The next day, we arrived in Virginia Beach. Despite standing up to Hanley, I wanted to spend as little time on shore as possible. We were just going to meet a friend, and then leave.
I had known that we might have to take the boat before it was finished, so I had drawn up a list of electronic equipment that we needed to complete the plans. I had gotten in contact with an electronics supplier and got everything I wanted.
The dry dock workers had managed to get the missile control computer installed. Because it was the same as used on Navy ships, the company had an extra lying around. Unfortunately, almost everything else was missing.
We left the boat in a temporary mooring at the marina and I called the shipyard to arrange a delivery of some things that we would need. I also called my friend, Andy Newhart.
Andy had been holding some of the sophisticated equipment for me. We hired a truck to bring it to the boat. Andy helped Nika and I get everything inside and set up in the Combat Information Center.
The CIC was modeled after the compartment of the same name on warships. All the weapon system controls, radar, and sonar systems were handled from there. Information was fed back to the bridge and to the weapons to make everything run. Around the compartment there were metal cabinets to keep all the gear secured in rough seas.
We loaded the rest of the electronics while Andy went to get his personal things. He was a college professor, gamer, and all-around nerd. Also, he was dating a British porn star named Hawker Hurricane. She was currently engaged in some kind of litigation as a witness.
Eventually the truck from the shipyard arrived. We unloaded a few buckets of paint from it as well as miscellaneous items that had been left at the dry dock.
While Andy got to work on the equipment, I got the marina workers to help me top off the fuel tanks. I didn’t know where we were going, but I wanted to have the fuel to get there. We were just about ready to get underway when Hanley showed up.
He must have left Langley the moment we docked to have gotten there when he did. I wondered if there was some kind of GPS tracker on the boat. Perhaps he’d hidden it when he’d come aboard the first time.
Hanley stepped aboard without asking permission. I met him on deck. I didn’t have any specific reason for not wanting him to meet Andy, but I figured the less he knew the better.
“You work fast,” I said.
“Well, since the boat wasn’t expected to be ready for another week or two, we were going to put this job on someone else, but I think it’ll make a good first trial.”
“What did you have in mind?”
He handed me a slip of paper with coordinates and a date and time. There were codes written beneath the numbers.
“Be there,” he said, and walked away.
I studied the information. The coordinates listed were for somewhere in the Caribbean. We had plenty of time to get there. The codes were used to establish radio contact and to show that we were who we said we were when it came time to meet whoever was waiting for us.
I cast off the lines and Nika steered us away from the pier. She was a little clumsy with it but learning fast. On our way south, we passed within sight of the Hatteras light. It was shrinking in the distance when I made my scheduled phone call to my therapist.
Dr. Mind Games had been counseling me for a while now. I wasn’t sure if it was completely necessary, but every time I thought about ending our correspondence something crazy would happen to me and I felt like I needed somepony to talk with.
In traveling all over the world, I couldn’t exactly make it in for regular visits. We had arranged for me to call at ten a.m. on Tuesdays, Norfolk time. That sometimes led to difficulties in time conversion, but I managed.
“Hello Sail. Where are you today?” she asked. I pictured her in my thoughts, an older mare with glasses and a brain for a cutie mark.
Sometimes I couldn’t tell her where I was. Today I didn’t think it mattered. “Off the Carolina coast. Not too far.”
“What’s happened in the past week?”
Where did I begin? I managed to tell her the whole story. She was a good listener and only interrupted with questions a few times.
“You seem to be taking a lot of risks,” Dr. Games observed.
“Nothing new.”
“Did you say you’re traveling with a female friend? What does she think?”
“A female human friend. Don’t think she’s anything more. Anyway, half of this trip was her idea.”
“I’m glad you’ve found a friend. You could always use more.” Dr. Games had a point.
“Looks like the hour is up. Talk to you next week.” I ended the call. It wasn’t a normal phone, of course. To get coverage all over the world, you need a satellite phone. The phones themselves aren’t that expensive, but the monthly service bills are killer.
I went back to painting the boat, hovering beside and dodging waves as I worked with the brush. After a couple of days, I had gotten it mostly covered. The waves kept me from getting down low on the hull, but that was something that could be taken care of at our next port call.
The boat had never been officially registered, so I sent the information to my lawyer so he could take care of it.
We finally got around to christening the boat. There was no champagne on board, so we used vodka and called it good enough. On the stern I painted:
Corsair
Norfolk, VA
Andy had done wonders in the CIC, and we had working radios and even internet. He could multitask like no one I’d ever met before, fighting on a virtual battlefield with one hand and plotting a real GPS course with the other. If he’d had a third hand, he would have been holding a coffee cup. Caffeine was very important to him.
