He lit the third and loaded it into the slingshot. This time, he took the risk of putting his head up higher to improve his aim. He released the bottle as bullets zinged past his head.
Both Juan and the gunman knew it would hit as soon as he let it go. The man got to his feet to dodge the tumbling bottle, but he was too late. It smashed into the deck a foot in front of him, splashing him and the boat with the flaming jelly mixture.
An inferno engulfed the gunman. His screams echoed across the water as he danced in agony. For a moment, Juan thought the man would ease his suffering by jumping into the water, but a single shot came from the Oceanaire. The burning gunman slumped to the deck, put out of his misery by the boat’s driver.
Juan readied the final bottle, but he wouldn’t be needing it. The hijacker must have realized the odds were now even instead of in his favor. The Oceanaire veered away and made a beeline for the closest beach. He’d be lucky to make it to shore before he could put the fire out or the boat sank.
The Cast Away wasn’t in shape for much more of a fight anyway. The engine was sputtering in fits and starts. A few of the rounds must have penetrated the hull and damaged the engines or nicked a fuel line. They’d be lucky to limp back into Montego Bay themselves.
Juan climbed back up to the bridge.
“Nice shootin’, pardner,” Max said.
“Are you all right?”
“The back of my chair sacrificed itself for me.” The thick leather had absorbed three rounds. “How about you?”
“Not a scratch.”
Juan bent down and saw that Reed had lost consciousness during the battle.
“How does he look?” Max asked.
“Not good.”
“I’m giving it all she’s got, but if the engines seize up, we’ll have to wait for rescue.”
“Reed doesn’t have that much time. Try the radio again.”
The whine was gone. They were out of range of the jammer. Max sent a distress call out on the emergency band. The reply surprised both of them.
“Max, it’s Linda. Are you guys okay?”
“Juan and I are fine, but we’ve got a serious injury on board.”
“We left port fifteen minutes ago to come get you.” She didn’t have to say that the Oregon located them by homing in on their subdermal tracking beacons, which were inserted into the thigh of every crew member. “I’ve got the RHIB in the water. You should see it any minute.”
Juan and Max looked at each other with concern. If the Oregon had left port so abruptly, there must be more going on than they were being told, but there could be no discussion about it on an open line.
“Copy, Linda. We’ll fill each other in when we see you. Tell Julia to be ready for the casualty.”
“Understood. Over and out.”
The rigid-hulled inflatable boat raced toward them, closing the distance in a hurry. When it pulled alongside, Max shut down the Cast Away’s coughing engines.
MacD and Trono vaulted onto the fishing charter.
“Looks like you saw some action, Chairman,” MacD said as he surveyed the damage.
“We did, but you should see the other guys.”
“I think we can,” Trono said, pointing at a trail of smoke nearing the shore. “Is that them?”
Juan nodded. “Is Gomez getting the chopper ready?”
“Since we were in port, he was doing routine maintenance on it this morning. It’ll take another half hour before he can take off. You want us to go after them ourselves?”
“No, we need to get the boat’s captain back to the Oregon ASAP. He’s been shot.”
As gently as they could, the four of them lifted Reed into the RHIB.
When he was settled, Juan said, “MacD, stay with the Cast Away. We’ll send a couple of technicians back to get it moving again. Then we’ll figure out what to do with it.”
The RHIB took off, skipping across the waves.
“I can’t wait to hear how you took on someone who plastered your boat with that many bullet holes,” Trono said as he tended to Reed.
“I want to know why the Oregon departed early,” Max said.
“You two weren’t the only ones to be attacked today.”
“Any casualties?” Juan asked.
“Just Mark Murphy. He took a bullet to his leg. Hux said he’ll be fine, though he won’t be skateboarding for a while.”
“Who else was attacked?”
“Everyone who went ashore.”
Juan and Max exchanged worried looks. The crew had been specifically targeted with detailed knowledge of their whereabouts. That led to only one conclusion.
Someone had breached the Oregon’s security.
Hector Bazin jumped from the burning Oceanaire and swam to shore two minutes before it exploded and sank with the bodies of his men still on board. Armed with his SIG Sauer pistol, he carjacked the first vehicle that came along, a rusted-out pickup driven by a barely coherent Rastafarian who reeked of marijuana. One shot to the head and Bazin had transportation. He stashed the corpse in the trees and sped toward Montego Bay’s Sangster International Airport.
His waterlogged phone was useless, and he couldn’t risk using the dead man’s to instruct his pilot to have the Gulfstream fueled and ready to take off. He didn’t want to leave a connection between this murder and the jet. He had to hope his other men had been more successful and were ready to leave.
As he drove, Bazin stewed over the missed opportunity. With so many simultaneous targets, he wasn’t able to get real-time intelligence from the Doctor or he might have anticipated Juan Cabrillo’s defensive strategy. But that was no excuse. Bazin had known the Chairman would be on that boat unarmed and that should have been enough.
