Night Moves (Doc Ford)

29




THREE MONTHS I’D OWNED THE ZODIAC AND HAD come to the conclusion it wasn’t the boat for me, but perfect for what I was doing now: running forty-plus in darkness through light chop, lights of the Sanibel Causeway ahead, a few cars already tunneling their way toward the island where windows sparked behind coconut palms.

I’d bought the twenty-six-foot rigid hull inflatable because it was unexpectedly available, it was equipped like nothing on the civilian market, and it would allow me to run offshore in weather that my previous boat, a Maverick flats skiff—as solid as it was—couldn’t handle. So I’d made a snap decision, which is the worst possible thing a boat buyer can do, but the result was only mildly disappointing, not disastrous as it is for most.

The Zodiac had all the high-tech touches: a bolstered T-top, radar tower aft, a cavernous console, an electronics suite shielded by Plexiglas, Ullman shock-mitigating seats mounted on a forgiving deck, and a full-length Kevlar shoe beneath a collar of rigid black tubes that looked bulletproof—and maybe were, considering the agency that had ordered the boat as a prototype. For power: twin Mercury 200s, top speed over sixty, a range of three hundred miles with extra gas bladders—to Cuba and back or more than halfway to the Yucatán. Great if you’ve got to bull through a hurricane and drop SEAL operatives on a beach but too much draft and too much boat for Dinkin’s Bay.

A very comfortable choice, though, for a fifty-mile trip to Lostman’s River and the Bone Field, so I should have been having fun with my new toy.

I wasn’t. The black-hulled Stiletto was on my mind. And a Haitian drug dealer who had an appetite for revenge when he wasn’t partying with wealthy clientele. My cousin Ransom’s voice reminding me, The rich ones, they think it very cool to have their own Haitian voodoo man they invite for drinks when they in Jamaica, Saint Martin. Ransom’s voice stressing, That boy get around!

Jet-set partiers . . . a Caribbean supplier . . . a jet-set assassin—but there was no tenable connection! One of the country’s top intel gatherers, Donald Cheng, had told me himself—the Stiletto was owned by some faceless company involved with offshore racing.

Stop obsessing, Ford. If you cross the line, vigilance becomes pathology. Shallow up! Float on—enjoy the ride.

The Zodiac’s storage console was chest high. Big enough for a chemical toilet, a handheld shower, and an electrically cooled Igloo. I told myself to be decadent, break a long-standing rule and have a breakfast beer. Instead, I fished out a Snapple, Diet Peach, the bottle cool in my left hand. Took another look inside the locker and considered my khaki gun bag—an old 9mm Sig Sauer pistol therein, a smaller, lighter 9mm Kahr, too, plus a box of Hornaday Critical Defense ammo and fifty rounds of Remington for plinking if I got the chance.

Put the Sig on the console just in case?

I asked myself the question, then mocked myself by answering, In case of what? Steer the damn boat and look at the stars!

After idling beneath the causeway, I muscled the boat back onto plane, bow pointed at the robotic eye of the Sanibel Lighthouse, and left the channel behind, both Merc outboards synced at 4000 rpm. Off the lighthouse, eons of tidal flow have piled sandbars. Cut in close to the point, though, water is deep enough, so that’s what I did, aware that the Holiday Inn was only a few miles up the beach. Then steered west toward a blazing moon that was melting into blackness that was the Gulf of Mexico.

Big moon, key lime yellow. Add rings, it could have been Saturn spinning out of orbit and about to collide with the Earth. I pinned the autopilot to the moon as if it were a target, switched the VHF to Weather Band III, then leaned back, checked the gauges, while a digitized voice reported: “. . . Cape Sable to Tarpon Springs, wind southeast ten to fifteen, decreasing by midday . . .”

Good. Finally, a chance to let my mind drift freely . . . free, at least, to browse the universally limited list of male standbys: sex, unfinished projects, my children, sex, how would the Rays do this year? women, sex, surfing—did Tomlinson ever pay me for that damn paddle?—fishing, sex, women . . .

It was a path that soon fixed my attention on last night’s conversation with Hannah.

Friday evening, her mother’s bingo night a week away, I was taking the lady to dinner. An actual date. Not a typical catch-kill-and-grill at my place, either. We would travel by car, not boat—well, by truck actually—to a fine restaurant, a place with tablecloths, mojitos, and the best Yucatán shrimp on the islands. Later, maybe stop by the lab to have coffee beneath the stars—Hannah’s suggestion, not mine. Which still rattled me because, as I reminded myself yet again, to the Hannah Smiths of this world, a date is not just a date, and the bedroom—if that ever happened—meant a hell of a lot more than a recreational romp.

Spooky, indeed, yet I’d felt unexpected relief after our talk. Almost as if I’d been waiting to breathe for a short time and could suddenly heave my chest full and enjoy the next big breath to come. No explaining it—I barely knew the woman. Not really. But that good feeling was still with me while my mind returned to browsing: oil pressure, water temp, all gauges good . . . nudge the rpms up to 4500 . . . next lab project . . . women, sex: Hannah naked, or even topless, my god!

