Salvage

by Chris Howard

  “Not Cuba the nation.” DuFour answered cautiously. “But outside Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and a few other metros and ports, there’s still a lot of wild, ungoverned coastline. Just keep in mind it’s a nation in transition, and what that means.”

  Angelo looked grimly thoughtful as he lowered the scopes, thumbing the viewer side closed. “Power plays.”

  DuFour nodded. “Individuals and organizations carving out what they can from an unsettled economy, shifting governance, hundreds of miles of unmanaged coastline with rampant oversight and officials who will look the other way for a price. There’s a lot of money in and around the Caribbean, and everyone wants a piece.”

  “Haven’t seen land-based piracy operations in years.” Angelo frowned, and then said, “Pirates” as if it contained all the quaintness of the word swashbuckler and all the unhistoric silliness of an Errol Flynn movie.

  DuFour caught the first officer’s inference, and let part of a grin appear for a moment before bringing the talk back to the deadly and the real. “Organized gangs of ocean-going robbers, rapists, and killers, which means some are interested in ransom. Others aren’t.”

  “So they kill the crew?”

  “And dump them overboard. With an unmanned vessel, they can try to claim ownership—or more likely, they’ll just rename and register the vessel, then sell it.”

  Angelo tilted his head inquisitively. “This from personal experience?”

  The Irabarren’s captain nodded. “I was first mate on the lightering ship Tideo, doing mostly grounded tanker work out of Houston, Texas. We contracted with all the big salvors from here to Rotterdam, but mostly Atlantic and Caribbean jobs.” DuFour turned to look out at the sea, as if there were landmarks he could latch onto. “We weren’t actually far from here. A bit south. Tanker hit a submerged oil platform—whole rig went under in Hurricane Ida, but was prone to floating as close as ten meters below the surface. Anyway, tanker hits the platform, goes through the double, starts leaking. We came in with a hot-tap, pulled the crude from the affected tanks and headed back to Houston.”

  “And what, you were attacked?”

  DuFour gave Wilraven a quick glance before answering Angelo. “They killed the captain right off. Rest of the crew and I were held prisoners for a week—they were hoping for ransom—before your old friends from FES showed up and took out the pirates. They had backup from the US—Navy and some Coast Guard District Seven snipers, but it was right outside Mexican water and it was the Fuerzas Especiales who pulled the job and set us free.”

  Adam DuFour clapped Angelo on the back, threw a smile over his shoulder as he made his way back to the Irabarren. “Keep your eyes on the horizon and the scopes. Those guys were based in Cuba—not even sure if they were all actually Cuban. But that’s where they hid out, up one of the estuaries way out on the peninsula. And the world hasn’t changed that much.”

  Wilraven felt the expression on his own face sour, but quickly adjusted to hide it. He had been thinking of the box of missiles and who knew what else Levesgue and the “security detail” had with them.

  After the soundings were done, Wilraven met with DuFour on anchorage planning, and the two of them went with a standard four-point mooring for the Irabarren, the roughly twelve-hundred- meter depth being too much for the telescoping legs of the platform. The Marcene would then tie up to the Irabarren with a row of fenders to prevent any hull-to-hull damage.

  During an early dinner meeting, Mr. Levesgue slipped in without being invited, standing off in the shadows of the master’s suite, arms folded, watching and listening. DuFour, noting the man, looked at Wilraven and raised an eyebrow.

  “Corkran’s provided security,” was all Wilraven said, gesturing to the soldier, and Levesgue stepped into the light and introduced himself to Irabarren’s captain with as much courtesy as he’d given Wilraven on stepping onto the Marcene.

  Along with the same instructions: no one was to speak directly to any of the other three in the “security team”—only to Levesgue. They were there “to get the job done.”

  Wilraven tuned him out, going over the charts on DuFour’s tablet, zooming into the details their prelim scan had captured of the floor, actually a sea mount that stood quite a bit higher than the floor. He drew a circle in yellow around the crown of the mount, fingering through the menu to pass the measured area to the sidescanning AUV team.

