“Pam.” She said it like a curse.
“At the least, plus those two boat boys. And maybe Bud as well. Old men and young women have been a deadly combination for centuries. Usually deadly for the old man.”
“What can we do?”
“We’ve got a good start on ‘em. If HiJenks hangs in there, I figure we’ve got at least two hours until they catch us. Maybe by then we can get some help.”
Jenks grabbed the GPS and wedged it where Hetta could read their constantly changing coordinates. The little electronic device showed they were doing ten knots, and their radar screen told them All Bidness was making almost double that. It didn’t take a mathematics whiz to figure out there would be a moment of reckoning.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and Bud'll blow an engine. He’s gotta be redlined,” Jenks said.
“I still can’t understand it. Bud doesn’t need the money.”
“Maybe he needs the excitement.”
“Well, I sure as hell don't. Our life has become an on-going nightmare. Will it never end?” Then despite her fear, she grinned. “Uh, that didn't come out quite right.”
Jenks hugged her, and said in a calm voice that belied the flutter in his gut, “Your fifteen minutes of fame are here. Get on the VHF and put out a ‘mayday’ on channel sixteen. Who knows, maybe someone, somewhere, will hear you.”
Hetta stared at Jenks, said, “I love you,” then picked up the mic and began transmitting in a shaky voice. “Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the motor vessel HiJenks. We are at twenty-seven degrees north, one-eleven degrees west, on a bearing of thirty-one degrees from Punta Caracol. We are an American-registered vessel, forty-two feet, with two adults on board. We are in imminent danger. We are being pursued by the motor vessel All Bidness, and believe they mean us harm. Mayday, mayday, mayday.”
While Hetta continued the distress call, Jenks listened on the handheld to make sure she was getting out. She was. They couldn’t receive on the big radio, and the handheld was useless this far from land, but at least they were broadcasting.
Giving Hetta a thumbs-up and a peck on the forehead, Jenks reached over her for the only weapon they had: a flare gun. He loaded the orange plastic pistol and placed it on the table, then rummaged in a cabinet under the settee for their outdated Class C EPIRB. The Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, bought years before, was meant for use in the bays, rivers and lakes of the United States, not for international waters. “What the hell,” Jenks mumbled, activating the device, “maybe this thing will work.”
All that done, he tuned up the ham radio and put a “Mayday, vessel in distress” call out to the entire planet.
Hetta continued her own mayday call, trying to block out a thought that threatened to make her physically ill; Bud Killebrew, my best friend, is trying to kill us.
"Mayday, mayday, mayday!"
Chapter 37
Whose words all ears took captive—Shakespeare
“Cap’n, sorry to wake you, sir, but all hell’s broke loose in the Sea of Cortez.
“What is it?” Bill Xavier asked, pushing himself from his bunk. “And what time is it?”
“Zero-zero-twenty, sir. We’ve picked up a VHF mayday, and a Class C EPIRB signal, both coming from the vessel HiJenks, seventy-three miles northwest of here. This is a real weird one, sir. It seems HiJenks is being chased by another American vessel called Oil Business or something like that. That lady giving out the mayday on HiJenks just keeps broadcasting over and over. She sounds scared out of her wits.”
Bill Xavier jammed his pants on and grabbed a shirt while he corrected the lieutenant. “All Bidness. The name of the other vessel is All Bidness. Can’t be much of a chase. All Bidness can easily do eighteen to twenty knots, and Jenks told me his boat was a six or seven knot job.”
“According to our radar he’s doing almost ten. You know these people, sir?”
“Yes, I do. How far are the two vessels apart right now?”
“Little over forty miles, if they’re the two we have on radar. And you’re right, All Bidness is doing eighteen. We’re running the numbers and trajectories right now.”
“Good. Have the XO meet me on the bridge, pronto.”
“Already on his way, sir.”
In Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Erik Nilsen lumbered past his pool, through his backyard, and unlocked the door to a room off his garage. Over the door a sign proclaimed, “Erik’s Ham Shack.”
