Castigo Cay: Part Three
In the afternoon, the GPS chart plotter in the pilothouse let us know we were nearing the Castigos, and I prepared the Raven UAV. It had a five-foot wingspan and an electric motor. The mini-drone broke down into its major components, and they fit into the Raven's own hard plastic case. Nick was visibly pleased when he saw the wings and fuselage emerge from the case. Our technical assets seemed to give him increasing confidence. I told him that I'd thought he was psychic the night before when he'd called Rebel Yell an aircraft carrier.
The Raven was painted flat off-white, with its battery and camera housed inside what looked like a flattened football. The one-piece wing unit was attached to the top of the "football." A backward-facing pusher propeller extended rearward from the electric motor, which was located just beneath the middle of the uni-wing. This rear position protected the prop and motor during hard landings on the Raven's blunt nose. A long, skinny fuselage stalk extended from the bottom of the "football," and at its end was a conventional-looking tail assembly, with a rudder and elevators.
Actual military Ravens came equipped with infrared night cameras, as well as a color day camera. The IR technology wasn't available on the black-market Raven I had bought (at least not at a price I could pay), but I didn't need it for my purposes. Without the weight of the IR camera, my Raven was able to climb to over 2,000 feet above ground level. It could fly as fast as sixty miles per hour, and was controllable at a range of ten miles from the ground control unit. On the negative side, my battery packs were not holding a full charge anymore, and the Raven would have no more than forty minutes of flying time.
We lowered the foresail, the big white Dacron sail that runs up the back of the foremast. This sail had full-length fiberglass battens running horizontally from the mast track back to the trailing edge of the sail, so when it came down it didn't whip or flog but was easily gathered and lashed to the boom. This cleared the area between the masts for launching the drone, and slowed our speed from seven to five and a half knots. We were still well balanced, with the big mainsail over the pilothouse and cockpit, and the two overlapping jibs extending from the foremast out to the bowsprit.
Even with the inflatable boat stowed between the masts, there was still a five-foot-wide space on the side deck for launching the UAV. With about twenty knots of wind coming across the port bow, it was easy to launch the Raven. I just held the plane's fuselage over my head and into the wind while Victor started the electric motor with the remote control ground unit. When the engine was humming and the propeller was a blur, I heaved the UAV out like a quarterback throwing a football.
Victor was better than I was at manually flying the Raven by the remote controls, and he really enjoyed it, so that was his job. He established flight control immediately, steadied it out, and began its ascent under visual direction. The R/C ground unit had a small screen showing the incoming video, a keypad, and a toggle stick for flying the bird visually. When we launched the Raven, the Castigo Cays were five miles away to our southeast, no more than an eyelash on the horizon. Once the plane had gained a few hundred feet of altitude, Victor switched over to automatic control and sent the Raven climbing to its predetermined GPS coordinates above the cays. He then handed the R/C ground unit over to me.
On this tack Rebel Yell was heeled over to starboard, so I sat on the higher port-side deck, with my back leaning against the inflatable's side tube like a comfy sofa and the ground unit on my lap. The Raven climbed through a thousand feet and headed toward Castigo Cay, showing just blue ocean beneath it on the screen. The course heading, altitude and other flight data were superimposed over the top of the video image in white letters and numbers. Victor sat next to me on my right and Nick was on my left, both of them also watching the small screen.
The Raven was at two thousand feet by the time the western sandbar island appeared on the screen. I'd memorized the details of the Castigos from Nick's chart and soon recognized the comma-shaped main island. From the initial run-in heading, it looked like a tadpole swimming north, toward the screen's left. The sun was behind us to the west, so the shallow water around the island appeared transparent, with no reflected glint or dazzle. From seven football fields straight up, every detail down to individual palm trees and shrubs was visible. In the water, every reef and coral head was revealed, as were several old shipwrecks. Above water, the hulk of a small ship or fishing trawler was resting just off the rocky island north of Castigo Cay. It had plowed head-on into the land, and was stuck there until eternity converted it into a rusty stain on the coral.
But I didn't care about the wrecks. I cared only about the motor yacht anchored in the small harbor that until recently had been a landlocked salt pond. Topaz was there--Nick hadn't been telling tall tales. When the megayacht became visible, he nudged me and said, "What did I tell you!" The 120-foot vessel was easily identifiable. The big white inflatable was pulled up on the beach on the east side of the basin. Topaz's lower transom was open above the full-width swim platform like a garage door. This was where modern megayachts usually stored their big tenders, so they could conveniently be launched and recovered by rolling them out and winching them back in. This was also where their jet skis and other water toys were normally kept.
Above the dinghy garage in the middle of the aft deck was a circular jacuzzi, a detail that had escaped my notice until seeing Topaz from directly above. It was full of water, glittering in the sun like a diamond on the tan deck. I wondered if Cori had taken a dip in it yet, and if so, with whom. I knew from several memorable experiences that almost nothing was guaranteed to put Cori in the mood for love like a warm soak in a bubbling hot tub, and my jealous anger took flight. If the Raven had had a missile to drop, I would have used that leering "O" for my aiming point.
Forward and above the aft deck was the superstructure, with a super deck half the length of the hull. The forward end of the super deck consisted of rakishly slanted and darkly tinted pilothouse windows. I'd been on a few megayachts, and inside those tinted windows their bridges were as modern as those on the Navy's newest destroyers. Above the super deck was a rearward slanting arch, with satellite communication domes and other antennas taking up every foot of space. Above them all, a radar was turning in endless circles. Hawser lines extended out from the bow and the stern to the land. No pier or dock had been built, at least not yet. Topaz was the biggest vessel that would ever be able to use the little custom-made harbor. There was just enough room in the basin for the vessel to turn around, working both engines and the bow thruster and using the lines ashore.
As far as modern megayachts went, Topaz was not extraordinary. Maybe twenty years ago anything over 100 feet was considered mega, but 50 meters, or 165 feet, was coming to be considered the new bar. Some were over 300 feet long, but these "hyperyachts" were extremely limited in the number of desirable ports and anchorages they could use. Worldwide, there were over seven thousand private yachts greater than a hundred feet in length, and Richard Prechter could no doubt afford a bigger one. But anything larger than Topaz wouldn't be able to enter the basin we were studying. At 120 feet, she was sized just right: big and fast enough to race over the open ocean from Florida in almost any weather, but small enough to enter his own private harbor, four hundred miles away on Castigo Cay.
Using Topaz as a reference, I estimated that the original shallow salt pond had been nearly three hundred feet in diameter, like a big eyeball in the head of the tadpole-shaped island. The northern half of the pond had been dredged to eight or ten feet, judging by the color. Most of it was still very shallow. In the Bahamas, the crystal-clear water acted as a light filter, darkening with greater depth. A foot or two of water over sand appeared from above as pure white. The water then ran the blue-green spectrum from lime to turquoise to azure to sapphire to indigo as it grew deeper.
The unusual paint scheme of Topaz now made perfect sense. Instead of the typical blinding white hull and deck of most megayachts, her hull and superstructure were pale turquoise, her teak decks the color of light sandalwood. Back in George Town, I had thought that the paint scheme was somewhat unusual, while still pleasant to the eye. Now I could see that it was more than a matter of aesthetics. Topaz was subtly camouflaged to blend in with the shallow Bahamian waters when observed from the very high altitude of passenger jets and military aircraft. The camouflage was not effective, though, at hiding it from the Raven's eye just two thousand feet above.
