“Actually, Topaz is thirty-six meters…about a hundred twenty feet. It’s an Azara, made in Italy only three years ago. I learned this from Richard Prechter when we were having our luncheon. But as to your question: it’s not so complex, if you think about it. A millionaire with political connections, a man like Prechter, he could buy a small island in the Exumas or the Jumentos easily enough, that’s true. Someplace like Little Whale Cay in the Berries, already developed. But then he’d have to deal with boats anchoring right off his beaches. Boats cruise up and down those chains as if they were stepping stones. There wouldn’t be enough privacy.”
I thought about the infamous history of Normans Cay in the Exumas during the cocaine era. The Nassau government had been bribed to look the other way, but the island’s criminal activity could not be kept a secret from the outside world. The cartels had drug planes flying in and out on an almost daily basis, and the island’s armed guards frequently had to chase away island-hopping tourists on sailboats. Those encounters brought the island too much notoriety and media attention in the United States, and eventually the law came down on the narcos. We’d visited Normans just a month before, on our way down the Exumas. There was still a ditched cargo plane in the lagoon, sunk in ten feet of water. Cori and I had snorkeled through its corroded aluminum fuselage.
“No, for real privacy,” said Victor, “a man like Prechter wouldn’t buy an island in a chain with strangers anchoring nearby. For real privacy he would want his own Far Out Island. And if it’s a wildlife sanctuary with no harbors or anchorages, surrounded by reefs and notorious for shipwrecks, far out to windward on the open sea where nobody will visit… well, then, what could be better than that? I think if you were a privacy fanatic, it would be perfect.”
“But it’s still a sanctuary, a national wildlife trust.”
Victor smiled. “Think again, Daniel. Everything is for sale in the Bahamas. Everything and everybody, right up to the prime minister. It’s always been that way; why should it be different now? All you would have to do is pay enough money to the right people. And maybe give yourself some cover, to protect the people taking the bribes. To give them plausible deniability. Maybe create some kind of environmental foundation to provide legitimacy, in case anybody looked into what you’re doing out there.”
“Like the Global Ocean Research Partnership,” I replied.
“Exactly,” he said. “I noticed that cap on the red-haired man as well. The Castigos are more than twenty miles from any other islands. Do you want to use dynamite to create channels the fast way? Just check the horizon for ships or planes, and you could blast channels and boat harbors all day long. Who would know? Nobody would see any channels unless they were right over them, but nobody dares come close enough to see. Even if you flew over in an airplane, you would have to know what the island looked like before the channels were created. Anyway, who cares? There are thousands of islands like that one in the Bahamas. Richard Prechter is very well connected politically. In the USA, in the Bahamas, in the UK, and at the UN. I’m quite sure that he has the prime minister in his pocket, to be blasting channels in a sanctuary.”
“And he has Cori on his boat,” I added.
“Yes, he does. He has taken our Cori.” Victor paused and took a sip of his rum. “So, Daniel…what are we going to do about it?”
“We’re going to visit the Castigo Cays—just to take a look. Then we’ll decide what to do about it.”
I didn’t tell Victor, but there were a few things I had already decided I was going to do about it. First, I was going to pound that smirk off Jolly Boy Trevor’s face when next I met him. Then I was going to break off that middle finger and feed it to him. And that was just for starters.
4
Tuesday before dawn, I awakened alone for the first time since before Venezuela and Cori, more than six months earlier. My aft-cabin double bed seemed absurdly large and empty by half, and I quickly rolled out of the rack and hit the deck in my black gym shorts. Tran was already up in the pilothouse, sitting in one of the padded pedestal chairs and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He kept a little tin of strong tobacco and used a device made from a split piece of bamboo to roll his own. The three forward windows hinged out and upward, and with the pilothouse door open in the back there was a little breeze moving through. The pilothouse was Rebel Yell’s only interior “designated smoking area.” There was no smoking down below, ever.
Tran’s gray hair was thin on top, and combed straight back. He wore a yellow T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. Much of his visible skin was crosshatched with old scar tissue. We didn’t exchange many words, but communicated more with looks and nods.
