Commander-in-Chief

51

John Clark motored his dinghy up to the wooden dock alongside a black ninety-eight-foot schooner with the name Willie T painted in white alongside.

The William Thornton 2 was an old cargo hauler that had been turned into a bar just offshore of Norman Island. Among yachties here in the BVIs it was an institution, a dump of a place that served booze and fried food to anyone who could make it to its dock.

Its namesake had sunk right here when it wasn’t too much older than the current version, and it was only a matter of time before this one found its way to the bottom of Davy Jones’s locker, but tonight it was raucous and alive, so alive Clark had heard the music all the way from where he was moored on the other side of the bay.

Right now it looked like the majority of the people here on the crowded boat were young; girls in bikinis leapt off the upper deck at the stern and into the water, a drop of no more than a dozen feet that was met by riotous applause, as if the girls had just dove from a cliff in Acapulco.

Clark climbed out of his dinghy, passed by a large group of kids dancing on a dock that didn’t seem to Clark like it was built to be a dance floor, and he made his way through the rowdy main deck of the bar. There were easily one hundred people in an incredibly small area, and Clark wished he’d come earlier in the day so he wouldn’t have to push through all of them. But he made his way through easily enough, simply because most of the people here were drunk and happy, and therefore particularly pliable, especially to a man trained in using his body and his gaze to encourage compliance in others.

At the bar he ordered a Cruzan rum and ginger ale, then he pushed his way back out through the crowd trying to get the lone bartender’s attention so they could get another round.

He sipped his drink for a moment, taking in the scene that could not have been any less appealing to him, then he climbed a circular staircase to the upper deck of the Willie T.

It was crowded here as well, but less so, and after a minute he found a stretch of real estate along the rusted railing of the boat. He leaned against it and looked out at the lights of the ships in the mooring field near the bar.

He counted twenty-four boats in total, nine of them catamarans, and he wondered if one of them might be his target.

He’d arrived at his conclusion that he was looking for a larger-sized catamaran by process of elimination. Walker had mentioned that he was being watched over by a group of four heavies, as well as the two Russians. Even though Clark had watched Kate and Noah kidnapped by just two people, he couldn’t imagine an operation that put a half-dozen bodies against a compliant man going to work, and left a pair of unwilling kidnap victims with only one or two guards. There would be at least as much security on Kate and Noah to keep them restrained as there was on Terry, Clark felt certain of this.

Four to six bad actors, plus the two victims, meant the vessel he was looking for had to accommodate eight people, for possibly as long as a month.

That would necessitate a decent-sized boat.

Terry had said Kate expressed surprise she’d not gotten sick on the boat, and that had Clark wondering if she was on a catamaran. If her previous experiences had been on a monohull sailboat, she would find the cat much less unsteady, and therefore there was less chance she’d feel the effects of nausea.

There was one more thing. The kidnappers had arrived in a private aircraft, they were here forcing a deal worth $8 billion, and there were, if Clark’s assumptions were correct, at least ten of them.

It stood to reason that they would have no problems spending money on their boat. They would buy something, not rent it, and it would be well outfitted and likely fast.

Clark checked the mooring field taking all this into consideration.

There were two catamarans out there that were more than fifty feet long, which as far as Clark was concerned made them big, but both of them had the name of the rental company they’d come from on the side. Neither of them looked any faster than any other boat in the water around them, so he thought it was less than likely either of these boats was involved.

His problem, Clark knew, was that there were easily twenty-five mooring fields this big or larger in the British Virgin Islands, as well as dozens more that were smaller. On top of this, there was no law that said the kidnappers had to park their boat in a mooring field at all. No, Clark thought it was possible, if not probable, that they just found a dark, quiet cove around one of the seventy islands and dropped anchor.

Clark would never find them just sailing around and looking for them. Not in a year of searching.

So he needed to enlist some assistance.

Through the gaggle of young people sitting and standing around on the upper deck, Clark noticed a group of men who didn’t look like tourists. They were older than average, which was a bit harder for Clark to judge, because not one of them was over forty-five, but they had a look to their dress and a stature that made him lock on to their conversation from across the deck. He tried to pick up bits of their voices from where he stood, but he failed miserably. He did have a clandestine listening device he could pop in his ear to pick up normal speaking voices from as far away as one hundred feet, but if he used it right now all the rap music and revelry would blow his eardrum, an eardrum that had somehow survived countless gun battles.

Although he couldn’t hear the men talk, Clark watched the men’s gesticulations and tried to discern what they were talking about.

For the first minute or two the topic of conversation was most definitely women: namely, women who were shapely — bordering on the cartoonish. But after this their gestures told Clark what he wanted to know.

These guys were boat captains.

Confident he had found what he had come to the Willie T looking for, he made his way over to the five men and leaned into their conversation. “Good evening, gentlemen. I wonder if I could buy you a round.”

