by Cap Daniels
He shook his head like he was trying to shake off a bad headache.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t believe you. Do you believe him, Clark?”
“Hell no. I don’t believe him. Break a couple more then give him another chance to tell the truth.”
I shoved his hand to his left knee, held it there, and picked up a heavy wrench from the deck. I quickly raised the wrench above my head. Javier’s eyes rushed to the wrench and then back to his broken, swollen hand. The dark skin of his face turned gray.
He whimpered, “I . . . I . . .”
“You what?” I demanded.
Again, he turned to stone. I was impressed with his resolve, but I had no choice. The threat had been made, and I had to follow through. I hammered the wrench into the knuckles of his middle and ring finger, instantly crushing the bones and ripping open the flesh. He wailed as blood gushed from his hand.
I shoved the greasy, bloody wrench into his mouth to stop the bellowing. He bit down on the metal tool and whimpered like a child as I forced it against the corner of his mouth.
“You’re not very good at this game, Javier. All you have to do is answer my questions, and I’ll stop. You can go home to your family or your goats or whatever you have. Just answer my questions.”
“You’re a dead man,” he breathed.
“I don’t think you’re in much of a position to be making threats, Javi. You had your chance to kill me, and you weren’t man enough to pull the trigger. Now, I’m in charge. If you say one more word that isn’t a direct answer to my questions, I’m going to do far worse than break your fingers. Do you understand?”
“What I understand is that you can do whatever you want to me, but you’ll be dead before the sun goes down,” he hissed.
I stood and planted my right knee in the bend of his elbow, trapping his arm against his thigh. I forcefully grabbed his hand. “One last chance, Javi. What were you planning to do with the explosives?”
He opened his mouth, bared his teeth, and lunged for my thigh. Before he could sink his teeth into my flesh, I twisted his bloody, broken hand through half a rotation, and felt the bones of his wrist surrender to the torque. He let out an animalistic groan, and his head fell limply to his chest.
“Damn it. He’s out again.” I released his arm and stood erect in the cabin. “I don’t think he’s going to talk.”
Clark was still guarding the door. “They always talk,” he said. “You just have to keep pushing. He’ll break if you’ve got the stomach to push him far enough.”
I drank a bottle of water and waited for Javier to return to the land of the living, though I knew that was the last place his brain wanted to be. He was much more content in the pain-free confines of the spirit world.
When he finally came to, Clark pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against Javier’s top lip and leaned in. “Hey, Javier. I just want you to know that I want to kill you. I want to blow your worthless head all over this boat, but I’m not in charge. He is.” Clark motioned toward me with his head. “I’m on your team, Javi. I want to end your pain, but my buddy here is crazy. He gets off on this kind of stuff. It’s hard for me to watch, but I’m just hired muscle. I don’t get to make decisions. Good luck.”
Clark’s Spanish was good enough to send a look of deepening dread into Javier’s eyes, and he let the muzzle of the shotgun fall from the man’s face and land in his crotch. The fear in Javier’s eyes turned to terror, and he stopped breathing.
“Go ahead. Ask him again. I think his memory might be somewhere right around . . .”—Clark prodded at the man’s groin with the shotgun—“. . . here.”
“Okay,” I said. “One more try, Javi. What were you planning to do with the explosives?”
He thrust what was left of his left hand toward his crotch and yelled, “The locks! The locks. We were going to blow the locks!”
“When?” I whispered.
Clark pressed the muzzle deeper into the man’s lap.
“When the big ship is in there,” he panted.
“Good boy,” I said. “Now, goodnight, Javi.”
Clark drove the butt of the shotgun into the man’s face, sending blood spraying in every direction, and his head fell backward like a ragdoll.
14
Down She Goes
“Is he dead?”
I felt for a pulse. “No, he’s still alive, but he’s going to wish he was dead. What should we do with him?”
Clark frowned. “We can’t leave him here. When his buddies find him, they’ll know we’re watching, and we’ll lose what little advantage we have now. We’ll have to take him with us.”
I looked down at his badly broken hand. “He’s going to need a doctor.”
“Yeah, he is, but we can’t risk having him warn anyone that we’re here. We’ll splint it and keep him doped up on morphine until we can drop him in someone else’s lap.”
Returning to the task I’d begun before our now unconscious visitor arrived, I pulled open the deck hatch and shined a light into the hold. It was stacked with bricks of plastic explosive.
“We can’t just leave this C4 in here. If they’re thinking of blowing up the locks, we have to stop them.”
Clark peered around my shoulder and into the hold. He let out a soft whistle. “That’s a lot of C4, but our instructions were to observe, not initiate contact.”
“We are well outside our mission parameters already,” I said. “I can’t, in good conscience, just let them blow up a lock. Sinking a ship in the lock is one thing, but are we really supposed to do nothing to stop them?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like anything about it. The whole thing smells bad to me.”
I checked our perimeter for anyone else approaching, but I saw no one.
“I need to tell you something that Diablo said to me before he jumped from the Huey.”
Clark had been counting detonators but stopped what he was doing and faced me. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
“He told me to forget about the locks and protect the bridge.”