A new channel about a hundred feet in length and fifty wide had been blasted through the northwest shoreline of Castigo Cay, to connect the landlocked salt pond to the shallow lagoon separating the four cays. North of Castigo Cay was a rocky cliff-edged island a quarter the size of the main island. Deep water led in a winding path from the new yacht basin north around the top of Castigo Cay, and then east into the open Atlantic. This deep-water passage was twisting and constricted, but usable by a vessel the size of Topaz if it had twin screws or water jets, and a bow thruster to assist in maneuvering. In places, the channel leading from the basin appeared natural, with the sides changing depth gradually, according to the water's color. In other places, the deep blue was straight, symmetrical, and steep-sided, evidence of recent dredging or blasting.
Observing from the Atlantic, a mariner would see only a wild coast of cliffs, bluffs, rocks, and small sandy beaches, all pounded by surf and guarded by offshore reefs and pinnacle rocks. If they were not enough of a deterrent, the shipwrecked coastal freighter would serve as a final warning. In a thousand years, no sailor would suppose that a safe deepwater channel led from the Atlantic around the top of Castigo Cay and into a protected harbor. From the ocean, the narrow cut would appear to be only a cleft in an unbroken rocky cliff. No mariner would ever risk getting close enough to that fatal shore to see the opening and wonder if it led to a safe harbor.
Southeast of the yacht basin was a scattering of trucks and trailers, a backhoe digger, a few shipping containers, piles and pallets of construction material, and what looked like a gray mobile home. Of particular interest to me was a pair of tanker trailers, small ones like those we had towed behind military vehicles all over Iraq and Afghanistan. One was probably diesel fuel for the equipment and the generators, and the other probably contained potable water. I recognized a circular patch of blowing scrub: camouflage netting. Evidently a construction project was ongoing at Castigo Cay, and some of it was meant to be hidden from aerial surveillance.
The normal practice was to use military-surplus landing craft to bring in building supplies and workers. This was standard operating procedure in the Bahamas, where the owners of flat-bottomed landing craft did a brisk business catering to the construction whims of millionaires. There was no other way to deliver a first-world level of luxury to an uninhabited island hundreds of miles from Florida. Four hundred miles from the nearest Home Depot, it was slow and cumbersome, but effective in the end.
All of this imagery was being recorded on the UAV's ground control unit, and I could study it in detail later after loading it onto my laptop, with its larger screen. I was searching for only one thing, one person: Cori Vargas. But nobody was visible on the yacht.
The little Raven UAV did not have the ability to pan, tilt or zoom its camera. I could see only what was captured directly below it within a thousand-foot circle, which grew or shrank with the camera?s altitude. The picture jiggled as the Raven was buffeted by the gusty winds up at two grand. It was initially flying on a preprogrammed orbit around the cays, so I let it run its course and studied the rest of the islands.
The bluff on Castigo Cay ran along the east side facing the open ocean, and halfway down the island's length. On the Atlantic side, lines of white breakers marched in to crash against the cliffs and small beaches. Offshore reefs took away some of their punch. The long hill flattened out toward the tail of the tadpole, again in accordance with the chart. To the south across a narrow and shallow inlet was a separate island half the size of Castigo Cay, but it was flat, low and covered with thick forest. On Nick?s chart mangroves had been indicated, so this also fit with what we expected.
The Raven continued its clockwise circuit around the cays, next flying northward above the sand bar island that protected the western side of the Castigos. Ocean currents off-shore on the western side of the long sandy key left a corduroy ripple pattern in the underwater sand. Pale turquoise water filled the area between the four cays, along with a sprinkling of black coral heads, brown reefs and deeper blue pools and pockets.
I studied the area around the vehicles and construction equipment, and noticed four people trudging toward the long hill against the Atlantic. I examined them carefully, wishing that I could zoom in the camera's lens, but soon satisfied myself that they were all men. They were too tiny when seen from two thousand feet up to notice particular details other than shape and the color of their clothing, but I could tell they were male, not female.
I redirected the Raven with typed commands, putting it into a new, tighter orbit over the northern end of Castigo Cay, with the yacht basin as the pivot. The group of four men appeared doubled in size by their shadows on the white sand. Soon they were standing along the top of the bluff, east of the basin. I imagined that they were discussing some upcoming construction project; what else would men be talking about on a barren island near idle construction equipment?
They walked partway downhill toward the Atlantic and then, one at a time, disappeared from view. The Raven was to their west when they disappeared, and when it next orbited around to the east there was no building or structure or cave visible, only a line of deep shadow across the ocean side of the bluff. That was a puzzle I could solve later, when reviewing the flight video after transferring it to my laptop.
I looked again at the megayacht, which still appeared deserted. Then I saw movement on the aft deck, a lemon-colored dot. It hit me like an electric shock--Cori often wore a floppy yellow hat, a wide-brimmed sun hat that could be rolled up for easy packing. It couldn't be a coincidence. She had gone aboard Topaz the day before, and now someone aboard was wearing a big yellow hat. I felt a jolt of recognition, combined with joy at seeing her alive, some fear for her safety, and more than a little jealousy.
Despite my worst fears, Cori wasn't chained up in a brig or being whipped with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Far from it. She was walking about, free and easy, on a millionaire's yacht. Well, good for her. I supposed that Richard Prechter had made a side trip to check the status of the projects he was overseeing on "his" island, prior to returning to Miami. He was probably one of the men on the other side of the bluff.
There didn't appear to be anything problematic happening on Castigo Cay, except for some questionable dredging and construction in a marine wildlife sanctuary. But so what? If Richard Prechter had government permission to do it, what business was it of mine? I typed a new command and directed the Raven to descend to only 1,400 feet. This was a little riskier. The drone could be seen, under certain circumstances, but I wanted a better look at the person I believed to be Cori. As the UAV descended in a slow corkscrew spiral, the view of Topaz slowly rotated, showing her from different sides. Cori was wearing her red bikini, the same one she'd worn while I scraped barnacles the day before. This time she was wearing the bikini's high-cut bottom, without the pareo knotted around her hips. She was standing near the end of the aft deck, facing east toward the bluffs. I idly wondered if she was going to take a dip in the jacuzzi while the other crew-members were ashore.
Or perhaps Cori and Prechter were alone on the yacht, and he would shortly be joining her in the hot tub while I watched them from above like a high-flying voyeur. Maybe he had sent his men ashore on some menial task so that he and Cori could have some quality private time together. I hoped not, and my jealous anger spiked again. I tried to reconcile the placid scene unfolding below me with Nick's story of seeing a girl running along the top of the bluff waving her dress over her head. I wondered what Victor and Nick were thinking as they leaned in to stare at the screen on my lap. I was sure that Victor recognized the yellow dot that was Cori's sun hat, but he said nothing.
Then two other men appeared from beneath the overhanging roof at the forward end of the aft deck. The men split apart and approached Cori from both sides. She backed away and was soon in a corner against the fantail's railing. One man lunged for her and she slid away, but by then the other one was behind her. He seized her around her waist and lifted her up, thrashing and kicking. In the melee, her yellow hat flew away and landed in the water behind the boat.
The second man worked in close, avoiding her kicks, and suddenly grabbed her legs around the knees, clamping them together. Then she was lifted up and carried forward along Topaz's aft deck until she disappeared inside, beneath the super deck. The images on the screen were miniscule and I couldn't see her face, but after living with her for six months, her probable facial expressions were clear in my mind. In my imagination, I could even hear her screams of fear and outrage. Cori had just been assaulted, grabbed, tackled, and bodily dragged away by two men! My emotions switched from jealousy to complete fury in seconds.
