Doc - 19 - Chasing Midnight

by Randy Wayne White

The same was true of the fishing lodge. It was mid-island, built upon the highest remnants of the shell pyramid. As I adjusted the monocular’s focus, though, I realized that my view wasn’t entirely blocked. I could see a wedge of balcony on the building’s fourth floor, where an American flag stirred in the night breeze.

  The porch was empty. But a heated corona within told me that someone had lit an oil lamp or candle.

  My main concern wasn’t the lone figure standing beneath the ficus tree. It was the trigger-happy gunman who’d shot Vladimir and had tried to kill me. Using the monocular, I searched for the guy, panning from one end of the marina to the other.

  Near a maintenance shed, and beneath a wooden water cistern, families of four-legged creatures foraged. They looked like furry balls of light—raccoons. Atop a roof gable, a glowing statue pivoted its black eyes toward me—a great horned owl.

  No human beings, though, that I could see, aside from the man in the far distance, now lighting another cigarette.

  As I searched the area—no doubt because I was on the stern of Tomlinson’s boat—I suddenly realized that I had overlooked another method of signaling for help. Possibly a workable method. The device was staring me right in the face, literally. Secured next to the sailboat’s helm was a U-shaped flotation ring, on a hundred feet of line. It was a man-overboard harness, designed for throwing.

  In one of the pockets was a waterproof electronic beacon called an EPIRB. Activate the beacon and it would transmit emergency GPS coordinates, and a unique serial number to satellites in space. The satellites then beamed the information to the nearest U.S. Coast Guard stations so that rescue choppers and boats could be launched.

  The portable jammers I had used were calibrated to interrupt all but the very highest and lowest radio frequencies. Maybe the EPIRB was immune.

  Without further thought, I pulled the beacon’s emergency ring… which also activated a blinding strobe light, as I should have anticipated.

  Damn it!

  In a rush, I used my hands to try to muffle the light. Impossible. So I gathered the harness, rope and all, and tossed the whole mess overboard. Seconds later, someone smacked the hull of Tomlinson’s sailboat so hard with a sledgehammer, I felt the fiberglass tremble beneath me.

  That’s what it sounded like, anyway.

  For an instant, I was stunned, even though I knew what had happened. It was a gunshot, and the simultaneous impact of a slug hitting the cabin bulkhead behind me. A rifle, probably. Something heavy caliber, and the shooter was using a scope. Unlike the trigger-happy gunman, it was doubtful that he would miss again.

  No Más was moored with her transom to the dock. I had thrown the EPIRB strobe off the starboard side, where the light blazed once every second.

  Without hesitating, I tumbled over the port side, holding fins and waterproof pack to my chest. As I crashed through the water’s surface, I was imaging the man I had seen beneath the ficus tree toss his cigarette away and shoulder a rifle. The angle seemed right. From the north end of the island, a shooter had a clear view of the marina. And the distance wasn’t a challenge if he was using a scope.

  It was a close call, but I had learned something. The Iranians were housed on the north end. Talas, the Turkmenian, was housed on the southern tip. Suddenly, I was less suspicious of Tomlinson’s eco-activist friends. Members of Third Planet Peace Force—even if they were a bunch of pissed-off neurotics—weren’t the type to use sniper rifles.

  Abdul Armanie, though, had a bodyguard with him, presumably a well-trained man. And Armanie himself was a cutthroat businessman who sometimes used Islam and the Koran to justify his methods—particularly when dealing with non-Muslims. That’s why he preferred to go by his last name only when doing business in the United States.

  In the bar, Densler, Kahn and I had butted heads, true. But, as I was already aware, they weren’t the only enemies I had made during my short time on Vanderbilt Island. The Iranian was furious at me, too. Possibly angry enough to kill me, if he got the chance. It was because, earlier that afternoon, I had embarrassed the man badly—Armanie and Talas both, in fact. I had done it knowingly, intentionally, and then had laughed in his face.

  Abdul Rahman Armanie, as I already knew, was not the sort to allow a slight to go unpunished.

