by Tom Clancy
“Safe that gun!”
“Aye!” the sailor answered at once, and dropped his hands to point it at the sky. The officer next to him winced with embarrassment. Another lesson learned. A few words would accompany it in an hour or two. This had been a mistake with a gun.
Wilcox reappeared a moment later, with Chief Riley behind him. The bosun handed over two pairs of handcuffs to the officer, who bent down to work them. They had to be the only two aboard; Riley holstered his pistol a moment later, and Obrecki’s shotgun went up to the sky again. Wegener thought he saw the youngster reset the safety. The farm boy knew his guns, all right, had learned to shoot the same way his skipper had. Why had he taken the safety off ... ? The radio crackled just as Wegener’s mind asked the question.
“Captain, this is Wilcox.” The lieutenant stood to speak, and both men faced each other, a hundred yards apart.
“I’m here.”
“It’s a bad one, sir ... sir, there’s blood all over the place. One of ’em was scrubbing the salon down, but—it’s a real mess here, sir.”
“Just the two of them?”
“Affirmative. Only two people aboard. We’ve cuffed ’em both.”
“Check again,” Wegener ordered. Wilcox read the captain’s mind: he stayed with the prisoners and let Chief Riley do the search. The bosun appeared three minutes later, shaking his head. His face looked pale through the binoculars, Wegener saw. What would make Bob Riley go pale?
“Just these two, sir. No ID on them. I don’t think we want to do much of a search, I think—”
“Correct. I’ll send you another man and leave you Obrecki. Can you get the yacht to port?”
“Sure, Captain. We got plenty of fuel.”
“There’s going to be a little blow tonight,” Wegener warned.
“I checked the weather this morning. No sweat, sir.”
“Okay, let me call this one in and get things organized. Stand by.”
“Roger that. Sir, I recommend that you send the TV camera across for a permanent record to back up the stills.”
“Okay, it’ll be over in a few minutes.”
It took half an hour for the Coast Guard base to get the FBI and DEA agreed on things. While they waited for word, the Zodiac took another crewman over with a portable TV camera and tape recorder. One of the boarding party shot off sixty frames with a Polaroid camera, while the TV recorded everything on half-inch tape. The Coast Guardsmen restarted Empire Builder’s engines and headed northwest for Mobile, with the cutter holding station on her portside. It was finally decided that Wilcox and Obrecki could take the yacht back to Mobile, and that a helicopter would pick up the two “yachtsmen” that afternoon—weather permitting. It was a long way to the helicopter base. Panache was supposed to have her own helicopter, but the Coast Guard didn’t have the funding to buy enough. A third seaman was landed on the yacht, and it was time to bring the prisoners back to Panache.
Chief Riley took the prisoners aft. Wegener watched the bosun fairly throw them into the Zodiac. Five minutes later it was hoisted aboard. The yacht headed northwest, and the cutter turned away to continue her patrol. The first man from the boarding party to reach the bridge was the seaman who’d worked the Polaroid. He handed over half a dozen of the color frames.
“The chief collected some stuff for you to look at, Cap’n. It’s worse’n it looks here. Wait till you see the TV tape. It’s already set up for copying.”
Wegener handed the photos back. “Okay—it all goes into the evidence locker. You join up with the others. Have Myers set up a new tape in the VCR, and I want you all to tell the camera what you saw. You know how it goes. Let’s make sure we get it all right.”
“Yes, sir!”
Riley appeared a minute later. Robert Timothy Riley was a man in the traditional pattern of the chief boatswain’s mate. Six-two and over two hundred pounds, he had the hairy arms of a gorilla, the gut of a man who knew his way around a beer can, and the rumbling voice to outscream a winter gale. His oversized right hand grasped a couple of plastic food bags. His face showed that anger was now replacing the shock.
“It’s a fuckin’ slaughterhouse, sir. Like somebody exploded a couple cans of brown paint—‘cept it ain’t paint. Jesus.” One bag came up. “The little one was cleaning up when we pulled ’em over. There’s a trash can in the saloon with maybe a half dozen cartridge cases. I pulled these two off the rug—just like they taught us, Cap’n. Picked ‘em up with my ball-point and shuffled ’em into the baggie. Two guns I left aboard. I bagged them, too. That ain’t the worst of it.”
