( 2011) Cry For Justice (30 page)

I needed to get to a phone fast. We crossed a garden of rock, hibiscus, and palms, rounded a waterfall, and stumbled onto the pool area and the gathering, to the dismay of those in attendance. A woman screamed as we sank down on the terraced deck, dripping and worn out. Another scream, and people were clustered around us asking what happened.

“Phone!” I demanded.

“You need an ambulance!” the man closest to me said.

I laid Amy on the cool, tiled pool deck, stood up, and grabbed a fistful of tangerine silk shirt. “Phone! Now!” The man hurried me toward a pair of French doors.

My first call was to the local constabulary. The desk man was quick and efficient. He told me to wait for help. An ambulance would be immediately dispatched, and a patrol boat would go out to look for the
Carpe Diem
. I became aware of the silence surrounding me. The music was no longer playing; the guests were no longer talking and laughing.

The constable asked for a description of the sailboat, and I obliged. I also gave him the names of the man on board and the kidnapped woman. The deputy asked for my name. I gave it to him and hung up. My next call was to the U.S. Coast Guard. I gave them the same information: sailboat heading out of Nassau Harbor, possibly en route to the Dominican Republic, with a U.S. citizen held on board against her will. He asked what plans I had. I told him I was going to follow the
Carpe Diem
in another boat, and hung up. I next dialed a number I had thankfully committed to memory: my good friend James Burke, CEO of Atlantis Royal Charters, Ltd.

James picked up on the third ring. I explained the situation and told him about Mackenzie’s predicament. It came as no surprise that he knew Mac and her family well. He asked where I was, then told me to get to a nearby destination, where he would pick me up within half an hour.

I hung up and looked out at two dozen wide-eyed party guests in casual island wear, gawking back at me in silent amazement. I told the man in the tangerine silk shirt to look after Amy until the paramedics arrived.

“There’s just one other thing,” I said, looking down. “What size are your shoes?” I had kicked my deck shoes off moments after jumping from the
Carpe Diem
.

Seconds later, I was running down the driveway and out onto Yamacraw Hill Road headed south, following Burke’s directions. I kept a steady pace, the thin rubber soles of our host’s newish Topsiders pounding the hard blacktop.

I wondered about Mackenzie. What on earth had prompted her to follow me to the meeting? The frequency at which people who got too close to me were ending up as collateral damage was unsettling. First the six guys in my squad who lost their lives in the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Then there was Jack, my roommate at West Point and the best friend I’ve ever had, who followed me back into active duty after Nine-eleven and straight into Afghanistan, only to come back home in a flag-draped box. Then there was Amy, a sad young girl whose only mistake had been to ask me to recover what was rightfully hers. She had trusted me and almost died for it twice. And to make matters worse, weather accidentally or not, I had come into Mackenzie’s life and now her own life was in peril.

I cursed myself. And then I cursed them all as I ran in the shadows, Nora included. For trusting me. For coming into my life.

For making me care so God damned much.

Twenty-eight

It took almost twenty-five minutes of steady running to reach the rendezvous point. I found a trail through the low-lying coastal thickets and hoped it would lead me to the designated spot.

Although the headache and dizziness had subsided considerably, my energy reserves were dangerously low. After traversing a thorny hedgerow I crossed onto an expansive lawn fronting a big house. I continued to jog along the periphery of the lawn, intentionally remaining in the shadows to keep from worrying the neighbors into summoning the police.

I heard the potent growl of marine outboard engines in the distance. The roar grew louder with every step I took. I came to the edge of the property, which backed onto a darkened lagoon. A long wooden pier jutted into the blue-blackness. This had to be the place. I saw navigation lights coming fast in the direction of the pier.

The roaring engines cut off only to be reversed near their limit as the boat glided to a perfectly executed stop beside the pier. A large wave generated by the boat’s high speed maneuver almost washed over the dock. Behind the wheel was James, all right, He was piloting a thirty-five-foot black-on-black center-console boat with triple Mercury three-hundred
 
horsepower outboard engines. The boat was painted in a sinister matte black and dark gray color scheme, a combo I knew to be the preference of law enforcement agencies as well as some military special-ops teams. James had certainly come through in grand form. It made me wonder who this guy really was. MI-6, maybe?

