Operation Caribe

22

THE DUSTBOAT FINALLY reached North Gin Cay three hours after sunrise.

They were way behind schedule. The plan had been to reach the island under the cover of darkness. But that idea was dashed by the freakish events that had slowed the trip.

Nolan had spent the rest of the night up at the bow, trouble light in hand, sweeping the waters in front of them. He saw more weird lights in the sky, weird shapes in the water, and their electronics—especially their compass and GPS units—continued to behave erratically throughout.

But as long as he knew there was some kind of rational explanation for these weird happenings—or at least most of them—he could live with the strangeness. At least until the sun came up.

So now, they were here. North Gin Cay looked like all the other islands of the outer Bahamas. Beautiful, isolated, a seventh heaven—but also a little mysterious, a pinprick of green in the middle of the bright blue sea.

They were approaching a small harbor on the east side of the island that was protected by a lagoon. The harbor was filled with sport fishing boats and yachts. There were a dozen buildings in the small seaside town nearby. Half of them appeared to be restaurants with outdoor bars attached, and all of the structures had a few years on them. North Gin Cay was part of the Old Bahamas. It was authentic, and seemed a million miles away from the mega-resorts on the bigger islands.

The Dustboat passed the lagoon and anchored on the north side of the island. The team had covered the boat’s weapons with tarps and fishing nets before sunrise. They’d also erected a fake wooden housing over the two helicopters. And the team had donned brightly colored island shirts, borrowed from the Senegals.

Nolan and Batman paddled ashore in a rubber boat, landing on a small beach of pearl-white sand. Palm trees swayed, and a warm breeze blew off the ocean. After the night they’d just experienced, it would have done them a world of good to collapse on the sand and take a snooze under the sun.

But they had a job to do.

They trudged along the beach, finally reaching the small town. Nolan and Batman needed haircuts and were sporting beards—their usual look. They immediately fit in with the small crowd of sports fishermen, natives and Jimmy Buffett wannabes.

Their mission statement said the informant hung out at a bar called the Smoking Conch. They walked down the dusty sidewalk, passing a handful of souvenir stands, diving shops and boat rental places. They came upon a number of “art works” along the way: weird metal things, basically trash welded together, glinting in the bright morning sun.

The first saloon they came to was attached to an upscale restaurant called The Sky Club; it was the biggest structure in town and had some interesting music coming from within. They passed it by and checked out three more bars with exotic-sounding names, but nothing called the Smoking Conch. They finally reached the end of the street—but, no Smoking Conch.

They asked a woman pushing a food cart where it might be. She looked them up and down and laughed. Then she pointed through a small cluster of palm trees to a broken-down structure beyond and said, “If you really want to know…”

Nolan and Batman looked at the place and groaned. It seemed like something transported here from the worst slum in the world.

As they started walking toward the rundown bar, the woman called over her shoulder: “Leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”

* * *

FOR SOME REASON, Nolan had envisioned meeting their informant in the bar of a fashionable restaurant on an exclusive resort island. He’d even imagined the informant might be someone who’d once been a Special Forces operator himself.

But this place, the Smoking Conch, was light years away from what he’d had in mind. Built of corrugated metal and flotsam, it was amazing only in that it was even standing, that’s how ramshackle it looked.

At the front door they were greeted by the sweet smell of marijuana smoke.

Batman breathed in deeply. “Maybe this is my kind of place after all,” he said.

They went through the swinging saloon doors to find a dark, cloudy, smelly dive—with about a dozen patrons, even though it was barely nine in the morning.

Taking seats at the bar, they ordered a couple drafts, then showed the bartender a sketch of the informant, wrapped in a twenty-dollar bill.

“Cops?” the bartender asked them.

“Do we look like cops?” Batman replied.

The bartender, all tattoos and nose rings, laughed. “Yeah, you do.”

Batman peeled off another twenty.

The bartender pointed to a booth in the darkest corner of the place, where a man sat, head in one hand, sound asleep and snoring loudly.

Batman looked back at the bartender. “Am I going to want my money back?”

The bartender quickly pocketed the two bills.

“Yeah, probably,” he said.

They took their beers and walked over to the booth. The man had Rastafarian dreadlocks and clothes, and reeked of ganja.

Nolan gave him a nudge, but this only caused him to snore more loudly. Batman nudged a little harder. Still, no effect.

Batman finally pulled the man’s arm out from under him, causing his head to hit the table.

This woke him—but just barely.

“No weed to sell ’til noon, mon,” he said groggily, adding: “What time is it?”

Nolan and Batman sat down across from him.

“We don’t want any weed,” Nolan told him.

The guy finally looked up at them and said, “Cops?”

Nolan pulled out the photo of the Navy officer the guy had first spoken to. “We’re friends of a friend of yours.”

The guy somehow recognized the photo. He sat up, his eyes brightening slightly.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You want to talk about the people who got taken away by the UFO?”

Nolan and Batman just rolled their eyes.

