by Jamie Metzl
But no one is here and nothing is doing.
The waves splash against the cracking concrete of the dock. Two wooden guardhouses creak in the blowing wind, paint peeling from their sides. A few broken-down fishing boats sway back and forth, screeching the Styrofoam of their makeshift bumpers against the mooring.
I tap my u.D for Joseph. It’s 5:15 a.m. in Kansas City, and this time he’s asleep.
“It’s supposed to be there, boss,” he mumbles.
“All I can say is I am literally on the dock at Arroyo Barril and I don’t see anything.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Joseph repeats, waking up. “It’s supposed to be an ‘ocean-worthy vessel with room for six passengers.’ Let me call up my notes.”
I hear rustling in the background.
“I have a telephone number for the captain. I’m calling it now.”
“I don’t see any—”
The sound of a ringing cell phone stops me mid-sentence. I rush over to the fishing boat with Joseph still connected through my earpiece.
“There’s no answer,” Joseph says.
I grab the side of the docked boat and jump aboard. The wood panels are weathered; the boat smells like rotting fish. This isn’t what I’d imagined an ocean-faring charter to be. Following the ringing, I open the screeching wooden door to the small navigational room and find a rotund black man asleep on a mattress.
“What did you say the name of the ship’s captain was?” I ask Joseph.
“It says Juan Jose Flores.”
“Juan Jose Flores?” I repeat. Somehow the man sleeping in front of me seems neither Ahab, Stubing, nor Picard. “Are you Juan Jose Flores?” I say loudly, tapping the side of the mattress with my foot.
“Si,” he says, not opening his eyes or moving in any way.
“I’m Rich Azadian. My colleague spoke with you yesterday. We’re supposed to be chartering a boat. I hope it’s not this one.”
“Si,” he says again, cracking open his eyes and sitting up. “Is this one.” His face is fleshy and broad under a balding head, his khaki pants stained and faded, his sleeveless undershirt a memory of white.
“Are you sure this boat is ocean worthy?”
He rubs his eyes. “In ocean now.” He grabs a Coke from his small cooler and flips the lid.
“I mean the open ocean,” I say.
“Si,” he says slowly, taking a long sip as if that ends that. Captain Juan Jose Flores doesn’t seem easily roused.
I don’t know much about boats but I’m pretty sure this pile of scrap couldn’t pass even the most cursory inspection. But my concern far exceeds my rudimentary Spanish. I aggressively tap my u.D. “We were told we were chartering an ocean-worthy vessel. This is not one by any stretch of the imagination. I demand we find a better boat.”
My u.D sings out the words: “Nos dijeron que estábamos fletando un buque marítimo digno. Este no lo es en ninguna extensión de la imaginación. Exijo que encontremos un mejor barco.”
Flores is unimpressed and answers me in Spanglish. “We vamos?”
I take a deep breath as I scan the rest of the dock. Some of the other boats look even worse. What other options do I even have? I swallow. “Yes.”
Flores rubs his face with his right hand then uses his left to push himself up. “Four thousand dollar one day. Two thousand now.”
I look around suspiciously. It’s highway robbery. “Do you have food and water, enough fuel?”
“Tiene comida y agua, suficiente combustible?” the u.D translates.
“Señor,” he says slowly, ignoring the voice coming from my wrist. “You hire La Perseverencia, you hire Capitan Juan Jose Flores.”
“Does the radio work?” I ask. “We’ll be outside of cellular range, and I may need you to contact someone for me.”
“Funciona la radio? Vamos a estar fuera del área de cobertura del celular, y es posible que necesite a alguien para contactar a alguien por mí,” my u.D translates.
Flores swats away the u.D language like it’s a fly. “Si,” he says grudgingly, “banda lateral única. For emergencia only.”
“Si se puede?” I say, raising my fist toward the sky.
Flores looks at me and smirks. “We go?”
His humorous gesture is somehow comforting. “We go,” I parrot.
“Two thousand dollars.”
I hand him the cash.
“Where?”
