by Tom Clancy
Ricci closed the door and led her toward the dining room. As she passed the wing chair, Julia noticed a big, packed sporting duffel — or hunting duffel, she guessed, since it had a woodland camouflage pattern — pushed against one of its arms.
“Planning to visit the great outdoors?” she asked, and nodded at the duffel. “I like to go camping myself a couple of times a year… y’know, just to clear my mind.”
Ricci’s glance went to the chair. He seemed a little thrown by her question, as if he hadn’t realized what was on it. Then he looked at her.
“Don’t need to clear my mind,” he said.
His chill tone, coupled with the stony expression on his features, caught Julia unprepared. She momentarily wondered if she’d done the smart thing coming to see him, then decided his reaction was proof enough that she had. Or at least that was how she was determined to take it.
She followed him to the table and set her bag down.
“I brought chocolate chip and macadamia nut muffins, my pick of the month,” she said, opening it. “Ever try them?”
Ricci’s head moved from side to side in the negative. “They’re from that bakery practically around the corner from here, Michael’s Morning Toaster,” she said. “Good luck to anybody who tries finding them in Pescadero, which is why I drove all this way to relieve my sicko addiction.”
Ricci turned to her.
“We going to need dishes?” he said.
She flapped a hand in the air.
“C’mon, we can rough it,” Julia said, and patted the tabletop. “We’ve got paper cups, napkins, paper plates… the bakery guy even tossed in plastic knives and forks. That’s, God forbid, in case you’re the type who’d actually use them to eat a muffin instead of your bare fingers and teeth.”
Ricci stood stock still, quietly watching her. She had reached into the bag and begun to empty it, laying out its contents on the table, carefully peeling the lids off the coffee cups, setting the muffins onto the paper plates.
“You don’t need to thank me,” he said.
Julia stopped what she was doing and looked up at him, her face abruptly serious.
“Would you prefer I didn’t? Or can’t I be the one to decide that?”
“I’m saying you don’t need to,” Ricci said. “I was doing what I got paid to do.”
Julia stood there holding a muffin halfway out of the bag in its waxed tissue wrapper.
“All right,” she said. “Want to hear my stroke of genius?”
Ricci’s piercing blue eyes went to hers. He held them there for a full thirty seconds, and then nodded.
“Let’s just enjoy a nice breakfast before we go about our busy days,” she said. “I won’t spout on to you about my feelings of gratitude, and you won’t talk about why you’ve dropped off the face of the earth when it comes to your friends. And we’ll consider it a fair bargain.”
A silence. Their gazes held together across the little dining area as the aroma of the hot fresh coffee rose in wafts of steam to permeate it.
Then, slowly, Ricci gave Julia another nod, and approached the table, and pulled out the chair opposite her.
“How’s Vivian?” he said after another long spell of silence. “She come around okay from those gunshot wounds?”
Julia reached for her muffin and raised it to her mouth. “Viv goes jogging with me every other morning,” she said. “Rain or shine, like it or not.”
Ricci’s face took on an expression she interpreted as pleased.
“Great dog,” he said.
Julia glanced at him, about to take a bite of the muffin.
“Yeah,” she said, and smiled. “She sure is.”
And with that they got started on their food.
SIX
BOCA DEL SIERPE, TERRITORIAL TRINIDAD APRIL 2006
“Good on ya, luv. Take hold a’ me hand’ere and I’ll getcha right up.”
His shoulder-length golden mane sweeping around his tanned face in the onshore breeze, Blake the Bronze leaned over from the pontoon boat Annie had reserved and extended a sculpted arm toward the pier. He wore a pookah shell choker, a yellow tank top, paisley swim trunks with a lot of bright pink and blue in the print, root-beer-colored wraparound Oakley sunglasses with reddish-pink lenses, and flip-flops.
Annie reached out from where she and Nimec stood on the floating gangplank and let him help her onto the boat’s flat fiberglass stern platform.
