by Michael Howe
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1 - Rio de Janeiro
Chapter 2 - South Florida
Chapter 3 - The South Atlantic
Chapter 4 - Houston
Chapter 5 - Rio de Janeiro
Chapter 6 - The South Atlantic
Chapter 7 - Rio de Janeiro
Chapter 8 - The South Atlantic / Drake Passage
Chapter 9 - En Route to Ushuaia
Chapter 10 - The Drake Passage
Chapter 11 - The Drake Passage
Chapter 12 - The Bellingshausen Sea
Chapter 13 - The Bellingshausen Sea
Chapter 14 - The Bellingshausen Sea
Chapter 15 - The Drake Passage
Chapter 16 - The Drake Passage
Chapter 17 - The Drake Passage
Chapter 18 - Rio de Janeiro
Chapter 19 - Ushuaia
Chapter 20 - South of Alexandria, Egypt
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1
Rio de Janeiro
Carlos Coccoli inhaled his cigarette in long, slow drags as he leaned over the safety railing and looked twelve stories down into Graving Dock Number Three. Behind him, half a mile and two security fences away, lay the industrial northeast of Rio de Janeiro. In front lay the wide, dark waters of the Baia de Guanabara.
Despite the late hour, the blue-white glare of the Xenon floods lighted the hole with the intensity of the tropical noon sun. He studied the dock’s gray-black concrete sides; the various cave-like mezzanines and work platforms built into those gray-black sides; the puddles of black water that glistened on the dock floor and the row of keel blacks lined up along the bottom about a hundred feet from the far wall. The dock was over twelve hundred feet long and over five hundred wide. Built to accept all but the most insanely large ships. It was so big, thought Carlos, that it had made Aurora Australis, the ship that had occupied it up till a few hours before, look like a toy. They could easily have fit three Auroras in there.
“Umberto,” called Carlos over his shoulder, “I now see why you like working here so. This dock reminds you of that quarry you used to work in.”
“I’d be better off back there,” replied Umberto, who was standing on the concrete apron a few yards back from the edge of the dock, in the dense shadow created by a work shed and the framework of one of the many surrounding cranes.
Carlos didn’t want to hear that sort of thing but said nothing as he joined his taller companion in the shadows. They stood there, dressed in light gray coveralls with Tecmar badges sewn to them, and smoked in silence. Even after dark the yard was still very busy, but the area around Graving Dock Number Three was also almost unsettlingly quiet. There were no air compressors roaring. There was no banging and crashing of steel on steel. No shrieking of hull and deck plates being cut to precise shapes. No screeching of railroad wheels on tracks. There were no truck horns and backing alarms. Even the sounds of the city, very much alive on the far side of the security fences surrounding the yard, were all but lost in the thick night air.
Where, the day before, the cruise ship Aurora Australis had rested now only a row of keel blocks, surrounded by black puddles of water, remained on the dock’s floor. Once the overhaul had been completed, the dock had been flooded and the steel doors opened. Tugs had worked the cruise ship out into the channel; the doors had been closed again and the dock pumped dry, leaving the lingering smell of petroleum and burnt steel, which permeates all shipyards. Tomorrow the blocks would be repositioned in preparation for the dock’s next guest, but tonight it slept.
“It’s hotter than hell,” snarled Umberto as he swatted what sounded to him like a mosquito.
“No hotter than usual,” replied Carlos, speaking and moving with the abrupt self-confidence of a young man who knows he’s headed up in a world filled with fools. “You worried all of a sudden?” As he spoke, he looked out over the dark waters of the Baia de Guanabara, the tear-shaped body of water that separates Rio from Niterói to the east. He watched the car lights moving across the distant Rio-Niterói bridge. The great span had been there all his life, and now was probably the last time he would see it. He wondered briefly if he would miss it. Of course not! The tourists might find Rio enchanting, but for millions of cariocas, including Carlos, it was nothing more than a suffocating prison filled with poverty and frustration. A prison that was becoming more and more crowded as the rural poor flooded in, thinking life was better in the big city.
Thanks to Omar he now had the chance to escape. Within a few minutes he would be very rich; able to visit practically any bridge in the world. Able to do practically anything, for that matter.
“Hell, no! Why should I be?”
“Having second thoughts?”
“Shit, no. Have I ever?” The expression on Umberto’s face seemed to belie his words.
“Good. With what they’re paying us, we’ll never have to have second thoughts again about anything.”
