by Ed Baldwin
Neville shrugged, smeared some jelly on a roll and stood to refill his coffee from the pot on the bar. He went above. Boyd found some cereal and milk and sat looking at the fax. The storm didn’t look as dense as it had the night before and was tracking due west, just as Neville had predicted. It was no threat. He heard a shower start in the guest room.
Pamela emerged, hair up in a towel, wearing the robe she had charged to her room at the Omni in Charleston.
“Hey, it’s a fine day. You guys sleep OK? I tried to avoid all the bumps,” Boyd said cheerfully.
“I slept fine. Don’t know about Casanova. He bunked with our hostess.” Pamela entered the galley and opened the refrigerator, taking out some eggs.
Mikki came down the stairs, crossed the saloon and refilled her cup.
“Want an omelet?” Pam asked, bright, unaffected.
Boyd quickly stepped into the bedroom, hoping to avoid the confrontation that seemed inevitable.
“Yes! Eggs for breakfast. I am fond of them,” Mikki said, ignoring Boyd as he closed the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Mikki
The fight may have come as a complete surprise to Boyd, but Mikki had known it would happen since that rainy night in Charleston when he’d held the umbrella for her. Before, actually, for she’d brought Wolf to her bed the first night out of Cannes with the expectation that in America, a delicious conflict might arise.
She had enjoyed watching Wolf’s confidence build until there was hope that he’d become more than just the bodyguard, hired by a cautious old man to watch his precious granddaughter.
Mikki had been able to claim the hearts of handsome, wealthy men since she was 12. It was so predictable as to be without pleasure. The thrill was when someone risked something for her. As a teen, it was older men as they risked disgrace and the retribution of her grandfather by slipping into her room or trysting with her in all manner of semipublic places. Being caught in flagrante delicto produced an especially intense pleasure.
Later, as an adult, with her own residence and the freedom to travel as she pleased, scandal, divorce and ruin followed in her wake across the capitals of Europe. Her mere presence in a resort created a ripple of anticipation among the cognoscenti, as they speculated about who it would be this time – lured, trapped, exposed.
Conflict bred danger, and danger fed the insecurities of a doting old man. He hired bodyguards to protect her from the consequences of scandal. Bodyguards introduced Mikki to a new game. Now the stakes could be more than just divorce or disgrace. Now the stakes could be death. The exquisite intensity of sex with a man who had just risked death in combat over her took Mikki’s pleasure to a whole new level of intensity. The fights so far had been stopped before death occurred. The playgrounds of the wealthy are always well policed. But, on Chardonnay, in the middle of the Atlantic, with only a geriatric captain and two smallish seamen to step in in the name of authority, there would be no stopping a fight between two big men, men who knew danger, men who liked the feeling death left when it passed close by.
There was another element now, too. Life without struggle is boring. The plan her grandfather had hatched had seemed, at first, just a way to settle some old scores and to consolidate their control over a business she didn’t understand. Then, somehow, it became clear. They were going to destabilize equatorial Africa and, in the chaos, seize control of the diamond business. The power to change the course of world history had sharpened Mikki's senses, given her a new energy and increased her need for the kind of fun her guests could provide.
Mikki loaded the gun by inviting the Americans for the crossing back to Europe. She cocked the hammer when she took Donn to bed, displacing Wolf. She pulled the trigger in international waters 200 miles west of Bermuda, an hour before dawn.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
Donn had had the late watch the night after Boyd had taken his turn. He turned with a start.
“Oh. Better put on some clothes.”
“No.”
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
The Fight
“Wolf! No!”
The scream woke Boyd. The thud on the deck above started the adrenalin flow. He leaped from the bed he had shared with Pamela, curled in a blanket at the opposite end. Fully dressed already by the agreement that allowed him to sleep in the guest suite instead of on the couch in the saloon, he took the stairs two at a time. It was still dark, and the scene on deck was illuminated by a full moon.
“Stop!” Mikki, nude, flapped ineffectually on Wolf’s huge shoulders while he hammered and tore at a limp Donn Wilde like a dog killing a rat. Donn was clinging to life on the starboard railing. In another moment was going to release his hold and be gone over the side.