He yawned, flipped the switch on his coffee maker, turned on his ham radio rig, tuned up, and dialed through the bands. His twenty-year-old Kenwood was like an old friend, and although his “hamster” buddies kept urging him to get rid of it and buy one of those new smart alecky auto-everything radios, he’d been doing just fine for years with this one, thank you.
The coffee maker spat steam and stopped dripping, so he pushed himself out of his cracking leather chair for a cup. Thirty years as a merchant marine pulled him habitually from bed every morning at four, and out to his radio shortly after that. Each day he talked to ships at sea around the globe until his wife, Susan, announced breakfast at six-thirty.
Between sips of coffee, Erik hooked up his telephone patch equipment. He kept a regular schedule with a few old friends who, like himself, made phone patches for men and women on ships who didn't have all that Skype technology crap. His group wasn’t organized enough to call themselves a net, but the word was out on the high seas and mariners wanting a patch tuned in regularly to his set time and frequency. It gave the old merchant marine satisfaction to put seafarers in touch with their people back home. Someone had done it for him during his working years, and now he returned the favor. He took a second sip of sugar-laced Yuban and dialed into the HiJenks mayday call.
Almost spilling coffee in his haste to grab a pad and pencil, Erik jotted down the particulars, and then waited for a break to answer. He talked briefly with XE1-WD5AWR, checked his AARL Directory listing to make sure Bob Jenkins was who he said he was, and then picked up the phone. Dialing the number given him by AWR, he waited while the line clicked, hummed, then rang.
A sleepy voice finally answered. “Bueno?”
“Uh, do you speak English?” Erik asked.
“Oh, yes. Who is calling, please.”
“My name is Erik Nilsen,” the ham operator told Juan, and passed Jenks’s message.
Next, Nilsen let Jenks know his message was being relayed to Jaime, and then picked up the phone once more to report the situation to the United States Coast Guard in Miami. That done he poured himself another cup of coffee and settled back to stand by until the emergency on a Mexican sea over two thousand miles away was resolved. Breakfast could wait today.
“Morrie, did you hear me? Radio’s making noise, Morrie. Turn it off,” a grumpy voice commanded. A nudge to his ribs dissolved the raven-haired beauty in his dream. He tried ignoring the interruption and recapturing the dreamy señorita, but it was not to be. He heard static. This time from the boat's radio.
“Dammit, I guess I left the bleeping thing on when we went to bed,” Morrie grumbled.
Reluctantly leaving his warm bed in the sailboat’s forepeak, he stumbled through a cluttered main cabin to the navigation station, fumbled for a light switch, found his glasses, and was reaching to cut off the radio when the word “mayday” startled him. Turning up the squelch, he clearly heard Hetta and tried to respond. No reply. His wife joined him and made coffee while Morrie relayed Hetta’s distress call on channel sixty-eight, otherwise known as the San Carlos party line.
Half of the Gringo population of San Carlos uses channel sixty-eight for fishing reports, an emergency rescue channel, and basic communications for those without telephones. Morrie, by relaying HiJenks’s mayday on that frequency, alerted a good deal of San Carlos of the drama unfolding in the central Sea of Cortez.
General Tom Reeves, recently returned from his plane trip to Sierra Vista, heard the VHF radio crackle to life in the next room and groaned. “Barbara, why don’t you leave
that thing off at night?”
“Because someone might need help.”
“That’s why we have Rescate, that rescue organization we raise money for. You guys should take turns leaving on the radio, then at least some of us can get a good night’s sleep.”
“I’ll bring it up at the next meeting, General Nuisance. Go back to sleep and I’ll see what’s up.”
Al Kanady was still awake in Puerto Escondido, watching his favorite movie, “Captain Ron”, for the umpteenth time. The radio crackled. He frowned and turned it off, annoyed that he had to replay the dock-ramming scene he’d missed. Settling back in he was distracted. Something nagged at him: Was that Hetta’s Texas twang he’d heard through the radio noise?
He shut down the DVD player and turned the VHF back on. It took awhile between static crashes to decipher Hetta’s message, but when he did, he was stunned. HiJenks, under attack by All Bidness? Had the world gone mad?