Clark seemed to be considering what I’d said. He rummaged through a first aid kit and pulled out a package of smelling salts. He broke the vial and held it beneath the unconscious man’s nose, and slapped him awake.
“Welcome back, asshole. Does your hand hurt?”
The man looked at his demolished hand and let out several whimpers.
Clark uncuffed his right hand and grabbed his thumb with a pair of pliers from the toolbox. The man shuttered in terror and tried to pull away.
“Listen to me very closely,” Clark said. “You lied to us. You’re not planning to blow up the locks. You’re going after the bridge. Now you’re going to pay dearly for that lie.”
Clark planted his boot squarely in the man’s chest, forcing him back against the gunwale, then squeezed and twisted his thumb with the pliers.
He screamed in terror. “No! No! I did not lie. We are supposed to blow the locks. The others are going for the bridge, but not us. Please! I’m telling the truth. Please stop.”
Clark stopped twisting but continued applying pressure to the thumb, which was oozing blood from the torn flesh beneath the jaws of the pliers.
“How many teams are there?”
The man stared at the pliers and then spoke between each struggled inhale. “Two teams. Four men on each team. Please let me go. I will go far away, and you will never see me again. Please. I need a doctor. Please don’t kill me.”
“Oh, no. That’s not going to happen, Javi. If we let you go, you’ll tell your team leader all about us. We can’t have that. I’ve got a much better idea. Get on your feet. Now!”
He stumbled to his feet, knees trembling, and his face contorted in pain.
Clark dragged the man through the pilothouse and handcuffed his unbroken wrist to the wheel.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” said Clark. “You’re going to drive this boat into the ocean, and we’re going to sink
it. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to uncuff you before we sink it. That depends on how well you behave.”
The man’s body was trembling, and he’d stopped sweating. His body was in the early stages of what would become severe shock.
“I think we’d better give him something to sit on. He’s not going to stay on his feet much longer,” I said, sliding a stool toward the helm.
Clark dug through the first aid kit and found a vial of morphine. He injected the man with a partial dose to ease some of the pain he was experiencing.
“I’ll cast off and follow about three minutes behind,” I said.
I left Clark and Javier aboard the workboat and leapt back to the bank. The crew had used a small Danforth anchor on a short section of rode to secure the workboat to the muddy bank. After working the anchor free, I laid it back aboard the metal deck. I tried to give it a shove away from the bank, but instead of moving the boat, my feet sank into the mud. The engines fired, and I watched the already murky water boil with mud as Clark backed the heavy boat from its hiding spot.
I was pleased to find my boat still where I’d left her. Javier’s arrival had caused me to wonder how many more of his crew might be lurking about. After replacing the coil wire, the engine purred at the touch of the key, and I slowly backed out of the slough.
Traffic in the canal was picking up, and I was thankful to see dozens of boats of every description going about their business. The more boats there were to see, the less chance anyone would remember ours following a workboat out of the canal and into the Pacific.
We settled into a nice pace of about twenty knots as we headed under the Bridge of the Americas. I wondered if Javier was still conscious or if the morphine had sent him back to his favorite spot in dreamland.
After an hour at twenty knots, we were in a hundred twenty feet of water, just east of Bona. I brought the RHIB alongside the workboat, tied her loosely to the starboard hip, and hopped aboard.
Just as I’d suspected, Javier was sound asleep with blood still oozing from his battered, swollen left hand.
“He made it to the bridge, and then he melted,” said Clark.
I didn’t envy the next twenty-four hours of Javi’s life, and especially the next fifteen minutes of it.
“Let’s cut the hoses and get out of here.”
Clark turned to the radar screen. “Fortunately, there’s no one around, so we may be able to pull this off without any witnesses.”
I pointed to our captive. “Except for him.”
“Yeah, except for him,” Clark sighed.
We moved Javier back to the rear of the pilothouse and re-cuffed his right hand to a pipe before we headed through the hatch into the engine room.
Just like the rest of the boat, the engine room was a mess. Oil and grease covered every surface, and the twin diesels were hardly recognizable; I couldn’t believe they ran.
I found the three bilge pumps and cut the discharge hose from each, while Clark made sure all of the thru-hull seacocks were open.
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said.
Clark cut four hoses, and I sliced three. The bilge of the old workboat started filling up with seawater, and the bilge pumps got to work doing what they were designed to do. Though without their discharge hoses, they were swimming against the current and simply circulating filthy seawater within the boat. None of it was being pumped overboard. We headed back up the ladder to the pilothouse.
“I’ve got an idea.” I rummaged through the first aid kit for another pack of smelling salts.
Once I found what I was looking for, I took a quick peek back toward the engine room, glad to see the water rising quicker than I’d anticipated. I wanted to get the old boat to the bottom as fast as possible without gathering any unwanted attention.
“Check the painter line. I want to make sure we’ve got a ride out of here when this thing falls out from under us,” I said.
Clark loosened the painter and returned to the pilothouse. “It’s good,” he said.
The water continued to rise, and the main deck was soon awash with filthy seawater and what had been the contents of the bilge.
