Piranha

21

Hector Bazin jumped from the burning Oceanaire and swam to shore two minutes before it exploded and sank with the bodies of his men still on board. Armed with his SIG Sauer pistol, he carjacked the first vehicle that came along, a rusted-out pickup driven by a barely coherent Rastafarian who reeked of marijuana. One shot to the head and Bazin had transportation. He stashed the corpse in the trees and sped toward Montego Bay’s Sangster International Airport.

His waterlogged phone was useless, and he couldn’t risk using the dead man’s to instruct his pilot to have the Gulfstream fueled and ready to take off. He didn’t want to leave a connection between this murder and the jet. He had to hope his other men had been more successful and were ready to leave.

As he drove, Bazin stewed over the missed opportunity. With so many simultaneous targets, he wasn’t able to get real-time intelligence from the Doctor or he might have anticipated Juan Cabrillo’s defensive strategy. But that was no excuse. Bazin had known the Chairman would be on that boat unarmed and that should have been enough.

Bazin wasn’t used to setbacks like this. From an early age, in the slums of Port-au-Prince, he’d shown a knack for thriving in trying circumstances. If Bazin needed something — whether it was food, education, or money — he found a way to get it. Like hundreds of thousands of other poor children in Haiti, Bazin had been a restavec, a child sent to be a servant for a richer host family.

Despite the access to education and enough food to grow strong, Bazin despised his new home with a high-ranking government bureaucrat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Beatings were a regular occurrence for even the slightest offense. The other restavec in the household, an orphan a year older than he named Jacques Duval, was never subjected to the same abuse because he was the favored one, the adopted son the minister could never have fathered.

The physical punishment only got worse when they were all transferred to the plum posting of the Haitian embassy in Paris. After a particularly bad beating put him in hospital with a broken jaw, arm, and ribs, Bazin took the chance to seek asylum in France. Without any other skills, he joined the French Foreign Legion and went into its elite commando team.

Bazin loved the training and action of the military, but he chafed at the authority, which only served to remind him of his childhood as a restavec. He wanted control over his own destiny once and for all, so he left the military after a ten-year stint to hire himself out as a mercenary, eventually building up a vast network of contacts and training his own soldiers from the vast pool of young poverty-stricken men back in Haiti.

He knew that Cabrillo and his crew were mercenaries as well. But they seemed to have the mistaken notion that there was some noble calling to their missions. Bazin was in it for the money, pure and simple. He would take any job that paid well no matter what the operation called for. He only hired men who shared the same ruthlessness, some because they enjoyed it and others because they knew what Bazin would do if they failed or betrayed him.

His reputation brought him to the attention of the Doctor, who had contacted him through various intermediaries. The money flowed from the beginning, and had turned into a tsunami of cash in the last six months.

Bazin’s debut mission for the Doctor had been to act as the go-between for the sale of stolen U.S. military technology to a Venezuelan admiral named Dayana Ruiz. It was for underwater drone hardware from the U.S. Navy, a project called Piranha. Bazin didn’t know what the admiral planned to do with it and he didn’t care. The sale price had been in the millions and Bazin’s share had been considerable. So when the Doctor offered him an exclusive contract for a much bigger operation, Bazin didn’t hesitate to take it.

The orders were to surreptitiously obtain an array of scientific equipment that was baffling to Bazin. Under the Doctor’s guidance and with the help of engineers and technicians, Bazin went about building a secret facility that seemed to have no useful purpose. Only when it finally went into operation did Bazin understand the true scope of the Doctor’s vision. He shared the breathtaking details with Bazin, making it clear that if the Haitian stuck with him, he would have more wealth and power than he ever dreamed.

The exploitation of the Colombian drug lords was merely a means to an end. Although the drone sale had been lucrative and had supplied the funds to put Phase 1 of the operation into motion, the Doctor needed millions more to bring his ultimate plan to fruition and the cocaine cartels supplied the money. After Bazin, who had since earned the Doctor’s trust, had heard where Phase 2 would lead, he gladly agreed to be a part of it.