“Okeydoke, mate, you’re next!” Blake shouted over the side at Nimec. “Or don’t you need an assist now?”
“Think I can manage on my own,” Nimec said.
He grabbed the boat’s rail, climbed aboard, and a moment later was standing next to Annie under the twenty-footer’s sun canopy. Both were wearing swimsuits and windbreakers, their snorkeling equipment in mesh totes on the deck. Nimec, in addition, had a pair of standard rangefinder binoculars on a strap around his neck. All around them a diversity of pleasure boats were making their way to and from the busy marina, one of them a double-deck cruiser booming hip-hop music from its cabin as it left a nearby slip.
Nimec pulled a face. “Loud,” he muttered.
Annie rolled her shoulders to the beat.
“Paa-aarty!” she said with a grin, playfully bumping her hip against his.
Nimec looked at her and, before he knew it, had a wet kiss planted on the tip of his nose — an instant frown-killer despite everything on his mind. He had deliberately failed to tell her what he’d hashed over with Vince earlier, and when she asked about it had just offered a few general words about them having to look into some things. No sense getting Annie disturbed over what were really just questions at this stage of the game. It was possible that by the time he and Vince consulted again, Vince might have cleared them up.
He put his arm around her waist and moved toward the middle of the boat, walking easily on the wide, well-balanced deck mounted atop its pontoon hull. Blake, meanwhile, had reeled in the aft mooring line, then started forward to do the same at the bow.
“It’s really great of you to take us out,” Annie said, turning to him. “I wouldn’t have even asked if I’d known we’d be imposing on your day off.”
Blake smiled as he unfastened the bowline from its support.
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “The reefs’re in a favorite spot a’ mine, and it’s a joy sharin’ it with a lovely couple like yourselves.” He neatly wound the line in his hands and set it down. “Gem of an afternoon like this, it’s fair odds I would’ve gotten my bathers on and headed out to relax on me own.”
The Aussie went into the helm station, slid in behind its console, and adjusted the tilt wheel.
“Another bit an’ we’re off ’n’ away, won’t be more’n a half hour’s ride,” he said, and then tipped his head toward the plush lounge chairs to his left. “Settle back if you’d like, friends; the seats’re comfy’s can be an’ you’ve got acres a’ room. And if you lift the top a’ that ottoman there in front a’ your legs, it’ll open into a cooler full up with drinks ’n’ sandwiches, though I’d wait on the food till after your dive — cramps, y’know.”
Nimec sat with Annie on the cushioned chair, listened to the engine throttle up, and gazed out at the water.
He was thinking he might have enjoyed being a spectator to the aquatic goings-on at a coral reef under different circumstances.
Right now, though, he would rather have been headed out to get a closer look at those feeder ships he’d seen last night.
Wherever on the deep blue sea they might have gone.
* * *
“I believe I’ve covered it all,” Tolland Eckers said, and slid his GPS pocket navigator into the pouch on his belt. “If any of you still have questions, or need something clarified, let’s hear it before we get moving.”
None of the other three men assembled on the beach spoke. They were in a sandy little cove formed between two lumpish masses of black igneous rock, wearing skintight neoprene wetsuits with short trunks, and a
nkle-high zippered booties. Behind them, at the surfline, their semi-rigid inflatable strike boat sat where it had been delivered ashore, its scalloped Kevlar-reinforced hull painted bright yellow, a custom touch added to give it the appearance of a sport racer. And while the Steyr 9mm TMP compact submachine guns stowed in compartments near the speedcraft’s straddle seats could hardly be considered standard sporting equipment, Eckers had stressed that they were only to be used in an extreme pinch.
It was what had been loaded in with them that would be the unlikely weapons of choice.
Eckers looked from one face to the other. This was a team of skilled professionals, men who knew what they were doing. Having already made his critical points, he ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered to hammer on them again. But he also would not have led the group out himself under ordinary circumstances. The job they were about to launch was of greater consequence than most, and he decided it could do no harm for them to have a quick final review before kickoff.