  When Tomlinson and I arrived on Vanderbilt Island, I’d had no intentions of alienating almost everyone I met—but that’s what happened. Which is unusual for me. I’m generally a quiet, private guy who, long ago, learned that a man can’t learn anything while his mouth is open.

  Even so, people are chemical-electrical beings, and sometimes our polarity swings inexplicably to the negative, inviting all kinds of trouble. In the space of a few hours, I’d invited more than my share by opening my mouth too much and too often.

  It happens. In my case, though, there was a purpose. When it comes to the wealthy Eastern Europeans, behaving like an asshole is sometimes the only way to force information out of them.

  That morning, I had introduced myself to Darius Talas first, then, an hour later, to Armanie, as a marine biologist who was working on sturgeon aquaculture with Mote Marine. My slanted honesty hadn’t been well received, so I’d been forced to reply to indignant accusations. No, I hadn’t lied to get an invitation to the caviar forum. Yes, I was a primary investor in two flourishing restaurants, as the forum’s rules required. But my primary interests were fish, in general, and sturgeon in particular. All true, of course.

  So far, so good.

  After getting that settled, my questions had been straightforward enough. They reflected my honest interest in the Caspian Sea’s declining sturgeon population. Even so, neither man was willing to talk about how he acquired the caviar his company sold discreetly through an international network of distributors, some of them “legitimate,” others gray market wholesalers.

  No problem. I already knew too much about both men to expect honest answers. So I had parted from each of them on cool but civil terms. Later that afternoon, though, everything changed.

  I had gone out to explore, got lucky and found both men at a table next to the pool, so I had taken a seat before they could protest. Talas and Armanie had been arguing about something, judging from Iranian’s expression and Talas’s flushed pumpkin-sized face. So I had put an end to the uneasy silence and attempted to ingratiate myself by saying, “The three of us need to get something straight. I’m not a federal agent, I’m a biologist. There’s no reason we can’t talk openly. Maybe we have more in common than you realize.”

  Armanie had looked at his watch and asked Talas, “What time is Kazlov serving hors d’oeuvres tonight? Knowing him, it will be potato vodka and that disgusting caviar he’s pedaling. Awful peasant-raised shit, have you tried it?”

  I had taken that as my opening to say, “Caviar and aquaculture—what a coincidence. Those are the very things I’d like to talk about. For instance, Kazlov’s hybrid sturgeon idea—the idea has merit, I think. But, before I can decide, I need to understand what’s going on in the Caspian region. Has the fishery gotten as bad as some say?”

  Silence—that was my reply. Which I had interrupted by waving to a waiter and ordering a Diet Coke before I pressed ahead, saying, “A good place to start would be to explain how your fishermen get around the ban on catching beluga. Why’s it so easy? I’d rather hear the truth from experts—men like yourselves—than get secondhand information. And it’s all confidential, of course.”

  The way Talas had chuckled and demurred reminded me of a Muslim Pillsbury Doughboy. Armanie had smirked and shrugged, like the condescending prick he is, and asked me, “Do you know who killed the cow to make the shoes you’re wearing? It is a ridiculous question for a man who claims to be a biologist—but perhaps that delightful dolphin show we attended pays staff with bogus dolphin doctorate titles.”

  The man had a gift for cutting insults, but I didn’t mind. Armanie and Talas were confirming what I already knew about them. And I knew far more than they suspected throu
gh my intel sources in Colorado and Maryland. Both men were smart, unscrupulous and rich—very different in terms of style and behavior, but they were also both killers if business required it.

  The background summaries I’d reviewed before leaving Sanibel hadn’t come right out and said that it was true. But the insinuation was there, between the lines, along with a lot more:

  Talas and Armanie each claimed to be “conventional modern” Muslims, yet they also tacitly endorsed fundamentalist causes with their checkbooks. Both had gotten rich piping fossil fuels out of the Caspian Sea, which is the Earth’s third-largest reservoir of oil and natural gas.

  Talas was a shareholder in Turkmenia’s largest petroleum company. Armanie was one of five in a consortium that managed seventeen oil rigs off the Iranian port of Neka. Black market caviar was a lucrative enterprise for both men—fifty million euros a year was a conservative estimate, according to profile summaries I’d received. But oil was their primary source of wealth. Which suggested that if Talas or Armanie wanted Kazlov dead, it had more to do with fossil fuel than a dinosaurian fish.

