Dark Watch

11

LINDA pressed her hands against the fabric, trying to find purchase, but her gloves could do little to slow her inexorable plunge. As her fingers reached the edge of the tear she frantically tried to grab the frayed edge. Her momentum was already too great, and a second later her head was over the hole, then her shoulders.

There wasn’t even time to scream as her upper body slid through the rip and dangled high above the cargo hold of the drydock. Inside was pitch-dark, but she knew that she hung over an eighty-foot void. Her hips hit the edge of the tear, shifting her center of gravity. She was powerless as her body coiled under and her legs were lifted from the tough cloth covering.

Just as the top of her thighs slid over the precipice, strong hands wrapped around her ankles. For a precarious moment she continued to fall, and then she felt herself being drawn backward. She was plucked from the rent in the fabric and dragged back from the hole, not caring that the tough material scraped against the skin of her cheek.

Linda rolled onto her back and smiled into the face of the Zodiac driver. “Jesus, thanks. For a second there I thought I was…”

“For a second there you were.”

“The other guard?” Linda asked.

“Taken care of.”

“Okay, we only have another minute or two before these guys are going to be missed.” Linda removed her combat harness as she spoke. She unclipped the suspenders from the belt, then reclipped them in a way to create an eight-foot-long rope of sorts. “Team two, bring the body out here.”

“Roger.”

“Hand me your harness.” Linda worked this belt, too, doubling the length of her safety line.

She threaded an arm through a loop she had made, then secured a night vision monocle over her eyes. She averted her face from the perimeter floodlights to preserve her vision.

“Belay me,” Linda ordered once the other team arrived and lowered the dead guard to the deck. She noted two things. One was that someone had thought to close up his trousers and the other was that his neck was at an oblique angle to his body.

She crawled toward the elongated hole. Nikoli’s knife had sliced next to a seam, the area of maximum tension, which was why it had torn open so easily. Originally she had planned to burn a hole in the fabric to dispose of the bodies, hoping the other guards would assume a hastily tossed cigarette was at fault. But this gash would serve her purpose just as well. The others aboard the Maus would guess their comrades had taken a shortcut across the hold and were swallowed when the cloth suddenly gave way.

Linda slithered closer to the rent, feeling the fabric sag under her weight but confident that her team could haul her back. As she neared the hole, she felt herself slide a little and instantly felt pressure under her arms as the men checked her descent. “Okay, hold me here,” she said.

She lowered her head into the hold and snapped on a tiny flashlight.

Her first concern was Nikoli. Had he landed in such a way as to make his bullet wound noticeable, their covert inspection would be blown. Linda peered downward. Because of the two-dimensional quality of the low-light optics, she didn’t experience the sense of vertigo she expected. Directly below her was a ship, a small tanker with its superstructure at the stern. She peered aft, seeing that they had cut off the ship’s funnel and masts to make it fit under the tarpaulins. From this vantage she saw nothing to identify the vessel, no name or distinctive characteristics. But now they had their proof that they were dealing with hijackers as well as pirates.

She switched her goggles from low-light to infrared. Her vision went black with one glowing exception. A smear of light appeared at the ship’s rail and continued down to the bottom of the hold where she saw a growing pool of bright color. She changed back to the night optics and trained her flashlight on the spot. It appeared that Nikoli had hit the freighter’s rail when he fell, blood that had shown up as warmth on IR looked black now, and his body lay on the lowest deck, covered in gore. She doubted very much that anyone but a trained pathologist would notice the bullet wound amid the carnage the fall had caused.

Satisfied, Linda called for her men to drag her back.

“There’s a tanker in the hold. They hacked off her funnel to make her fit. I put her length around four hundred feet.”

“Is there any way you can get her name?” Max asked from the op center.

“Negative. We have to clear out. Those guards are due back from their patrol about now.”

“Okay. We’ll be ready for you.”

At a crouch the team ran back to where they had secured the Zodiac and climbed down the rope. The driver started the electric motor and was ready when the sniper released the rope. The inflatable smashed into the sea and immediately pulled away from the Maus, bobbing dangerously for a second before its speed evened out the ride.

Fifteen minutes later they approached the Oregon at twenty knots, the gasoline engine purring smoothly. The deckhand in the garage watched their approach through closed-circuit television and, as they drew nearer, he doused the red lights and opened the door just in time for the Zodiac to rocket up the ramp and come to a perfect stop. The doors were closing even before the pilot killed the engine.

Max Hanley was there to greet them. He handed his cell phone to Linda.

She peeled her watch cap from her head. “Ross here.”

“Linda, it’s Juan. What did you find?”

“She’s hauling a midsized product tanker, Chairman. I couldn’t tell her name.”

“Any sign of the crew?”