We’d installed a massive satellite data link, so despite Andy’s games the rest of us still had fast internet. It was just one feature among many aboard Corsair that made it a very nice place to live and work. I congratulated myself on making several smart decisions when drawing up the plans for the boat.
Not everything was sunny, though. In the first few days, I had noticed some shake from the port side propulsion. The problem gradually got worse to the point that I could feel a vibration when standing on deck.
We eventually figured out that the port-side propeller shaft was warped. Maybe the metallurgy was incorrect, or maybe it had been damaged during installation. Whatever the reason, if we continued using it, it could cause a bigger problem. If we’d had a proper shakedown cruise before putting the boat to use, we might have found the problem and gotten it fixed.
We had been cruising along at a modest pace, but now forced to put one screw out of commission, we had to run the remaining propeller at full speed to get to the rendezvous point on time.
We were now down in the Gulf of Darién, bordered by Colombia to the east and Panama to the west. Despite being low on power, we made it to where we needed to be twelve hours early.
I took some time to figure out exactly where we were. The point was located outside the territorial waters of either country, but we could make landfall within a day’s sail. The scheduled meeting time was well into the night.
As the hours passed until the meeting, Andy seemed to grow more and more excited.
“So we’re going to meet some people. Then what?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“No.”
“What if it’s some kind of double cross?”
“They could have done it without making us come all the way down here.”
“Should I have my gun, just in case?”
I laughed. Andy owned a small pistol, but that would be next to useless in any kind of real fight.
The three of us were ready to go as the time approached. Nika and I were up on the bridge. I had turned down the lights to a dim red glow to help our night vision, although light amplifying goggles were close at hand. Andy called out that he had picked up an aircraft on radar.
I checked the screen in the bridge. Based on the size of the return and the speed of the target, I figured it was probably a cargo plane.
Two minutes early, the radio came to life.
“One-eight-two-zero.” The voice was quiet and sounded like it had been through a synthesizer, which it kind of had. Secure communication required that voice be scrambled by the transmitter and reassembled into words by the receiver. The paper Hanley had given me contained the information I needed to set up an encrypted channel. The encryption process made things sound different. The voice also barely moved the needle on the signal meter, which measured the strength of the incoming radio waves. The transmitter was using low power to limit the distance the signal would travel. Encrypted or not, we wouldn’t want anyone else to hear it.
I keyed the microphone and spoke the code I had been given.. “One-one-three-seven.”
There was no reply but the airplane continued on, passing straight over the top of us at twenty thousand feet.
It was very faint, but several small blips separated from the airplane. The radar wouldn’t have caught it if we weren’t so close. They quickly dropped through the sky. At a thousand feet, the radar returns suddenly increased in size. I grabbed one of the night vision scopes and saw six parachutes open and drift down to the ocean.
Because of wind, they didn’t land directly on us. We had to move about a quarter of a mile. We found four men and two floating watertight containers.
Corsair’s twin engines were positioned forward of the usual design to accommodate a well deck. There was a door on the stern that could be opened and small watercraft could be driven inside. I brought the boat around and dropped the tailgate.
The men swam in with their equipment. The containers floated low in the water. When they were all inside, I went down to meet them.
The four of them were dressed in wet suits and they all looked like professionals. The one who appeared to be in charge handed me a waterproof map. “This is where we’re going.”
It was a map of the coast of Colombia. A mark was drawn on it, with the exact coordinates written. I handed it to Andy, who had come down to the well deck.
“Get us there,” I said. He nodded and took a last look at the men before heading back to the CIC.
“Where can we sleep?” asked one of the visitors.
I showed them to the block of staterooms. They seemed to approve of the accommodations, despite the fact that there were no mattresses besides the one in my room that I had brought from home. None of them were interested in small talk and they disappeared into their rooms.
We had six rooms, four guests and three of us in the crew. We could have asked a couple of the men to share a room, but instead Nika volunteered to stay with me. Really, I think she just wanted to take advantage of my king-size bed. There was enough room for both of us.
The men were on the boat for perhaps twenty four hours. They had their own food, but accepted coffee from us. The leader was unhappy to learn of our mechanical difficulties, and advised us to push as hard as we could for the destination. I calculated a speed that would allow us to arrive on time and use the warped shaft as little as possible. Despite that, the vibrations got worse.
It was night again as we got near the spot. The men went down to the well deck. From the two containers, they took scuba equipment and guns.
The air tanks were small, so I figured they would only need them for the short trip to shore. They also had battery powered scooters to pull them though the water faster.
They asked us to punch holes in the containers and let them sink. Then they left.
