Stabenow, Dana - Blindfold Game (v1

by Blindfold Game(lit)

  Doc looked immensely relieved. “Agreed, he said.

  “Aye aye, Captain, the aviators said in unison and then left the bridge in a hurry, like they were afraid the captain might change his mind.

  The operations officer showed up, in gym shorts, sweaty and out of breath. “Im sorry, Captain, I was working out, I didnt hear the pipe.

  The captain jerked his chin at Sara, who said, “Weve got a hundred-and-seventy-foot longliner forty miles off our starboard bow. Hes got a deckhand with a three-inch J-hook in his eye.

  Ops, Clifford Skulstad, a slim, intense lieutenant in his late twenties, whistled. “Thats gotta smart, he said. “The aviators tell me were trying an NVG hoist?

  “Roger that, Sara said, and Ops went to the nav station to coax the sat phone into operation, which he alone on board seemed to be able to do.

  “Flight quarters, the captain said, and everyone on what was now a very crowded bridge pulled off their caps and stuffed them into their belts or hung them on bulkheads or wedged them behind handrails. Ensign Hank Ryan, the helo communications officer, donned mike and earphones and started turning things on. As the closed-circuit television overhead warmed up, they saw the hangar telescoping back and the helmeted and vested hangar deck crew scurrying around. On the sat phone Ops called Anchorage to arrange a Life Flight to meet the helo in Dutch Harbor, and then got the name of the ships agent and called her, too.

  “I relieve you, Chief, Sara told Mark.

  “XOs got the conn, he said, followed by a chorus of ayes acknowledging the handover.

  “Helm, steer three-four-zero, all ahead full, Sara said.

  “Three-four-zero, all ahead, aye, Charlie said.

  Sara took up station in front of the control console and watched the bow pull to port. The Sojourner Truth was a joy to handle, quick to respond, a Cadillac of a ride. There wasnt five knots of a prevailing breeze, and most of the wind now coming across the port bow was created by their own forward motion. There was no pitch and no roll to speak of. Conditions could not be better for a helo launch. If it was daylight, they would, in Coastie vernacular, be riding the seagulls ass. “Maintain course and speed, she said.

  “Maintaining course and speed, aye, the helm responded, and everyone turned to watch the television screen as the helo was rolled out onto the hangar deck, its rotors unfolded, and the flight crew climbed in. The rotors began to turn, slowly at first, accelerating into a blur.

  “Black out the ship, the captain said, and everything except for the nav screens was turned off, including the running lights, because any light no matter how small could white out the night vision goggles. It wasnt exactly legal but it was an acceptable alternative to crashing the helo.

  “Go for launch, Captain? Ryan said.

  “Go, the captain said. Ryan spoke into the microphone and almost instantaneously the whine of the helo ratcheted up to where it drowned out the Sojourners engines. A dark shape rose into the air off their stern, nosed into the wind, and roared past their port bow.

  “Secure from flight quarters, the captain said, and everyone put their caps back on.

  “Resume course zero-three-zero, all ahead full, Sara said.

  “Zero-three-zero, all ahead full, the helm replied.

  Everyone strained their eyes at the distant masthead light on the northeastern horizon. Sara couldnt get the image of the fisherman with the three-inch J-hook in his eye out of her mind, and she knew she wasnt alone.

  Five minutes later Lairds voice crackled over the radio. “Longliner Arctic Wind, this is Coast Guard Rescue six five two seven.

  “Coast Guard, Arctic Wind, go ahead. The skipper sounded unenthusiastic but resigned.

  “Yeah, Arctic Wind, Coast Guard, could we get you to turn out some of your lights? Were operating with night vision goggles and light kinda gets in the way.

  “Roger that, Coast Guard. There was about five more very long minutes worth of conversation as the helo and the longliner identified which lights should be turned out.

  “Yeah, Arctic Wind, Coast Guard, thatll do it. Wed like to hoist from the portside stern area, I say again, portside stern. Can you get your guy out there?

