Piranha

22

Juan was sure the Jamaican authorities were asking a lot of questions about why dead men were cropping up all over the island and two charter fishing boats had disappeared. He didn’t want to risk returning to Montego Bay.

Instead of repairing Craig Reed’s fishing boat and returning it to Montego Bay without him aboard, they used one of the Oregon’s cranes to hoist it into the largest hold, where technicians would fix the engines and patch up the damage free of charge for all the trouble they’d caused.

As soon as the Cast Away had been secured, Juan ordered the Oregon at full speed to get out of the area as fast as they could in case their attackers had something more up their sleeve. Three hours later, they had Eddie, Linc, and his motorcycle on board via a side trip from one of the Oregon’s high-powered lifeboats into Ocho Rios. The local Harley shop would have to send someone to retrieve Eddie’s rental.

Once Juan had his crew back together and they were sailing out into blue water, he went to visit the medical bay. He entered to find Julia writing some notes on her tablet.

“How’s our guest doing?” he asked.

She tossed the tablet on her desk and leaned back, running her fingers through her hair. Except for a slight weariness around the eyes, she showed no sign of the stress she’d been through. “The surgery went well. Internal bleeding was causing a pressure buildup around his pleural sac. I’ve removed the bullet, put in a chest tube, and sutured the wounds. He should be up and about in a few days. Six weeks for a full recovery.”

“That’s good to hear. Is he awake?”

“No. I’ll let you know when he’s up for visitors.”

“Thanks. When he comes to, let him know that his boat is well taken care of.”

“I will.”

“What’s the diagnosis for our daring skateboarder?”

“A few stitches and a walking cast. He’ll have a nice scar to impress the ladies.”

“He’s cleared for duty?”

“He can certainly sit at his post in the op center, but I wouldn’t make him run laps.”

“Don’t worry,” Juan said, “we’ve already got his skateboard park stowed.”

Julia rubbed her eyes.

“You okay?” Juan asked. “You’re not usually in on the type of action you and Linda went through today.”

“I’m fine. I’m just glad I could get back to saving people instead of killing them.”

“If you and Linda hadn’t defeated those guys, we would have lost a lot of crew today.”

“It was all Linda. I just tripped in the right direction.”

“Craig Reed is happy that you did. I’ll be back later.”

He left and went to Mark Murphy’s cabin, far forward of any other quarters on the ship to isolate the meteor-impact volume levels that were blasted from the room. The door was ajar, so Juan gave a perfunctory knock and then stepped inside. If this had been during Murph’s downtime, Juan would have expected to see him battling Eric at one of his video games on the giant television, but he found them glued to their tablets. Murph’s leg was stretched out on the sofa and wrapped in bandages. The air cast sat on the floor next to him.

“I’m glad you didn’t join me in the Long John Silver Club,” Juan said. “I’m the only one on the ship allowed to have a peg leg.”

“And I will gladly let you keep that distinction,” Murph replied. “I’ve decided I don’t like being shot.”

“Have you finished the analysis of our computer security?” Juan asked, closing the door.

“We’ve gone over it three times,” Eric said. “Nothing.”

“If someone has been tiptoeing around our network,” Murph said, “we should have found something by now. Our firewall is as secure as ever. No one is inside our servers that shouldn’t be.”

“What about eavesdropping devices?”

“No network besides ours is sending any signals from this ship,” Murph said.

“And I’ve swept the op center, conference room, and mess hall with our bug detection equipment. They’re clean.”

Juan frowned. “We were attacked in five different locations at the same time. That took detailed intelligence to coordinate.”

“Everyone could have been tailed from the ship,” Eric offered.

“One or even two of us could have been followed. But all five groups? And they’d have to know where we were going to be ready for us in Montego Bay with considerable firepower to take us down.”

“Besides,” Murph said, “how could anyone know the two of us would be exposed on deck? Someone had to scout out that oil tank to snipe from.”

“So we have no network penetration and no one listening into our meetings with bugs,” Juan said. “I’m looking for any other explanation for how the information about where we’d be could have made it into the wrong hands.”

Eric stared in disbelief. “You mean we might have a spy on board?”

Juan sighed heavily. “We haven’t had a new crew member in over a year. We’ve vetted everybody, both financially and personally. I don’t see how it’s possible.”

“Do you want me to start looking into the crew members who weren’t targeted today?”

Juan shook his head. “Not yet. I can’t accept that we have a traitor on the Oregon, and going down that path will start making everyone paranoid. We work and live together too closely to be suspicious of each other. It would destroy us as a unit. I want another explanation.”

“But how could they have known where we’d be unless they were in the room when we were talking about it?”

Juan was grasping for any explanation that didn’t involve a witch hunt, and it couldn’t hurt to take precautions. “We might get more answers about how it was done if we knew who’d done it.”

The two of them shrugged and Juan left. His next stop was the op center, where he found MacD and Hali Kasim listening to headphones with both hands on their ears.

Juan leaned against the console. “Is this the recording Eddie made?”

Hali nodded. “MacD thinks he can translate what the guy was saying.”

“Anything useful?”

MacD shrugged, which seemed to be his crew’s favorite new gesture. “It sounds like the guy was delirious. Eddie said he hit the ground pretty hard with his head before he died.”