Cori must not have had permission to wander around the exterior decks by herself. Perhaps this strict policy was the result of an escape attempt by the girl that Nick had seen two weeks earlier? Perhaps Nick's girl slipped over the side and swam the short distance to shore before making a run for it? Perhaps Cori had been locked in a room inside the yacht but had managed to escape temporarily. Or perhaps she had simply violated a warning not to go outside on deck. I had no way to know exactly why what happened had happened, but I had seen her forcibly dragged back inside the yacht by two men. Of that I had no doubt.
The Raven had twelve minutes more battery time, but I saw no reason to continue the surveillance. I had confirmed that Cori was aboard Topaz and under physical duress. That was all I needed to know. I punched in the return-to-base command and redirected the drone to fly to our new position, now west of the Castigos. Tran and Victor hauled the recovery net up between the two masts, above the inflatable and the foresail boom.
Once the inbound UAV was in visual range, I handed Victor the ground unit and he took over manual flight control. He flew the drone downwind of us to our starboard side, executed a racetrack turn while dropping its altitude, and brought it straight in to us. The Raven flew thirty feet above our heads between the two masts like a field goal splitting the uprights. It became entangled in the loose netting, the propeller and the motor stopped, and we lowered it to the deck.
I had seen Cori aboard Topaz, under physical coercion by two male crewmembers. I had seen four other men ashore. The temptation was strong to turn Rebel Yell toward the Castigos, launch my Avon, and go in with guns blazing.
But I didn't. The geography of the Castigos would not permit a daylight attack without our being seen. It wouldn't work, I thought, so I stuck to my evolving plan. We kept on course and sailed past the cays, just another sailboat on an inter-island trip.
In the pilothouse, my passive Collision Avoidance Radar Detector system was chirping away, so I knew that their surface search radar was turning and burning. As long as our radar blip was progressing on a straight line between San Salvador and Mayaguana Island, now sixty miles to our southeast, any Topaz crewmember keeping radar watch would not pay us any heed.
We sailed onward, and when we were miles over the horizon from Castigo Cay and beyond their radar range, we turned slightly to starboard. This course adjustment took us toward our assault anchorage twenty miles past the Castigos, on the northeast corner of Acklins Island. My crew, plus Nick Galloway, sat in the pilothouse and studied the video after transferring it to my laptop. With each viewing we noticed more details, and we gradually formulated a flexible mission plan with several contingency options.
I wanted to go in after dark, with the element of surprise. Nick and I would go in tactically, heavily armed and on my terms, while Prechter and the Topaz crewmen were sleeping. It would be stupid to go blundering in half-cocked in broad daylight. We would return at night.
We made visual landfall of the northeast corner of Acklins Island just after five p.m. When we were about a mile out, we cranked up the diesel, headed into the wind, and doused all four sails. I'd visited Atwood Harbour before, and I had already loaded my old waypoints into Rebel Yell's GPS chart plotter. This allowed me to find the pass in the outer reef, with waves breaking over submerged coral only twenty yards off each side of our bow.
I steered by hand back in the cockpit, while Tran stood on the bow reading the water depths by eye and watching for coral heads. I made small steering adjustments based on his arm signals. Once past the reef, we motored into calm water and set the hook in twelve feet of clear water over sand.
Atwood Harbour had room for a dozen or more boats inside the sweep of its curving beach, but Rebel Yell had it to all to herself. No Bahamians lived in this isolated corner of Acklins Island. We were alone. The anchorage had storm protection from every direction except the northwest, but "Northers" were a wintertime phenomenon. In the prevailing summer trades from the southeast, Atwood Harbour was as calm as a pond. Normally this would be a time for relaxing after a good overnight offshore sail, but not tonight. Tonight we were going operational. Tran had already prepared a fish and rice stew, and we ate in the cockpit and the pilothouse, with bowls on our laps.
After dinner we watched the UAV video several more times on my laptop and laid our paper charts out on the pilot-house table. Victor hand-copied a larger chart of the Castigos, updating it with what we had seen from overhead.
As a former Army Ranger, Nick Galloway was accustomed to using surveillance video taken from drones in mission planning. Maps, charts, aerial imagery, radios and rifles: I could see that he was comfortable in this world. So far, I had no reason to regret inviting him aboard for the operation.
The seas between the Castigos and Acklins Island had not been bad, just long swells and almost no whitecaps. The radio forecast called for the easy summer trade winds to continue for a few more days at least. I decided to take my sixteen-foot Avon directly from Atwood Harbour across the twenty open-ocean miles to the Castigos. In the prevailing conditions, the rigid-hulled inflatable could make the trip in an hour or a little more. GPS made navigation simple, and the inflatable would be invisible to the surface radar turning atop Topaz. With Rebel Yell safely at anchor instead of directly participating in the mission, a major worry was removed from my mind. The Castigos had a deservedly bad reputation for snaring vessels on her reefs. And when I engage in risky business, I prefer my floating home to be safely out of the line of fire.
The planning complete, it was time to break out the gear. This was going to be a recon mission and then a rescue. We were not going to take body armor, but we were taking almost everything else. I wondered about the wisdom of leaving body armor out of the inventory. I didn't want the weight and bulk of armor for what was essentially a maritime operation. Drowning would kill you as dead as a bullet.
Anyway, I was never much for going places where full battle rattle was the uniform of the day. There tended to be too much metal in the air to be healthy. Stealth and concealment were more my style. Hit 'em where they ain't expecting it. In and out. Insertion and extraction. Go light and go fast.
Most of Castigo Cay was open sand, or sand beneath scrubby bushes and palms, so we both wore sets of my old USMC desert digital camouflage uniforms, with the eagle, globe and anchor of the Marine Corps embossed on the left pocket. I laughed about the Army Ranger becoming an honorary jarhead, and Nick laughed too. Nervous laughter, but what the hell.
We left after sunset. The handheld GPS fit into a bracket on the Avon's plywood console. Our weapons and other gear were stowed in whitewater rafting bags and lashed to rings on the sides and front of the Avon?s center console. We ran without any lights showing on the inflatable.
My single-tube PVS-14 NOD gave me night vision in my left eye. I had put a flip-up mount for it on a hockey helmet that I had painted a flat brown. The modified hockey helmet was much lighter than a military K-pot, and added flotation in water instead of dead weight. The NOD had no magnification, for the widest field of view. I turned the gain down to give me just enough light to see the ocean. This way I retained some binocular vision with my night-adapted right eye.
Once offshore, I found the best speed for the waves: about fifteen knots, almost twenty miles an hour. Nick and I both stood behind the center console, using our knees to absorb the pounding. We wore cheap green rain slickers to ward off some of the spray, but we expected to get soaking wet and we did, despite the short Plexiglas windscreen at the front of the console. I stood on the right side to steer and control the throttle; Nick was to my left, hanging onto the grab bar. The compass and VHF radio were on his side of the console.
You couldn't sit when occasionally flying off waves and slamming back down. Twenty miles an hour doesn't sound like much--unless you are in a sixteen-foot inflatable on the ocean crossing a moderate swell. At night, with only starlight for illumination, and night vision in only one eye. It was harder for Nick, who couldn't see the waves and couldn't predict the next jolt.
We could see the electronic outline of the Castigos on the GPS's screen. I slowed down when we were a mile south of the small mangrove island that was our initial destination. The NOD allowed me to find the channel between the mangrove island and the long sand bar to its west. I pushed the console's toggle switch and raised the outboard motor until the prop was barely submerged, but we still churned up some sand.
We proceeded up the side of the overhanging mangrove jungle, feeling our way along and looking for an opening into the trees. The seventy-horse Evinrude was just idling; it was quieter than the sounds of the surf and the trade wind blowing through the mangroves. After a few minutes and more bumps and scrapes, I killed the motor and raised the prop all the way out of the water. I used a pole I kept on the boat to move us along in the shallows while I studied the jungle close by our right side.