Santa Rosalia Harbor, thirty miles west of HiJenks, was quiet in the hours before the squid fleet returned, so Captain Luis Ortega was sleeping soundly when he was roused.
“Capitán, we have received a mayday call. In English,” a groggy radio operator told him.
Ortega went to the bridge, listened for a few minutes, tried to respond, then ordered the Mexican Navy Patrol Boat P-04, Matamoros, readied to leave the harbor. He returned to his cabin, pulled on a uniform and, when he returned, noticed the wind had freshened. Dios mio, he thought, why do we never respond to maydays on nice, calm, days?
Comandante Jaime Morales was dodging blue tear-shaped bullets when they started making a ringing noise and blew up like inkblots. Waking with a start, he was gratified to learn he wasn’t under siege. Except by that insistent pealing. “Teléfono,” he muttered. Trying to reach the phone, he found his shoulder pinned down. Reluctantly and gently he slipped his arm from beneath Nicole’s head.
“Bueno?”
“Papi, it is Juan. A Gringo just called here asking for you. He is in Florida and he picked up a mayday call on amateur radio. It was from Mr. Jenkins aboard HiJenks. They are in the middle of the Sea of Cortez, and it seems they are in bad trouble.”
Jaime sat up abruptly. “Give me the details.”
Nicole, alerted by Jaime’s tone that something urgent was afoot, snapped on a bedside lamp and handed him a notepad and pen, then leaned against his back and nibbled his ear while he listened. The warmth of her breasts and breath made it difficult for him to concentrate, so he whispered, “Stop that,” in a way that Nicole knew he didn’t mean it.
“Mande?” Juan said. “Papi, are you there?”
“Ah...yes, son. Give me the coordinates.”
To Nicole he said, “Get dressed. Warm clothes.”
“Papi, I am....Oh, you are not alone?”
“Just give me the coordinates, Juanito.”
Juan grinned and did as he was told. He hoped the distraction at his father’s other ear was that beauty, Nicole.
Nicole bounded from bed, pulled on her clothes, gathered Jaime’s, flung them at him, and opened the door to her connecting room. She was brushing her teeth when she heard Jaime slam down the phone.
“What’s up?” she asked, wiping toothpaste from her chin.
“We’re going for a boat ride.”
“Gee, how romantic,” Nicole purred. “Shouldn’t you put on those clothes first? And shall I bring champagne?”
“No, my darling Nicole, but you might want to bring that highly illegal weapon of yours.”
The pilot of a DC3 flying just above the wave tops picked up the mayday call while he was still over the Pacific Ocean. As they entered the Sea of Cortez, he continued to listen, and did not like what he was hearing.
“Balls. Sounds like some Yank’s after another Yank and they’re doing it right near our drop point. Leave it to the bloody Yanks to screw things up. Bugger all,” he cursed.
“Can we abort?” his crewmember asked.
“Not bloody likely. We’ll just have to tough it out, make the drop, and get the fuck out.”
The captain of the shrimp boat, Gaviota II, never turned his radio on unless he was fishing with the fleet. Otherwise, even tonight, he could give a damn about the comings and goings in the Sea of Cortez. He checked his watch, frowned as a gust buffeted the boat, and decided to take a nap before it got too rough. Instructing the first mate to hold Gaviota in position, he stretched out for a nap before the pangas began to arrive.
“Shit! HiJenks’s radio is working and they’re putting out a mayday call,” Pam told her husband above All Bidness’s engine noise.
“Big deal. By the time anyone can do anything about it they’ll be a memory.”
“But they’re naming us, Gibby. They’re telling the whole stinking Sea of Cortez that we’re after them,” Pam whined.
“No, Pammy, they’re telling the whole stinking Sea of Cortez that All Bidness is after them.”
“What’s the difference?”