The next baggie contained a small, framed photograph. It had to be the yacht’s owner and his family. The baggie after that contained a ...
“Found it under a table. Rape, too. She must’ve been havin’ her period, but they didn’t let that stop ‘em. Maybe just the wife. Maybe the little girl, too. In the galley there’s some butcher knives, all bloodied up. I figure they carved the bodies up and tossed ’em over the side. These four people are shark-shit now.”
“Drugs?”
“Twenty or so keys of white powder stowed in the crew’s quarters. Some marijuana, too, but that just looks like a personal stash.” Riley shrugged. “I didn’t even bother using the test kit, sir. Don’t matter. This is straight piracy-and-murder. I saw one bullet hole in the deck, a through-and-through. Red, I ain’t seen nothing like this in my whole life. Like something in a movie, but worse.” He let out a long breath. “You have to have been there, sir.”
“What do we know about the prisoners?”
“Nothing. They ain’t done nothing more’n grunt, leastways not when I was around. No ID on them, and I didn’t want to go messing around things looking for passports an’ stuff. Figured I’d leave that for the real cops. The wheelhouse is clean. So’s one of the heads. Mr. Wilcox won’t have much trouble taking her back, and I heard him tell Obrecki and Brown not to touch anything. Plenty of fuel aboard, he can run her at full speed. He’ll have her in Mobile ’fore midnight if the weather holds off. Nice boat.” Another shrug.
“Bring ’em up here,” Wegener said after a moment.
“Aye aye.” Riley went aft.
Wegener filled his pipe, then had to remember where he’d left his matches. The world had changed while he’d been off doing other things, and Wegener didn’t like it. It was dangerous enough out here. Wind and wave were as deadly an enemy as man needed. The sea was always waiting for her chance. It didn’t matter how good you thought you were; you only had to forget once, just once, that you could never trust her. Wegener was a man who never forgot, and devoted his life to protecting those who had. Remembering that one hazard, and protecting those who forgot, had given him a full and satisfying life. He liked being the guardian angel in the snow-white boat. You were never lost if Red Wegener was around. You always had a chance, a good chance, that he could reach into the wet, stormy grave and pull you out with his bare hands ... but sharks were feasting on four people now. Wegener loved the sea for all her moods, but sharks were something to loathe, and the thought that they were now eating people that he might have saved ... four people who’d forgotten that not all sharks live in the sea, Wegener told himself. That’s what had changed. Piracy. He shook his head. That’s what you called it on the water. Piracy. Something that Errol Flynn had made movies about in Wegener’s boyhood. Something that had ended two centuries earlier. Piracy and murder, the part that the movies had usually left out. Piracy and murder and rape, each of them a capital offense in the old days....
“Stand up straight!” Riley snarled. He had both by the arm. Both were still cuffed, and Riley’s hands kept them from straying. Chief Oreza had come along to keep an eye on things.
Both were in their mid-twenties, both were thin. One was tall, about six feet, and arrogant, which struck the captain as odd. He had to know the trouble he was in, didn’t he? His dark eyes burned at Wegener, who regarded the younger man dispassionately from behind his pipe. There was something odd about
his eyes, but Wegener didn’t know what it was.
“What’s your name?” the captain asked. There was no reply. “You have to tell me your name,” Wegener pointed out quietly.
Then something very unusual happened. The tall one spat on Wegener’s shirt. There was a strangely long fragment of time in which the captain refused to believe what had happened, his face not even showing surprise. Riley was the first to react to the blasphemy.
“You son of a bitch!” The bosun lifted the prisoner up like a rag doll, spinning him in the air and smashing him down on the bridge rail. The young man landed on his belt, and for a second it seemed that he’d break in half. The air whooshed out of his mouth, and his legs kicked, trying to find the deck before he dropped into the water.