“First thing to remember: Nature’s given us a window of opportunity. We have more speed than we should need, and water and sky patrols making sure nobody else comes near it,” he said. “It’s up to us to get in the window when it opens, get the job done, and get out.”
Eckers saw nods.
“Second thing: We can assume our targets will be the objects of an exhaustive search, and that they’ll be given equally thorough postmortems when they’re found,” he said. “This must — I stress must—pass for an accident under intense scrutiny. I don’t expect it to happen, but the moment one of us has to fire a shot is when we’ll know something’s gone critically wrong, got me?”
Eckers saw more nods around him and left it at that.
“Time’s come,” he said, and then turned toward their waiting craft.
* * *
The Aug Stingray was into its third pass of the overflight zone when its pilot sighted an immense yacht nearing the cordoned off area… surprisingly the first boat he’d encountered, but he’d heard reports of several perimeter interceptions on the shared communications channel.
He tapped his copilot’s shoulder, pointed to the tuna tower aft of the enclosed bridge.
“Looks as if’n ’twere headin’ out t’fetch some big yellers,” he said. “Gon’ be some bloody disappointed faces on that fishin’ tub, don’ ’e think?”
The copilot nodded, withholding a frown. The perils of multinationalism, he thought. A Frenchman who’d once flown with the DAOS special operations aviation unit in a squadron attached to Henri Beauchart’s Group d’Intervention, he often had to strain to decipher his fellow crewman’s pronounced Yorkshire accent.
“I’ll notify a patrol boat to turn them aside,” he said in perfectly enunciated English, and toggled on his radio headset.
* * *
Nimec had assumed the pontoon boat would provide a smooth, quiet, and comfortable ride — that was the whole idea behind its low-drag design — but he’d thought it would be kind of weak in the horsepower department. All told, though, it moved at a faster clip than he might have expected, and he guessed Blake the Bronze must have pushed it up to a speed of about forty knots getting them to the reef area.
In the stern with Annie, Nimec was also surprised by the sense of well-being that gradually came to possess him. It didn’t quite shut out his thoughts of what he’d observed at the harbor, and he would have felt delinquent if it had. But the pleasures of the ride swung him away from those thoughts, removed him from them mentally as he gained physical distance from Los Rayos, to find himself in a seemingly endless space absent of anything but blue water and sky. Within ten or fifteen minutes after setting out, he’d even ceased to notice other watercraft nearby. And while the faint, recurrent drone of patrolling helicopters would occasionally remind him of the island at his rear, its tug at his consciousness lost insistence as the trip went along, the choppers seeming far off and peripheral in their unseen flight patterns.
At one point he’d gotten up to lean quietly out over the rail, the breeze streaming over him, when Annie came over and gently took hold of his arm.
“This is how it’s always been for me on an airplane,” she said. “Even before the Air Force or NASA. When I was a teenager flying in my dad’s rattletrap Beech.”
Nimec had looked at her, smiled, gone back to staring out at the water.
They had been standing there together for a few minutes when her fingers tightened around him a bit.
“Pete, honey, look at them!” she said, and gestured excitedly to their rear with her other hand. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
Nimec had glanced down and seen the scythe-like dorsal fins and curved backs of dolphins breaking the water as a bunch of them raced toward the boat, stayed alongside it for a while, then shot past like light gray torpedoes.
He’d returned his eyes to Annie’s face.
“Beautiful,” he’d said, his throat inexplicably tight.
Fifteen minutes or so later Blake had cut the engine and come around out of the pilot’s station. Turning toward him, Nimec noticed a group of steel deepwater buoys some distance from the bow… far enough away, in fact, so that they might have been small red and green apples bobbing on the calm surface. He lifted his binoculars and had a look.
“That where the reef is?” he’d asked, wondering why they would have stopped so short of it.
Blake had shaken his head.