He pulled Pam close, so only she could hear him. “The difference is that by the time anything gets done about it, HiJenks and All Bidness will both be oil slicks on that great ocean of life. And we’ll be out of here. As far as anyone knows, Bud’s the one chasing HiJenks, and Bud, his boat, dog, and crew will be blobs of charcoal at seven-hundred fathoms. No one will be looking for us. Well, they’ll be looking for you. Or pieces of you. Too bad, they’ll say, All Bidness and HiJenks, for some inexplicable reason, went down with all hands. And with no witnesses.”
“Gato and KiKi?” Pam whispered, casting a glance at the two young Mexicans on the flying bridge.
“Did I stutter? I said no witnesses. We’ll take care of HiJenks, clean up the loose ends here, get in the dinghy and toss back a match.”
“I never thought we’d have to kill anyone.”
“That’s the trouble with you Pam, you don’t think. Now, are you gonna give me shit, or can we get on with what we’ve got to do?”
“It’s just that Bud has been so good to me. I just kinda hate to see him hurt.”
“Pammy, he won’t be hurt. In fact, he’ll never feel a thing.” Gibbs laughed, amused by his own joke.
Chapter 38
You cannot choose your battlefield, The Gods do that for you,
But you can plant a standard where a standard never flew.—Nathalia Crane
U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Endeavor: 0045hrs.
What’s our speed now, Rich?” Captain Xavier asked, not looking up from a tome he was studying that covered International Maritime Laws and Regulations. Steaming into new territory, both figuratively and literally, Xavier was looking for something, anything, that might save his career when the caca hit the prop. He didn’t find it.
From their busy command center on the bridge, the two officers were delegating to, and observing, the men and women under their command. Under full battle alert for the first time since 9-11, the cutter was a beehive of activity and youthful excitement. For many of the Coasties, this was their first opportunity to put into practice hundreds of hours of rigorous training.
Hetta’s mayday droned over the ship’s radio, her voice growing scratchy with fatigue as she broadcasted the same message over and over. Only HiJenks’s coordinates changed.
“We’re making thirty knots, Cap’n, but this wind is really picking up, so we may have to slow down. Course, I guess All Bidness will, too.”
Xavier checked his monitor, watching as the computer triangulated Endeavor’s intercept with HiJenks. A timer ticked off the hours, minutes and seconds until estimated contact: two hours, four minutes, thirty-two seconds. Another display showed All Bidness’s estimated time to overtake HiJenks: one hour, forty-five minutes, five seconds. The figures didn't lie: Endeavor would be too late.
“Rich, can’t the snipes pour on more speed?”
“No sir, the chief engineer reports they’re getting all they can out of her. Blood out of a turnip and all that.”
“Damn. I was wondering if we could, or should,
try to raise either HiJenks or All Bidness on the VHF.”
“It’d be a stretch from this distance. Besides, Cap’n, Hetta’s jamming channel sixteen with her mayday. Of course, All Bidness might have a scanner, and if it was turned on we can raise them on another frequency. And when we get closer we can turn up the wattage and override HiJenks’s signal on sixteen. Even then, Hetta won’t hear us unless she lets go of that transmit button.”
“Just as well, I guess. For now I think it best we keep All Bidness unaware of our presence. They’ll probably pick us up on radar, but can’t know who we are if we remain silent. Let’s keep ‘em in the dark. And speaking of, issue the order to darken ship. We don’t want to look like New York City steaming over the horizon.”
Within minutes Endeavor was blacked out to the outside world. Inside the darkened ship, Xavier stared at the drama unfolding on the screens before him. “Rich,” he said, pointing to a new blip, “what do you figure this is?”
Arrington looked where Xavier pointed, then checked his charts. “Can you believe we’re working from charts from the 1800s, with few updates? Oh, well, even accounting for the fact that charts can be a couple of miles off, there’s no rocks, small islands or the like anywhere near that skunk,” he said, using the naval term for an unidentified surface contact. Turning to a technician, he ordered, “Jones, designate that contact Skunk Alpha.”
Xavier watched the letter A appear below the blip. “He’s not moving, so he must be holding position against the wind and tide. He’s making no move to respond to the HiJenks mayday.”
Troubled Sea Page 24