I tap my u.D for the coordinates. “22° north, 60° west.”
“Vamos,” he says with a nonchalant confidence.
45
The engine sputters as Flores steers us out to open sea.
“No problem?” I ask nervously, pointing at the engine.
“Si,” he says.
I have no idea if he means si, a problem, or si, no problem, but I get the feeling asking again won’t clarify things. I also wonder if we’re even capable of getting to the coordinates I’ve provided him given the antiquity of the few pieces of equipment on board.
“You have family?” I say after a long silence.
“Si.”
I wait for more. “Children?”
“Si,” he says again, focusing his gaze on the open ocean.
With not much to glean from further conversation and momentarily comforted by the thought Flores has something to lose, I step to the front of the boat and sit on the wooden deck. The briny air flows through my hair as I look out at the vast expanse around me. Growing up in Glendale I’ve been out on the ocean before, but the experience somehow hits me differently now.
The rawness, the smallness of our boat, the relative insignificance of our individual lives, play with my mind as we sputter forward. We understand so little about the brain and yet we’ve not been able to help ourselves from genetically selecting our next generations to be smarter. We comprehend next to nothing about the complex ecosystem of the oceans and yet we fish them to death and dump our waste into them as if they are inexhaustible. We hardly know what makes our lives meaningful when lived eighty years and yet our species may now be on the verge of extending them in perpetuity. Our creaky boat plods blindly along.
I think about Toni’s parting words. Running to the Dominican Republic may make me an honorable person, a responsible person, a loyal person. I’m not sure it makes me a present partner. As if on cue, my u.D vibrates. I hadn’t realized we were still in range. I pop in my ear piece and tap my wrist.
“Baby, it’s me,” Toni’s excited voice says in the message. “I woke myself in the middle of the night and the pieces suddenly were clearer. I think I’m starting to remember parts of what Heller told me. Something about a place. The message is in a place. I don’t have any details, but I’m remembering. Call me.”
I tap, but the u.D does not respond. I tap it again frantically. Nothing.
“Recepción?” I yell at Flores, pointing at my u.D.
“Non, señor.”
“There’s got to be reception. I just received a message. If there’s no reception here we need to turn back to a place where we can get it.”
The u.D is silent. I tap it to translate mode and repeat my sentence. Nothing.
“Non recepción,” Flores repeats.
“Can you make a call on your radio?”
“Non call, señor, banda lateral única. For emergencia only.”
“We turn back for reception?”
“Non, señor. Recepción far away.”
“But I just received a message.”
“Non, señor. Recepción far away.”
I have no way of assessing Flores’s words. Maybe Toni’s message arrived a while ago but hadn’t registered on my u.D. Maybe it had but I’d missed it during my meditations on the deck. “We turn back for reception,” I repeat.
“Recepción far away,” Flores says again, this time more forcefully. “Dos horas.”
With all of the stratospheric balloons and solar drones circling the globe to provide Internet access, how could such swaths of the open ocean r
emain uncovered? “It can’t be two hours. I’ve just received a message.”
“If turn back now, no arrive today. Come back mañana.”
I feel myself almost physically pulled in two opposite directions. But as the struggle plays out in my mind, I recognize my triage with increasing clarity. I’m desperate to know what Toni has learned and tempted to turn back or send her an emergencia message, but what would I say in the message? That I received her message? That I’ll call her as soon as I can? And I need to keep my powder dry as the possibility of reaching the SBN ship forces me forward. I’ve come too far to turn back now.
“How long until we arrive?” I ask, reorienting myself toward the journey forward. I make a hand gesture trying to express what I am saying.
“Quatro horas,” he says. “Four.”
“Gracias.”
“What there?” he asks.
“Boat,” I say, tracing the outlines of our boat with my finger. “Barco.”
Flores eyes me suspiciously, I’m sure he’s wondering what kind of boat we are meeting so far into the open sea.
I have no idea how to say aircraft carrier in Spanish but sense it’s probably best to not try.
“How GPS?” I say.