Charging forward, Boyd ducked under a flailing Mikki and grabbed Wolf’s legs, pulling them forward. Wolf fell backward onto Mikki who screamed in pain. Donn rolled off of the railing onto the deck. Blood flowed freely from his nose, and his upper lip was open on the left side, teeth in disarray showing through the gap. Jumping to his feet, Boyd found himself forward of the mainmast, with his back to a furled and jacketed jib, and the bowsprit.
Wolf regained his feet quickly and kicked Mikki away. He faced Boyd. In the week Boyd had known Wolf, he’d faced him in his imagination a dozen times. Wolf was past his prime by five years. He was 40 pounds overweight and had taken steroids to build those huge arms and shoulders. Though impressive, the price paid for them was loss of flexibility. Boyd had noticed when Wolf walked he carried his elbows slightly bent, and he could barely reach above his head.
Though his abdomen was ridged with muscle, it was thick. His legs, neglected by a fitness routine focused only on the more fashionable upper body, were too small to carry a large frame with power. The way to beat Wolf was to stay at a distance and beat his snarling face to a pulp with a longer reach. The way to lose was to get caught close by those overdeveloped arms and crushed. Wolf charged.
Trapped, Boyd put everything into a straight right aimed at Wolf’s chin. Wolf slipped it to a glancing blow and his momentum carried him onto Boyd on top of the sail. As the arms closed around him, Boyd hooked a leg around and over Wolf’s and pushed Wolf’s head and body toward the mainmast. Twisting, they fell onto the deck with Boyd on top. He flexed his knee and butted it repeatedly into Wolf’s groin. Wolf screamed in rage and pain and released him. They rolled apart.
Circling, Boyd was able to flick out a half dozen jabs smacking Wolf in the face. It felt good. Wolf began to block them, learning Boyd’s style quickly. Then he ducked under one, and an uppercut lifted Boyd off his feet and caught his tongue between his teeth. Blood cascaded down the front of Boyd’s chest. Infuriated, Boyd stepped back when most men would have run or attacked.
Wolf crouched. Breathing hard, he came in swinging. Boyd endured some more shots to the face to concentrate on body blows. Wolf was very solid. They were ineffective.
Boyd backed quickly to get out of the clinch. They reached midship as Candido Mendes came up the crew’s ladder in the rear. Wolf risked a roundhouse right and received a crushing two punch combination counter that sent blood spraying across the deck to the cowering Mikki. That slowed him down momentarily, and a right cross staggered him. A mighty body blow, delivered without restraint and with no resistance by the stunned bodyguard, took his wind. He dropped to the deck on his knees.
The glint of steel in the moonlight would have been missed by a man rushing in for the kill, made primitive by adrenalin or vulnerable by hatred. Boyd saw it. Saw it flick from the boot and prepare to gut the attacker. Saw it as a coolly premeditated intent to kill.
“You son of a bitch!” Boyd roared as he led with his foot, smashing the knife and the wrist that held it onto the deck. Now, he was mad, madder than he’d ever been in all the fights he’d had. Now he felt the rage that would have made him vulnerable to the blade a moment before.
This was battlefield rage. It transcended the fear and excitement of the usual bar fight. This is
what had driven the men of the Dark Ages with broadswords and axes to pound at an opponent until he weakened, and then hew and bash until brains and limbs covered the field. This rage demanded satisfaction.
Eyes blazing, Boyd crouched and swung at Wolf, trying to rise, holding his broken right arm with the left. He quickly jerked backward but caught the next blow straight on the chin. He staggered backward toward the side, and Boyd grabbed him by the throat and groin, lifted him to chest height and threw him over the rail.
Wolf disappeared into the darkness without a sound. Chardonnay hit a swell and there was a rush as foam and spray flew from the bow.
Boyd found a life preserver which he threw over the side, running aft, looking into the black water for Wolf. At the stern, he dove in.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
The Pentagon
The telephone in Joe Smith’s bedroom at Fort Detrick rang at 0446 hours.