That was something fun to visualize, and I did while I turned the boat southeast and typed in a digital heading of 147 degrees. Hit autopilot, a sip of tea, reduced radio volume, looked to port, starboard, spun around for a look aft, then my brain resumed scanning mode.

Weather radar: Pod of squalls, red dots off the Tortugas . . . how the hell do you reduce range? Remote toggles? No . . . touch screen . . . Hannah’s a big girl, too, solid . . . so I walk in, no way of knowing, and there she is in my bed, blouse unbuttoned, one long leg canted just so—she pulls a stunt like that, what’s she expect me to do?

Open the Plexiglas shield, punch buttons but without much confidence, engage the radar system I did not need on this clear black morning, a rim of orange heat fast expanding in the east. My mind still streaming:

Too damn many electronics, screws my night vision . . . the dimmer button, where is it? Or . . . better yet, find Hannah waiting in panties and bra, nipples right there under a meshy sort of material and she knows it! . . . Pale nipples, or maybe darker, when the straps slide off her shoulders—unless some drunk knocks on the door . . . or if the dog . . .

I closed the cabinet and sat, unaware of what I’d done, as the flow of consciousness continued: . . . or if the dog, humm, the dog—the owner, bet he’s gotten the forms by now. Damn it all, was getting rid of that dog a mistake? No . . . screw it, hair all over my sheets, with a woman lying in bed waiting, her bra on the floor, wearing nothing but . . . Humm?

Interesting diversion: By definition, is a woman actually naked if there’s a ring on her finger? Argue all I wanted, Hannah would by god expect it!

The radar system booted, the screen sweeping pixelated circles around the Zodiac: BLIP . . . BLIP . . . BLIP . . . Then suddenly faster: BLIP-BLIP-BLIP . . .

I studied the screen a moment, thinking: That can’t be right.

The pulse increased, the sound of an accelerating heartbeat: BLIP-BLIP-BLIP . . . BLIP-BLIP-BLIP . . .

Out loud, I said, “What the hell’s wrong with the radar?”

BLIP-BLIP-BLIP-BLIP-BLIP! Then a chiming warble—a collision alarm.

“Jesus Christ, there’s nothing out here to hit!”

Four minicomputer screens aglow in video game colors: depth, navigation, Doppler weather, and the digital ping of radar. So why the alarm? Why two boat icons, one red, one yellow, on a collision course, not a hundred yards between them according to the grid?

I stood and raised my voice: “What the hell’s going on!”

At sea, or in a car, whenever unsure of what lies ahead, you slow down and continue slowing until your brain ferrets out the puzzle. So I did, backing throttles gradually, feeling the Zodiac teeter, stern-heavy, as the engines dropped into a trough of their own making. In a boat, when slowing, you also always, always look behind you to make sure some inattentive idiot isn’t about to climb your vessel like a ski ramp.

I did.

A lunar halo, a wafer of orange showing—that’s the only reason I saw the Stiletto. Thirty feet of boat that punched a black hole in the moon, a silhouette shaped like an axe blade, the sharpest edge rocketing toward me at a speed that exceeded my experience on the water—seventy, eighty knots. The shock of it froze me for an instant: a rodent awareness of a stooping falcon, no point in resisting or attempting to flee—something else I’d never experienced. The Stiletto’s Kevlar hull, only fifty yards from impact, cleaved air molecules so cleanly that the warning scream of engines didn’t slingshot ahead until too late.

Even so, I lunged and hammered the throttles forward, my swollen left hand spinning the wheel to port. The Zodiac reared itself, bow-high, like a breaching whale, the combined torque throwing me to starboard, which probably saved me from being flung overboard when the Stiletto, engines suddenly in reverse, dug its stern deep to avoid colliding. The abrupt stop ejected a ton of displaced water that hit my aft quarter as a towering wave. For one long, shaky microsecond, I thought my prototype, high-tech, bullet-resistant special ops craft was going to flip like a cheap bathtub toy. To stabilize, I pulled throttles into neutral, as I almost fell but caught myself. One knee on the deck, a hand on the pilot’s seat, I looked up.

Sunrise isolated waves with horizontal light, stars still glimmering in the west, the sea gray beyond the Stiletto, which appeared massive because its bow had swung directly above me. Close enough that the bowsprit banged the Zodiac’s T-top and caused me to duck. This time, though, when I came up I had the khaki gun bag in my hands, fighting with the damn zipper.

“Morning, Dr. Ford! Imagine running into you out here!”

Vargas Diemer’s voice above the rumble of engines while a cloud of scudding exhaust delayed his appearance. He was standing on the flybridge, wearing surgical gloves, I noticed, a familiar pistol in his hand: the .22 Mosquito, sound suppressor attached. Beside him was a sumo-shaped little man in a Nehru shirt of red and green, holding what looked like an Uzi machine pistol.

Kondo Ogbay.