He takes the small device out of his pocket. It is oddly rectangular, like an old iPhone. I haven’t seen a relic like this in years. The arrow on the screen points and our rickety fishing boat is heading in the same direction. The distance counter rolls down slowly. My agitation builds with every wave we crest.
Flores walks toward me with a small cardboard box. “Tiene hambre? You eat?” He shakes the box to counter my hesitation.
I reach out tentatively. Pulling open the flap of Flores’s box, I realize what he meant when he told me a few hours ago we were supplied for the trip. The plastic-wrapped chicharron fried pork skins seem entirely unappealing, so I go for the Crokatto peanut bars. The bar almost fights back as I gnaw at it, trying to bite off a chunk. “Gracias.” I slur the words through the peanut clusters still congealed around my teeth.
Every twenty minutes or so, I step into the navigation room to have a look at Flores’s device. Forty-two nautical miles, thirty-seven, thirty-two, twenty-nine. The number slowly ticks down as we thrust forward. At three, I can feel my heartbeat accelerating. At one, the beating becomes pounding.
At zero, my heart sinks.
Flores cuts the engine. Our small boat bobs up and down, alone atop the vast ocean.
It’s a fucking ship, you idiot, I say to myself. A ship moves. Maybe it was once here. Now it’s somewhere else. Just because Gillespie said the SBN vessel tried not to move doesn’t mean it can’t. And now you’re here in the middle of the fucking ocean and Toni is alone and you are a moron.
I calm my internal critic a moment to think.
“Capitan, are you sure this works?” I say, pointing to the Chinese-made GPS device. “It works? Funciona?”
“Si, funciona,” he says, looking around us wondering, I’m sure, what about this patch of ocean was worth four thousand dollars to me. “We go casa?”
I force my mind to focus. The SBN ship may be long gone but I am already here. Could Gillespie have given me the wrong coordinates? Could Flores’s antiquated machine be off? Could the boat be listing somewhere nearby? I have no idea, but I’ve come this far and I’m not giving up the search without a fight.
“No casa. We make circle?” I say, pointing my finger in a loop around the boat.
Flores eyes me suspiciously. Wider circle patterns around a central spot are exactly what we would make if we were searching for drugs dropped from an airplane.
I start to sense why Flores has been so reticent.
“No time,” he says. “Go casa. Mal tiempo coming.”
The skies are a fierce blue but as I gaze up into the sky, I notice the ashen clouds collecting in the distance.
“We need to go circle,” I say, again with my hand gesture.
“Non,” Flores says in a voice far more forceful than I’ve heard from him before.
I’d found him amiable enough over the course of the day, but I only now fully realize I’m in the middle of the ocean with a lot of cash in my bag and a man I hardly know. “One hour circle,” I offer. “I pay two thousand dollars more.”
He shakes his head in a way I interpret more as suggesting I’m an idiot than rejecting my offer outright. “Una hora, four thousand dollar more.”
I stare at him defiantly for only a moment, then hand him the cash.
Flores tracks our course haphazardly on his GPS machine and our dwindling time meticulously on his watch. Forty-five minutes. Nothing. Thirty minutes. Nothing. Twenty minutes …
Anxiety begins to overtake me as the clock ticks down. A cloud of self-doubt, of deep anger at myself, begins to form. I’m out in the middle of the open sea, sequestered and alone. It’s not just that I’m here, it’s that I’ve left everyone else in my world in order to be here. It’s that I’ve become my own little island, bobbing up and down in the ocean of my own isolation. I feel a surge of self-loathing bubbling up from deep within. Its presence becomes almost physiological, a strange buzzing flowing through my head. I place my face in my hands. What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck am I doing here?
And then I notice it.
The buzzing hasn’t stopped.
I look down at my hands, then hold them over my ears. The buzzing, and the sounds of the blowing wind, calms. I remove my hands and the buzzing ramps up again.
The buzzing isn’t in my head.
“Do you hear that, the noise?” I shout frantically at Flores.
He stares at me, nonplussed.