“Where the hell is he? Who the hell is he? Really?”
Carlos glanced at him, snorted, then looked away again. While Graving Dock Number Three might be sleeping, the rest of the shipyard was not. A quarter of a mile away, a Venezuelan ULLC, a supertanker, was p
arked in Graving Dock Number Two, bathed in its own banks of brilliant floods while its bottom was cleaned, repaired and painted. Another half mile beyond that a deep-drilling rig was under construction for Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company. Up and down the coast of South America, the shipbuilding business was booming. From where Carlos and Umberto stood, however, the noise of the rest of the yard was barely a muted mumble, almost as if it were coming from another planet.
“You do understand that we have to disappear forever . . . tonight. We can’t be in Rio or anywhere nearby tomorrow morning.”
“Those new IDs he’s supposed to bring us . . .”
“He showed me mine. They’re good.”
“What about Anna?”
“I told you, I’m not bringing her. She’s stupid. I can’t trust her. With the money we’re getting I can do much better. You and me are both going to be rich and free as birds.”
“How does Omar know we did it right? That we didn’t cheat him?”
“He has some way of checking. Omar’s no fool. Probably somebody in the crew. Somebody’s got to detonate the damn things.”
“You think a lot of them will get killed?”
“Their asses are going to be blown to hell. I’m going to love it. They’ve been raping us and everybody else for centuries. They don’t mind a few of us dying if they can make some money on the deal, so why should we let a few of them stand between us and millions of dollars? U.S dollars. Even the sheiks who own this place don’t like them.”
“You think Omar is working for him? The sultan?”
“Seems likely. He’s some sort of Arab, I think, though he talks almost like a carioca.”
“Is the sultan an Arab?”
“Is there some other kind?”
Umberto was silent and Carlos cursed to himself. The fool was having second thoughts, he concluded as he looked out over the harbor, at the lights sparkling along the Niterói shore and at the full moon, huge and yellow, hanging above it. Umberto was far too nervous—it was hard to believe he had worked for years as a blaster in a quarry.
Whatever he may have done in the past, he was now having second thoughts about their recent and future activities. Losing his nerve. In this condition he was dangerous. Dangerous to Carlos. And Carlos started to have second thoughts about him.
As Carlos considered what to do about his tall, thin co-conspirator, the light of a pair of headlights swept across the concrete apron. As they moved side to side, the beams dodged some air compressors and welding machines, only to fully illuminate others. Periodically they dipped down and reflected on the railroad tracks set into the apron.
“This must be him,” said Umberto, a note of relief in his voice.
“Yes,” agreed Carlos, watching as a beat-up van with “Estaleiro Tecmar” written on its side pulled up to the crane and stopped.
“Isn’t this a surprise,” commented the van’s driver, a thin, darkish man, dressed in a blue coveralls identical to those worn by his victims. The driver could have been either Arab or Latin and would have fit into practically any crowd anywhere. “Carlos and Umberto taking the night air under a crane.”
“Don’t be funny,” snapped Carlos, irritated at their employer’s tone. “Our work was satisfactory, wasn’t it?”
“Very much so. The oppressed of the world are very much in your debt.”
Before either victim could react, the driver raised a small-caliber pistol and shot each in the forehead. The pistol made a breathy pop when it was fired, one easily mistaken for the sound of a pneumatic tool being disconnected from the air hose that had provided its power. The two ship fitters each grunted and collapsed to the grimy concrete, where they twitched slightly. The driver opened the door and stepped down onto the apron.
Pop. Pop. To be certain, he fired a second shot into each head, from a different angle than the first. He then loaded the two cadavers onto a plastic tarpaulin in the back of the van, washed away the small, obvious pools of blood with a five-gallon jug of water he had brought with him, and drove off.
To the south, over the city, there was a distant flash of lightning. Then another.
The air was humid, hazy and heavy as the sun first peeked over the horizon. Anna Olivieros lay in bed, watching the pink wall of her bedroom brighten, and wished she were dead.
Carlos had not come home that night. True, he had stayed out other nights, but she knew that this time was different. The past few days he’d been so distant. It was as if she weren’t even there. She’d tried to convince herself that he had another girlfriend. That would have hurt but it would have been bearable. But it wasn’t true. Carlos had been busy with some project, some clever, unsavory project. He often was. But this time was different, she knew in her heart. He’d moved on to something bigger. This time he had left her and she was certain she’d never see him again.