“Attaboy, ace — nice to see you payin’ attention even if you’re a tick off the mark,” he’d said with a throaty laugh. “I suggest you leave the sailin’ to me, though. We’re sitting right over the coral banks. The water’s shallow enough hereabouts, too right. Those warning buoys are to steer you ’round an underwater ledge three quarters, a half mile on… you wouldn’t want to conk into it when the tide’s low, and that’ll be soon enough by my figurin’.”
Nimec had grunted. Had his question really been that funny? Nothing like somebody having a chuckle at your expense, he’d thought.
But Blake had hardily slapped his back before he could get too annoyed. “C’mon, mate, hand off the binocs, an’ let’s see if we can’t get you an’ the missus ready for a dive,” said the Aussie.
Upon which he’d gone back across the deck to where they had deposited their equipment bags.
Although Nimec hadn’t needed assistance gearing up, Blake was determined to provide it, and it seemed more trouble than it was worth to even consider fending him off… a sentiment Annie indicated she shared with a private little wink. As she sat to slip into her fins, clip her snorkel to her diving mask, and fit the mask over her face, Blake bent over her to make some vague added adjustments, then sidled over toward Nimec and did the same for him.
“A few tips I’ll have you remember while you’re dippin’ under,” he said, fiddling with the strap of Nimec’s mask for no apparent reason. “Twenty feet down, twenty feet from the boat’s my rule of thumb. And don’t pet the cute little fishies, ’cause it can hurt’em. And don’t go reachin’ into any holes or crevices’cause some wonky creature hidin’ inside’m might want to hurt you.” He paused, looked the two of them over with his hands on his hips, nodded pridefully as if at a job well done. “Summin’ up, don’t bother anythin’ with scales, tentacles, or a jelly bod, or get bit, stung, or snagged on the coral and you’ll be jake… an’ much as I’d like to accompany you lovebirds, I’ll be up here keepin’ lookout if there should be any problems.”
They waited until he was finished talking, got up, and flapped toward the stern in their fins.
Crouching beside Annie on the dive platform, Nimec glanced back over his shoulder at Blake.
“Forgot to ask,” he said. “There sharks in these waters?”
Blake grinned from where he stood on the deck.
“Just of the laid-back variety, mate!” he said.
And before Nimec could manage a frown, Annie grabbed his wrist, let out a yip of frisky delight, and rolled into the water, pulling him in with a splash.
* * *
Steering his regular course to the yellowfin tuna grounds about thirty kilometers out from his dock at Los Rayos, Greger Fisk, the captain of the sportfisherman charter Norwegian Wind, had scarcely taken notice of the helicopters overhead. The least well-off passengers on his luxurious Netherlands-built Heesen were millionaires, and they were looked upon with near scorn by the truly prosperous aboard, who were in turn thought of as a bare step up from crude bourgeoisie by the wealthiest of the resort’s guests — sheiks, royals, and business tycoons of celestial power and financial means who would sail their own motor yachts or none at all, in search of prized finned specimens.
In the air for purposes of security, the helicopters were constants in these parts and, like hovering gulls and clouds, had come within range of the captain’s awareness only as familiar aspects of the scenery. To be sure, Fisk was used to them. But he had sometimes found it a comfort to see them in his first months captaining a ship based on the island, given that he’d known he must navigate his important and valuable patrons — prize specimens in their separate right — through a dangerous world of terrorists, hijackers, and modern pirates.
The coastal patrol boat with a Los Rayos Security emblem on its prow, however, caught his attention even before it came speeding up on his port side to hail him on its public address system. And unbeknownst to Captain Fisk, his newbie spotter on the radar-equipped tuna-and-marlin tower had reacted to the sudden, deafening alert with a startlement that nearly sent him tumbling down from his high platform to the bridge.
“You are entering a temporarily restricted zone, Norwegian Wind,” the voice blared over the cutter’s loudspeaker. “Inform us at once of your destination over intership channel twenty-two B — that is two-two-Bertha — and we will reroute. Over.”