We were almost at the top of the island when I found a creek opening. Beneath the mangrove branches was an unbroken wall of blackness to the unaided human eye, but it was a world of subtle shadows in my green left eye. The creek was about ten feet wide at its mouth, with branches merging overhead to almost block out the stars. These hidden creeks are one of the reasons I love mangroves. You can take an inflatable inside of mangroves and it will disappear completely from any possible observation.
The other thing I appreciate about mangrove swamps is that practically everybody else absolutely loathes and fears them, particularly at night. They are a snake- and insect-filled hell, with tightly spaced trees over a labyrinth of roots extending in all directions in an intertwined lattice. These thousands of root arches support the trees in the tidal zone. Walking through a mangrove forest--or swamp, if you prefer--is nearly impossible. You have to place your feet on thin, slippery roots that are either in the air or in the water, depending on the height of the tide. If it is extremely difficult going for a former Marine like me, it's virtually impossible for just about anybody else. The hidden creeks really make the only passable inroads through them.
We tied the Avon between trees and suited up in our combat gear. I broke a single green chem-lite; otherwise, Nick would not have been able to see even the hands in front of his face. I left the chem-lite on the boat, in case my night vision device malfunctioned later. It would help us find the boat in the blackness if we had to return later tonight using only our unassisted eyes instead of my NOD.
One final touch was applying streaks of green and tan camouflage greasepaint to our faces and hands, squeezing it from the tubes and smearing it on by feel. I hadn't wanted to make the open ocean run from Acklins Island to Castigo Cay in camo face paint. If we needed to abort the mission, or if another vessel approached and put a spotlight on us, I wanted us to look as innocuous as possible. Nobody in camo face paint was up to any good, that was a given.
I carried my scoped bolt-action rifle slung over my back and the AK-47 on another sling hanging in front so that it was at the ready. Nick took the folding-stock pump shotgun, also with a sling to carry its weight and keep his hands free. I had my full-size Glock in a leg holster, and Nick had his .357 in another. Both of us carried plenty of ammo. We wore combat vests with ammo magazines and pouches, and lightweight boots to protect our feet. Under the tactical vests were green military inflatable vests, in case we fell into a deep hole while wading through the shallows. If we needed to swim, we had dive fins that would fit over our boots, with extra-long straps to secure them behind our ankles. For now, the fins were attached to our vests in the back, within reach.
When we were ready, we slipped from the Avon into the warm, hip-deep water of the mangrove creek, with me in front taking point. If Nick was going to have a problem, this would be the time. But he didn't; he stuck to me like a shadow, his fingertips brushing my shoulder. The chem-lite behind us provided enough illumination for my NOD as we waded through the water and muck. Looking out from the creek's mouth, I could see the water of the lagoon glowing in my NOD, the reflected light of individual stars making a pattern of bright green points on its surface.
After leaving the hidden creek, I stayed near the mangroves, keeping the lagoon to our left. It was slow going at first, with the muck trying to suck my boots off. At least it wasn't pluff mud, like back in South Carolina around Parris Island. If it had been that kind of quicksand muck, we'd have had to swim over it in the yard of salt water on top. You could sink up to your hips in that oozy stuff, effectively trapping you. Fortunately, this bottom felt more like wet cement. Our boots sank in only a few inches, and we were able to churn through it.
At the north end of the mangrove island we paused while I studied the narrow ocean cut separating us from the southern tip of Castigo Cay. This pass was a twenty-foot-wide inlet, with a strong tide running into the lagoon between the two isles. In the bright green world of my PVS-14, the flowing salt water, full of living bioluminescence, looked like something from a sci-fi movie. Like the star points reflecting off the glowing translucent water of the calm lagoon, it was a scene that probably not one in a million humans had ever viewed or even imagined. In a strange and perhaps misplaced way, I felt fortunate to be there, just to experience the other-worldly uniqueness of it.
We had studied the aerial video from the Raven UAV carefully, and I surmised that the inlet was scoured sand on the bottom and no more than a few feet deep. I stared at Nick with my bright left eye. I could see him clearly, but I knew that with only starlight for illumination, I was just a dark shadow to him. As we had planned, he hooked his left fingers into the back of my vest and we started across.
The current was very strong, maybe three or four knots racing against our legs to the left, and difficult to walk against. If I stepped into a deep hole, we'd go over and be swept into the lagoon. This didn't worry me much, because everything on us was waterproof and we had our inflatable vests and fins just in case. It would be an inconvenience, nothing more--unless Nick panicked. But we kept our feet under us, forded the race, climbed the sandy bank on the opposite side, and we were on Castigo Cay.
Seen through my NOD, the breaking Atlantic waves were bright explosions. On the other side of the sandy point, the lagoon was undulating green Jell-O. I saw a creature zoom by like a glowing torpedo, surrounded by and trailing green sparkles: a shark or a porpoise entering the lagoon through the pass we had just waded. The combination of starlight, glowing water and a night vision device created a show that made me want to stop and stare in awe.
My plan was to patrol northward along the ocean side, just above the surf zone. Then we'd climb the dune hill that formed the spine of Castigo Cay and get into a position where we could conduct surveillance on Topaz. The yacht would occupy most of the dredged basin at the north end of the half-mile-long cay. When I judged the time was right, I'd leave Nick in a good location a few hundred yards from the yacht, proned out beneath cover with my Savage .308 rifle. At that range, using that rifle with its ten-power scope, Nick would be able to provide me with effective covering sniper fire. Three hundred yards was point-blank for that rifle. No holdover. We had a pair of walkie-talkie radios for comms between us, using ear buds.
A lot depended on the lighting on Topaz, and around the little harbor. The sniper rifle's optical scope had an illuminated reticle, but I couldn't attach my PVS-14 to the rifle for true night vision. It just wasn't set up for it, and besides I needed the NOD for my own part of the mission. To be effective on overwatch, Nick would need some light around his potential targets. There would be no moonlight at all tonight. If Topaz was completely unlit, I would have to wait until first light for the final attack, in order to benefit from Nick's long reach and suppressive fire.
The plan was simple. The geography was plain in my mind after studying the Raven UAV video. I would sneak down to the single construction trailer near the dredged basin, check it for occupants, and either restrain or kill anybody I found sleeping inside. I wouldn't know which way that would go until I was there, but I couldn't afford to leave a potential reaction force behind me. If the trailer was empty, that would be best, because I didn't want to hurt any uninvolved parties. But I was going to find Cori and we were both going to get away. That was my bottom line.
When I reached the edge of the little harbor, I'd put on my fins and slowly swim across to Topaz on my back, with just my nose and eyeballs above the water. I would be camouflaged with a palm frond over my face to look like drifting flotsam, in case anyone was looking, which was unlikely after midnight on such a dark night. Then I'd climb up the stern of Topaz, enter the yacht through the open boat garage built into its transom, search the vessel and kill or incapacitate anybody who stood between Cori and me. I'd use the AK-47, the Glock 17 or my Ka-bar knife, depending on what I found as I crept through the yacht. If nobody woke up or got in my way, great. But I was going to get Cori, and I wasn't going to debate with anybody about the finer points of her custodial arrangement.
Nick would be up on the hill with the scoped rifle, my guardian angel in case anybody needed shooting that I couldn't reach with my AK or my Glock. If Topaz was unlit, I would wait until first light to enter the yacht and begin my search. I'd find Cori and release her, and we'd swim across the basin and rejoin Nick. I wanted him to be able to see well enough to distinguish his targets in case we had pursuers, or if anybody was firing at us from Topaz or from near the trailer. I didn't want him shooting Cori or me because he couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys in the dark.