  It was more than just a theory. There was something else I had learned from my sources: the three men despised one another. The reasons weren’t given, of course. No way for anyone to know them all. Kazlov’s, Talas’s and Armanie’s families had been competitors for decades, so they had probably all been scarred by past dealings. And some wounds never heal.

  But if Kazlov truly had made a breakthrough discovery regarding caviar, Armanie and Talas had more battle scars coming. There were several reasons, but one was that the news would invite international attention to the Caspian Sea and its dwindling beluga population. That’s the last thing two men who profited from caviar and oil wanted.

  Oil companies in the region despise media attention because they don’t want the world to know the truth about the Caspian. The truth is that it has become an environmental cesspool since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. No longer is the oil industry governed or policed. Soviet regulations were never strict by Western standards, but now there are none. None that are enforced, anyway.

  The same is true of the sturgeon fishery, which is why the venerated wild beluga is being slaughtered into extinction.

  While the five bordering nations squabble about territorial rights and whether the Caspian legally is a sea or the world’s largest freshwater lake, a Wild West mentality controls the region. International petroleum companies are rushing to capitalize on a rare opportunity to pump millions of barrels of oil without the expense of minimizing or even monitoring pollution.

  With the same hyenalike fervor, international caviar procurers are looting the Caspian fishery because they know better than anyone that, soon, the last mature female beluga will be netted and that will be the end.

  Armanie and Talas were burning both ends of the Caspian Sea candle and profiting hugely. I didn’t blame them for making a profit. I’m a realist. It’s what businesspeople do. But I found their methods contemptible and their superior attitudes galling.

  Which is why when Armanie goaded me by saying my questions were ridiculous, I smiled and gave him a pointed look that read Anytime, anyplace—asshole.

  That’s when the real trouble between us started.

  The man was unused to being challenged by inferiors, so it turned into a stare-down. After he finally contrived a way out by lighting a cigarette, I said, “If you won’t talk to me about it, maybe you’ll let me tell you what I already know. You can fill in the blanks, if you want, or tell me where I’m wrong.”

  “Dr. Ford, you remind me of one of those stubborn detectives in an American film.” Talas laughed, jowls shaking. In my mind, the Pillsbury Doughboy instantly became Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca.

  Talas pretended to be interested. Armanie glowered, smoked and checked his wristwatch. It took me about five minutes to tell two of the world’s most ruthless suppliers of black market caviar how their organizations worked.

  I began by asking, “How many fishermen along the Caspian coast do you employ? Six or seven hundred? No—let’s count Kazlov’s organization, too. So we can double that. Together, your organizations probably own about fifty percent of the international market, which means you sell how much illegal caviar annually? A hundred and fifty metric tons at least, from what I’ve read.”

  I paused long enough for Talas to nod, as if impressed with his own success, before continuing.

  “You sell the product on the gray market to five-star restaurants, exporters, whoever will buy it. Your wholesale price is around eight hundred U.S. dollars a pound, right? So eight hundred dollars multiplied by one metric ton—which is what? Around twenty-two hundred pounds? That comes to about”—I let the men watch me struggle with the math—“just under two million dollars per ton. Multiply that by a hundred and fifty tons annually and”—I looked to check their facial reactions—“and we’re talking a whole bunch of money. Three hundred million gross. At least a hundred million net. Am I right?”

  From the flicker of a smile that appeared on Armanie’s face, I knew that I had underestimated the figure.

  That was okay. I was getting to him, and we both knew it. It gave me the confidence to attempt to trap the men into telling me the truth about why they’d come to Vanderbilt Island—a trap I began to bait by saying, “But neither one of you is going to be in the caviar business for much longer—unless Kazlov’s hybrid sturgeon becomes a reality. If you don’t know why, I’ll be happy to explain.”

  Armanie exhaled smoke and said, “This is something I’m going to complain to Viktor about. More visits to the casino, fewer fraud biologists. And after we were guaranteed privacy.”