“No, sir. And since the hold was completely dark, my bet is they’re either dead or on one of the tugboats.”

Neither needed to say that the second option wasn’t likely.

“Okay, great job to all of you,” Cabrillo said. “Put yourself down for an extra ration of grog.”

“Actually, I’m going to avail myself of a couple shots of the Louis XIII brandy you keep in your cabin.”

“That is to be enjoyed in a warm snifter, not shot down like cheap tequila.”

“I’ll warm the shot glass,” Linda teased. “Here’s Max.” She handed back the phone and left the garage for a long shower, and yes, a snifter or two of Juan’s fifteen-hundred-dollar cognac.

“So what do you want us to do now?” Hanley asked.

“According to what Murph told me, the Maus is headed for Taiwan. Why don’t you get ahead of her and wait to see if she enters port? If she does, I’ll meet you there and we’ll play it by ear.”

“And if she changes course and heads someplace else?”

“Stay with her.”

“You realize she’s making about three knots. We could be shadowing her for a couple of weeks before she makes landfall.”

“I know. Can’t be helped, old boy. Think of yourself as one of the cops following OJ on his low-speed chase along the L.A. freeways.”

“Low speed? Hell, lobsters migrate faster than that damn drydock.” Max turned serious. “You do remember that the last ship taken from your Japanese friend’s fleet was a tanker. The, ah…”

“Toya Maru,” Juan provided.

“Right. Stands to reason that’s her in the Maus’s hold. Why not just contact the navy or Japan’s coast guard?”

“Oh, I’m certain it’s the Toya Maru. But this isn’t about one ship, and I doubt anyone on those tugboats can tell us much. The pirates are playing this too smart. You mark my words: About a day out of Taipei they’ll get orders to go someplace else. We take down the Maus now, we nab one vessel and a few low-level guys. We track her back to wherever they’re going to scrap the Toya or disguise her so they can use her themselves, we’ll have made a dent in their operation.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Max agreed. “We’ll play tortoise to their snail and see where this chase takes us.”

“I’m handing the phone over to Eddie. He has a list of things he’s going to need for his insertion into China. You can send someone to act as courier when you pass through the Korea Strait. The Robinson has more than enough range to make it to Pusan. From there, the courier can take a commercial flight to Singapore and meet up with Eddie at the airport.”

“Hold on, let me get a pen. And some paper. And my reading glasses.”

Five hundred miles north of where the Oregon steamed near the Maus, another drydock, her sister ship in fact, was just clearing the La Perouse Strait separating the northern tip of Japan from the Sakhalin Islands and entering the frigid waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. She, being towed by more powerful tugs than the Maus, was making six knots despite the fact that the ship hidden inside her hold was considerably larger than the tanker Linda had seen.

The seas were building around the vessels, high, rolling waves that alternately tightened and slackened the long towlines so one moment they were submerged and the next they were as taut as steel bars, bursting with water wrung out by tension. The tugs turned into the seas, shouldering aside the waves as they plowed northward, meeting the ocean as a ship should, nimble and responsive to her vagaries. The drydock played no such game. She took the waves square into her bow so explosions of white froth were flung almost to her top deck. Then she would throw off the water, slowly, ponderously, as though the sea was merely a distraction.

Like the Maus, the drydock’s holds were covered over, but in this vessel’s case, metal sheets had been laid over a steel framework and all the seams welded. The hold would have been virtually airtight except for several industrial ventilators mounted at the stern. These powerful machines drew in thousands of cubic feet of air per minute to circulate within the drydock’s hold. The outgoing air was fed through banks of chemical filters to disguise the raw stench emanating from belowdecks, a smell that hadn’t been found on the high seas for almost two hundred years.

Cabrillo was stuck in Tokyo until Mark Murphy came up with a lead, so he spent three days basically playing tourist in a city he’d never particularly enjoyed. He longed for the fresh air on an open sea, a horizon that seemed unreachable, and the peace that comes from standing on the fantail watching the wake curve into the distance. Instead he dealt with an impenetrable language, crowds that defied imagination, and constant staring by people who should be used to Westerners but acted as though they’d never seen one.

His feeling of impotence was further compounded by Eddie Seng’s mission. Eddie had left days earlier, rendezvoused with the courier in Singapore, and had already gone on into China itself. He’d phoned the Oregon upon his arrival in Shanghai but then ditched the phone. While cell phones were ubiquitous in the cities, he was going deep into the countryside. Not only would there be no cellular service, but if he were caught with a phone, it would likely arouse suspicion. He would be completely on his own in a country that had already issued his death sentence until he’d learned the circumstances behind the villagers being aboard the Kra.