Joe answered it sleepily, looking at the clock, rubbing his mostly bald head.
“Joe, wake up. Joe, it’s Bob Ferguson, General Ferguson at the Pentagon.”
“Uh. Yes, sir.”
“You awake?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I just got word we’re on the schedule to brief the tank at 0930 hours this morning.”
“Yes sir. What’s the tank?”
“That’s the conference room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet.”
**********
Called from a small waiting room, they were ushered into a luxurious but small conference room in the depths of the Pentagon. Joe couldn’t have found his way there again if he’d had a map. There were only a dozen people in the room, and they all had stars, except for Joe, and one colonel who acted as the moderator.
“We have Major General Ferguson of the USSTRATCOM Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction regarding a new biological threat.”
The colonel stepped back allowing Ferguson to take the podium.
“Sirs, the World Health Organization notified us in January of an outbreak of filovirus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fifty people died. A viral researcher on leave from the Pasteur Institute in Paris got to the outbreak before the authorities and collected blood containing live virus. Subsequent events have shown that researcher isolated a rare virus, Ebola, and replicated it. He died on a remote island in the Indian Ocean while testing a vaccine on live monkeys. We traced the money paid to the researcher to Charleston, South Carolina, and believe a Dr. Lymon Byxbe and his company, BioVet Tech Corporation, are involved, though we don’t have hard evidence linking them with the money or the virus. Based on information collected on that island by Colonel Joe Smith, USAMRIID’s resident expert on Ebola, the CDC in Atlanta felt strongly we might be facing a dangerous outbreak here in the United States and recommended an immediate seizure of the property and quarantine of the contents. That was done yesterday and was reported by the local television stations in Charleston last night. BioVet Tech was essentially empty. Nothing was found that could immediately be identified as virus or vaccine, though the CDC took a lot of samples and is evaluating them. Dr. Byxbe was gone also.”
They sat like stones, no facial expressions, no questions, no notes taken. They dealt with “might, maybe, and possible” every day.
Joe had brought all his slides and submitted them to the staff an hour ago to be scanned and uploaded in case he needed them for questions. He hoped there wouldn’t be any. He had downed three cups of coffee rushing down from Frederick, Md., and now he needed to pee.
“We believe a European bank, Meilland Freres, based in Luxembourg, was the source of the money, and a principal of that bank left Charleston four days ago in a sailing yacht bound for Europe. She met with Dr. Byxbe the night before she left Charleston. She may have the virus or the vaccine. We have an undercover team on board that yacht. It will be in Bermuda tomorrow.”
“You don’t really have anything at this point,” a skeptical Chief of Staff of the Army said. “I heard ‘we think’ quite a bit in your statement.”
“Yes, sir, that is true,” Ferguson admitted.
“Is it that easy to just whip up a vaccine?” the Chief of Naval Operations asked, then added, “You hear about that taking years. Would it work?”
Ferguson looked at Joe. “Gentlemen, Colonel Joe Smith, USAMRIID.” He stepped back from the podium.
“Safely, in this period of time, with the equipment they had on that island, no,” Joe said, standing. “But it is beginning to look like the researcher had extreme confidence in his ability. He tried a simple technique, and his preliminary notes indicate it did work. We think he stripped the protein coat off the virus, attached some of it to a messenger RNA segment that could take that bit of protein into living cells and force those cells to manufacture some more of that same protein. When released into the bloodstream of a living primate, the primate would recognize that protein as foreign and begin to produce antibodies to it. With his preliminary success, it would still take years of study in tissue culture, monkeys and, finally, humans before it could be called a vaccine.”
“Sounds like a crackpot on a wild goose chase,” another flag officer added.
“Yes, sir, as far as the vaccine is concerned,” Joe said. “But, I saw firsthand on that island what Ebola can do if it gets loose, and someone has a bunch of it.”
“Someone has already spent more than $5 million on this project,” Ferguson said, returning to the podium to stand by Joe. “It’s like plutonium. You can make a bomb with it if you know how, or you can poison a bunch of people if you can’t make a bomb.”
