by Mack Maloney
These days, the people moving all these drugs around were, more often than not, the most feared, if most secretive pirate gang in the islands: the Muy Capaz.
* * *
OF THE TWO dozen bars in Badtown, most were little more than shacks with mud roofs. But one stood out, because it was made not of metal, but of stone.
It was as old as anything could be in this part of the Bahamas. Built more than two hundred years before by the British Army to house prostitutes close to one of its many forts, it was known then, as now, as the Tainted Lady.
The bar inside was as rundown as the building itself. Made of rotting wood from a nineteenth-century schooner, it was bordered by three shelves of bootleg liquor. There were a few tables, a few chairs and that was it. Cigarette smoke, pot smoke, spilled beer and blood combined to give the place a unique aroma. It was always dark inside, no matter what the time of day.
Just off the bar was a small room whose door was hidden behind a false wood panel. Few people knew the room existed. Inside it tonight were four members of the Muy Capaz. There were dressed badly even by Badtown standards, in stained, ragged shorts, dirty beach shirts and tattered straw hats. Each man had a gun in his belt and a machete by his side. Several bottles of rum sat on the table.
The pirates had been playing Cuban Poker since midnight. At about 2 A.M., the secret door opened and four heavily armed men came in. Everyone in the room froze. The four men weren’t rival gang members—they were bodyguards. Their sudden appearance could mean only one thing.
Another man walked in a few moments later. He was six-foot-two, with the build of an ex-boxer and the scars of an ex-con. He was dressed all in white, and his hands, cracked and rough, were an odd shade of red, as if they were permanently stained with blood.
He was Charles Black, the boss of the Muy Capaz.
This was not good—and the four pirates knew it. For Black to show himself in public was a rare event. He almost never left the gang’s secret hideout. His presence here meant something was wrong inside the world of the Muy Capaz.
And that could be bad for everybody.
* * *
BLACK’S MAIN SOURCE of income was buying and selling large quantities of pot and coke. His suppliers were from Jamaica; the business was strictly cash up front. Whenever Black and his men needed an injection of funds to get resupplied, they did what pirates do: They robbed vessels at sea. Turning that booty into money, they bought the drugs wholesale, and then resold them to mid-level dealers, most right here in Badtown, for a good profit.
The problem was, Black and his men were pirates from skin to bones. Like their predecessors of centuries past, they had something in their genes that caused them to be quickly separated from any extra money they came across. Despite their reputation for moving like ghosts when it came to committing crimes at sea, they were terrible businessmen. When they made a score, they would take the profits and hit Badtown hard. And whether their visit lasted several days or even a week or more, after a bender of booze, drugs, gambling and paying for the boom-boom, most if not all of their ill-gotten gains were gone.
This was why the gang was almost always broke, forcing them to knock off more yachts, to get some more seed money, to buy more stuff from the Jamaicans, to sell again, to blow the profits again. It was a vicious cycle. And had it had nothing to do with voodoo or the full moon.
The problem flowed from the top. Black himself was prone to recklessness when he was in the chips, and to foul moods when the well went dry. In the past year alone he’d murdered six people, three inside this very bar, all over money matters.
There was no way the local police were going to arrest him, though. The only reason they came to Badtown was to pick up their bribe money.
* * *
BLACK WAS IN an especially bad mood tonight.
The gang was again low on funds. A raiding party he’d sent out the night before had spent nearly all of its profits over in Bimini. Doubling their sin, the same four men had not returned from a raid they’d gone out on earlier this night. Again, the big selling week was coming up, and gang’s coffers were seriously depleted. But even worse, the thought that his men might be holding out on him was enough to make Black’s blood boil.
He walked over to the table where his gang members were playing cards and viciously slapped the first man he saw. The man fell to the floor, his nose broken, his mouth bloody.
“When I slap you, you goin’ to stay slap,” Black roared at his astonished victim. “You understand? Or do you need more cut lip?”
The man didn’t reply; he just scrambled away.
Black took his seat, which was all he really wanted.
The pirate captain also commandeered the man’s meager pile of money and began playing poker, but clearly, he was distracted. He was constantly checking his watch, waiting for his raiding party to show up with some much-needed capital. But as each minute ticked by, that possibility seemed more and more remote.
Into this swirl of dangerous vibes stumbled a man named Petey Chops. He was small and rodentlike, and he’d spent more than half his life in jail for murdering a child. These days he was a low-level drug mule for Black’s crew; his forte was pushing powdered coke on American college students here on school break or for a long weekend.
Chops was supposed to be carrying a $10,000 payment for a load of coke Black’s men had given him the week before. Tonight was the night to pay up, which was the reason Black had left his hideout in the first place. He wanted that money in his own pocket, no one else’s. But when Chops walked in and saw Black himself in the flesh, he immediately tried to turn and run. Black’s bodyguards stopped him at the door, though, and the pirate captain motioned them to bring him over.
By the time Chops reached the table and sat down, he’d turned ghost white. He also looked beat up. His eyes were puffy, his lips swollen.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted out, not daring to look at Black across the table. “But I don’t have your scratch.”
Black glared back at him. “What do you mean?”