“What’s he saying?”

“Just one sentence over and over. ‘The doctor’ — whoever he is — ‘promised the world would be different in four days.’ He says it like he’s sorry he wouldn’t live to see it. Does that phrase mean anything to you?”

Juan joined in the shrugfest. “It sounds ominous.”

“Maybe he was being treated for some condition,” Hali said.

“Then why does he say ‘the world would be different’?”

“Maybe he means his world.”

“Nope,” MacD said, “he’s definitely saying the world.”

“That still doesn’t answer why he and his friends would want us out of the way,” Juan said.

“Could be they think we know something about this doctor.”

“Or about what happens in four days,” Hali said.

“If anyone has any theories,” Juan said, “I’m all ears.”

Linda came up and handed Juan several sheets of paper. “We just got this from the CIA. It’s a preliminary list of everything newsworthy that happened on the dates found on the phone you took from that Venezuelan Navy lieutenant. They’re doing more in-depth analysis on it right now.”

Juan saw the four Greek letters and codes, each paired with a date, but they seemed as inscrutable now as they were the day Murph and Eric hacked into the phone. Alpha 17, Beta 19, Gamma 22. Delta 23, the fourth in the series, corresponded to today’s date.

“Did they find any correlation?”

“The CIA checked for every series progression they could think of. Nothing fit. And there doesn’t seem to be anything that ties the dates together.”

Juan scanned the list of events. It included a wide variety of possibilities and spanned the entire world: murders, traffic fatalities, political speeches and rallies, weather phenomena, terrorist bombings, sports events. None of them fit a pattern that Juan could see.

One item caught his eye: a ship sinking. Most of the general public doesn’t realize how regularly ships on the high seas go down. During an average year, more than a hundred ships sink, sending two thousand sailors to a watery grave. Even in the age of GPS tracking, weather forecasting, and satellite communications, many of the ships disappear without a trace, falling prey to mechanical failures, fire, storms, and rogue waves.

The listed ship fit into the Gamma 22 spot. She was a cargo vessel named Santa Cruz that went down with all hands.

The number of crew was twenty-two.

Juan felt the hairs on his neck prickle.

“What about this one?” Juan said, pointing at the shipwreck listing.

“Santa Cruz?” Linda said. “The CIA thinks the fact that it had twenty-two crew is a coincidence. The analyst told me it’s easy to find random numerical links to anything. On the Alpha seventeen date, there was a traffic pileup in New York that involved seventeen vehicles and a snowstorm in Calgary where they received seventeen inches of snow.”

“It’s the Santa Cruz name that bugs me. Humor me.”

They went over to her terminal, where she had a remote link to a worldwide ship database. She punched in Santa Cruz.

“She was flagged Panamanian, but was owned by a Venezuelan company called Cabimas Shipping. The company’s owner is one of the richest men in Venezuela, Ricardo Leal.” She did a quick search and found thousands of mentions of his name. “Seems like Mr. Leal has political aspirations in his country. Many are expecting him to use his wealth to run for president next year.”

Juan looked at the list again and realized what the link was between them.

“Linda, check the database for all the ships that have sunk in the last three months.”

“Even though there aren’t any other ships on the CIA’s list?”

“The dates that they sunk and the dates they were reported missing could be different. Sometimes a ship isn’t considered missing for a couple of days after it misses a scheduled check-in.”

Linda brought up the list and they compared it to the numbers on the phone list. She gasped when she saw how they matched up.

The numbers weren’t a progression. The lieutenant was keeping track of how many crew members were on each ship.

Alpha 17 — Cantaura, a containership lost off of Portugal with seventeen crew.

Beta 19 — Tucupita, a tanker reporting missing with nineteen crew members as it was rounding Cape Horn.

Gamma 22 — Santa Cruz and its twenty-two men disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic.

All of them belonged to Cabimas Shipping. The first two didn’t broadcast any kind of Mayday or indicate anything was wrong before contact was lost. They simply vanished.

“Three ships disappeared in three months?” Linda asked. “That can’t be chance.”

“I’m sure Leal’s insurer is saying the same thing. They must think he’s deliberately sinking his ships or they’ve become so ill-maintained that they’re falling apart. Either way, it would make him uninsurable. Without insurance, no one would send freight with his company ever again.”

“Do you think Ruiz is targeting his ships?”

“It’s possible. If she has political ambitions of her own, what better way to get rid of her biggest rival than to bankrupt him?”

“He must be teetering on the edge of that now,” Linda said.

“One more sinking might do it,” Juan said. “Check the crew complements on the rest of his ships to see if we get a match.”

The answer came back immediately. Only one Cabimas ship had exactly twenty-three crew: a car carrier named Ciudad Bolívar.

“Where is she now?”

Linda queried the Marine Traffic database. “She departed Veracruz, Mexico, two days ago with a load of cars and construction equipment. Her destination is Puerto Cabello, Venezuela.”

“Which would put her a few hundred miles due south of Jamaica,” Juan said. “We just found our answer.”

“To what?”

“To the question of why someone was trying to kill us,” Juan said. “Ruiz is planning to sink the Ciudad Bolívar today and we’re the only ones capable of stopping it.”