by A. J Tata
Plus, Copperhead, Inc. owned the landing craft, or LCM, and Nix wanted to ensure that he owned what he was transporting on the barge, because it was not a done deal, by any stretch.
“Okay, have you worked the Wikipedia site?”
Falco smiled, nodding. “I’ve got a dummy page up and ready to go. I’ll load it tomorrow, when things get serious.”
Nix looked at Falco, noticing his soul patch, earring, and skull-and-crossbones tattoo. “You look like Blackbeard.”
Falco laughed. “Blackbeard was British. I’m Italian and I get more pussy.”
“That you do. Okay, so let’s get these guys rolling into Zone Foxtrot. Need to get the buffer zone clear,” Nix said.
Falco walked to a map that hung in the sparsely appointed room and pointed at a section.
“Foxtrot it is,” he said.
They had divided the map into relatively equal-size chunks labeling the southern tier of zones using the military phonetic alphabet Alpha through Echo, the middle tier Foxtrot through Juliet, and the northern tier Kilo through Oscar. Clearing Alpha through Echo had been relatively easy, but it had taken eighteen months because it was mostly swampland, all salt marshes and some woodland cut by narrow, straight creeks in similar byzantine fashion to a Louisiana bayou. They had found the MOAB in Zone Charlie.
They had used thermal imaging with a slow-flying airplane tracking back and forth at night looking for heated anomalies. Part of the contract included their purchase of a King Air twin propeller aircraft tricked out with state-of-the-art forward-looking infrared and thermal recording devices. They had included the cost of the airplane and the Thermal Imaging Systems, Inc. Nightfire Ball into the contract, which pumped it up another two million dollars. For annual maintenance for all six years of the contract, he charged the government an estimated $100,000 per year. Nix knew he wouldn’t need that much, as they got the Nightfire for a steal by agreeing to prototype the new Generation II High Definition camera with megapixel thermal and low-light cameras in exchange for feedback on functionality. Thermal Imaging Systems, Inc. was in competition with FLIR, who made the SAFIRE ball. In essence, Nix would give them all of the imaging data for the first two years of the contract and Thermal Imaging Systems, Inc. provided them a rebate of $500,000 for the first two years.
Copperhead, Inc. was then allowed to charge the government for the equipment, get its rebate without having to pass it back through to Uncle Sam, and keep the equipment. Not a bad deal.
“You hearing anything about Royes?” Nix asked.
“They’re looking at that guy. A drifter named Mahegan. Says he was swimming in the middle of Croatan Sound and bumped into the body.”
Nix laughed. “That sounds so crazy I bet it’s true,” he said.
“But it also sounds crazy enough to be bullshit,” Falco countered.
Nix pursed his lips, took a sip of coffee, and said, “You still talking to the right folks over there?”
“Nothing’s changed, boss.”
“What do you know about Mahegan?”
“Ex-Army. Ranger. Dishonorable discharge.”
Nix considered this for a moment. “Get me some intel on him. Call your friends in the Pentagon. I’ll talk to the sheriff.”
“You looking at making this stick to him?”
Nix smiled. “Actually, yes.”
“Well, you should know he had a knife on him.”
“Even better. Sheriff Johnson have it?”
“That’s what I’m told. Coast Guard was looking for him, too. Something about an incident on the Ocracoke Ferry.”
“See if you can’t lock that down for us.”
“Aye, boss.”
Falco scampered down the stairwell and disappeared into the headquarters hut behind the control tower.
Nix thought about what Falco had mentioned. Again, it was all about product lines. Definitely in today’s economy any business needed to diversify. Copperhead, Inc. had had a setback, but now they had some momentum. They were growing despite the headwinds. The more product lines, the better.
He picked up his binoculars and watched as one of his men followed the mine-clearing crew into the swamps. The crew consisted of dark men with black hair and tattered clothes. If one of them died today, no one would mourn his loss. That mourning had already taken place.