Chops was trembling. “I had the money. But I was rolled thirty minutes ago. Two guys in military uniforms. They took everything I had.”
Black drank an entire glass of rum without taking his eyes off Chops. “I got rolled” was the oldest excuse in the book, and everyone at the table knew it.
“But it’s true,” Chops insisted. “I was leaving my crib and these two army dudes came out of nowhere. Masked faces, billy clubs. They hit me from behind, then dragged me into the alley and took my roll. Ten grand in tens and twenties. It was like they were waiting for me. It was like they knew I was coming here with your money.”
Black never broke his gaze. The tension in the room was nearly unbearable.
He asked Chops, “So, when can you get us the money? Tomorrow? The next day?”
Chops’s relief was so apparent, he nearly fell out of his seat.
“For sure, Captain,” he said. “Tomorrow, for sure.”
Black reached across the table and tapped Chops lightly on his face.
“Tomorrow,” the pirate captain told him. “Or else.”
More blood trickled from Chops’s busted-up nose. But he didn’t care. He’d somehow escaped with his life.
“Yes, Captain,” he said, wiping the blood away. “I won’t gin it up.”
Black reached into his shirt pocket and came out with a joint the size of a cigar.
“Let’s smoke this outside,” he told the others at the table. “It’s new stuff—from Panama. We don’t want everyone out there to be smelling us.”
Everyone at the table got up and filed through the secret doorway and outside via a short stairway that faced the dirty canal. Black’s heavily armed motorboat was tied up close by.
The pirate king handed the Panama blunt to one of his men, who lit it with a huge cigarette lighter. He got the joint going and blew out a huge cloud of bluish smoke.
The man passed the huge joint to Chops. The dealer t
ook a long drag—but before he was able to exhale, another of Black’s men had moved up behind him and suddenly had a leather belt around Chops’s neck.
The pirate started pulling the belt tight, slowly twisting and turning it. Chops began fighting madly, but his fate was sealed.
“Examples must be made,” Black told Chops nonchalantly. “You understand, mon?”
Chops collapsed to his knees, but his executioner yanked him back to his feet. The pirate kept twisting the belt tighter and tighter while Black and the others calmly passed the joint back and forth, looking on, unmoved.
Finally, the pressure was so intense, Chops’s eyes popped out. Only then did the pirate let his lifeless body fall to the ground. Black took another long drag on the joint and then gave Chops a final kick in the stomach.
“He’s lucky we didn’t tear him to shreds first,” Black said.
They took rope from Black’s motorboat and tied Chops’s body to a docking post. When the sun came up, his corpse would be visible for all of Badtown to see.
It was a clear warning: Don’t cross the Muy Capaz.
* * *
THE PIRATES RETURNED to the hidden room and opened another bottle of rum.
Dispatching Chops had eased Black’s frustration level a bit. But it left the gang with the same old problem: They still had no money. In fact, now they were another ten grand in the hole.
That’s when Black’s cell phone rang. It was one of his contacts in the nearby casino district. Could Black still get a large quantity of coke on just a few days’ notice? The contact had three customers looking for a substantial deal. They would pay up front, and were interested in regular large buys in the future.
It was just what Black needed.
He turned to the two senior pirates at the table, Doggie and Jacks.
“Clean up and head over the hill,” he told them. “Sniff out a deal with these guys—and don’t bitch it up. If spirits agree, tell them we can move up to a ton of stuff if they want us to.”
* * *
DOGGIE AND JACKS walked into the lounge of the Regency Casino just before 3 A.M.
They’d changed their clothes to appear a little more presentable, but at best, they still looked like part of the casino’s kitchen crew.
They spotted the contact sitting in a dark corner with three coal-black men. They were well-dressed, very refined looking, and spoke with strange accents. The pirates sat down and made small talk while an army of high-priced hookers paraded around the casino’s main floor.
Finally, they got down to business.
The contact told the pirates the three men were looking for coke, meth, pot—and weapons. These were things the pirates could get with ease. The three men were also looking for someone to attack the vessels of their business rivals at sea. Again, the Muy Capaz were the people for the job. Best of all, the three would pay in cash, up front, for everything the pirates could give them.
It was the deal that the Muy Capaz had been awaiting for a long time.
Drunk and stoned and now dreaming of riches in their heads, Doggie and Jacks shook hands with the three men, sealing the deal.
Then Jacks asked, “Where are you blokes from? Antigua? Belize?”
The three men laughed.
“No, mon,” one of them replied: “We are from Senegal.”
8
The outer islands
THE NEXT NIGHT, Doggie and Jacks left the dock at the Muy Capaz’s secret hideout and headed out to sea.
It was just past midnight. They were using Black’s own twenty-four-foot sports fishing boat for this trip. In the boat’s hold was a quarter pound of cocaine, just about all the pirate gang had left. They also had four ounces of methamphetamine, two AK-47s and a hundred rounds of ammunition. These were just teases for the three men who wanted to make the big score.