The last thing in the world she wanted to do was get up, but she did. She dragged herself out of her bed and headed for the bathroom. Life does go on, she told herself, knowing that was true but not totally relevant. More to the point, she had to work to eat, and that, she knew, was something she would want to do. As for the apartment, she suspected that without money from Carlos it was history.
Realizing she was running late and struck with a sudden terror that she might lose her job in addition to losing Carlos, Anna picked up the pace, her actions reflecting habit more than conscious thought. She showered, dressed in something, made up her face, combed her hair and was out the door, her heels clacking, in less than half an hour.
If Anna’s apartment and neighborhood were far from grand, they were also far from favela. No tin and cardboard shacks with muddy dirt floors. The building was of concrete and had electricity, running hot and cold water and an elevator. The interior walls and floors were worn but reasonably clean. Despite the almost overwhelming pain at losing Carlos, she was able to feel how much she would miss living in the building, which she wouldn’t be able to afford on her own income. Unless some miracle occurred, her next stop would be both lonely and wretched.
Muggy though the morning was, it was still early. In another hour it would be much worse. When Anna stepped out the front door of the apartment building, she stepped into the vibrant flow of life that is Brazil. The crowds flowing both directions along the sidewalk weren’t exactly dancing the rumba, but they were moving rapidly and purposefully. Out in the road, the solid mass of cars, trucks and buses executed their own incomprehensible ballet—jerking and twisting and weaving around and between one another. As they danced, they filled the already super-saturated air with the blasts of their horns.
Anna turned toward the bus stop, only to see the bus pulling away, leaving a dense tail of diesel smoke. She cursed quietly, then debated with herself whether to try to catch the bus at the next stop or wait for the next one at her normal stop.
Did it really matter? she wondered numbly. Her mother hadn’t liked Carlos. Neither had her brother. They didn’t trust him, and neither, really, did she. He was handsome, flashy, vibrant, and she knew that she was plain. Worst of all, she was in love with him. Now all she could do was hope against hope that she was wrong. With a sigh, she decided she couldn’t run with her heels on, so she turned toward the stop she used every day.
Distracted as she was, Anna didn’t at first notice the white SUV with heavily tinted windows parked between her and the bus stop. Out of the corner of her eye she did, however, notice Oswaldo, the handsome young street thug standing beside the car. Impossible as it seemed to her, she found him even more attractive than Carlos. The fact was that everybody who’d ever laid eyes on him would have agreed that he was a very presentable and attractive young man. Except when he was beating your face to a pulp with a two-by-four or shoving a knife into your navel.
“Anna, my love!” shouted Oswaldo as he reached out and grabbed her passing arm. Using her momentum, he then swung her around in one smooth motion and ushered her into the SUV before she understood what was happening
. He jumped in behind her, slammed the door behind him, and the van sped off, weaving through the heavy, but not impossible, traffic. Without pausing, Oswaldo wrapped a thin line around Anna’s neck and quickly twisted it tight. He wanted to silence and strangle her, not to cut her head off. He watched with pleasure as her startled look turned to one of fear, her hands clutched frantically at her throat and her mouth opened wide, screaming silently. He slammed her in the side of the head when her body tried to struggle. He looked again at her face. Her eyes looked as if they were about to pop out. He considered relaxing the garrote slightly, deceiving her into believing that she might yet draw another breath, but he resisted the temptation. The job had to be done quickly and thoroughly.
If any of the passersby had even noticed the incident, they would have undoubtedly assumed that the handsome lad was giving a friend a ride. Unable to see through the windows, they would have had no way of knowing that Anna Olivieros was dead four minutes after the SUV pulled away from the curb.
Moored next to the finishing dock at the Estaleiro Tecmar yard, the white hull and upper works of the expedition cruise ship Aurora Australis glowed in the morning sun. Highlighting this great expanse of white, the ship’s Day-Glo orange covered lifeboats/survival capsules hung like beads along the sides of her superstructure.
Roughly five hundred feet in length, with a net register tonnage of slightly under twenty-five thousand and powered by two huge, German diesels, Aurora was as small as cruise ships go. She was nothing in comparison with the immense floating hotels, over a thousand feet long, that made their long-established circuits around the Caribbean, but then she wasn’t a standard cruise ship. Rather, she was one of the smallish group of ships designed to take—in her case five hundred—affluent adventurers on expeditions to out-of-the-way places and, along the way, provide a level of luxury almost equal to that offered by their larger cousins.