The crew was chained together at the waist as they high stepped through forbidding terrain wearing snake boots and hip waders, each carrying a World War II mine detector.
Escape was not an option. They would work until their bodies fell apart or he no longer needed them.
But if one of them got loose, the whole scam would unravel.
Chapter 16
Floating beneath the landing craft in Croatan Sound, Mahegan had a decision to make, which was to either explore the Teach’s Pet or jump on the landing craft before it pushed off. He watched the two men operating the boat begin to untie from the Pet.
His calculation was that if the landing craft was lashed to the Pet, then the Pet was some kind of staging base for whatever was happening. What he knew was that some MVX-90s had just been loaded onto an offshore fishing boat in the middle of the night. Chances were that it was an illegal transshipment and those devices were going to wind up in the wrong hands. Had they come from the workboat or from the Pet?
Mahegan knew that MVX-90s were small, lightweight devices, each the weight of a home Internet router. A bargelike vessel would not be required to ship even a thousand of them. Whatever the landing craft had transferred to the Lucky Lindy was heavy and had required a forklift. The MVX-90s seemed like an afterthought, as if they had been added to whatever the main thing was.
The workboat was probably empty, but the two men on it might hold some useful information. Where had they come from and what were they carrying? Would they even know? They had spoken about the box as if it might be fragile. Confronting them would certainly lead to the possibility that his identity would be revealed, as if he wasn’t in deep enough with the authorities in Dare County.
The active lead, the actionable intelligence, was on the workboat, he decided. He climbed the six-foot freeboard by using the spud pole sleeve, which was jacked up and hidden inside the metal cylinder in telescope fashion.
Pulling up out of the water and then pushing with his arms, he slipped over the gunwale and took a knee behind a generator that was secured with chains to four-inch metal eyelets. The forklift was near the bow, to his left. Other than the two pieces of equipment, the landing craft was an open, flat deck without cover or concealment. He huddled there until he felt the craft move and turn away from the Pet.
He knew he was in a precarious position. The two men were either in the pilot’s cabin or on the deck, and the moment he moved away from the generator they would see him unless they were distracted. Also, he had no idea where they were going or how long they would be gone. He instinctively reached down for his knife and cursed himself when he realized it was still at the police station.
There was enough starlight for him to see both men in the pilot’s cabin. A dim light shone from the instruments into their faces. He felt the boat backing up instead of moving forward and put together three separate thoughts. First, the light in the cabin would hamper their night vision. Second, since they were backing up, they would be looking over the aft portion of the ship, away from him. And third, the cabin was elevated above the deck of the landing craft and its base would in fact be the most covered and concealed position on the vessel. Dead space, in military parlance. To a soldier like Mahegan, dead space was that piece of ground where he could hide protected, if not undetected, out of the line of sight of the opposing forces. Here specifically, the two men would not have the angle to see him if he pressed himself against the base.
He slid around the rusted generator. Masking his movement was the loud roar of the two diesel engines that were kicking up silt and churning the shallow sound. He forced himself to be deliberate, remembering what he used to tell his teamm
ates when they were about to enter a building and clear it of the enemy: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Keeping his maxim in mind, he crossed the thirty feet, ten yards, from the generator to the base of the cabin. He moved to the starboard side where there was a bulkhead and which was opposite the door to the pilot’s cabin. He would have two options if spotted.
Fight it out or slide over the side and live to fight another day.
The landing craft churned for at least two hours. Huddled against the base of the elevated captain’s platform, and separated by sheet metal at the bottom and ballistic glass at the top, Mahegan felt himself stiffen against the hard metal flooring. Watching the darkness fade into a faint gray hue on the eastern horizon, he also realized that this was about the time he went swimming every morning. He wistfully thought of Lindy Locklear and how much he would prefer to be entwined with her right now as opposed to crouching low on a workboat.