Traveling slowly on one screw, we headed for Panama. When morning came, I called Hanley on the encrypted satellite phone to discuss payment. It probably would have been better business practice to agree on a price beforehand, but this way allowed us to compensate if anything unexpected happened.
I got him to agree to send a new propeller shaft and a crew with the proper security clearance to install it. He also made arrangements to borrow a dry dock in the shipping facilities around the Panama Canal.
By the time the sun was up, we were far away from where we’d dropped the men, and in much deeper water. It was time to get rid of the containers.
They were made of high density plastic and when empty they floated high in the water. I pushed them out from the well deck and asked Nika to bring the boat around to where the containers bobbed in the waves. On my way down to the deck, I stopped by the CIC. “Come on, Andy.”
He grabbed a shotgun and followed me. I had managed to get the helicopter deck covered with nonskid paint, but the markings to help pilots land weren’t applied yet. We walked to the edge of the deck and I pointed out the containers floating below us.
“Work the action and chamber a round,” I said.
Everyone who has ever seen an action movie knows how to use a shotgun. Andy racked the foregrip. Clack-clack
He grinned. “That’s the greatest sound ever.”
I agreed, it was one of the best cues to tell someone that you meant business. “Most shotguns don’t have effective sights, so just line the barrel up with your eyes.” Andy stepped to the edge of the deck and aimed down.
The first shot made him lose his grip on the shotgun and almost drop it into two thousand feet of water. If he had, I probably would have sent him in after it.
I walked over to survey the results. The heavy lead slug had no trouble tearing through the container and it was beginning to fill with water.
I nodded. “Do the other one.” Andy racked the action again, ejecting the empty shell and loading a fresh one. Another shot, and the second container was soon sinking.
I swept the empty shells over the side with my hoof and we walked back in. Andy said, “Thanks for this.”
“I just don’t want you to be useless in a gunfight.” I was only half joking. I didn’t plan on getting us into any shootouts, but it never hurt to be prepared.
We spent a few days in Panama while the boat was being fixed. Nika insisted on going to the beach . Andy was content to sit in front of his computer and work on his anti-tan.
Most of the people at the seashore were tourists. I looked around but didn’t see anyone suspicious. I would have liked to be able to relax completely, but I doubted that I would be able to do that ever again. Part of the job, I guess.
Even Nika in her bikini didn’t seem relaxed, but that could have been because of all the men stealing glances at her. I thought it was hilarious.
While the boat was out of the water, I finished the painting the hull. Before leaving, we bought a lot of things to finish fitting out the boat. First among them were mattresses.
Hanley contacted us with the news that the British wanted to hire someone discrete to transport a VIP from The Bahamas to England. He didn’t give further details, and we didn’t ask.
When we arrived in Nassau, we called the man Hanley had put us in contact with. His name was A. J. Stuart. On the phone, he sounded very British.
He told us to wait, and he would come to us. After that, we needed to be ready to leave. I went to work filling the boat with fuel while Nika went ashore to buy food. We’d nearly run out and it wouldn’t do to have our guests eating military surplus MREs. She was nice enough to find some animal crackers to replace my dwindling stock.
Nika had returned and I had just begun to get restless when a car pulled up and three men and a woman got out.
I pressed the button for the intercom to the CIC. “They’re here.”
Nika and I walked down to the main deck. Andy joined us shortly. His eyes went wide. “Oh my God, that’s Hawker!”
I swung my eyes back to the woman. When she had gotten out of the car, she’d been covered up with a head scarf and a long coat, despite the warm weather. As she came aboard, she shed the outside layers of clothing she was wearing.
In my limited study of human anatomy, I knew that Hawker’s face and body were on the upper edge of believability, but not overdone like some porn stars.
One of the men offered his fist to me. “I’m Stuart; we talked earlier. I’m with the United Kingdom’s Serious Organized Crime Agency. I’m escorting this young lady home. Are we ready to leave yet?”
I gave him a hoof bump and told him that we ready to go. The two men who had come with them brought his and Hawker’s luggage to the boat before leaving in the car.
Nika and Andy went back inside to prepare to get underway. I showed our guests to their staterooms. They each deposited their things. Since they were going to be aboard for almost a week, I gave them a short tour.
I left them at the bridge and went to slip the mooring lines. When the boat floated freely, I waved to Nika, who stood at the wheel. From where I stood, I could see the three of them standing there around the controls. Stuart looked bored. Hawker seemed excited. Nika didn’t seem pleased to be stuck on a boat with a porn star.
When the sun came up the next morning, I got up with it and went to the galley to get some coffee. The coffee maker had apparently been running all night. The pot was several cups low, and I assumed Andy drank it.