Cabrillo felt his phone vibrate in his jacket pocket. He slid it free and opened the line as he continued strolling the park surrounding the Imperial Palace, the only quiet location in the sprawling megalopolis. “Cabrillo.”

“Juan, it’s Max. Are you ready to put an end to your vacation?”

“Murph found something?” Cabrillo didn’t bother to mask the delight in his voice.

“You got it. I’m putting him through, but I’m staying on.”

Juan found a deserted bench so he could give the conversation his full attention. He had a small pad and a Montblanc pen ready in case he needed to take notes.

“Hey, boss, how’s it going?”

“Max tells me you have some information,” Cabrillo said, anxious to find a direction in which to hunt.

“It took a while, and I had to consult with Mike Halbert on quite a bit of it.” Halbert was a sometimes consultant to the Corporation and also acted as their investment broker. He’d gone on a couple of missions aboard the Oregon, though usually he worked out of his New York apartment, a fiftieth-floor corner unit overlooking Central Park. Halbert was a whiz at the more arcane aspects of international finance, the shadowy world of front companies, tax havens, and derivatives, though right now, with the current sad state of the Corporation’s financial situation, Halbert wasn’t one of Juan’s favorite people.

“So what do you have?” Cabrillo prompted.

“This might get a bit confusing, so bear with me.” Murph paused to study the notes on his computer screen. “Okay, first what I had to do was find out who was behind all those dummy companies I told you owned the Maus. You remember, D Commercial Advisors, Equity Partners International, and all the rest. First off, it appears these companies were created strictly to buy the drydock. They don’t have any other assets.”

“That’s not uncommon,” Juan said. “If there was ever an insurance claim against the vessel’s owners, their only asset is the drydock itself.”

“That’s what Halbert told me. None of these companies are based in the same place. One is Panamanian, another is headquartered in Nigeria, another is out of Dubai. I tried contacting D Commercial Advisors directly. They don’t even have a phone number, so it’s likely the headquarters are nothing more than a PO box with automatic forwarding to another address.”

“Is there any way to find out where their mail is sent on to?”

“Not without breaking into some Third World post office and having a look at their files.”

“We’ll keep that option open,” Cabrillo said in all seriousness. “Keep going.”

“Next, we checked the corporate structure of each company. These are public records and fortunately kept on a database. My hope was we would find the same names on the boards of each company.”

“You didn’t think it was going to be that easy?” Juan chided.

“Well, I’d hoped. As you can imagine, no such luck. There was one common element, though. Of the seven companies that own the Maus and the forty people listed as directors of those companies, every one of them is Russian.”

“Russian? I thought they would be Chinese.”

“Nope, Russkies to a man. Which ties in with Linda’s suspicion about the men guarding the Maus being from the land of the tsars. I have a search under way through Interpol right now. So far, I’ve already gotten hits on a few of these guys. They’re members of the Russian mafia. No one highly placed, but they’re definitely connected.”

“So this whole thing is a Russian enterprise,” Juan said, thinking aloud. “I can see how they’d benefit from the hijackings, but what about the human trafficking? The snakeheads are well organized and entrenched in China. I can’t see them allowing competition from the Russian mob.”

“I had an idea about that,” Max interjected. “What if the snakeheads have a contract with the Russians? Could be they use Russian ships or allow the Chinese to use Russia as a conduit to get the illegals into western Europe.”

“That could be,” Juan agreed. “They could use the port of Vladivostok. Dump the Chinese there, then send ’em across on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Once in Moscow or Saint Petersburg it’s a simple matter of some forged documents, and they’re on their way to Berlin, London, or New York. I’ve heard that customs police all over the world have closed a lot of the old back channels, so this could be their new route.”

Cabrillo was already thinking ahead. He didn’t know many people in the cold water port city of Vladivostok, but he still had contacts in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. In fact, several of his old Cold War foes worked in private security for the new-generation capitalist oligarchs, and more than a few were wealthy oligarchs themselves.

“So I’m headed to Moscow,” Juan said.

“Not so fast, Chairman,” Mark countered. “You might end up there, but there could be another way.”

“I’m listening.”

“I thought about how hard it would be to track down forty Russian gangsters and what leverage we could use to get them to talk. Mike Halbert and I talked about it at length, and we both came to the conclusion that the Russians probably don’t have a clue what these companies do. It’s likely that whoever set up D Commercial Advisors and Ajax Trading and the others paid the Russians a fee to use their names, and they know nothing beyond that.”

“You’re talking a dummy board of directors for a dummy company.”

“Exactly. Complete deniability.”

“So where does that leave us?” Juan asked, slightly irritated that Murphy seemed to be leading him along.

“The guy who set up the companies.”

“Wait. Guy? You said guy?”

“Yup.”