“Hop on, mate!” James Burke barked at me. “Time’s a-wastin’!”

“You’re not going,” I argued.

“Nonsense! You don’t know these waters like I do. And you’re not familiar with all the toys on board this beauty. This doll’s equipped with a powerful radar and radar-jamming equipment.”

I gave him a sideways glance.

“Don’t ask,” he said. “This little wonder belongs to some chaps who shall ever remain nameless. I merely provide safekeeping. The point is, we can sneak up on anyone completely unnoticed. I can drop you as close as fifty feet from the target and stay in range, out of sight, and ready to assist.”

“This is not your fight,” I retorted.

“What?
” James gave me an incredulous glare. “You afraid of putting
me
in harm’s way?” I may have touched a raw nerve.

“Not at all,” I lied. “It’s just, this doesn’t concern you. Besides, you’re too...” I couldn’t say it.

“Old
for this shit?” he finished for me. “That is what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

I shrugged.

“Well, let me tell you something, my dear still-wet-behind-the-ears chum... ,” James began. He touched a switch on the boat’s impressive control panel and entered a numeric code. First I heard a hissing sound, followed immediately by the whir of invisible motors and gears churning in the dark. Recessed panels located low on the port and starboard gunwales rolled down to reveal a cache of automatic weapons neatly stored inside the hollow walls. It was an almost obscene display.

“I don’t need the likes of you telling me I’m too old or can’t take care of business,” James went on.

The arsenal included six M-4 rifles, two M249 SAW light machine guns, a shoulder-mounted SMAW rocket launcher, three spear guns, and two XM25 grenade launchers.

“While you were barely off your mum’s tit and still watching
Sesame Street
on the telly, I was out in the Falklands leading a squad of Royal Marine Scouts in a night assault. I could mention quite a few more such jaunts, but I’m afraid you don’t have the necessary clearance.” He was studying me, gauging my reaction.

“Who are you again?” I asked.

“Satisfied now, are we?” James asked, feigning a bored look. “Or do you require two forms of picture ID, too?”

We shoved off, and the bow came about and rose toward the stars as the three roaring engines pressed us back in our seats, trusting the boat forward with an infernal force, churning a great, arcing rooster tail behind us as we made a sharp 180-degree turn. James expertly steered us around a rocky point without once pulling back on the triple throttle control, and the boat began to pound and jolt as we left the protected lagoon for the choppier waters of the Atlantic.

“Better hang on tight, lad!” James yelled over the engine noise. “This won’t be a joyride!”

After swinging ninety degrees onto the selected bearing, James Burke buried the throttle, and the engines’ roar became something resembling a high-pitched scream as the boat surged forward and high on its wake. We were soon clear of the choppy confluence where the shallow lagoon’s outflow met the Atlantic swells, and the boat’s jouncing and banging calmed down enough for me to have a look at the onboard instrument cluster. The radar sweep on one of the overhead monitors reported several dozen contacts scattered about, going various speeds and directions.

I told James that I thought Baumann was making a run toward the Dominican Republic. That would put the
Carpe Diem
on a southeast course with an estimated heading of 125 degrees south. I glanced at the compass. We were already heading that way.

“Concentrate on slow-moving contacts heading southeast ahead of our location,” James yelled into my ear. “That’s where we’ll find him.”

Baumann had about an hour and a half’s head start. At a speed of five to six knots, he should be some twenty miles ahead of us. We were doing about fifty miles an hour, so if we had our bearings right, it wouldn’t be long now. I turned a knob on the radar panel and zoomed in on the swath of ocean where I expected to find Baumann. That was where we would focus our effort to locate the
Carpe Diem
.

With the ocean swells growing steadily bigger the farther from land we got, the boat began to leap clear of the water, crashing back down with bone-jarring force that sent huge sprays of water high above the gunwales. The sheer force of each landing felt like some form of torture. It made my teeth grind hard against each other. My kidneys and liver felt as if they were being turned into mush and every hard landing compressed my spine with such force I swore, should I survive the night, it would shave off at least a couple of inches off my height.