Joe waited a few seconds and, when there were no more questions, returned to his seat. Ferguson said, “The State Department has notified the government of Bermuda, and they will board the vessel with a customs inspection, a very detailed customs inspection. The Justice Department tells me we have enough evidence to seize the ship and any cargo on board if they find anything.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Bermuda
The Jewish exile from Israel/Judah began in 597 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar sacked the First Temple and scattered the Jews. The Second Temple was sacked by the Romans in AD 70 and, again, the Jews were scattered. And finally in AD 135, the Roman Emperor Hadrian plowed the city under and changed the name to Syria Palestine and forbade Jews to live there. Scattered to the four corners of the world, the Jews became permanent outsiders wherever they lived. Prevented from the usual occupations and aided by their stubborn insularity, they became money lenders and merchants in diamonds and gold. Always at the mercy of the mob, Jews perfected the hiding and transfer of wealth across borders and around the world.
*********
The customs inspector approached Chardonnay in a launch with two armed police officers and a dog trained to detect drugs and explosives. He’d been warned that contraband of a biologic nature might be on board and was notified by the captain that a medical emergency necessitated that several people be transported to the hospital. Warily, he climbed the steps to the deck where he encountered a large man with a swollen, puffy face and both arms in slings, and another man horribly disfigured with gaping facial lacerations and missing teeth.
Mikki leaned against the rail as the customs inspector carefully searched Wolf, Donn, Pamela and Boyd before allowing them to board the launch and head to the hospital. She remained calm, aloof, as the crew was searched and took another launch to the Harbor Master’s office to make their report on the incident that had occurred in international waters.
Chardonnay looked like a rich man’s toy, a sailing cruiser in classic form. In reality, Chardonnay had been conceived, designed and built from the keel up to smuggle gold, diamonds, currency, antiquities, art and people. She had hidden and transferred the fortunes of desperate and dishonest people for more than a century. Even with his dog, this customs inspector wasn’t going to find what Mikki was carrying for her grandfather. She’d played this game before, and though it wasn’t as much fun as other games sh
e played, she was good at it.
“Sir, did you wish to inspect?” She asked innocently, holding up a ring of keys.
From bow to stern he opened every drawer, went through every suitcase, and tapped walls and floors looking for secret compartments. His dog sniffed everywhere, eventually growing bored and taking a nap while the inspector opened bottles and jars. Nothing.
But, Ebola was there. Hidden in a compartment in the keel beneath the diesel engine, it was secure, secure as the diamonds her great-grandfather had smuggled from Africa to defy the diamond cartel; the gold, art and currency as Jews fled the Third Reich; she had transported radios for the resistance; spies for the Allies; antiquities leaving Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union; and lately, currency leaving China. There is always a need to move wealth on the sly.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
Dark Water
Boyd had hit the water off-balance and the blow to his side and the cold of the water disoriented him. Still underwater, he opened his eyes and swiveled his head a complete turn before seeing the glow of the moon in the foam left by the ship’s passing. He kicked in that direction and broke the surface. Gasping for breath from the cold and exertion, he looked about. Chardonnay was already 100 yards away and only the top half of her mast was visible in the swells of the open Atlantic. He heard the engine start.
The enormity of his risk in jumping in to save Wolf now became evident. Dark closed in like velvet as a swell blocked the moon. There was no sound.
A swell lifted Boyd and a beacon flashed only a dozen feet away. He swam toward it. Candido had thrown a flag float over just as Boyd had hit the water. It actuated immediately and its strobe and 10-foot-high flag gave a comforting center of activity to approach. A life jacket was attached.
“Wolf!” Boyd shouted into the vastness of the North Atlantic.
There was no response.
The next swell lifted Boyd and quickly he scanned 180 degrees behind him. With the next swell he scanned toward the moon. The third swell he looked back again, and this time he saw a smaller beacon several dozen yards away. It was the self-actuating beacon on the life jacket Boyd had thrown to Wolf.