Bazin wasn’t used to setbacks like this. From an early age, in the slums of Port-au-Prince, he’d shown a knack for thriving in trying circumstances. If Bazin needed something—whether it was food, education, or money—he found a way to get it. Like hundreds of thousands of other poor children in Haiti, Bazin had been a restavec, a child sent to be a servant for a richer host family.
Despite the access to education and enough food to grow strong, Bazin despised his new home with a high-ranking government bureaucrat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Beatings were a regular occurrence for even the slightest offense. The other restavec in the household, an orphan a year older than he named Jacques Duval, was never subjected to the same abuse because he was the favored one, the adopted son the minister could never have fathered.
The physical punishment only got worse when they were all transferred to the plum posting of the Haitian embassy in Paris. After a particularly bad beating put him in hospital with a broken jaw, arm, and ribs, Bazin took the chance to seek asylum in France. Without any other skills, he joined the French Foreign Legion and went into its elite commando team.
Bazin loved the training and action of the military, but he chafed at the authority, which only served to remind him of his childhood as a restavec. He wanted control over his own destiny once and for all, so he left the military after a ten-year stint to hire himself out as a mercenary, eventually building up a vast network of contacts and training his own soldiers from the vast pool of young poverty-stricken men back in Haiti.
He knew that Cabrillo and his crew were mercenaries as well. But they seemed to have the mistaken notion that there was some noble calling to their missions. Bazin was in it for the money, pure and simple. He would take any job that paid well no matter what the operation called for. He only hired men who shared the same ruthlessness, some because they enjoyed it and others because they knew what Bazin would do if they failed or betrayed him.
His reputation brought him to the attention of the Doctor, who had contacted him through various intermediaries. The money flowed from the beginning, and had turned into a tsunami of cash in the last six months.
>
Bazin’s debut mission for the Doctor had been to act as the go-between for the sale of stolen U.S. military technology to a Venezuelan admiral named Dayana Ruiz. It was for underwater drone hardware from the U.S. Navy, a project called Piranha. Bazin didn’t know what the admiral planned to do with it and he didn’t care. The sale price had been in the millions and Bazin’s share had been considerable. So when the Doctor offered him an exclusive contract for a much bigger operation, Bazin didn’t hesitate to take it.
The orders were to surreptitiously obtain an array of scientific equipment that was baffling to Bazin. Under the Doctor’s guidance and with the help of engineers and technicians, Bazin went about building a secret facility that seemed to have no useful purpose. Only when it finally went into operation did Bazin understand the true scope of the Doctor’s vision. He shared the breathtaking details with Bazin, making it clear that if the Haitian stuck with him, he would have more wealth and power than he ever dreamed.
The exploitation of the Colombian drug lords was merely a means to an end. Although the drone sale had been lucrative and had supplied the funds to put Phase 1 of the operation into motion, the Doctor needed millions more to bring his ultimate plan to fruition and the cocaine cartels supplied the money. After Bazin, who had since earned the Doctor’s trust, had heard where Phase 2 would lead, he gladly agreed to be a part of it.
The only thing that seemed to stand in their way was the crew of the Oregon.
Bazin drove into Montego Bay and left the pickup in an abandoned lot. By now his clothes were dry. He hailed a taxi to take him to the airport’s private jet facility, where he breezed through immigration and boarded the Gulfstream.
The only one of his men inside the cabin was David Pasquet, a former Haitian National Police SWAT officer and the sniper who’d been sent to take down Eric Stone and Mark Murphy.
“Where is everyone else?” Bazin asked him.
Pasquet solemnly shook his head. “No one else is coming.”
Bazin stared at him in disbelief. “Dead?”
“According to the police reports I’m hearing. I barely made it here myself.”
Bazin poked his head into the cockpit and barked at the pilot to take off as soon as he had clearance.
“What happened?” Bazin snapped as he changed into fresh clothes.
“I can only speculate,” Pasquet began, “but I think at least one of the women at the spa survived the attack and warned the rest of them. By the time I was set to take my shot, my targets were taking cover. I believe I clipped one of them, but the police arrived before I could finish them off. The Oregon left the harbor over an hour ago.”
Bazin told him about his sea battle with Juan Cabrillo.
“Including the two who came with me, that’s nine men lost today.” Bazin shook his head in disgust. They weren’t his best, but they were the best available on short notice. “This crew is formidable even when they don’t have their magic ship. We’ve gotten complacent with our surveillance advantage.”
“Do you think this jeopardizes the plan?” Pasquet asked.
“That’s up to the Doctor.”
Once the jet took off, Bazin braced himself for the phone call he had to make. It wasn’t going to be pleasant.
When the Doctor answered, he was his usual curt self. “Well?”
“They got away.”
“How many of them?”
Bazin grimaced. “All of them.”
There was silence on the phone for a gut-churning moment. “I give you literally the best intelligence money can buy and you let them escape?”
“The plans were put together at short notice,” Bazin said, a defense he knew was lame.
“You know we’re only four days away from the drone intercept mission. We can’t afford to commit unforced errors.”
“I can assure you this won’t happen again.”
“If the U.S. military finds out that their Piranha drones were not only stolen but also put to active use, it could eventually lead back to you and me. If that happens before the mission, the whole plan could fall apart. Do you understand?”