  “Hope the Serina’s somewhere in here.”

  With the depth plummeting steeply to three thousand meters on all sides of the marked-off area, DuFour glanced away from Levesgue and sighed. “We’re not good if she’s resting off the mount.”

  DuFour opened a beat-up old leather wallet he’d placed on the table. He used it for storing useful stuff like business cards, licenses, a little notepad, an expired RBC Royal Visa card that could open locked cabinets on the ship, and his sewing kit with needles and various colors of thread—because you never knew when you might need to fix a button, repair the zipper on your pants, or sew up an open wound. Adam tugged out a blue pen, using one end as a pointer to drag and tap around the map, then writing down the coordinates of interesting topographic points on the notepad.

  “Off the seamount, or nose into the floor with the stern up on one of these heights. That’s not going to work either.”

  Levesgue, still standing over the captains, leaned in and placed a big, possessive hand flat on the table, his head swiveling to lock eyes with each of them for a second. “So what happens next? Mr. Corkran would like this wrapped up as soon as possible. He’s paying for your crews to work round the clock. And all I see them doing is fucking around with simulation games, anchor cables, and underwater toys.”

  Wilraven knew there were half a dozen men and women working on the moorings, deploying the spring buoys, and running anchors and over 1,200 meters of cable and chain to secure the platform and ship to the site. He also knew another group of DuFour’s submersibles team, six or seven men and women, were busy programming the AUVs—autonomous underwater vehicles—to run a very thorough terrain and target scan during the night so that, given a little luck, the machines would surface in the morning and tell them exactly where the Serina was sitting on the bottom.

  Wilraven leaned back, watching Levesgue for a few more seconds. He should have said: These things take time to get started; there’s a lot of planning that goes into a job, and a planned job is a successful job, even though no job ever goes off as planned. You can’t tell me that as someone with a military background, probably special ops background, you don’t understand this?

  Instead, he kept his hands on the table, easing back on how hard he was gripping the edge. “Okay, first thing, Levesgue.” He indicated DuFour and himself. “We know what we’re doing. Our crews know what they are doing. You’re here to see that we don’t get disturbed doing whatever we see fit to be doing.” Wilraven leaned a little closer. “And right now I don’t give a squid-fuck if there’s a drunken orgy in the ROV shed. Nor do I give a fuck what you think our crews are doing.” He pointed to the cabin door. “Why don’t you go play with your carefully packed toys while we get this job done?”

  Levesgue straightened calmly, lifted his hand from the captain’s table. There was every indication of a whirlwind of violence and blood splattering walls in the next few seconds. Instead there was just silence and the low hum of machinery; the slow, rocking motion of the sea. What scared Wilraven the most was that Levesgue showed no sign of doing anything, no change in his breathing, no sense that his heart rate was up or adrenaline flowing.

  Levesgue just nodded somewhat politely to both captains. “Goodnight, gentlemen.” He turned and walked away, left the suite, closing the door quietly behind him as if the three of them had just concluded a serious but routine business discussion.

  DuFour made an open-handed gesture. “What was that about?”

  Sighing heavily, Wilraven answered, “I don’t know.”

  He had a better idea bright and early the next morning. D
uring the night, Clark Seiffert, one of the site scanning team from the Irabarren, had apparently fallen into a deep depression about the lack of direction from Captain Wilraven and had hanged himself from Crane Two.

  That’s how Seiffert’s own handwritten note told the story, and his closest friend, Dena Lisveld, a tech lead on the scan team, verified the writing, crying that she couldn’t believe Clark would ever do such a thing, but admitted that he had turned in early, saying he was tired.

  Chapter Nine

  Lenient Luck

  Laeina showed up late at night in the Knowledgenix labs—without alerting security, soaking wet, dripping seawater all over the floor.

  Martin looked more exasperated than angry. “Again, how is it that you can come and go right through our security?”