We began to patrol up the eastern side of Castigo Cay, less than a half mile from our target. Nick was a natural at stealthy night movement. I could tell that he had not forgotten what he'd learned in Ranger training and in Afghanistan. We moved from cover to cover taking turns in little bounds. The terrain was sandy and sloping uphill to our left, partly covered in thick boxwood and myrtle. These were almost impossible to patrol through, but would be great for hiding under. Nettles and brambles ripped at our pants. We had to be careful not to fall as we sneaked along the broken boulders and small cliffs just above the surf zone. A broken leg or arm would not help us to accomplish our mission. Any sound that we made was more than covered by the steadily pounding waves.
After a quarter mile I found one of our key reference points gleaned from the Raven's aerial video: a V-shaped pair of palm trees leaning landward, pointing away from a small, rocky peninsula jutting out into the ocean. The wind made their husky fronds clatter as I huddled with Nick and communicated with him using standard military hand and arm signals. Though the surf masked any sound that we might have made, we were professionals and maintained our silence anyway. He signed back his understanding and I turned upslope, weaving a path between the heavy clumps of brush, climbing the loose sand. It brought back a hundred memories of doing the same thing in California, North Carolina and various other locations in the Caribbean and the Middle East. I'd never been on Castigo Cay in my life, but it was already familiar terrain after studying it through the Raven's eye.
Climbing that hill in low-slow gear, crouching and slithering up through the dense vegetation, I almost felt sorry for Richard Prechter and anybody else on this island who was not named Cori Elena Ferratti-Vargas. They just had no idea of what was creeping up over the berm toward them.
Before reaching the saddle-shaped ridgeline, I went down onto my belly, with both long guns slung across my back to keep them out of the sand. I wanted to crawl beneath the boxwood to take my first look at the yacht basin and eliminate even the smallest chance of skylining myself. I snaked under some low brush until the slope leveled out and I could see over to the western side of Castigo Cay.
I looked down at the newly dredged yacht basin.
Topaz wasn't there. I scanned the lagoon between the cays. Nothing! Topaz wasn't anywhere to be seen. Four hundred yards away the basin was empty, and Topaz was gone. And so, I presumed, was Cori. "Oh, shit!" I muttered aloud over the surf noise, and Nick low-crawled up beside me.
"What's the matter?" he whispered, knowing the situation had to be bad for me to blurt out loud so close to our target.
"The goddamn boat's gone, that's what the matter is! We're too late! Topaz is gone!" I hissed.
Lying prone beside me, Nick whispered, "What now?"
Leaning on my elbows, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Several deep breaths. "Well, we're here. We'll wait. Who knows, maybe they left Cori on the island. Maybe she's in that trailer down there, with some of the crew guarding her." Or maybe, I thought, she's just aboard Topaz, drinking champagne and screwing Richard Prechter's brains out on the way back to Miami. Or maybe she's already dead and she's been thrown to the sharks. A million fragmentary thoughts blasted around inside my cranium.
Nick spoke, and I refocused. "Are you going to go down anyway, after midnight like we planned?"
I thought about it. "No. Let's wait for dawn, unless we see some activity. If anybody is on the island, they'll be out-side moving around after daylight. If I go down there now and take anybody out, and Cori's not on the island--then that's just going to make it worse for finding her. Prechter will find out that somebody attacked his island, and he'll be on guard. That'll just make it harder to find her. Maybe impossible. We can't tip our hand."
So we waited, proned out on our bellies below the shrubs. We ate cold rations, sipped water, and waited. At least the steady ocean breeze flowing over the top of the sand ridge kept the mosquitoes and biting gnats away. My Savage bolt-action was set up beside me in position, with a round chambered and four more beneath it in the internal magazine and the bipod's legs extended beneath the barrel. My AK-47 was propped at a low angle against a branch of the boxwood, within easy reach but out of the sand. Both rifles were camouflaged with little pieces of brown netting and green rags to break up their distinctive outlines while we waited.
Nick managed to catch some Z's, but I couldn?t. I made periodic scans of the basin and the surrounding area with my NOD, but nothing changed as the minutes and hours crawled by. In the early pre-dawn Thursday morning, I took off my hockey helmet and put the night tube away in its case. In place of the plastic helmet I put on my floppy boonie hat, matching the one Nick was wearing. Looking around our position in the natural light, I could see that we were in one of the few boxwood thickets that curled up over the sand ridge, most of which was bare to the north and south of us. These hilltop shrubs were the reason we had chosen this spot for our observation post as we'd studied the Raven video.
About ten feet away to the left inside our little stand of boxwood, I spotted something peculiar: a straight-sided length of wood stuck into the ground. It was a yard or so long, like a piece of pallet wood or part of a packing crate. A human hand had placed it there. Sticking into the top end of the wood was a small nail. I crawled over to examine it more closely. The little plank was gray and smooth, like driftwood. Somebody had found it down by the beach, brought it up here, and stuck it into the sand in our little thicket of dry bushes. I pulled it out and crawled back to my position by the sniper rifle.
As it grew lighter, I was able to study the board in more detail. I turned it and detected a pattern on one side of the smooth wood. Suddenly it made sense. The 'pattern' was a few words, words that had been scratched into the wood with the rusty nail. The nail must have been pulled out of the board, to be used as a crude pen. I strained to read the scratchings in the growing light, turning it this way and that.
Letter by letter I deciphered the entire message:
HELP! / Bev. Clifton / kidnpd Nassau
Numbers were scratched after those words; I thought they read Mar 11 or 17, of that year. Nick was lying on his back with his hands folded across his chest and his gear for a pillow, but now he was awake with his eyes open. I showed him the plank. He sat up, read it, and then shook his head slowly. It was a triple confirmation, after his seeing the girl waving her dress and our seeing Cori being dragged inside Topaz yesterday. My final nagging shreds of doubt evaporated. Bev Clifton had probably climbed to this very spot for the same reasons that we had chosen it. It provided both concealment from observation and a good view of the surrounding island in most directions.
Nick studied the plank closely, turning it and examining the nail in particular. "Did you see these hairs? Long blond hairs. After she wrote her message, she must have stuck the nail in the end and twisted the thing around her hair to yank them out."
I saw the hairs and sighed. "That poor girl. She must have known she was doomed. The hair roots were for DNA, maybe. She probably figured she couldn't get away, not once she was up here and she could see how small the island was. She knew she couldn't get away, so all she could do was try to leave a sign, a marker."
Nick said, "You know, I really hate these guys now."
"I'll pack the board; we?ll take it out with us. At least we can let the Cliftons know what happened to their Bev."
A half hour after first light, we saw movement below. A door opened on the end of the trailer toward us, and a bushy-haired man came out wearing only striped boxer shorts. The trailer was less than three hundred yards from our position, so with the ten-power rifle scope I could see that it was the redhead from the beach on Great Exuma, the one who had carried Cori's bags to their white inflatable. He walked a short distance from the trailer, took a piss on the sand, then walked past pallets of construction materials and switched on a diesel generator. Then he went back inside the trailer. A few minutes after that a dark-haired man came out and headed for a blue porta-potty latrine, where he stayed for a few minutes before returning to their housing unit. Unfortunately, he wasn't Jolly Boy Trevor. He was nobody I recognized. Dark hair, long pants, a white jersey with blue sleeves.
The sun finally broke the horizon, but it was still obscured behind a ledge of clouds. A few minutes later came the second sunrise, when the sun emerged fiery orange into the sky. With the sun low behind us, there would be no revealing shine off our lenses. But even with a kill-flash on the end of my scope, I never took the chance. Hidden beneath the boxwood, we were invisible to the men below us, even if they looked directly at our position. Before us, the entire western side of the island was still in deep shadow.