“Everything is cool, Chu-tau,” his dark eyes said. “Your woman is gone, but life goes on. Cori will be fine, and so will you.” Tran spoke several Asian dialects besides his native Vietnamese, but mastery of English eluded him. It’s not that he wasn’t smart: he usually beat me at chess, and he won against Victor as often as he lost. I think that at his age he just wasn’t interested in studying another language, beyond what he needed for the galley and for sailing.
I did my regular physical training routine on deck before sunrise, my pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups and the rest. I skipped my usual swim to Stocking Island and my run over the dunes and along the ocean beach. There was not enough time for that today. While the fresh oxygen pumped through my brain, I planned, schemed, and finally made a command decision.
It was time to break out my untapped emergency fund, thirty ounces of gold Krugerrands, Eagles, and Maple Leaves. This well-hidden stash didn’t figure into my routine budgetary calculations; I would take a straight job ashore somewhere before going to this fund. This compact cache of gold was to be used only to save my life or to save Rebel Yell from immediate and ruinous disaster. The plastic tubes containing the gold coins would go with me into the life raft if my schooner was going down. I would also dip into the gold to save the life of Victor or Tran. Otherwise, it was strictly off-limits. It was my calamity fund, and the only insurance policy that I carried.
Cori presented a different situation. What if there was a chance that she was in real danger? I recalled again how I had shaken Señor Eduardo Vargas’s hand and, man to man, promised to keep his daughter safe. I’d made the same solemn promise to her mother. So, despite my bruised ego, despite the fact that Cori had left Rebel Yell of her own free will, that promise settled it. A promise like that is a point of honor. You keep them, or you don’t call yourself a man. There is no third option I know of.
Passing through the pilothouse, I told Tran to make our home ready for sea. I went down the ladder, through the galley into the cargo hold, and scrounged around in the rigging locker. I didn’t have a fifty-foot length of quarter-inch wire, but I did have a couple of Norseman terminals for that size wire. These terminals were thumb-size stainless steel devices that clamped onto the wire end. I collected some rigging tools and other things I thought I might use and dropped them into an empty white five-gallon plastic bucket.
My gray inflatable was riding against Rebel’s hull just below deck level, suspended from its four-point bridle. I put in the bucket full of rigging parts, used the block and tackle to lower the boat into the water, and climbed down. The seventy-horsepower Evinrude had an electric start on the console, and it kicked over after a few coughs and stutters. It was an old two-stroke engine that smoked and sounded ragged when it was cold, but once it was running it would go like hell all day, as long as it was fed relatively clean gasoline mixed with oil.
I disconnected the four snap hooks of the lifting bridle, freeing the inflatable from its mother ship, and shifted the motor into forward gear while standing behind the plywood center console. The original knob atop the throttle lever was long gone. The Avon’s previous owner had replaced it with a plum-sized silver skull with glinting ruby eyes. The grinning skull faced forward, a piratical totem. I drove at idle speed through the calm water, both to allow my engine to warm up and to keep from making un
necessary noise so early in the morning.
****
Nick Galloway was already sitting in the cockpit of his thirty-three-foot Hunter, and grabbed my bow line. I tied alongside his boat amidships, with fore and aft lines. He was shirtless, and I saw the rest of the military tattoos on his arm. I was happy to see a Ranger tab and Army jump wings tattooed above the names of the dead troops from his old unit. Death from Above, I thought automatically, but that Army paratroop slogan wasn’t written on his visible skin.
Though he didn’t have an especially muscular physique, Nick didn’t look like a weakling either. The sailing life kept most people fairly strong. We talked first about the damaged cap stay wire. As I expected, we determined that we could hacksaw his wire just above the broken strands and attach one of my Norseman terminal fittings as a replacement.
While we worked on his wire rigging, we discussed his participation in the possible reconnaissance of Castigo Cay.
“Nick, how long have you been out of the military?”
“Four years.”