“I guess it’s time to wake up our friend.”
I broke the capsule of ammonia and waved it under Javier’s nose. He shook his head and furrowed his brow as he tried to piece together the scene that was unfolding around him.
With his left hand, he pressed against the deck and tried to raise his head out of the water, then let out an agonizing cry as the pain rifled through his arm. Falling back to the deck, he thrashed about until Clark finally grabbed his collar and pulled him to a sitting position.
The water was almost knee deep to me and shoulder deep to Javi, who was sitting on the deck. His eyes were growing larger by the minute.
“Well, Javi, I guess you’ve lost what little usefulness you had to us. Oh, by the way, we’re in about forty meters of water. Enjoy your dive.”
With that, Clark and I turned to slosh our way out of the pilothouse.
Javier screamed and pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything! Everything! Please, I’m begging you!”
My plan had worked. I’d established my willingness to be cruel, and there was no question in Javier’s mind that I would stop at nothing to get the information I wanted. Sometimes it isn’t easy getting a man’s full attention, but I had Javi’s.
“Oh,” I began, “so, you do know more.”
“Yes, yes! I know everything. Remove the handcuffs, please. I’ll tell you everything!”
I patted my pockets. “Hmm, now where is that handcuff key?”
“Please, señor. Please!”
I pulled the key from my pocket as the water reached Javier’s chin. He was on his knees on the deck, pulling hard against the handcuff around his right wrist.
I held the key inches from his face and whispered, “If you refuse to answer anything, or if you lie about anything, there will be no more warnings. Do you understand?”
He nodded in exaggerated, terrified motions. “Yes, yes. Just get me out of here!”
With the water continuing to rise in conjunction with Javier’s degree of panic, I leaned toward his right hand and aimed the key for the tiny hole in the handcuff. At that instant, the workboat rolled violently to port, and I stumbled backward, catching myself against the chart table.
Sickened by what I had just felt happen in my left hand, I stared into my empty palm where the handcuff key had been an instant before. Javier’s eyes widened in horror, and I fell to the deck, feeling for the tiny key among the piles of floating debris and garbage.
Javier started to pray, and Clark started to curse. The water was well past Javier’s chin, and he was craning his neck to keep his nose above the surface. Clark leapt across me as I frantically continued to feel for the key. The gunwales of the deck disappeared beneath the waves, and I dived through the water, continuing my frantic search for the key. The salt water and debris made it useless for me to try opening my eyes, but I continued my search. The panic rose in my chest as I thought about what Javier was experiencing. I could stand up, get in my boat, and motor away, but he was destined for a watery, terror-filled dive to his death.
When I’d used every ounce of oxygen left in my lungs, I burst upward through the surface to see Clark standing over Javier with a fire axe raised high over his head. I shook the water from my face and tried to piece together the scene unfolding in front of me. Clark powered downward, slicing through the air and water with the heavy axe. Javier screamed a gurgling cry and turned away, forcing his head beneath the surface of the dirty water.
As the axe hit its mark, Clark dived beneath the surface and slid the handcuff from the pipe he’d just severed, then pulled Javier back to the surface with the handcuffs dangling from his right wrist. Javier was sobbing and still praying.
By the time we made it to our boat, all that was visible of the workboat were the lights and radar antenna. Clark shoved Javier aboard as the painter line came taught and
began to pull at the bow of our boat. I drew Anya’s knife from its scabbard on my belt and sliced the line before it could force the bow of the RHIB beneath the surface.
I didn’t know why I’d brought her knife with me. After discovering it sticking out of Michael Anderson’s back on Cumberland Island, I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. Was I subconsciously clinging to Anya by refusing to ignore the single piece of material evidence that proved she was still alive? I stared at the glistening blade and black onyx handle against my greasy palm. I pictured the knife sinking through the depths and coming to rest in the sand beside the workboat on the bottom of the sea beneath me, but I couldn’t open my hand. I couldn’t let it go.
We climbed aboard, caught our breath, and wiped the salt water from our faces.
“Well, that got interesting,” said Clark.
Javier was lying on the deck. His chest was heaving, and whispered prayers were still escaping his trembling lips.
He stared up at me. “Who are you?”
I spat a piece of debris from the corner of my mouth. “Believe it or not, we’re the good guys.”
15
Domino Theory
We brought the RHIB up on plane and headed for the protected inlet and beach on the northwest side of Bona. The seas were two to three feet, but our boat continued to impress. It cut through the waves and made over forty knots. It wasn’t a comfortable ride, but I was thankful for Pablo’s contribution to our mission.
We made the beach at high tide and made a call to Leo.
“We’ve got a gift for you. Can you meet us at the cove on the northwest shore?”
“A gift? What do you mean, a gift?”
“Just get here ASAP,” I said, and ended the call.
The Huey was soon hovering over the beach and blowing sand everywhere. I don’t know how he did it, but Leo put the chopper on the ground between two stands of trees with less than two feet of clearance on either side. I could make a helicopter fly in the direction I wanted, and I could put it on the ground as long as there wasn’t a tree or telephone pole in sight, but I’d never have skills like Leo.