“Should we warn the Venezuelans that their operations may be compromised?”
“No. I kept a back door into the code controlling the drones. Once they’ve done their work today, I’ll set them to self-destruct. They’ll sink, and that will be the last anyone hears of them.”
“What about Admiral Ruiz?”
“What about her? The drones have done the job for her. Besides, this is her fault. If she hadn’t let the Oregon go, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“And the Oregon?”
“I’ll keep tabs on her just in case.”
“They’ve left Montego Bay. They must be near where I had to abandon my pursuit of Juan Cabrillo’s fishing boat.”
“I can’t surveil them unless I know exactly where they are. Have the jet circle the area and tell me the coordinates.”
“They couldn’t have gotten far in the time it took me to get to the airport,” Bazin said. “We’ll find them for you.”
Bazin told the pilot where to fly, tracing the route the Oceanaire had taken from Montego Bay Harbor to the fishing grounds and then adding on the distance the ship had time to travel since it left. The cloud cover was low, under three thousand feet, so the pilot had to dip below it to search for the ship.
They descended from the clouds, and Bazin was ready to transmit the GPS coordinates to the Doctor as soon as he spotted the ship. But when they reached clear sky, all they saw was an expansive carpet of blue stretching in all directions from the Jamaican coastline. The only visible vessel was a cruise ship on the distant horizon. Otherwise, the sea was unbroken. There wasn’t even a sign of the Cast Away, which presumably meant it was now sitting on the bottom of the ocean. As for the freighter, Bazin was mystified.
The Oregon was gone.
Thirty miles east of Jamaica
Juan was sure the Jamaican authorities were asking a lot of questions about why dead men were cropping up all over the island and two charter fishing boats had disappeared. He didn’t want to risk returning to Montego Bay.
Instead of repairing Craig Reed’s fishing boat and returning it to Montego Bay without him aboard, they used one of the Oregon’s cranes to hoist it into the largest hold, where technicians would fix the engines and patch up the damage free of charge for all the trouble they’d caused.
As soon as the Cast Away had been secured, Juan ordered the Oregon at full speed to get out of the area as fast as they could in case their attackers had something more up their sleeve. Three hours later, they had Eddie, Linc, and his motorcycle on board via a side trip from one of the Oregon’s high-powered lifeboats into Ocho Rios. The local Harley shop would have to send someone to retrieve Eddie’s rental.
Once Juan had his crew back together and they were sailing out into blue water, he went to visit the medical bay. He entered to find Julia writing some notes on her tablet.
“How’s our guest doing?” he asked.
She tossed the tablet on her desk and leaned back, running her fingers through her hair. Except for a slight weariness around the eyes, she showed no sign of the stress she’d been through. “The surgery went well. Internal bleeding was causing a pressure buildup around his pleural sac. I’ve removed the bullet, put in a chest tube, and sutured the wounds. He should be up and about in a few days. Six weeks for a full recovery.”
“That’s good to hear. Is he awake?”
“No. I’ll let you know when he’s up for visitors.”
“Thanks. When he comes to, let him know that his boat is well taken care of.”
“I will.”
“What’s the diagnosis for our daring skateboarder?”
“A few stitches and a walking cast. He’ll have a nice scar to impress the ladies.”
“He�
�s cleared for duty?”
“He can certainly sit at his post in the op center, but I wouldn’t make him run laps.”
“Don’t worry,” Juan said, “we’ve already got his skateboard park stowed.”
Julia rubbed her eyes.
“You okay?” Juan asked. “You’re not usually in on the type of action you and Linda went through today.”
“I’m fine. I’m just glad I could get back to saving people instead of killing them.”
“If you and Linda hadn’t defeated those guys, we would have lost a lot of crew today.”
“It was all Linda. I just tripped in the right direction.”
“Craig Reed is happy that you did. I’ll be back later.”
He left and went to Mark Murphy’s cabin, far forward of any other quarters on the ship to isolate the meteor-impact volume levels that were blasted from the room. The door was ajar, so Juan gave a perfunctory knock and then stepped inside. If this had been during Murph’s downtime, Juan would have expected to see him battling Eric at one of his video games on the giant television, but he found them glued to their tablets. Murph’s leg was stretched out on the sofa and wrapped in bandages. The air cast sat on the floor next to him.
“I’m glad you didn’t join me in the Long John Silver Club,” Juan said. “I’m the only one on the ship allowed to have a peg leg.”
“And I will gladly let you keep that distinction,” Murph replied. “I’ve decided I don’t like being shot.”
“Have you finished the analysis of our computer security?” Juan asked, closing the door.
“We’ve gone over it three times,” Eric said. “Nothing.”
“If someone has been tiptoeing around our network,” Murph said, “we should have found something by now. Our firewall is as secure as ever. No one is inside our servers that shouldn’t be.”
“What about eavesdropping devices?”
“No network besides ours is sending any signals from this ship,” Murph said.
“And I’ve swept the op center, conference room, and mess hall with our bug detection equipment. They’re clean.”
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