“You look like you’re still in pretty good shape.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to turn into a slug like a lot of guys do when they get out.” He’d probably seen me doing my calisthenics on Rebel Yell’s deck. It was a lot easier to do them on a sixty-footer than on a thirty-three-footer with almost zero open deck space.
We sat on his narrow side deck, on either side of the bad cap stay wire. While we passed crescent wrenches, pliers and other tools, I asked him, “You do any shooting lately? Any tactical training?”
He shrugged. “Not really. I’ve got a .357 for a boat gun, and a .22 rifle. I shoot some, out on the ocean.”
“Are you a good shot?”
“Oh hell yeah, I am,” he said without hesitation. He extended his right arm out toward the monument on the top of Stocking Island, with his index finger pointed. His arm was rock steady despite the movement of his boat, and then he curled his finger back as if pulling a trigger.
“How good a shot?”
“How good?” He turned back and looked at me. “Well, there’s about a dozen Taliban you could ask, but they’re all dead. That was back when they let us shoot the Taliban. And I shot Expert every time I qualified, from boot camp on. You want to see my DD-214? If you want to see my medals, they’re back in the States at my mom’s house.”
“I’m just asking…” So he’d seen the elephant. I was satisfied with that much.
“Yeah, I understand. You don’t want to take some rear-echelon motherfucker with you. Clerks and jerks and fobbits. I wouldn’t either.”
I slowly nodded in agreement. “You any good with a scoped rifle?”
“You mean, was I ever a sniper? Not officially, but for a while I had a four-power Trijicon on my rifle. That’s how I nailed most of those Taliban. One was at six hundred yards, I shit you not. And I hunted deer with a scoped rifle ever since I was a kid in North Carolina. Got my first buck with a .243 Winchester when I was thirteen. Does that count?”
I grinned and nodded yes. “Hell yeah, that counts.” I’d learned to shoot scoped rifles as a boy back in Virginia, also hunting deer. And like Nick, I had from time to time used a Trijicon sight on an M-16 to nail some bad guys. Nick would do just fine.
He had his own questions for me. “So, Dan, do you have some guns on board? Real guns, I mean. More than what I have, just a revolver and a .22 rifle. They’re not much, but I heard they wouldn’t get me hassled too much in foreign countries.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve got some real guns on board.”
“Like what?”
I paused and decided to tell him just the basics, enough for him to take my armaments seriously. “For long range I’ve got a .308 bolt gun. That’s why I asked you if you ever shot scoped rifles much. For up close I have a pump shotgun. And I have a Glock 17. Nothing too expensive: you never know when you might have to chuck your guns overboard. It’s happened to me before.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. It was either that or prison in Nicaragua. We were boarded and searched. I threw a two-thousand-dollar SR-25 and a couple other expensive guns over the side, about five minutes before the patrol boat came alongside. After that, I decided not to spend too much money on boat guns. No gun is worth losing your boat and spending twenty years in a third-world jail, and it’s a lot easier to throw cheap ones overboard. So now I just stick to what works that doesn’t cost a fortune. Stuff I can replace.”
“So if we go ashore on Castigo Cay…”
“I plan on taking what we need. Does that bother you any?”
“Hell no. Why would it? I’ll tell you the truth, Dan. I’ve been pumped up thinking about this thing all night. Hoping the mission would be a Go. And I’ll be honest—I wouldn’t mind some trigger time. The four years before I escaped from America, after I got out of the Army, I was basically a human punching bag. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir. Get in line. Stand there and shut up. Fill out the form and don’t skip any blocks. Pay your health tax or go to jail. I even spent a year in the Conservation Corps planting pine seedlings in Colorado, and it wasn’t by choice. No, to be perfectly honest, to be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t mind dealing out a little pain for a change. I mean, not if they’re doing bad things to women out there on Castigo Cay.”
“Good. That’s about how I feel too. So, Nick, once we finish your rigging, do you want to spend a few days on Rebel Yell? Do a little armed tourism and see the sights on Castigo Cay? And maybe find something worth bringing home? Besides my girlfriend, I mean.”