The only thing that seemed to stand in their way was the crew of the Oregon.

Bazin drove into Montego Bay and left the pickup in an abandoned lot. By now his clothes were dry. He hailed a taxi to take him to the airport’s private jet facility, where he breezed through immigration and boarded the Gulfstream.

The only one of his men inside the cabin was David Pasquet, a former Haitian National Police SWAT officer and the sniper who’d been sent to take down Eric Stone and Mark Murphy.

“Where is everyone else?” Bazin asked him.

Pasquet solemnly shook his head. “No one else is coming.”

Bazin stared at him in disbelief. “Dead?”

“According to the police reports I’m hearing. I barely made it here myself.”

Bazin poked his head into the cockpit and barked at the pilot to take off as soon as he had clearance.

“What happened?” Bazin snapped as he changed into fresh clothes.

“I can only speculate,” Pasquet began, “but I think at least one of the women at the spa survived the attack and warned the rest of them. By the time I was set to take my shot, my targets were taking cover. I believe I clipped one of them, but the police arrived before I could finish them off. The Oregon left the harbor over an hour ago.”

Bazin told him about his sea battle with Juan Cabrillo.

“Including the two who came with me, that’s nine men lost today.” Bazin shook his head in disgust. They weren’t his best, but they were the best available on short notice. “This crew is formidable even when they don’t have their magic ship. We’ve gotten complacent with our surveillance advantage.”

“Do you think this jeopardizes the plan?” Pasquet asked.

“That’s up to the Doctor.”

Once the jet took off, Bazin braced himself for the phone call he had to make. It wasn’t going to be pleasant.

When the Doctor answered, he was his usual curt self. “Well?”

“They got away.”

“How many of them?”

Bazin grimaced. “All of them.”

There was silence on the phone for a gut-churning moment. “I give you literally the best intelligence money can buy and you let them escape?”

“The plans were put together at short notice,” Bazin said, a defense he knew was lame.

“You know we’re only four days away from the drone intercept mission. We can’t afford to commit unforced errors.”

“I can assure you this won’t happen again.”

“If the U.S. military finds out that their Piranha drones were not only stolen but also put to active use, it could eventually lead back to you and me. If that happens before the mission, the whole plan could fall apart. Do you understand?”

“Should we warn the Venezuelans that their operations may be compromised?”

“No. I kept a back door into the code controlling the drones. Once they’ve done their work today, I’ll set them to self-destruct. They’ll sink, and that will be the last anyone hears of them.”

“What about Admiral Ruiz?”

“What about her? The drones have done the job for her. Besides, this is her fault. If she hadn’t let the Oregon go, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“And the Oregon?”

“I’ll keep tabs on her just in case.”

“They’ve left Montego Bay. They must be near where I had to abandon my pursuit of Juan Cabrillo’s fishing boat.”

“I can’t surveil them unless I know exactly where they are. Have the jet circle the area and tell me the coordinates.”

“They couldn’t have gotten far in the time it took me to get to the airport,” Bazin said. “We’ll find them for you.”

Bazin told the pilot where to fly, tracing the route the Oceanaire had taken from Montego Bay Harbor to the fishing grounds and then adding on the distance the ship had time to travel since it left. The cloud cover was low, under three thousand feet, so the pilot had to dip below it to search for the ship.

They descended from the clouds, and Bazin was ready to transmit the GPS coordinates to the Doctor as soon as he spotted the ship. But when they reached clear sky, all they saw was an expansive carpet of blue stretching in all directions from the Jamaican coastline. The only visible vessel was a cruise ship on the distant horizon. Otherwise, the sea was unbroken. There wasn’t even a sign of the Cast Away, which presumably meant it was now sitting on the bottom of the ocean. As for the freighter, Bazin was mystified.

The Oregon was gone.