I twist my head frantically in all directions trying to track the sound amid the shifting ocean air. Where, where, where? I look up. Nothing.
And then I spot it.
It could easily be missed. The small, twirling blades are almost too well camouflaged to be seen, probably digitally cloaked to match the sky. But the refraction of the sun’s rays bouncing off the water creates a slight contrast.
“What’s that?” I yell to Flores, pointing up.
He looks up but doesn’t see it. “No see. Que?”
“Look. There,” I say again, pointing to what now appears to be a miniature helicopter floating above us, its deep blue camouflaging it against the sky.
“Vehículo aéreo no tripulado,” he says.
My Spanish sucks but the English word is far simpler. Drone.
My angst vanishes as my mind swings into gear. A drone like that can’t be on its own in the high seas, at least not at such a low altitude. It can’t be a coincidence that both it and we are here in the same place.
“Capitan,” I say firmly. “I need you to radio your base. Radio. Emergencia.”
He stares at me blankly.”
“Emergencia!” I repeat more forcefully.
He nods, then leads me back into the control room.
I write down the number for the base to call and spell out the name. “S-I-E-R-R-A H-A-L-L-E-Y. Tell her to make the call. Make call. Llamada. You understand?”
“Si,” Flores says, then radios in the request.
“We keep circling,” I say excitedly.
“Non, Señor,” he says abruptly, pointing to his watch, “diez minutos.”
“Non, diez minutos,” I say. “Two thousand dollars more.”
“Non.”
His bark pushes me back, making me suddenly fear we may be on the verge of physical confrontation.
“Mal tiempo coming. We go casa, must go casa,” he orders.
“Capitan, no,” I plead. “Capitan—”
“La creta que baina!” A look of wonder crosses Flores’s face as his eyes widen and shift focus from my face to a space over my shoulder.
I turn slowly and behold the light blue hull of the massive carrier floating city-like in the distance.
46
“Cut your engine immediately or you vill be fired upon.”
The accented Eng
lish booms from the helicopter drone, now hovering about twenty feet above us and no longer playing for stealth.
“I repeat, if you do not cut your engine immediately you vill be fired upon. Cut your engine now.”
I flash Flores a hand gesture of my finger across my throat. He flips the switch.
“Take out the pistol in the floorboard in the captain’s room,” the voice from the drone continues. “Show me you have it, then throw it in the ocean.”
I nervously make a gun gesture for Flores then point at the floor. The drone must have some kind of thermal imaging technology. Flores lifts a wooden floorboard apprehensively and takes out the gun. I take it from him gently, holding it from the tip, walk out to the front of the boat, wave it in the air, then toss it in the ocean.
“Now both of you come to the front of the boat and lie down on your stomachs vith your arms and legs spread apart.”
I look over at Flores apologetically. His angry eyes make clear who he blames for getting him into this situation. His hands are shaking.
I try to keep eye contact with him as I lie down, signaling for him to do the same.
“A boarding party is heading out to you. Do not move. I repeat, do not move.”
I hear the rev of the engine growing louder as the boat approaches, then the vibration as the boat locks on to ours. Our wooden floorboards shake with the heavy footsteps of the boarding men. I count six pairs of black boots.
“Put your hands behind your backs,” one of the men shouts in what seems a slightly Middle Eastern accent.
“My friend doesn’t speak much English,” I say into the floor.
“Espanol?” the man asks.
“Si,” Flores responds nervously.
“Pon tus manos detrás de la espalda, rapido,” he barks.
I feel the jerk of Flores’s quick movements as he complies, then my u.D being stripped from my wrist and the pressure of the plastic cuff replacing it. I hear the zip as they lock down Flores’s arms.
Two men grab my arms and flip me up, then push me down with my back to the boat wall. Flores doesn’t resist as they do the same to him.
The six men are all dressed in black cargo pants with black boots and light blue Dri-fit polo shirts. All have close-cropped dark hair and angular, muscular bodies and appear to be in their thirties or forties. Their focused glares suggest an iron discipline and a comfort with force. I breathe deeply in a vain effort to remain calm.