He grinned and put out his hand. “Hell yeah, Skipper, I’m up for that.”
We shook on it, bumped fists, and it was a done deal. I asked him, “How are you set for anchors? To leave your boat unattended, I mean.” There was always the chance of an early hurricane in June, though it was a small one.
“Good. Real good. I can stick At Ease back inside the inner basin and leave it for a week, no problem. I’ve got somebody who can keep an eye on her. So, what’s the plan?”
“We’ll take Rebel Yell north around Long Island, and then we’ll tack over toward the Castigos and take a look.”
“You mean looking with binoculars, or going ashore?”
I laughed. “Neither. I’ve got my own air-ops department. An old Raven UAV.”
“You do? No shit! How did you manage that?”
“I bought it from a guy in the States.”
“A Raven?”
“Come on, Nick, you were in the military, you know how it works. Those things crashed all the time. And they’re modular anyway; they just snap parts together to make a complete unit. So the UAV operators would scrounge up the supposedly broken or worn-out parts and rebuild new ones off the books. And sometimes they’d just lose Ravens on a flight. It wouldn’t respond, or it’d fly past its radio range or run out of battery juice, and it’d crash God knows where. Once higher got used to losing them that way, some UAV operators did it on purpose.”
“Only they weren’t lost at all.”
“Sure, why not? The military bought thousands of them. They were practically an expendable commodity, like beans or bullets. Rebuilt Ravens are available, if you know where to look. And there are civilian versions too, so it’s no problem having one on board a civilian boat. I bought it for a treasure-finding job. Nothing’s better when you’re searching for something in clear, shallow water than having an eye in the sky. We’ll launch it when we’re a few miles off the Castigos. We won’t even have to change course.”
I didn’t have to explain all this to Nick. Soldiers knew that you could not see or hear drones when they were at their working altitude, whether they were big Predators way up high or little ones like Ravens closer to the earth.
“Nick, this operation is really going to happen. I want to know for sure that you’re ready for it. Ready for anything.” I looked straight into his eyes. “Anything.”
“Hell yeah, I’m ready. I’ve just barely been treading water. Thi
s is the most alive I’ve felt in a couple of years. Know what I mean? It’s got my blood pumping again.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve been sitting on my ass in Chicken Harbor for way too long.” This was the sailors’ derisive nickname for George Town and Elizabeth Harbour. It was the furthest point that many American sailors made it down island before deciding that the Big Blue Ocean beyond was just too challenging for them. “While you’re moving your boat and getting it ready, I have to go ashore and talk to a pilot, and then we’ll be getting under way.”
“An airplane pilot?”
“Yeah, an airplane pilot. He’s kind of a buddy, and he has a Cessna 180 he charters. I’ve flown with him before. He lives here, and I want him on standby, just in case.”
“Does he charge for that? To be on standby?”
“Hell yeah, he charges! He’s not that good a buddy.”
****
We raised anchor and got Rebel Yell under way soon after I returned from making my arrangements with the pilot. It cost me some of my dwindling Bahamian dollars for a taxi ride a couple of miles from George Town to the airport and back, but I had to make this trip in person because I needed to pay him up front. He didn’t have any charters, but to keep him in George Town for the rest of the week it cost me a half-ounce gold Maple Leaf, non-refundable but applicable toward any flying we might do.
Tuesday night we motor-sailed over the top of Long Island. The wind was just a bit south of east, too close to our bow to make good progress under sail alone, so we had to expend some diesel. Nick went into the watch rotation, and he was a good sailor. Sure feet beneath him, and quick hands on a line or a winch. He wasn’t as big as I was, but he was agile and had sharp eyes for keeping watch, and that’s what counted most of all.
This made me more confident about going ashore with him in the Castigos. In the military, you ordinarily trained with guys for weeks or months before you left the wire. But not always. Sometimes you were thrown together with troops you had never met or only barely knew. Sometimes they weren’t even Americans.
Castigo Cay Page 6