I glanced at James; he was comfortably seated in his nicely padded seat, seat belt snugged around his considerable girth, eyes peering into the dark ocean ahead. He extended his left arm and flicked off the running lights, then opened a drawer in the console. A moment later, he was cinching down the chinstrap on night vision headgear. Running completely dark like we were, you could certainly hear the boat approaching but no one could see us.

The boat leaped higher than it had thus far. We floated improbably long in the air, and I felt my stomach churn with the sudden loss of gravity. With the churning props now completely exposed in the night air, the engine noise ramped up to a deafening high-pitched whine. The hull shuddered as it hit the ocean again at fifty miles an hour, sending torrents of water skyward and driving my chin into my upper chest. No doubt the integrity and seaworthiness of the boat’s hull was being tested well beyond what was reasonable, but the craft seemed built for this kind of punishment. It landed true every time, enveloped in surging dark watery cataracts, only to bound ahead with no letup, a dark and sinister force on a relentless quest.

Rubbing my jaw to make sure it hadn’t come unhinged, I glanced at James. Beneath the black apparatus shielding his eyes, his lips creased into a wicked grin. The bastard was enjoying watching me wince with each landing.

“What?” James screamed in my ear. I could barely understand him. “Too rough for you, old girl?”

With the battering I was taking, all I could manage was a weak smile. James was certainly a surprise. I knew he was no pushover, but I had never suspected this side of him.

James never slowed his insane pace. After twenty minutes of this soaring and crashing, my brain felt as if it wanted only to shut down and avoid any more buffeting. But I knew we had to press on. Baumann had an ample head start, but we were gaining on him with every passing second. In a boat like this, tricked out with the all the high-tech gadgetry it had on board and piloted by a nut-job like Burke, there was little chance Baumann would elude us. I glanced down at my radium-dial watch. At this rate, we would be in a position to intercept in mere minutes.

I examined the radar screen once more. There were a few well-defined contacts now, all on similar headings and moving at a relatively slow pace except for one large contact further east. This contact was moving southeast at seventeen knots. Much too fast for a sailboat. There were no signs of a craft the size of
Carpe Diem
.

We ran flat out for almost ten more minutes, and the battering brought my headache back with a vengeance. I gave James a hand signal to cut the engines. He eased off the throttle, and the roar of the engines subsided to an almost dull grumbling as the bow eased back down to parallel with the dark horizon. Suddenly, I could hear the ocean swells slapping against the fiberglass hull and, beneath that, the quiet gurgling of the engines. I studied the radar screen, searching for anything resembling our fleeing vessel.

James pushed up his night-vision goggles. “Well?” he asked.

I shook my head.

He reached under the center console and brought out a silvery flask, unscrewed the top, and took a liberal sip. “Cheers!” he said, offering it to me. “Fifty-year scotch. Elixir of the gods. It’ll do you good.”

I took a sip without giving it the savoring it deserved, and went back to the screen. Of the four slow-moving contacts, two had broken off and were now on a northerly bearing. Not what I expected Baumann to do. In that direction lay miles of dangerous shoals. If I were the one running, I would set a course closer to Freetown or Bannerman Town instead. That course avoided most of the hazards and opened up eventually to the Atlantic. I watched the two radar contacts sailing in a south by southeast course. They appeared to be about five miles apart and maintaining similar cruising speeds. The first contact looked about the right size, the second much larger than the
Carpe Diem
. I mentioned it to James. He flicked on his radar-jamming gear, turned the wheel, and accelerated to about twenty-five knots on a course slightly south of the two contacts. Our intention was get to a point ahead of the two contacts and come in somewhere between them. We would then sit still and invisible on the water and wait for the two craft to sail by as we checked them out with the night-vision gear.

***

Arriving at the intercept point, we cut the engines and settled in for the short wait. Radar sweep reported the contacts still on course. My heart skipped a beat when I saw lights appear just north of our position. James produced a space-age
 
looking monocular and handed it to me. I put it to my eye and peered into the darkness. Reddish LED displays on the heavy night-vision telescope’s visible screen displayed bearing, distance, and speed information. Behind the informational displays, the garish red profile of a large two-masted motorsailer hove into view. Perhaps 140 feet definitely not the
Carpe Diem
.