  She appeared to be taking the question seriously, but ended up pointing down the hall. “I came in through the door . . . underneath? What do you call it? Moonpool?”

  Andreden sighed and got her a towel.

  After drying off and getting most of the water out of her hair, Laeina looked up to see that both men were still staring at her—as if she was from another world. “Do I scare you?”

  Martin shrugged, an inadequate attempt at nonchalance he obviously did not truly feel.

  Andreden said, “In a new way every time we meet.”

  She just sighed, then tilted her head to one side as if giving his response some thought, but also conveying thatwhat he had said wasn’t surprising.

  Andreden gestured around the lab. “So, you’re here. I’ve shown the plans to Martin. We have a hundred questions, but I assume you want me to hear your end of things first?”

  Laeina looked from Andreden to Allievi, then back. “Yes, my end.” She said the words low, distracted. “My sister, Adista. I have followed trails and currents all over the world. Most have dried up. One leads to your American government and Navy, but something out of the past. I do not have deep hopes for this path, and I have no expertise and very little understanding around the working of your government. This is where I require your help.”

  “We don’t do much in defense contracting.” Andreden was already shaking his head, frowning. “Names? Details? At least get me someone or something to start with?”

  She was quiet, giving it thought as she paced back and forth in the shadows at the end of the lab, a dancer’s fluid motion even in the slightest and most trivial movements.

  She brightened suddenly, gesturing at Andreden and Allievi. “There is a phrase I do not understand. Perhaps it will help? Do you know of Lenient-Luck? The name of something your government does—or did in the past—perhaps?”

  Andreden glanced at Martin, who shrugged, but offered a guess, “Project name? That’s what it sounds like to me. There are systems—NSA has them. So do other agencies, which work off semantic linking to generate a code name that’s easy to remember, but which has no relation to the function of the project. So, in this case, the project would have nothing to with leniency or luck. Where did you see the name?”

  Martin was nodding. “That would give us more to go on.”

  “I made arrangements . . . ”

  Now that she was speaking in longer and more meaningful statements, Andreden was starting to get a better read on her. She spoke English fluently, spoke it with a rich eastern European or Mediterranean accent, but it clearly wasn’t her first language, and it was also clear she was trying to choose her words carefully. She ended up going with a shrug and moderate subtlety. “I threatened him. There was a man I tracked down who had access to secure documents. He even promised to acquire copies of them for me—the Lenient-Luck documents. But when he went to retrieve them, they had been removed or stolen by someone else.”

  Martin and Andreden exchanged a look. “That’s it?” Andreden asked.

  “He thought there may be backup copies in another place in the city of Baltimore. He did not appear when we agreed to meet next. Your news media . . . it said my contact had drowned and his body was found in the water near the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. It could not have been an accident. He could swim very well for . . . ” She gestured at them. “For one of you.”

  Andreden nodded. “The Wilson crosses the Potomac south of D.C.”

  Martin didn’t hide his skepticism. “You think your sister’s disappearance has something to do with this Luck project? And that whoever killed your contact is also connected?”

  “I do not know what I think. That is why I have come to you.”

  Chapter Ten

  Anchor Hitch

  Wilraven found it disturbing that Levesgue’s team had thought to pack body bags for a salvage job that—on the security side—needed nothing more than a bit of protection while it was parked on Cuba’s doorstep. Not as disturbing as Clark Seiffert’s death, but unsettling none the less.

  Levesgue shouldered through the gathering around Clark Seiffert dangling above the mess he had made on the deck below. The soldier pointed at two members of the crane team. “Climb up and cut him down.” When they didn’t move in the first few seconds after the command, he said, “Now!”

  “No.” Wilraven pulled out his utility knife and jumped to the crane’s base, climbing up the structural steel bracing. “I will get him down.”

  Leaning his chest against the widest beam, with both arms wrapped around it, Wilraven hooked his boots into the angle braces at the base.

  He reached as far as he could with his left hand—knife in his right—and grabbed the rope, lifting Clark straight up to build in a loop of slack, enough to bring the knife around underneath the beam and cut through it.