“Christ, Bob!” Wegener managed to say as Riley picked him back up. The bosun spun him around, his left hand clamped on the man’s throat as he lifted him clear of the deck with one arm. “Put him down, Riley!”
If nothing else, Riley had broken through the arrogance. For a moment there was genuine fear in those eyes as the prisoner fought for breath. Oreza had the other one on the deck already. Riley dropped his man beside him. The pirate—Wegener was already thinking of him in those terms—pitched forward until his forehead touched the deck. He gagged and struggled for breath while Chief Riley, just as pale, rediscovered his self-control.
“Sorry, Captain. Guess I just lost it for a second.” The bosun made it clear that he was apologizing only for embarrassing his commanding officer.
“Brig,” Wegener said. Riley led both aft.
“Damn.” Oreza observed quietly. The quartermaster fished out his handkerchief and wiped his captain’s shirt. “Jesus, Red, what’s the world comin’ to?”
“I don’t know, Portagee. I think we’re both too old to answer that one.” Wegener finally found his matches and managed to light his pipe. He stared out at the sea for several seconds before finding the right words. “When I joined up I got broke in by an old chief who told stories about Prohibition. Nothing nasty like this—he made it all sound like a great big game.”
“Maybe people were more civilized back then,” Oreza thought.
“More likely you couldn’t carry a million bucks’ worth of booze on a motorboat. Didn’t you ever watch ‘The Untouchables’? The gang wars they had back then were as nasty as the ones we read about now. Maybe worse. Hell, I don’t know. I didn’t join up to be a cop, Chief.”
“Me neither, Cap’n.” Oreza grunted. “We went an’ got old, and the world went an’ changed on us. One thing I wish didn’t change, though.”
“What’s that, Portagee?”
The master chief quartermaster turned to look at his commanding officer. “Something I picked up at New London a few years back. I used to sit in on some classes when I had nothing better to do. In the old days when they caught a couple of pirates, they had the option of doing a court-martial on the spot and settlin’ things right then an’ there—and you know something? It worked.” Oreza grunted again. “I s’pose that’s why they stopped doin’ it that way.”
“Give ‘em a fair trial—then hang ’em?”
“Hell, why not, sir?”
“That’s not the way we do things anymore. We’re civilized now.”
“Yeah, civilized.” Oreza opened the door to the wheelhouse. “I can tell. I seen the pictures.”
Wegener smiled, then wondered why. His pipe had gone out. He wondered why he didn’t just quit entirely as he fished for his matches again, but the pipe was part of the image. The old man of the sea. He’d gotten old, all right, Wegener thought. A puff of wind caught the match as he tried to toss it, dropping it on the deck. How did you ever forget to check the wind? he asked himself as he bent down to retrieve it.
There was a pack of cigarettes there, halfway out the scupper. Wegener was a fanatic on ship-cleanliness and was ready to snarl at whoever had tossed the empty pack when he realized that it hadn’t come from one of his crewmen. The name on the pack was “Calvert,” and that, he remembered vaguely, was a Latin American brand-name from a U.S. tobacco company. It was a hard pack, with a flip-top, and out of simple curiosity he opened it.
They weren’t cigarettes. At least, they weren’t tobacco cigarettes. Wegener fished one out. They weren’t hand-rolled, but neither were they as neatly manufactured as something from a real American cancer factory. The captain smiled in spite of himself. Some clever entrepreneur had come up with a cute way of disguising—joints, wasn’t it?—as real cigarettes. Or maybe it was just more convenient to carry them this way. It must have pitched out of his shirt when Riley flipped him around, Wegener realized belatedly. He closed the pack and pocketed it. He’d turn it over to the evidence locker when he got a chance. Oreza returned.
“Weather update. That squall line’ll be here no later’n twenty-one hundred. The squalls are upgraded some. We can expect gusts up to forty knots. Gonna be a fair blow, sir.”
“Any problem for Wilcox and the yacht?” There was still time to recall him.