  “Roger that, Coast Guard.

  Sara peered through the forward windows, trying by divine telepathy to follow what was going on on board the longliner. After a moment a smaller light came on next to the brighter masthead light off their starboard bow and lifted up and away. “Theyre off, she said.

  Lairds voice came over the radio. “Cutter Sojourner Truth, Coast Guard helo six five two seven, were off and en route for St. Paul. Our compliments to the deck crew, they were flawless.

  “Roger that, six five two seven, Ops said. “Cutter out.

  “Helo out. See you tomorrow morning.

  No one cheered out loud but there was a communal exhalation of breath. Ensign Robert Ostlund, the landing signals officer, entered the bridge. “Everything by the book and then some, Captain. The deck crew performed just about perfect.

  “Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth, longliner Arctic Wind. If the guy had been anything but a Bering Sea fisherman he might have been crying, he sounded so relieved. “Thank you. That was amazing, I didnt know you guys could do that.

  “All part of the service, Arctic Wind, Ops said. “Cutter Sojourner Truth out. He clicked the marine radio back up to channel 16 and said over his shoulder, “Lets see if he remembers that the next time we board him.

  “Well done, all, the captain said. “XO, pipe the news to the crew. Wait, belay that last, he added. “Let them sleep. And holiday routine tomorrow until noon.

  “Aye aye, Captain, Sara said. Shed have to revise the plan of the day, but the flight deck crew, some of whom were also boarding team and fire team members, would work better with the extra rest.

  Within sixty seconds the bridge was empty of everyone except Sara, Chief Edelen, PO Barnette, Tommy Penn, and Seaman Razo. In all, the SAR case had taken about ninety minutes from the time the first call came in from the Arctic Wind to the last communication from the helo.

  Mark grinned at Sara. “Coast Guard, he said.

  NOVEMBER,

  HONG KONG

  NOORTMAN CHOSE HONG KONG as his base of operations for the new commission, partly for its location and partly because anything could be had there for a price. Also, he was a little lazy and he liked the idea of working from home.

  Maritime freight was his specialty: his vocation and his avocation. Hed spent much of his childhood on the docks and the marinas of Singapore, watching as the cargoes of the worlds nations were off-loaded from the gigantic maw of one ships hold to be freighted to another dock and deposited in the hold of a different ship bound for another port. Fruit from New Zealand. Vegetables from Chile. Beef from Argentina and lamb from Australia. Computer chips from Japan, waybills beautifully inscribed with Japanese characters that looked more like art than a cargo manifest. From Thailand, beds and dressers and tables and chairs made of teak, from the United States entire ships full of Ford Escorts, from Canada wood products from raw timber to wood pulp to newsprint. From China textiles and toys, from Jamaica sugar, from Sierra Leone cocoa.

  He would scribble down the cargoes he saw each day on a notepad and at home look up the countries of origin and destination in his fathers atlas, a tome so large that as a boy he was barely able to lift it down from its shelf. Its pages were filled with colorful illustrations of the worlds great mountains and canyons and rivers and deserts, and maps topographical, agricultural, and political. He mooned over the oceans and the coastlines of continents and fell headlong in love with the perfect natural harbors created by islets and inlets and peninsulas, places like Sydney and San Francisco and Seattle.

  Not so surprising, certainly not from a boy born to a nation made up of fifty-nine islands, with only two percent of its land arable and a less than amicable neighbor across its only border. It followed that the lifeblood of that nation would be carried by ships, and that much of that nations industry w
ould be concerned with ships and the sea.

  Apart from inclination and familiarity, there were personal reasons as well. He was following in his fathers footsteps, a respected man on the Singaporean waterfront. The elder Noortman was a Netherlander who had gone to sea when he was sixteen and fetched up on the shore of the South China Sea, there to meet and marry a less than beautiful but very well connected Singaporean woman whose father had retired from twenty years at sea to a post with the Board of Customs in Singapore, and who brought his new son-in-law into what he regarded as the family firm almost immediately, which would have been impossible otherwise for a white man with no connections.

