, but the president overruled them.
Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 2