I went up to the bridge and found him there. We made small talk and he got up from his seat behind the wheel. “I’m going to go down to the CIC.”
Stuart came up the stairs. “Good morning gentleman. Is there a place to exercise on board?”
We didn’t have any exercise equipment. I made a mental note to get some at the next opportunity. “Not really.”
“The deck is too small to run on,” said Stuart.
“Well, so is anything short of an aircraft carrier.”
Stuart went down to the foredeck and did calisthenics. He looked like he was in excellent shape. On impulse, I used the intercom to call Andy.
“What do you know about Stuart?”
“Not much. He’s not very pleasant.”
I laughed. “See what you can find out about him. Be discreet.”
Andy said he would, and I left him to it.
Later in the day, Nika brought me a sandwich. I muttered thanks between bites. I hadn’t asked her to do it, but I was kind of hungry. When she relieved me, I went down to the CIC.
When I got there, Hawker and Andy were gathered around his computer. The screen showed a website with a lot of pink and some pictures of her.
“Hey boss,” said Andy. “Hawker wanted to put a notice on her website that she won’t be available to work for a while. While we were at it, we decided to update the site and freshen it up a little.”
He handed me a plain folder. “This is what you asked for earlier.”
I turned to go back to the bridge, looking at the folder. It was a brief report on Stuart. It looked as if Andy was still able to effectively multitask even with his girlfriend around.
I dug into the report. Ambrosius Jamieson Stuart. I could see why he preferred A.J. He had been with the Special Air Service before joining the Serious Organized Crime Agency. That would explain why he was in good shape. The SAS was a special unit of the United Kingdom Army. They were about as badass as British people got.
Andy also found out that there was nothing suspicious about his finances or anything else to indicate he was into shady business. He concluded the report by stating that while Stuart might have been unlikeable, he was committed to his job.
I gave Nika the report. She used to work in the intelligence business and was impressed by what Andy had been able to dig up. We were talking it over when Andy came over the intercom to say that he’d just gotten an email from Hanley.
Hanley usually called, so this was something new. I went down to look at it. It was a change in plans. The British decided we should change course for Monaco to pick up some information that went along with the trial that Hawker was being sent home to testify at. I figured that it must be a really high profile crime.
The message had been sent in email form to better convince Stuart that things had changed. I pressed the button for the ship-wide intercom. “Mr. Stuart to the CIC, please.”
Andy worked out a new course for Monaco and sent the information up to the bridge. I went up and informed Nika what we were going to do. She shrugged and said, “As long as we are getting paid.”
After passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, we had to make an emergency stop in Morocco. The primary hydraulic control for the rudder sprang a leak. There was a backup system, so it wasn’t a problem that hurt the boat’s functionality, but it still needed to be fixed.
I first discovered the problem when I noticed the hydraulic oil was low. Because the backup system had taken over and everything still worked, it was hard to find the problem. Finally, after several hours, I emerged from the bilge sweating and covered in oil, dragging a broken hydraulic line with me. Once again, it was something a proper shakedown cruise would have caught.
I didn’t figure the CIA would be too keen on allowing shipyard workers from a third world country to inspect the boat too closely, so I had to bring the hose ashore and find an identical one.
We stayed tied up to the pier for two more days. The first replacement hose I had gotten wouldn’t fit, despite the claims of the man who had sold it to me. Rather than try him again, I called Norfolk and had the company send one overnight by airplane.
While we waited for it, I began to notice some people hanging around the dock. Sure, the boat stuck out, but it couldn’t be the first yacht the people had ever seen. Even if it was, it would just be cause for some rubbernecking and then they would move on. I didn’t like it. I called Stuart and had him come take a look. “I think we’re under surveillance.”
“How do you know?”
“For the past day I’ve been watching the shipyard workers. Every time I’ve glanced around, there’s always one who isn’t doing anything. It’s not always the same man, and he’s not always in the same place, but there’s always one acting suspicious.”
“What do you think; they’ve set up a rotating watch on us?” Stuart asked.
“Yeah.”
He thought for a moment. As a former soldier, I figured he had more experience with this type of thing, which is why I asked him about it.
“As long as they’re just observing, I don’t think we have a problem. To be on the safe side, I think we should set up a rotating watch of our own. If they try anything, we’ll want to have warning.”
I nodded. “What did Hawker get involved in, anyway? Are they willing to track her all the way here?”
Stuart shook his head. “I didn’t think the man Ms. Hurricane is going to testify against had the resources to have underlings working here. I was also sure she left the Bahamas under total secrecy. That was the whole point of using your boat.” He paused. “Unless they’re here about you?”