  Noortmans father rose slowly but steadily in rank, achieving a local reputation for ability and an international reputation for probity, by which was meant that he stole no more than what was generally recognized as a reasonable percentage of the worth of the goods that passed beneath his mark. Neither did he flaunt his extracurricular earnings in a vulgar display of wealth, which he well knew would provoke envy and suspicion, because he was already laboring under the handicap of his white skin. He maintained a modest if well-appointed home in the Or-:hard suburb for his wife, son, and two daughters, who were sent to pubic school, and the son on to the National University of Singapore.

  Young Noortman graduated in the middle of his class, although he could have achieved high honors were it not for the admonishments of his father, whose own credo was never to draw any more attention to oneself than absolutely necessary. The younger Noortmans degree was in business administration, but his real education took place on the docks, working nights and weekends for the Board of Customs, learning the arcane language of international shipping, no little facilitated by his flair for languages. This polyglot state had been inculcated almost from birth, as his father decreed that the family would speak Chinese on Mondays and Tuesdays, Dutch on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and English on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Noortman expanded his international vocabulary in school, studying French first, which introduced him to the Romance languages, and then Russian and Japanese, to the point that one day an instructor wondered out loud why he was majoring in business instead of in languages. He invited the young man out for dinner at a first-class restaurant run by an expatriate Filipino chef. There followed further discussion of Noortmans tendency toward the multilingual, what he might do professionally with such an agile tongue, and seduction. Noortman thoroughly enjoyed both the chicken adobo and the sex.

  From his instructor, an Israeli who had found the continual state of war on his nations borders to be aesthetically distasteful and had emigrated the day after he was of age, Noortman gained, among other things, a working knowledge of two more languages, Hebrew and Arabic. The instructor was moved to say, “There is a real future in government for a young man with your talents.

  Noortman, to whom double-entry bookkeeping did not come naturally, reported this to his father that eveninghis father had decreed that he would pursue his studies from home, not from a room in a dormitory on campuswith the admittedly faint hope that he might be allowed to take his future into his own hands. The elder Noortman had replied calmly, “There is a real future in the customs service as well.

  Resentfully, Noortman went back to school and continued to wrestle with interest rates and amortization and debentures. When he graduated he made a second bid for freedom, requesting permission to pursue a masters degree in languages. This, too, was denied, and his resentment, festering beneath a dutiful facade, grew into a bitter anger. Still dependent on his fathers largesse, he accepted an offer of employment in the customs service. If he was not quite under the direct supervision of the elder Noortman, then he was close enough for his father to critique his job performance every evening after dinner. Which he did, with a devastating eye for every tiny error and a dispassionate manner of speaking that was withering in the extreme. The younger Noortman endured these critiques with outward calm, but he was already looking for a way out.

  By this time his clothes occupied half the closet and drawer space in the Israeli instructors home. He told his father the instructor was continuing to tutor him in languages, which was technically the truth. The elder Noortman, in the magisterial way that his son had come to detest, decided this was acceptable. Freighters, containerships, bulk carriers, tankers, military vessels of every size and shape, cruise ships, they all docked at Singapore, and they carried multinational crews. Many languages could greatly enhance ones future in the customs service.

  One day, a year into full-time employment in the family business, he was told by his father that he had located a suitable bride for his son, a well-connected young woman whose father was a relation of the Goh family, a scion of which currently occupied the prime ministers office. The Goh familys reservations over allying themselves with a half-breed had been overcome by the general respect with which the elder Noortman was regarded by people who mattered. The matter was fully explained to the younger Noortman, who walked out of his fathers study that evening with the sound of a cell door slamming in his ears.

  The following week, a wiry Chinese man in his late thirties had appeared in the customs office. He asked for Noortman in Mandarin.

  “I am Noortman, the young man replied, in that same language.

  The Chinese looked at him with an indifferent gaze. “Not you.