  Took him a couple of tries, but his old fold-out Buck got the job done. Breathing hard with the strain of holding up Clark’s body one-handed, he said, “I’m going to slide down the beam. Grab Clark when you can reach him.”

  This would also help avoid any of the crew slipping in the body fluids—mostly urine and shit—that had run down Clark’s legs to the deck under him.

  Adam DuFour reached up for Clark, taking the dead man in his arms, letting his head rest against one shoulder, blue pale face and lips, mouth gaping, his eyes open and dead. DuFour, tearing up, whispered, “Please, someone, take the damn rope off his neck.”

  Transfixed by the sight of one of their own so cold and lifeless, no one looked at Wilraven scrambling back up to the lower crane beam to retrieve the rest of the rope.

  He swung a hand under to find the end where he had neatly sliced through, but stopped as he was about to bring it up and feel for the underside of the knot to untie it. Holding it between his fingers, he swung the top half of his body over the edge, ducking in to get a close look.

  Right in front of his face was a perfectly slung anchor hitch. He ran his fingers over the knobs of rope under the beam, automatically counting and feeling his way down the hitches to the tail. This was a nice knot, something he could do with his eyes closed.

  Wilraven thought it interesting that whoever tied this off could do it in the dark. The moon had been heading into the sky at dusk, had set early, and if Clark had “hanged himself” in the early hours, it would have been close to lightless out on the Irabarren. Mooring lights would have been no good for seeing.

  He would have had to have help on that knot.

  Clark operated one of the ROVs—remotely operated vehicles. He ran scanning software and programmed missions for the autonomous vehicles. He was a computer guy, a software engineer in his mid-twenties, not an old barge hand or sailor. Maybe a Boy Scout? That was a possibility, but who would remember that particular knot so well years after earning that badge? And given that you’re not a sailor, if you were bent on hanging yourself from a rope, would an anchor hitch be the first knot that jumped to mind?

  Wilraven shook his head, leaving the rest of the knot where it was tied. It wouldn’t get in the way of crane operation, and it marked where Clark had died.

  Had been killed. Letter or no letter, no fucking way he killed himself.

 
; Wilraven slid back down the beam, stared at Levesgue a moment; nothing but icy control in the man’s return look. Levesgue shifted first, his gaze sliding past Wilraven to notice he had left the remaining rope where it had been tied. The reason was certainly clear to Levesgue.

  One of the silent security squad, the one with the goatee, spread out the black PVC bag on the deck, unzipped it, tucked Clark’s body inside and sealed it back up. The body was hidden from view in a matter of seconds, the soldier’s practiced hands in bright blue surgical gloves moving over the folds and zipper.

  Goatee Boy straightened up, relaxed on the gently rocking deck, feet braced apart, arms loose at his sides, a handgun in a holster held butt-down in a three-way harness in the middle of his chest. He turned to Levesgue, who had jumped up on one of the deck-mounted toolboxes.

  “I want everyone’s attention.” Levesgue spoke softly, barely audible over the lap of waves against the Irabarren’s steel sides.

  Other than Nature—the sea and a few seagulls—there was silence, and every eye was on the old soldier in faded gray and black camo.

  “We are going to do a round of introductions. I will go first. I am Mr. Levesgue and I am running security on this operation—this ‘job’ as you may call it. You will see my team patrolling the Marcene and the Irabarren. Do not talk to them. If you have any questions or information, speak to me. I am available around the clock.”

  Levesgue pointed to a clear space of deck on his right. “I want the crew of the Marcene to stand over here.” Pointing on his left, he said, “And the crew of the Irabarren over here.”

  With some grumbling, the gathering divided and moved to each side, the Irabarren’s crew numbering twice Marcene’s. Wilraven hadn’t moved, still standing on the base of the crane where Clark had died. DuFour remained standing next to Clark’s body in the cadaver bag, arms folded, and he hadn’t wiped away the tears on his cheeks.