At seven a.m., the ginger reappeared from the trailer, dressed in walking sandals, tan shorts, a green shirt and a ball cap. I studied him through my rifle's ten-power scope. He had a black MP-5 submachine gun on a sling hanging across his chest, and a wide web belt with a canteen on one side and a radio on the other. He walked counterclockwise around the shoreline of the yacht basin, all the way to where the new channel exited into the lagoon separating the four cays. After he chunked a few rocks into the cut, he began hiking clockwise around the top of Castigo Cay, staying close to the water.
The Dawn Patrol. He had probably drawn the short straw, or possibly he just enjoyed beachcombing before the heat grew oppressive. I could have dropped him anytime as I followed him with my crosshair. When he was at the very north end of the island, I lost him from sight behind the ridgeline. The entire island was only a half mile long, so a round trip might take him as little as twenty minutes if he knew the best paths. I whispered a new plan, and Nick smiled in agreement. In a few minutes we saw him again, walking down the beach toward us on the Atlantic side.
We slid back down the slope and found an ambush location along the shore just seaward of our observation post. There was a fifty-yard hollow crescent of beach between rocky outcroppings, with a rugged ten-foot cliff to landward. In some places the gray rocks were almost impassible on foot, and in others small boulders formed convenient steps down to the sand. I guessed that to patrol the shoreline, Red would alternate between hiking along the lip of the cliff, in places where the waves smashed directly against the rocks, and climbing down onto the sand where there was dry beach.
The tide was out, and the surf on this little stretch heaved over and rolled back, leaving a twenty-yard strip of pink coral sand. We crept along the cliff's edge until we reached the north end of the beach. I stationed Nick behind a rock out-cropping shrouded by brush. Then I dropped down onto the sand at the base of the cliff and found a hiding spot in a vertical slot in the rock face. Whether Red stayed above on the rocks or climbed down to the beach, we'd have him either way. I placed both of my rifles and Bev Clifton's wooden stake in a small nook in the rocks beside me. The next phase was going to be better handled unencumbered.
I had a little time to wait, to look around and to remember. In the islands, these micro-beaches are as common as seashells. You could sail in the Bahamas for a thousand years and not see a fraction of them, and every one is as breathtakingly beautiful as any postcard, calendar photo or computer screensaver. Cori and I had walked and swum on dozens of isolated beaches like this one. She was in superb physical condition, from months of swimming, skin diving and windsurfing. Sometimes we found these little beaches while out snorkeling reefs. We would run the Avon up on the sand and have the beach to ourselves for as long as we wanted. We never saw another human footprint on these picnic forays. Cori went topless and sometimes bottomless as well on these secluded beaches, and along with collecting shells and drift-wood, spear fishing and exploring ruins and caves, love-making al fresco would usually be on our itinerary.
Not on this beach, not today. I put Cori out of my mind. A few minutes later Nick made a subtle clicking sound with his tongue, and I knew that Red was on his way. I tucked myself into my little alcove beneath the overhang, waiting. No matter where Red chose to climb down onto this beach, right here or further along, I'd be behind him and I'd have him. I heard his feet crunching along on the rocks before I saw him, and I heard him singing to himself. Up above, some pebbles slipped loose and bounded past me, announcing his arrival. Sideways toward the sea and just a few feet from my hiding place I saw a sandaled foot, toe in toward the cliff, and then two bare legs as he turned to jump the last five feet down onto soft sand.
He landed on all fours, but before he could raise himself I sprang onto his back and drove him face-first into the sand. His green GORP hat came loose and I grabbed a shock of red hair with my left hand, my knees straddled on either side of his back, pinning him down. My big Ka-bar fighting knife was in my right hand, but I didn't need it. He was in too much shock to resist, quivering in mortal fear.
Nick was above me, still up on the rock lip. He called down, "Need any help?"
"Nope, I've got this one," I said. Then I told Red, "Open your eyes and look at this blade. It's sharp enough to shave with. If you move a muscle without me telling you, I'm going to use it to cut your head off. Understand?" He nodded yes, and I slid my Ka-bar back into its sheath on my hip. Then I pulled a green triangular battle-dressing bandana from a leg pocket, stretched it around his eyes, and knotted it tightly in the back. Red was completely helpless, and at my mercy.
"Relax, just go limp," I ordered him, and then I pulled his polo shirt up over his shoulders and off. That done, I zip-tied his hands together behind his back. Zip ties are one of those little things that just naturally like to live on the straps of your combat vest, taking almost no space but always ready for a prisoner. Once his hands were secured I switched my position, sitting on his back facing the other way, pulled up one of his feet and then the other and unfastened his sandals. I tossed them up to Nick.
"Here's the new plan," I told him. "He went for a swim and he didn't come back. Lay it all out so it looks like he got undressed on purpose. Find a place up there that looks like a logical spot for him to leave his stuff." At high tide the surf would be all the way up to the rocks, and his clothes might be washed away before his friends could find them. Already the waves were rolling up to within a few yards. In a little while, our marks in the sand would be erased.
"Got it," Nick replied. "Good plan." I handed up Red's nine-millimeter MP-5 submachine gun, even though I was tempted to take it with me. Next went his web belt with the radio and the canteen. The radio was an ordinary palm-size marine VHF handheld. On such an isolated island it was all they needed for communication. Set on low power it would have enough range to cover the island and not much more.
I took the wallet out of his back pocket and flipped through his ID cards. His name was Archy Mildenhall, and his address was a post office box in North Miami. I replaced the cards in his wallet, put the wallet in his GORP hat, wrapped them both in his shirt, and tossed the bundle up to Nick. Finally, I rolled him on his side, unbuckled his pants belt, unsnapped his khaki cargo shorts, and pulled them down and off his legs, leaving him wearing only his boxers.
The idea was misdirection. If Red just went missing without a trace, there would be the thought that perhaps he had been attacked. After all, he had a radio to call for help and a submachine gun to defend himself. But if everything was left behind in neat piles, it would look as if he had decided to take a swim and had had the terrible misfortune to be caught in a rip current, or meet a shark, or step on something venomous and paralyzing. Maybe the early morning beachcomber had seen something of interest floating just a little way out, and had decided to swim out and retrieve it. The waves rushing over the little beach would soon erase our footprints and any sign of this struggle.
When Nick was finished, he gave a thumbs-up and I waved him down. Once he was on the beach, I asked him to fetch my rifles from their nook. I wanted to stay close by our prisoner and minimize the footprints. When I had my weapons again, I said, "Okay, Archy, we're going for a little stroll." I jerked him up onto his feet by his red hair and dragged him through foamy salt water that was knee deep when the waves rolled all the way in. Nick grabbed a stiff brown palm frond from the beach and whisked away our footprints from the rocks down to the water. We stayed in the wash zone and left no other prints.
Despite our current mission, I couldn't help but appreciate what a spectacular view this side of Castigo Cay presented, with its cliffs and bluffs, palm trees and sand dunes, unique little beaches between rocky points, and everywhere the deep blue Atlantic and the wind-blown surf. What well-connected multi-millionaire privacy freak wouldn't want to dynamite a yacht harbor and build a vacation hideaway here?
We hauled Archy along in the surf zone until we reached the inlet between Castigo Cay and the mangrove island. The tide was low and the pass was shallower than before. Archy, of course, had no idea of what was happening to him as he stumbled along through the water. My goal was to get him into the mangroves before his partner or partners missed him and came looking. We made it into our creek and found the Avon in short order. When we passed our waiting inflatable, I unslung my rifles and slipped them into the boat. I didn't need them for what was coming next. They would just get in my way and be coated with muck. I dragged Archy farther up the creek. It was fully daylight by now, but still very dim and gloomy beneath the thick canopy of mangrove branches and leaves.