With daylight creeping toward them, he felt a subtle shift in the engines and the craft slowed, then turned sharply. He gauged their direction of travel from the Teach’s Pet to have been south in between Roanoke Island and Dare County Mainland past the line of his morning swim off the Wanchese marsh. Now he felt as if they were hooking west and northwest.
He saw the faint outline of tree branches hanging over them like skeletal arms creating a welcoming cordon and marking the transition from the sound to an estuary of some sort. With the migration from sound to river or creek, the density of the foliage actually provided him more concealment in an added layer of darkness. Until the giant spotlight came on.
A powerful rectangular beam of light punched through the blackness and lit the front of the landing craft with its bottom arc while creating a faux daylight into the river and surrounding woodlands. Mahegan could not see much above the lip of the vessel but, based upon his experience in hunting terrorists in caves, he judged this to be an industrial-grade searchlight, perhaps 200,000-candlepower. It was like a Xenon headlamp on a new German car, only 100 times more powerful.
Its ambient glow cast downward onto him, putting his position at risk if he were to move or if one of the two men in the bridge decided to venture onto the deck. The river would narrow, Mahegan figured, and one would steer the boat and the other would move forward from the cabin to lean over the bow and ensure clear passage, perhaps with a handheld searchlight. The din of the engines slowed from its high pitch to a low thrum as the vessel began to decelerate.
Another shift in the engines caused the boat to slow again, to what Mahegan figured was about five knots, slow enough to be looking for something. It was moments like these where endless scenarios began playing through his mind like several chess pieces, moving to checkmate and then resetting before considering another way to win and then another.
The door to the cabin opened with a creak.
“Okay, I see the tree up there. We need to shut off the light.”
“Gimme a sec to throw the line.”
“Hurry up then. Copperhead Six tells us not to use the light at all. So no more than another thirty seconds.”
“Six” was usually the military suffix for the commander. Mahegan presumed Copperhead Six to be the radio call-sign for Nix, the person Lindy had mentioned as running the Copperhead operation.
One of the men moved quickly past Mahegan, no more than ten feet away. He walked the entire distance to the bow and grabbed a coiled rope. The man was lit in high definition by the searchlight, making him appear like a rock star on a stage, the beckoning forest his fawning audience. Mahegan closed his left eye and counted down from thirty seconds, protecting his night vision and intending to move as soon as the light shut down.
With fifteen seconds to go, he felt the boat shift to the west side of the diminishing creek. One of the motors slipped into reverse as he watched the man on the bow slide to his left, toward the port side, and focus on the shoreline.
As soon as the light went out, Mahegan stayed low, hooked a leg on the gunwale, and shinnied over the boat’s edge on the starboard side, grasping the top rail as if he was prepared to do a pull-up. Opening his left eye, he pulled himself up enough to observe, his legs still hanging in the cool water below.
The man on the bow tied the rope to a tree as the pilot reversed and revved the engines rapidly to crab the landing craft sideways before gunning the engine and pushing the vessel up onto dry land, leaving only the engines and Mahegan hanging in the water. Not knowing the depth of the river, he lowered himself so that only his fingers were visible on the top rail of the craft. He remained suspended, pressing his head against the metal hull.
“Get the rifles and let’s boogie,” the pilot called out as he shut down the engine.
“’Kay. Gotta cover the boat first. Sun will be up shortly.”
“Screw it. We’ve got one run left and we’re here.”
After a pause, the other voice, said, “Aye. Let’s bolt then.”
Mahegan heard footsteps clang off the metal deck, then the rustle of two men walking through the forest. He waited another ten minutes, concerned that there might be a setup. He wasn’t sure about the pause. Maybe there were some hand and arm signals indicating that he was hanging off the back of the boat. Or maybe he was just thinking too much.
His arms tiring, he executed a pull-up until his chin was above the top rail of the gunwale. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness and his night vision was intact. He shinnied back over the rail and knelt on the deck for another few minutes, silent. He saw the forklift and the generator, and could still feel their heat.