“They screwed up,” Cabrillo exclaimed, irritation turning to excitement as he grasped what Murph had just said.

“Sure did, boss.” Mark agreed, a smile in his voice. “Every one of the dummy companies had two things in common. They all own part of the Maus, actually on the documents it’s called Mice, but I think it’s a translation problem. And the other thing is they were all set up by the same lawyer in Zurich. Guy by the name of Rudolph Isphording.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No reason you should have, at least not until a few months ago.”

“What happened a few months ago?” Juan had suddenly become wary.

“Isphording was named as a star witness in the biggest financial scandal to hit Switzerland since it was discovered they had hoarded gold for the Nazis. He was caught up in a money laundering net, quickly saw the writing on the wall, and made a sweetheart deal with Swiss prosecutors. The scope of the investigation is expanding every day. A few bank presidents are under indictment, a couple of government ministers have tendered resignations, and now the investigators are looking into the Swiss representatives at the United Nations for potential bribe-taking. And there might be a link to the billions of dollars the late PLO chief Yasir Arafat hid away in Swiss banks that has yet to surface. It seems there’s no limit to how high or far the scandal goes.”

“All because of this Isphording character?”

“He had a very long reach into some very dirty pockets.”

“If the PLO is involved, I’m surprised he hasn’t been killed by now.”

Max Hanley spoke up with a low chuckle. “He’ll get a grateful hug by a suicide bomber only after the Palestinians find their money.”

“So where’s Isphording now?”

“Under protective custody at Regensdorf prison outside Zurich. The only times he’s been seen in the past five months is at special prosecutorial court sessions. He’s driven to the courthouse in an armored van. The media aren’t allowed anywhere near him, but one telephoto shot that might be him shows a figure in a flak vest with his face covered in what looks like bandages. Rumor circulating in the Swiss press is that he’s undergoing plastic surgery during the proceedings and will be given a new identity after he’s finished testifying.”

“An armored van?” Cabrillo asked, just to be sure.

“With a police escort. I said this was an alternative to tracking down forty Russians who may or may not know anything,” Mark replied. “I didn’t say it was an easier one.”

“Is he allowed visitors?” Juan asked, already thinking about what he could use as leverage over the attorney. Isphording was getting a great deal from the Swiss authorities. Why would he jeopardize that by talking to the Corporation about a handful of dummy companies he’d helped establish? Juan would have to get creative.

“Just one. His wife.”

That shot down his idea of trying to intimidate him in the prison’s interview room. If they couldn’t talk to him in jail, and he doubted Isphording would be allowed to speak to anyone in the courthouse, Juan saw his options as severely limited. He played a hundred different scenarios in his head and came up with nothing. Well, not nothing — but what sprang into his mind was one hell of a long shot.

“How sure are they about a PLO connection?” he asked.

“Reports are sketchy,” Mark said, “but it fits with his pattern of corruption.”

“That’ll have to be good enough. Even rumor can work to our advantage.”

“What’s happening in that scheming mind of yours?” Hanley asked.

“I’m too embarrassed to tell you yet. It’s that nuts. Are there any pictures of Isphording’s wife?”

“Shouldn’t be too hard to dig one up in newspaper archives.”

“Okay, get on it. I’m going to Zurich, get the lay of the land to see if my idea could even work. Where are you guys now?”

“We’re in the East China Sea about two hundred miles north of Taiwan,” Max said.

“And the Maus?”

“Twenty miles ahead of us. We’ve determined this is the limit of her radar. We send up the UAV every twelve hours just to put some eyeballs on her and make sure nothing’s changed. So far it’s just a regular tow job. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Except the ship in her hold was stolen off the high seas.”

“Well yes, there is that.”

With the Maus only covering 150 miles a day, they were only a day and a half out from Taipei, although Juan was still convinced the vessel would change course and head someplace else. Taiwan was a modern democratic country and was too well-regulated for the pirates to use it as their base of operation. He was sure they’d continue on to Vietnam, the Philippines, or Indonesia.

That meant that if he was going to get to Rudolph Isphording, it would be without the Oregon as a base of operation. But he would need her unique capabilities if he was going to pull off what he’d been thinking. He calculated distances and times, factoring in the range of the Robinson R-44 in her protected hangar belowdecks. If he wanted to get equipment or personnel off the Oregon, he had a short window as the ship steamed past Taiwan in which to do it. Once she reached the South China Sea, they’d be too far from land to make any transfers. With a sinking feeling, he figured he had just two days after reaching Zurich to determine who and what he wanted off the Oregon before she was out of range.

They had needed three weeks to get everything set up to pull off the job in North Korea, and even then they had been rushed. And that caper was a piece of cake compared to what Cabrillo had in mind now.