I had to admit, that was probably a likely scenario. The northern coast of Morocco where we had stopped wasn’t that far from Libya. It was possible that someone connected to Ali Al-Azhem knew we were here. Whether we had an intelligence leak or it was just pure dumb luck, I didn’t know. In the meantime, setting up a watch like Stuart suggested was smart.
We kept an eye out during the rest of the day. As I had observed earlier, there was always someone watching us. That night, I volunteered to stay awake.
I sat up in the bridge with all the lights off, occasionally eating animal crackers. I had night vision binoculars and a pistol.
I’d grown fond of the FN Five-seveN semiautomatic in the time that I’d owned it. It was able to carry twenty armor piercing rounds in the magazine, yet it was accurate and low recoil.
Yes, trying to figure out how to shoot a gun while not being equipped with fingers was difficult. Luckily, I had the resources to figure it out. A bracket that fitted to my hoof was connected to the grip. A piece of high strength synthetic twine was tied to the trigger. I had to pull it with my teeth. Overall, it was a terribly complicated system, but when was the last time you saw a non-unicorn with a gun?
I didn’t have to use the Five-seveN that night. When I carried it with me, I usually concealed it inside a vest I wore. Nika thought it looked rather stylish.
As I sat there on the bridge, I made a slow sweep with the night vision every so often. Each time, I was able to pick out a watcher. I wondered if they knew we were on to them. If they did, it didn’t look like they cared.
In the morning, our new hydraulic line arrived and we made ready to sail once I got everything put back together.
I had a shower to clean off all the dirt and oil, paying special attention to keep my feathers clumping. Afterwards, I joined Nika on the bridge. I called the CIC to check if Andy was ready to go. He was. The two Brits were in their respective staterooms.
After casting off the lines and getting the bow pointed out to sea, I looked back. The man who was watching us had a cell phone to his ear.
About half an hour after leaving the pier, Andy called from the CIC. “We’ve got two contacts almost directly behind us, traveling fast. They’re probably small boats.”
If someone was after us, I wondered why they didn’t try an assault while we were in port. Maybe they were trying to stay out of the public eye by attacking us on the open sea. To be on the safe side, I cranked the boat up to its maximum speed.
I lifted a pair of high powered binoculars and looked aft. The radar had picked them up about twelve miles away. Because of the curvature of the Earth, I couldn’t see them yet.
For the second time in as many days, I called Stuart. When he arrived in the bridge, he listened carefully to my description of the situation and studied the radar display.
“I think we should prepare,” he said, “but we aren’t in any danger yet.”
That was true. They had cut into the twelve mile lead a little, but since we had increased our speed, they closed on us more slowly. Doing some quick math, I figured that we had almost two hours before they were on us.
If we’d had more weapons aboard, I would have turned the boat around and gone on the offensive. As it was, we had only what I had scavenged.
Almost exactly two hours and more than sixty miles later, one of the boats appeared to drop back, as if it had run out of fuel. Through the binoculars, I studied the remaining boat. It had closed to within a quarter of a mile and I could see four men in it. They appeared to be armed.
Stuart appeared, holding a MP5K submachine gun.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“I brought it along just in case. It’s small enough to fit in my baggage.” I started to like the man a little more.
The men on the boat began firing. Their aim was being upset by how much the waves rocked the smaller vessel, but I distinctly heard the sounds of bullet ricochets off the stern of my boat.
I ducked inside the bridge, protected by the bulletproof glass. Stuart had the binoculars to his eyes. The pursing boat had closed to no more than two hundred yards away. I’m not sure if it was because he was British or if it was because he was a trained special operations soldier, but Stuart looked unruffled. He stepped out, unfolding the compact stock of his weapon. He put it to his shoulder and calmly fired several short bursts into the boat even as bullets whizzed around us. When he was finished, no one fired back.
Crewed only by dead men, the boat continued to speed along. It passed us and we kept it on radar. About half an hour later, we found it drifting, out of fuel.
If someone found the boat, they would ask questions. Sure, we’d acted in self defense, but questions were something we didn’t need. I swung the wheel and Corsair’s bow plowed through the thin sheet metal skin of the smaller boat, sending it to the bottom.
Andy came up from the CIC. “Interesting day,” he commented, sounding casual. We’d both had half an hour since the shooting had stopped to calm down.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Is this going to become a habit?”
I shrugged. “You never know.”
He paused a moment. “Can I paint a kill on the side of the bridge?”
He meant a battle record, something warships sometimes did.
“Sure.”
Andy went to get a fine brush and carefully illustrated a silhouette of a small boat on the superstructure. When he was finished, he stepped back to admire his work.
“That’s one,” he said.