  “But I’m enjoying myself!” Talas responded, smiling at me—but his eyes had an empty look, as if I were a corpse who refused to be silent. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard so many outrageous inaccuracies come from one man’s mouth.”

  I replied, “I take that as a compliment. Apparently, my information is better than expected. Mind if I continue?”

  Talas listened while Armanie made a show of turning to face the swimming pool. I could hardly blame him when I saw why. I got my first look at the woman I would see later, sitting in the dining room with Lien Bohai. The one with the exotic face and Anglo-Malaysian eyes. She wore a burnt orange bikini and was lowering herself into the pool. The water must have been cool because the woman paused at rib level while her breasts acclimated—a hypnotic few seconds. Then I watched her remove an ivory quillet, then a comb from the top of her head, before submerging in a swirl of Polynesian hair.

  The visual impact was such that I managed only a vague recollection of her stunningly plain counterpart, the square-faced woman with the swimmer’s shoulders.

  Talas, the fat man, was watching, too, because he said to Armanie,“Have you spoken to her this trip? She really is quite beautiful. And what a magnificent body! Do you think she’d agree to drinks after dinner?”

  In an insinuating tone, the Iranian replied, “I think you’d have to ask Viktor’s permission. I saw them walking last night and then they snuck off together this morning. I’m sure he can provide her answer—and her price.”

  At the time, the remark seemed only rude. Later, when I saw the woman sitting with the Chinese mega-millionaire Lien Bohai, it would acquire a sharper edge.

  After I turned away from the pool, it took me a moment to collect myself, but I finally refocused and told the two caviar kings why they would soon be out of the caviar business. First, though, I told them how they did what they did. Some of it was an educated guess, most was not.

  The fishermen they hired—and paid next to nothing—avoided detection by laying their nets after dark. Miles of nets pulled by boats working in packs. For hours, they would drag their web into slow circles that trapped every living, swimming thing. Then hydraulic derricks would haul the nets and dump the catch in a thrashing, suffocating heap onto the deck.

  There are seventy-some species of fish that
live in the Caspian Sea, including six species of sturgeon. But only three of those species provide salable eggs for caviar, so everything else would be left to die while the profitable fish were culled. Twenty years ago, the fishermen might have caught a thousand sturgeon in a two-hour drag. Today, a hundred was a more likely number.

  Of those hundred fish, fewer then ten would be the valuable beluga. Two other species, the osetra and sevruga, which are more common, but still endangered, would also be kept.

  Because it takes fifteen to twenty-five years before a female sturgeon can produce eggs, only one of those ten beluga would be large enough to be considered mature—a fish between three hundred and three thousand pounds. Smaller, mature osetra and sevruga sturgeon would add another twenty fish to the pile. These fish would all be clubbed unconscious and dragged, tail first, into aerated tanks. Smaller fish would be kicked overboard or killed for meat.

  At the docks, while the sturgeon were still alive, underlings hired by Talas and Armanie would then stun the fish a second time with a blow to the head. Why? Because it’s impossible to do surgery on a conscious fish that’s three times the size of the men handling it. And surgery was the next step. The only way poachers can find out if a sturgeon is male or female is to make a precise abdominal incision that exposes the fish’s reproductive organs.

  Males would be hauled away to die and dumped later—the carcasses were incriminating. Gravid females would also be left to die but only after their ovaries had been slit, the valuable egg sacs removed whole, and immediately iced—all while the fish was semiconscious. Studies are as varied as the definitions of “pain,” but the consensus is that fish don’t feel pain as it is experienced by primates. A fish’s existence is brainstem dominated, not cerebrally dominated, but a sturgeon’s behavioral response to such a procedure would cause even me to wince and I’m not known for my sensitivity.

  Nor were Armanie and Talas, judging from their yawning indifference to what I had just described.

  “This year, your fishermen will catch about half as many mature sturgeon as they caught last year,” I continued. “That’s the way it’s been going for the last decade, right? It’s because you’re killing the brood stock. The golden geese. And that’s why you’ll be out of the caviar business soon. Even if someone very smart, like Viktor Kazlov, develops a beluga hybrid, you’ll still be out of the business because the Caspian Sea is so polluted, a restocking program isn’t likely.”