There were a few feet of water between the mud and the mangrove trunks, but the tidal currents made weird channels and in many places the black mud was higher than the salt water. In these elevated areas were hundreds of baseball-size holes in the mud, randomly spaced just inches apart from each other. As we approached, crabs scuttled into their burrows, then re-emerged clicking and dripping after we passed. These ugly lopsided crabs had one tiny claw and one nearly the size of a Maine lobster's. Land crabs are voracious carrion eaters, prone to cannibalism if nothing else floats in on the tide.
Around a bend in the creek I found what I was looking for, a perfect corral for our prisoner. It was a mangrove tree a little apart from the others, with seven or eight roots joining into a single trunk about a foot above the salt water. The gently curved roots were the diameter of broomsticks, or perhaps a little thicker. I grabbed Archy by his thick red hair and shoved him underwater, forcing him down between two of the outward-arching roots. He came up gasping, sputtering and choking for breath, directly beneath the mangrove tree.
In a pouch on my combat vest I kept a fifty-foot wad of green parachute cord smaller than a plum. It had a hundred uses in the field, especially in jungle settings like this. I cut off a few feet with my knife, made a slipknot noose, dropped it over my prisoner's head, and secured it around his neck. Then I took the other end of the nylon cord and tied it around the mangrove trunk over his head and above the waterline. Roots extended out and down into the salt water in all directions around him, like cell bars. He would have to go underwater again to find a place where the roots were spread far enough apart for him to escape, but now that he was tied with the parachute cord, he couldn't lower himself enough to get out of his living prison.
Once he was secured, I pulled the wet green bandana blindfold off his face and let his surroundings sink in. It might have been more frightening to him if it had been nighttime, perhaps with a few candles placed on mangrove roots for effect. But at night he would not have been able to see the hundreds of land crabs, clicking and dripping and studying him very carefully with their beady black eyeballs on little stalks.
He was still paralyzed and incoherent with fear, so I needed to loosen him up a little.
I grinned at him and said, "Good morning, Archy. And how's your day been so far?"
"W-who are you p-people?" he said with an English accent. Or maybe it was Scottish, or even Irish; I'm not too good at guessing British accents. Especially not when the talker is blubbering in sheer terror while sitting in water up to his chin, looking out through a lattice of mangrove roots, with a paracord noose tied around his neck.
"We're friends of Cori Vargas. So, Archy--how is Cori?"
His eyes rolled, staring up at my camo-painted face, and then he looked past me to Nick, who still held onto his pump-action shotgun. Archy was trying to find some point of reference, something familiar and comforting to hold onto. There was nothing. For the first time, I was able to study him closely. He was older than me, maybe forty, and had close-set blue eyes paler than mine, a bent nose, acne scars, and crook-ed yellow teeth.
At last he found his voice and stammered, "This can't... you can't... no, no, there's no way?"
"Come on, Archy, wake up and smell the coffee." Actually, it stunk like rotten eggs in the mangrove swamp. "We are, and we can, because we're United States federal agents." Of course that was a lie, but real federal agents lied all the time too. "We can do anything we want. But that's not important. What's important is the level of your nose, and the level of the tide. Do you see that scum line on all the man-grove trunks? That's where the waterline is going to be. Which means you'll need a snorkel pretty soon--but Archy, I don't see any snorkels. So today's program is 'Make the men with the green faces very happy, so they will want to keep me alive, so that I can testify in federal court in Miami.' That's the program today. Do you understand?"
Archy just stared at me openmouthed, so I splashed some salt water right in that wide-eyed, gaping face. "Do. You. Understand," I repeated.
He nodded his head rapidly. "I-I un-und-understand."
"Good. Think of this as an informal preliminary deposition. Here's what we?ll do. I'll think of questions to ask you, and you'll think of the best answers. The answers that will make me happy are the truthful answers. Okay? And remember, we don't have all day. Or at least... you don't."
"O-okay," he stuttered, still looking all around him but seeing nothing but two green-faced monsters and a maze of mangrove roots in every direction.
And hundreds of crabs.
I squatted down in the muck with salt water up to my shoulders, so that we could see each other face-to-face. "Good. Now, tell me all about Cori Vargas, the girl you picked up at George Town Monday. How is she? And don't even think about lying. Not even for one second."
"Well, she...she's okay, I suppose. That's, that's not my... my...department."
"Has anybody hurt her?"
He hesitated before answering. "No, no, I wouldn't think so."
I switched gears, to keep him off balance. "Why are you on the island today, instead of on Topaz with the rest of the crew?"
"Why what? Oh, well, I'm staying here until the LCU comes. The big landing craft, with some workers and more equipment. I'm really a construction foreman."
"When is the LCU coming?"
"Should be next Tuesday.
"How many are on the island right now?"
"Just two of us. Me and Eddie. Eddie Medina."
"How do you communicate with Topaz?"
"Satcom and single sideband."
Switch gears. "What about the girls?"
"Girls? That's not my department."
"You said that already. So whose department is it, then? Trevor's?"
"Y-you know Trevor Ridley?" Archy seemed shocked to hear Trevor's first name, and offered his last name without even being asked.
"Sure, we know him. So, are the girls his department?"
"Yeah, that's right. Trevor, and Mr. Prechter. Not me!"
"So, Archy, where is Topaz right now?"
"Now?"
"Yes, right now. Is the water getting in your ears?" The tide was coming in fast, flowing through the mangrove roots. The top of Archy's head was pressed up against the bottom of the trunk. The water level was at his chin.
"Topaz is going back to Miami. Mr. Prechter has a mansion there, on Hibiscus Isle. He has his own private dock."
"Good answer. Now we're getting somewhere. How long does it take Topaz to get to Miami?"
"How long? Oh, twelve hours with good water, not too rough. That's at top speed, thirty knots. They left at eight last night," he offered without being asked.
"How many crew are on Topaz, besides Prechter?"
"Trevor Ridley runs the boat. He's the captain. Then there's the engineer, Milan Vuko...Vukojebina. He's Serbian. Andre is the chef, he's Belgian."
"Last name?"
"I never heard it."
"That's the whole crew?"
"Right, that's the lot. I do whatever they ask me to when I'm on board, but I'm not really part of the crew. I'm not."
A full-time crew of three was typical for a modern yacht the size of Topaz. Time to change gears again, or rather, to toss a monkey wrench into the gears of Archy's mind. "So, what happened to Bev Clifton? The blond girl, last March."
His blue eyes opened big as saucers and his mouth hung open, so I splashed him again and left him sputtering.
"Bev Clifton!" I repeated. "What happened to her?"
"Y-you know about B-Beverly Clifton? How in bloody hell do you know about her?"
"We know everything, Archy. We just want to know what you know. To see if you're telling us the truth. To see if you're worth arresting, to bring to federal court in Miami to testify against your boss. Next question: What does Richard Prechter do with the girls? Tell me the truth, or we'll leave you here for the crabs. What about the girls, Archy?"
"Mr. Prechter is crazy; he's mad, mad! Crazy!"
"So, what does he do with the girls? Tell me everything!"
"He messes with their heads, he does! It's his hobby...well, one of them, anyway. Mr. Prechter has lots of hobbies."
"I'm not interested in his other hobbies, Archy, only the girls. What does he do with the girls?"
"He seduces them if he can, and then he hurts 'em and humiliates 'em. It's all a bloody game to him. He calls them his 'lovely lab rats.' He cuts off their hair, and sometimes he brands them with a hot iron. Sometimes he lets them go on the island and he chases them, if he thinks they'll make good runners. He's a bleedin' marathoner, he is. He lets them escape--at least, that's what they think. Then he chases them down, and the longer it takes to catch 'em, the better he likes it. Richard Prechter is a great one for sport, oh yes he is!"