The men looked up in confusion, but not suspicion or any animosity. This was the Caribbean; these were boat captains, so their answer to him was predetermined. Some nodded, others said yes. Clark stepped away, and in minutes he sat back down with six rum drinks. He was in with these guys now, at least as long as the booze held out.

The captains were nice enough, but while they included Clark in their conversation, they weren’t terribly interested in him. He asked them about their vessels, and he immediately suspected at least one of them would indeed be able to provide him with some intel. Two of the five were down here on vacation but kept their own vessels here and sailed regularly. The other three were all captains for hire: one from the U.S., one from Uruguay, and the other from Jamaica. They all lived here year-round, made money off tourists who employed them to captain their chartered boats to sail them to all their favorite locales. All three of them were currently on a charter, but their clients were tucked away in their cabins somewhere out in the mooring fields, and these men were meeting up for drinks and girl-watching.

Clark had to almost yell over the sound of the god-awful music; some woman yammering something about milk shakes, if Clark could at least understand the monotonous chorus. He told the five men he was down here renting a monohull Irwin, trying to find his way around the islands.

The captain closest to him, an American from Florida, nodded almost like he gave a damn, then said, “Know anything about captaining?”

Clark shrugged. “Just a bit. Used to have a forty-foot diesel cruiser back in Chesapeake Bay. Did a little sailing on leave in the Navy.”

The men looked at one another knowingly. He knew he’d not impressed them.

Another man, this one with a British accent, said, “You had yourself a rust bucket, did you?”

Clark laughed good-naturedly. He knew all these men identified him as a “renter,” a man who comes down to the islands once or twice a year to rent a boat and, as far as they were concerned, not a real captain. In fact, these guys probably thought him something of a menace.

“How about another round?” he asked, and their looks softened.

“How ’bout yes?” said the tall, thin Jamaican captain.

After he returned with six more rums Clark leaned closer to the American sitting next to him. The others had started chatting with one another, blocking Clark out of the conversation. He asked the man about where he had been recently, and the captain explained he’d been going to at least two or three different islands and marinas a day all week.

Clark nodded, then said, “Big catamaran. Fast and expensive. Half-dozen men on board, maybe more. Seen anything like that?”

The man turned to Clark. “Uh… Why?”

“Let’s just say I’m looking for a guy.” Clark wiggled his right hand on the table. There was a fifty-dollar bill in it.

The captain looked down at it, then up at Clark. “What kind of cat?”

“I don’t have a clue. Would have just started showing up this week. The boat itself might not be new to the area, but I’m sure the crew is. My guess is they don’t all look like the sailing type.”

The man slowly reached out for the money, but Clark flipped it away. “Give me something, I give you something.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the dumbass offering you a hundred bucks to answer an easy question.”

Another fifty appeared in Clark’s hand.

The American captain nodded slowly. “I know a guy who mentioned to me he ran into exactly who you are looking for. Seriously. Exactly.”

“I need to talk to that man.”

The captain said, “A hundred-dollar finder’s fee and I’ll take you to him. He’ll want a hundred as well.”

Clark said, “If the info pans out, I’ll give him another hundred.”

The captain snatched the hundred dollars, gave a wide smile, then looked across the table. “Diego?”

A tan man in dreadlocks who’d said he was from Uruguay looked up.

The American captain said, “That sixty-eight-foot gunboat you passed the other day. Where did you say you saw her?”

The man on the end said, “Last night I was at the south tip of Guana. It was in a little cove just west of Monkey Point.”

Clark cocked his head. “A gunboat?”

The American captain laughed and said, “It didn’t have a cannon or anything. It’s a type of racing boat. Fucking beautiful. It looks like a cross between a catamaran and a spaceship.”

Clark’s eyebrows rose. He sure as hell hadn’t seen anything like that sailing around here in the BVIs.

Clark asked Diego, “What color was it?”

“Cobalt gray. It’s called Spinnaker II.”

Clark hadn’t even considered asking for the name of the boat. He had no idea he’d be getting this much information. He pressed his luck. “Did you see who was on board?”

“Bunch of guys. White guys, black guys. Didn’t look like racers. They are renters, that’s for sure.”

Clark was confused. “How do you know they were renting?”

“The dumbass had the thing moored in the wrong place. Boat like that, you want people to see it. It was anchored like they were trying to hide out or something.”

Clark nodded, then asked, “A catamaran like that? How fast could it go?”

“Thirty-five knots, easy. Fast as hell.” Diego returned to his conversation with the other men.

Clark nodded again, making a show of his interest in the boat as a sailing vessel, not as a potential target.

The American whispered to Clark, “I’ll take Diego’s hundred. Make sure he gets it.”

Clark felt like telling the man to go screw himself, but he didn’t need animosity from the locals. For all he knew he’d see this guy again. He fanned him the money. “You be sure to pass that on, okay?”

“I’ll do that. Hey, does that sound like the boat you are looking for?”

Clark had a feeling it was indeed the right boat. But he shook his head. “Don’t think so. Still, I’d love to pass it someday. Sounds nice.”