  At that moment his father appeared and shepherded the Chinese into his office and closed the door behind them. They were in there for quite some time, and when the Chinese left the elder Noortman escorted him to the door and all the way out to his car, an honor usually accorded only to high government officials on fact-finding missions.

  “Who is the Chinese man you spoke to today? Noortman asked his father over dinner that evening.

  His father returned an impassive stare. “He is nothing and no one to you. Do not speak of him again.

  The next day the younger Noortman noticed a great deal of activity on and around a freighter moored three docks down from the office. When he went to take a closer look, he was waved off by a man with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder and no uniform.

  He sat on a crate just outside the perimeter created by perhaps a dozen such men, the majority of them Indonesian and Filipino, he thought, all with the same flat, steady regard. This regard was trained outward, away from the ship they ringed, ignoring the cranes and trucks moving around them as container after unmarked container was unloaded, settled onto the back of a flatbed, and moved off the dock. The men were rough-edged and muscular. They continued to ignore him so long as he did not breach their perimeter, but when he appeared the next day the Chinese man he had seen in his fathers office came down the gangway of the freighter and walked up to him. “What do you want?

  Noortman rose to his feet without undue haste, a nice blend of deference to elders and a display of self-confidence. “I am the son of Noortman, the customs agent.

  “I know, the Chinese said. “What do you want?

  “I have been watching you. Over the last thirty-six hours, you have off-loaded almost one hundred containers of freight and reloaded them on a freighter bound for the port of Tokyo.

  The Chinese did not change expression.

  “I notice that my father passed all of the containers from your ship through customs, even when he had to work overtime to do so.

  “And?

  “My father is a creature of habit. He goes home to sit down to dinner with his family at six P.M. every day of his life.

  The Chinese watched him with a menacing gaze meant to intimidate, very similar to those of the guards posted round his ship.

  The younger Noortman continued to speak. His father would have been proud of his careful, detached manner. He hoped he didnt look as frightened as he felt, but he could either wait for his doom to be pronounced or he could try to build a future of his own. Desperation was a highly motivating force. “I notice that the identification numbers on the containers have been very recently renewed. I notice also
that they have been reinforced to carry heavier loads.

  “Youre a very noticing fellow, the Chinese said.

  It was not a compliment. “Very, Noortman agreed, not without an increase in heart rate. There was something very initimidatingand not a little excitingabout the Chineses cold eyes. “And then I remembered reading in the newspaper one month ago of the taking of a ship loaded with aluminum ingots in the Makassar Strait. Pirates boarded her at four in the morning, shot the captain and crew, and tossed their bodies overboard, and vanished into the night. Noortman paused. “One of the crew survived. He was pulled out of the water by a fisherman the next day, and he lived long enough to tell the authorities that the head pirate was a Chinese man in his thirties or forties, wiry, with a very dark tan and black hair cut very short, like American soldiers in the movies.

  He paused, and let his eyes wander over the Chineses brush cut. “The ship has not been found. Neither has its ten-million-dollar cargo.

  The Chinese said nothing, calloused hands remaining loose at his side, but there was an alert set to his head and a thoughtful expression in his eyes that had not been there before.

  “It was an interesting story, and I looked for more, but there was nothing. The ship and its cargo simply disappeared. He stopped to consider, and added, not without admiration, “It must have been very carefully planned, to be able to make a ship of that size disappear. Not to mention, Mr. Fang, seventy metric tons of aluminum ingots.

  Fangs expression did not change. “Supposing I was this Chinese pirate, he said. “According to the story you read, I made a ship disappear, and I made its crew disappear, and I made seventy metric tons of aluminum ingots disappear. How hard would it be to make you disappear as well?

  “True, the younger Noortman said, nodding. It required an effort to keep his expression as bland as his voice, but he thought he succeeded quite well. “Very true. But I was able to figure out who you were and what you were doing here the first time I saw you and your ship. If I could do so, so, too, could others. He let Fang think this over.