Doggie and Jacks were a bit on edge. Four of their fellow pirates had yet to return from a raid the previous night. But Doggie and Jacks weren’t feeling uneasy because they thought something bad might have befallen their comrades—there was no honor among the Muy Capaz gang. Their fear was that the four might have been nabbed by some law enforcement agency higher than the paid-off Bahamian cops—the U.S. Coast Guard, for instance—and that the Muy Capaz’s string of perfect crimes had been broken. While they were fairly sure the gang members wouldn’t fold under interrogation for fear of what Captain Black would do to them if they did, Muy Capaz’s ghostly street cred would definitely take a hit if the four missing pirates had been arrested.
The mystery of their missing colleagues was not enough to delay this deal, though. It was a rare day that the gang could find regular customers for pot, coke, meth and weapons.
This one was just too good to pass up.
* * *
THEY FOUND THE ship just where the three men said it would be.
It was anchored off a cay near one of the Bahamas’ mysterious Blue Holes. This island was a part of the outer Eleuthera chain, an area that saw few visitors—not just because of its isolation, but also because it was believed the waters in this part of the Bahamas were haunted. It was a perfect place for this type of meeting.
Doggie and Jacks were surprised by the ship itself, though. Because the three men from the casino had seemed so refined and were so well-dressed, they’d expected to be meeting on an expensive mega-yacht or even something more luxurious.
What they found instead was an enormous container ship.
They saw the prearranged signal, four flashes from a red light, and were soon up alongside the huge vessel. A rope ladder was dropped from amidships and the two pirates climbed up. Doggie was carrying the coke and meth; Jacks had the weapons and ammo.
The three well-dressed gentlemen greeted them up on the rail, embracing them with monstrous bear hugs as they came aboard. No other crew members were in sight.
The three men took them to the ship’s galley, where drinks were waiting for them.
“What is this?” Doggie asked them, looking at the amber liquid swirling around inside his paper cup.
“It is mooch,” one of the three men replied in his thick French-tinged accent. “Soothes the muscles and calms the nerves.”
The pirates drained their cups and accepted the offer for a refill. Then the three men suggested they take a quick tour of the ship.
Walking along the cargo hold, the three men told the pirates that they could carry anything within the huge containers—tons of drugs, weapons, stolen merchandise. Even an airplane, one bragged.
Whatever the pirates could supply to them could be moved practically anywhere in the world, without fear of being caught by law enforcement because just about anyone they would encounter at sea could be paid off or disposed of.
“More money for you,” one of the three men said. “More money for us.”
The pirates were not only taking it in, they were getting physically excited. Everything the three men were telling them made great sense. By the time the tour was over, the formerly drab ship looked bigger and more elaborate than any seagoing vessel the pirates had ever seen.
When the three men asked if the pirates had any questions, Doggie had only one: He asked if they could have another cup of mooch.
* * *
DOGGIE AND JACKS left about twenty minutes later. They had a deal in place, a half-gallon of mooch in hand, and a bag of money as payment for the guns and drugs: ten thousand dollars in all, mostly in tens and twenties.
They started their boat’s engine and headed off to the southwest.
A minute later, the helicopter known as Bad Dawg Two took off from the Dustboat, hidden on the other side of the cay, and headed in the same direction.
* * *
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Bad Dawg Two was flying at 10,000 feet, extremely high for its type of rotary aircraft.
Batman was behind the controls; Nolan rode shotgun. They were bundled up in heavy flight suits, boots and gloves, essential as the copter’s cockpit doors had been taken off, and it wa
s extremely cold at nearly two miles up.
Gunner and Crash were shivering mightily in the passenger seats behind them. Both were wrapped in emergency blankets, but they were of little help, as each man was wearing nothing more than a wet suit and flippers.
“How did we draw the short straws again?” Crash asked, blowing on his hands, trying to keep them warm.
“I thought we lost a bet,” Gunner replied.
“You’ll be warm soon enough,” Nolan told them over his shoulder.
He was peering into an instrument called an XFLIR. An upgrade on a typical FLIR, or Forward Looking Infrared Sensor, it functioned like night-vision goggles—identifying people, places and things based on their heat signatures, but over large areas. The “X” stood for the device’s extraordinarily long range at night; at the moment, it was maxed out at three miles and change. That was the reason for their nosebleed altitude; they could cover more ground up here than flying closer to the earth.
They were passing over a string of tiny islands called the Sunset Chain. This was where they’d tracked the pirates’ fast boat after it left the Georgia June. They’d kept a visual on the vessel despite their frosty altitude until it disappeared in among the dozens of minuscule islands and reefs in the chain. Somewhere down there, Whiskey was sure lay the Muy Capaz’s hideout.
At first, what they saw was not very promising. The islands of the Sunset Chain looked practically deserted. Lots of oceanfront, lots of beaches, a few villages here and there—but nothing that would qualify as a hideout for a bunch of cutthroat pirates.
But then they flew over an island located about a mile off the northeastern edge of the archipelago, away from the others. Surrounded by thick reefs and rocky beaches, it was appropriately named Craggy Two Cay for the river that ran through it, cutting it in half. And though it was covered with heavy jungle and almost impossible to approach safely from any side by sea, the XFLIR almost immediately started picking up clusters of heat sources on it.
“We might have a bingo,” Nolan declared.