He moved quickly into the pilot’s bridge and studied the interior cabin. He saw a large steering wheel, two gearshifts, several instrument displays, and a state-of-the-art portable Loran Global Positioning System. Before powering the GPS, he searched a couple of empty boxes in the corner of the cabin, but the most helpful thing he found was a pencil. He tore off the lid to a liquor box, stepped outside, saw nothing, and then returned to the cabin.
He stood where the pilot had been standing and looked to where he had been hiding. He had chosen the perfect position. The height of the cabin made it impossible to see into the blind spot he had selected.
Mahegan powered up the GPS, which cast his face in a bright green glow. If anyone were within a quarter mile of his position, they would notice. He quickly scrolled through the functionality, discovered the waypoints, and then stopped.
With each waypoint appearing on the left side of the display, an accompanying map was displayed on the right side. Mahegan pushed the down arrow and scrolled through six different map shots with what he presumed were latitude-longitude numbers on the left. Immediately, he recognized the Teach’s Pet position off the north edge of Roanoke Island, about fifteen miles away. There was a map of the south edge of the island near Oregon Inlet. There were two points in the Alligator River near Buffalo City, one off Milltail Creek, and one point off Mann’s Harbor, which he knew was on the east side of Dare County Mainland. The navigation device announced major landmarks in bold letters in the same fashion as an automobile GPS, with big block letters highlighting significant areas and smaller words identifying less prominent ones. This maritime GPS also identified all creeks, rivers, sounds, bays, and oceans.
The last point in the GPS was located in the Long Shoal River, which he decided had to be his present position, though the river seemed wider on the map than where he believed the landing craft was.
He quickly scribbled onto the cardboard the lat-longs for each of the points, stuffed it in his waistband, and then shut down the GPS. Hearing a noise in the distance, he knelt inside the pilot’s cabin until his night vision returned.
The noise seemed to grow in intensity and he suddenly realized that at least two men, if not more, were heading toward the landing craft.
He silently moved to the most advantageous position in the pilot’s cabin, which wasn’t saying much. He was at a forty-five-degree angle from the door, catty-corner from the instrumentation. He f
igured that if anyone came up the steps, they would move toward the instruments, away from him, giving Mahegan an opportunity to attack and disappear down the long end of the vessel, perhaps even over the side into the forest.
“Okay, nobody knows about this shit, you understand?”
He recognized the voice. It was the one of the men who had piloted the vessel.
“Yeah, got it.”
A new voice.
“What about Lars?”
“Lars won’t be bothering us. We’ll take this last load and go,” the pilot said.
“I’m with you. Just don’t want Copperhead Six on my ass,” the new voice said.
The two men boarded the landing craft and stopped.
Mahegan looked above the rim of the pilot’s cabin through the ballistic glass. He saw two large men talking next to the generator where he had initially hid after he boarded.
“We’re talking several million dollars, Jimmy.”
Jimmy was the pilot, Mahegan deduced.
“Damn right. And we’ve earned it.”
Another pause, and then, “Okay, I’m with you. But if that asshole Nix finds out before we can disappear, we’re toast.”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take,” Jimmy said. “I’m tired of driving this bitch around while he gets rich. Plus, all those damn ghosts give me the creeps. I’ve seen what’s down there. Falco thinks he’s hiding all that, but I’ve read about Tommy Thompson and know what the hell is going on.”
Mahegan’s mind reeled. Bream’s office. Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder. He had seen another name on the book’s jacket: Tommy Thompson, the treasure hunter. On the trip back from the Pentagon, he had borrowed Locklear’s phone to Google the book because it seemed out of place. The synopsis described Thompson as a genius explorer who ultimately found the SS Central America, a ship that in 1857 had sunk in a hurricane off the coast of Cape Hatteras with practically the entire California gold rush onboard. Thompson had spent three years at sea searching for the Central America two hundred miles offshore in two miles of ocean.