"Sport? That?s what you call it?"
"No, not me, that's what he calls it. I call it bloody mad!"
"But you didn't leave, did you, Archy? And you didn't report it. So he pays you well, doesn't he?"
"Too right he does, but it's more than that. We can't leave because he has something on all of us. It's blackmail!" Archy was trying to push himself up, to jam his nose and mouth between the highest root junctions as the water swirled in around him.
"What does Prechter do with the girls, when he's finished chasing them?"
"He likes to 'tame' them, his word--that's his favorite hobby. He likes the girls with lots of spirit, lots of fight. After he catches them, he likes to tame them and gentle them down. Take all the fight out of 'em."
"And after he 'tames' them, what does he do with them?"
"That's the thing. After he tames 'em, he has no more use for 'em." Archy had to struggle to lift his lips and nose above the rising water. It was horrible to watch him fight for breath, but not as horrible as the story he was telling.
"So, Archy, what does he do with them after he tames them?" The water subsided slightly.
"He gives them to us, once they're tamed! He lets us have a go with them, any way we like. Mr. Prechter, he likes to see that they'll do anything with anybody, like a trained donkey. Do anything with anybody, on his say-so! And that's how he blackmailed us--they took bloody movies!"
I wanted to choke him with my hands, but he was already choking as the salt water rolled back over his face. Archy was a participant, not an innocent party. "What happens to the girls after that? What happens?"
He had to wait for a long surge of water to drop. "After? After, I don't know for sure. I think Trevor takes them out in the tender and gives them the deep blue goodbye."
"Alive or dead?"
"I dunno. I never went along when he took them out."
I was already beyond disgusted, moving into a rage, but I pressed on. "So, where do you think Cori Vargas is right now? If they're going into Miami, what about customs and immigration? How will Prechter deal with it?"
"Oh, that's no problem, believe you me. First, nobody mucks about with Richard Bloody Prechter. He has your Yank politicians in his pocket. And second, he has a clever little place under his main stateroom floor where he keeps his girls. All soundproofed, so customs and immigration would never know about them anyway, even if they came aboard to inspect--which they never do."
"And just how would you know that, if the girls aren't your department?"
"Because I built it my own bleedin' self, that's how I know! By myself, with no help, and all in secret. I had to build it, on Mr. Prechter's orders. I was black ..."
"Blackmailed. I know." I sighed. I felt as if I knew too much already, but I wanted to wring him out completely.
His face was now pushed all the way up against the bottom of the mangrove trunk, his lips and nose searching for the highest gap between the roots. A hundred acres of mangroves dampened the ocean waves but didn't completely eliminate the surge. The water was going up and down several inches, but the crests were getting progressively higher. "I told you every bleedin' thing, Cap'n! Every bleedin' thing!" The sea rolled in again, and he had to hold his breath until it subsided. "Please, for the love of God, cut this rope and pull me out!"
"Just one more thing. Where will Richard Prechter take Topaz next? Will he stay in Miami, or come back here?"
"I don't know, Cap'n! Maybe he'll come back here with the girl, if she's a good strong runner with lots of fight in her. Maybe not. But... I did hear something. He went to Miami because he's givin' a speech tomorrow. At a convention in Miami Beach. After that, I don't know. Maybe back here, maybe somewhere else. He don't inform me!" Some water went down his windpipe, and after he coughed and choked he said, "For the love of God, please ..."
Another big surge washed over his face, and he held his breath again. The salt water above the mud was clear, and I could see his pinched face while he waited for the air to return.
As soon as the surge passed, he gasped and called out, "I can't breathe, Cap'n, and I can't testify in court if I can't breathe! You're going to take me out now, like you said?"
I thought about it for a few seconds. Archy wasn't just a mere construction foreman. He had raped Richard Prechter's beaten-down discards after he'd helped to lure them aboard Topaz, the way he had done with Cori, carrying her bags with a knowing leer on his face. He'd even built a secret compartment to hide these girls. And he was trusted to carry a submachine gun while guarding Castigo Cay.
My sympathy meter read zero.
"Sure I will, Arch. Sure I will." But I was too furious to cut him loose. He'd picked a bad morning for beachcombing.
I stood up in the muck, turned my back on him, and waded down the channel to our boat, with Nick right behind me. After we climbed over the side tubes he said, "Dan, you know you're a coldhearted son of a bitch. But I'd have done the same thing. It made me sick, listening to him." Behind us we could hear Archy screaming, then gurgling and hacking, then screaming again, each scream progressively weaker. By the time we had untied the Avon and begun to drag it back out of the creek, he wasn't screaming anymore.
Hundreds of crabs would strip him to a skeleton within a few hours. With their powerful cutting claws, they would even attack his ligaments, leaving just bones to be scattered by the tide. There would be only a short piece of dangling green paracord to mark his passing from the world above the water to the world below.
I poled the Avon along the lagoon side of the mangrove island until we were in water deep enough to lower the engine, and then I fired her up. We left on a southerly heading, to mask ourselves behind the mangroves from the sight of anybody on Castigo Cay. We stripped off our combat gear and took turns with a little tube of makeup remover. We used the green bandana that had been Archy's blindfold to wipe the camo paint off our faces.
When we were a few miles from the Castigos and they were diminishing behind us on the horizon, I used the Avon's console-mounted VHF radio to call Rebel Yell, using a brevity code on channel 71. In the Bahamas, VHF radios were universally used as a free wireless phone service both at sea and ashore. I just said, "Henry, you dere, mon? De snapper be bitin' good here, mon, de snapper be bitin' real good here."
Each choice of fish species conveyed a different message. It was a long range for VHF, but Rebel Yell's whip antenna was mounted at the masthead, sixty feet up her mainmast. I hoped the radio static would take the edges off my bogus Bahamian accent. I heard Rebel Yell's confirmation reply, three evenly spaced breaks of squelch, and I pushed the throttle forward. In just a minute or two, Victor would call Harry Allan on the single sideband.
The seas were angling behind us on our return trip, and I was able to maintain better than twenty-five bone-jarring knots, half of the time airborne. I was in a big hurry to catch an airplane. Very soon, my chartered Cessna would take off from George Town for the 120-mile flight to the northeast corner of Acklins Island, where it would land on a dirt road. Then I would have a low and slow 350-mile flight over the breadth of the Bahamas to Bimini, just fifty miles across the Gulf Stream from Miami.
I didn't even have a boat lined up to get me into Florida, and it all had to happen today and tonight, in order for me to get to Miami before the end of Richard Prechter's speech tomorrow, when Topaz--and Cori--might be lost from my radar forever. I nudged the little silver skull atop the throttle ahead some more, and grabbed the wheel with both hands.
Salt spray flew back on each impact of the inflatable's fiberglass hull against the warm blue water. Nick Galloway was hanging onto the grab bar on his side of the console with his left hand, and he slapped me on the back and nodded his head at me. He was grinning like a maniac, with his wet hair plastered back and salt water streaming off his long mustache. I'm sure that I grinned like a maniac right back at him.
By now, Archy was drowned and dead, and becoming a feast for crabs. Cori, I didn't know about, but I hoped that she was still okay and would remain so until I could reach her. Richard Prechter and Trevor Ridley, they were going to pay, and pay dearly, even worse than Archy had paid. They were dead men walking, even in Miami.
And I was alive, man, I was alive!
(These three excerpts are only the first 117 out of the 537 pages in the printed version of Castigo Cay.)
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