“Shouldn’t be, sir. It turned south. A high-pressure system is heading down from Tennessee. Mr. Wilcox oughta have it pretty smooth all the way in, Cap’n, but it might be a little dicey for the helicopter. They didn’t plan to get it to us until eighteen hundred, and that’s cutting it a little close. They’ll be bucking the front edge of the line on the way back.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Supposed to clear off about dawn, then the high-pressure system takes over. We’re in for some rollin’ tonight, but then we got four days of good weather.” Oreza didn’t actually voice his recommendation. He didn’t have to. The two old pros communicated with glances.
Wegener nodded agreement. “Advise Mobile to put the pickup off until noon tomorrow.”
“Aye aye, Cap’n. No sense risking a helicopter to haul garbage.”
“Right on that, Portagee. Make sure Wilcox gets the word on the weather in case that system changes course.” Wegener checked his watch. “Time for me to get my paperwork done.”
“Pretty full day already, Red.”
“True enough.”
Wegener’s stateroom was the largest aboard, of course, and the only private accommodation aboard, since privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded a skipper. But Panache wasn’t a cruiser, and Wegener’s room was barely over a hundred square feet, albeit with a private head, which on any ship was something worth fighting for. Throughout his Coast Guard career, paperwork was something Wegener had avoided whenever possible. He had an executive officer, a bright young lieutenant whom the captain stuck with as much of it as his conscience could justify. That left him with two or three hours’ worth per day. The captain attacked it with the enthusiasm of a man on his way to a hanging. Half an hour later he realized that it seemed harder than usual. The murders were pulling at his consciousness. Murder at sea, he thought, as he looked at the porthole on the starboard bulkhead. It wasn’t unknown, of course. He’d heard of a few during his thirty years, though he’d never been directly involved. There had been a case off the Oregon coast when a crewman had gone berserk and nearly killed a mate—turned out that the poor guy had developed a brain tumor and he’d later died from it, Red remembered. Point Gabriel had gone out and collected the man, already hog-tied and sedated. That was the extent of Wegener’s experience with violence at sea. At least the man-made kind. The sea was dangerous enough without the need for that sort of thing. The thought came back to him like the recurring theme of a song. He tried to get back to his work, but failed.
Wegener frowned at his own indecision. Whether he liked paperwork or not, it was part of the job. He relit the pipe in the hope that it would aid his concentration. That didn’t work either. The captain muttered a curse at himself, partly in amusement, partly in annoyance, as he walked into his head for a drink of water. The paperwork still beckoned. He looked at himself in the mirror and realized that he needed a shave. And the paperwork wasn’t getting done.
“You’re getting old, Red,” he told the face in the mirror. “Old and senile.”
He decided that he had to shave. He did it in the old-fashioned way, with a shaving cup and brush, the disposable razor his only concession to modernity. He had his face lathered and halfway shaved when someone knocked at the door.
“Come!” It opened to reveal Chief Riley.
“Sorry, Cap’n, didn’t know you were—”
“No problem, Bob, what’s up?”
“Sir, I got the first-draft of the boarding report. Figured you’d want to go over it. We got everyone’s statement on tape, audio, and TV. Myers made a copy of the tape from the boarding. The original’s in with the evidence, in a lockbox inside the classified-materials safe, as per orders. I got the copy if you wanna see it.”
“Okay, just leave it. Anything from our guests?”
“No, sir. Turned into a pretty day outside.”
“And me stuck with all this damned paper.”
“A chief may work from sun to sun, but the skipper’s work is never done,” Riley observed.
“You’re not supposed to pick on your commanding officer, Master Chief.” Wegener managed to stop himself from laughing only because he still had the razor to his throat.
“I humbly beg the captain’s pardon. And, by your leave, sir, I also have work to do.”
“The kid we had on the fifty-cal this morning was part of the deck division. He needs a talk about safety. He was slow taking his gun off the yacht this morning. Don’t tear his head all the way off,” Wegener said as he finished shaving. “I’ll talk to Mr. Peterson myself.”
“We sure don’t need people fucking around with those things. I’ll talk with the lad, sir, right after I do my walk-around.”
“I’m going to do one after lunch—we have some weather coming in tonight.”