Batman turned back to the bar and yelled to the bartender, “We’re going to need a couple more beers over here.”

* * *

HIS NAME WAS Ramon. He was Jamaican, though he’d lived in the Bahamas for many years.

He was somewhere between thirty and fifty years old, Nolan guessed. It was hard to tell. But whatever his age, one thing was for sure: he’d spent a lot of time smoking weed.

He was an artist—of sorts. He did sculptures by welding metallic sea junk together. This was the stuff Nolan and Batman had seen earlier, walking through the tiny village.

And Ramon had a story to tell, though it wasn’t quite the same story he’d supposedly told to the visiting Navy officer a week before. Either it had gotten garbled in the translation, or Ramon was telling Nolan and Batman a new tale entirely.

But what a tale it was.

Ramon was also a handyman of sorts. He helped clean some of the restaurants in town, he repaired decks, he could cut chum, and when business was good, he helped out on the sports fishing boats.

His story began after one recent fishing trip. The boat’s owner brought his customers into North Gin Cay for a post-trip drink. But because the local marina’s fuel tanks were dry, he asked Ramon to take the boat to a nearby island and gas it up.

Ramon set out, but halfway to his destination, the boat ran out of fuel. He drifted for a long time, unable to control his direction. He passed many islands, some with people on them, some without, but he had no means of signaling them, as the boat’s batteries were also dead, killing the radio.

At one point, he almost drifted out into the Atlantic, but a violent storm blew up and forced him back in among the islands.

Night fell and, tossed by the storm’s wind and waves, he spent a terrifying several hours bailing out the boat and trying his best to reach land.

Finally, the gale washed the boat up onto an island he’d never been to before. He took refuge in a small village of native Bahamians, all of whom were women, children or elderly men. The island was one of many in the isolated northeast Abaco chain that had seen no development and attracted no tourists. Many of the people who lived there worked on other islands nearby.

When Ramon asked where all the men were, he was told by the women that one day all twenty of the island’s males were hired by three men in black clothes who said they needed a forest cut down on an uninhabited island nearby. The job would take a week. That had been a month ago, and the men had still not returned. When the women reported the situation to a passing Bahamian police boat, the police went to the island in question and found it deserted—and treeless. But the trees hadn’t been cut down; the island didn’t have any in the first place. There’d been no vegetation on the island over five feet tall to begin with.

When the police returned with this news, the only explanation they could give the women was that either professional pirates had kidnapped their men to work on a ship or a UFO had taken them away. The cops basically told them, “Take your pick.”

With the men gone and the women frantic, some of the elderly people on the island began telling stories they remembered from their youth, similar tales of large groups of people being led away by strange men in black—maybe pirates, maybe not. At the time, these were disappearances not considered unusual, because strange things were always happening in the Bahamas. The elderly people kept telling these stories over and over again, and at the end of the three weeks, half the people on the island believed a UFO had taken the men away—and the other half believed it was pirates.

The next day, using gas given to him by the women, Ramon found his way home. When he returned to the island a few days later to repay the women, it was deserted. The women and their families had all left for parts unknown.

This story took three rounds of beers and a couple smoke breaks for Ramon to complete. He spoke very slowly, with a deep Jamaican accent, and frequently lost track of where he was, which meant he had to go all the way back to the beginning and start over again.

But just a few minutes into the tale, Nolan was convinced that this was either a massive practical joke being played on them, or that the ONI was punishing them by putting them through some kind of weird security check. There just was no way they could take this guy, or his story, seriously.

That is, until he offered to show them the island where the woodcutters were really taken.

“It exists?” Nolan asked him. “You know where it is?”

“I can find it,” Ramon assured him. “Bring me out in a boat and I will sniff it out.”

Nolan and Batman just looked at each other. What all this had to do with some catastrophic pirate attack, they had no idea. Their mission was to find this guy, get the information he supposedly had in his irreversibly stoned brain, and then follow up on any usable intelligence. They weren’t sure if going on a search for the missing woodcutters really applied.

“But, hey, we get paid no matter what we do,” Batman said to Nolan as Ramon took another smoke break. “And believe me, I don’t mind taking the ONI for their money, especially after what they did to us a couple months ago.”

“I’m with you there,” Nolan agreed.

“So we kill the day by taking a little boat ride,” Batman went on. “What’s the big deal? We’ve got the perfect excuse for f*cking off—the ONI’s nifty antenna fell overboard and we didn’t want to use an unsecured line to let them know. Plus, we need the rest. Plus, we’re in the islands—that’s how everyone does it out here. We’ll look for these missing guys, we’ll write up whatever we find, and then we’ll sail back to the Mothership. Unless you’re in a hurry to go back and deal with those guys right away.”

Nolan shook his head fiercely at that idea.

“Not me,” he said, draining his beer.

Batman did a fist bump with him.

“Good man,” he said, ordering two more beers. “Besides, by the time we get back, those SEALs will have probably caught the real bad guys anyway.”