Operation Caribe

6

COLONEL CAT WOKE up the next day, worn out and hung over.

He’d bought a large bag of crack after the third flight with the Muy Capaz, joining the pirates in a seedy Bimini bar once their work was done and smoking it all. He’d returned to Florida just before sunrise, flying the sixty miles from Bimini to Fort Lauderdale in a narcotic haze. Landing, putting the plane away, driving to his condo in Cooper City: it was all a blur.

He didn’t mind helping the Muy Capaz—he had no conscience, no qualms when money was involved. But he couldn’t keep falling into the same pattern of behavior that the pirates always did: get a bunch of money and blow it on drugs and booze before the night was through. That’s exactly what happened last night.

His bedroom TV was on. Through bleary eyes, he saw nothing on the news crawl that mentioned any missing persons in the Bahamas. This was usually the way it went. It would take the owners at least a week to locate their chartered yachts; only then would they suspect something was really wrong. And by the time the Bahamian cops realized the Muy Capaz had struck again—well, it was a pretty good bet they wouldn’t be calling a news conference to blab to the world about it. And because Cat never left a paper trail, when it came to who he flew and where, there was little chance anyone would connect him to the disappearances.

So, it had been clean and quick. If he just hadn’t spent all his share …

He finally rolled out of bed only because his phone started ringing and would not stop. A pair of wealthy bachelors was answering his ad. They needed a discreet ride over to an isolated cay used by couples craving privacy.

Cat took the gig for only one reason.

He needed more dope.

* * *

AN HOUR LATER he arrived at Fort Lauderdale to find the customers waiting for him.

One man was large and dopey-looking; the other was small and muscular. They had a lot of luggage and were dressed like people who were experiencing the tropics for the first time, sweaty and sunburned. Prime pigeons.

Cat wearily loaded their luggage onto the plane, got the men settled into seats up close to the cockpit and took off.

As always, as soon as he turned east, he started up a conversation. They talked about the weather, the seas, the Bahamas themselves.

Cat gave them his usual spiel about the mysterious islands—but then, thinking they might enjoy a free tour above Via-grass Cay, called over his shoulder: “So, are you two a couple?”

The next thing he knew, cold steel was touching the top of his spine.

Crash Stacks leaned forward and pushed his pistol deeper into Cat’s neck.

“A couple of what?” he asked him.

* * *

THE ARADO FLOATPLANE appeared over the tiny unnamed cay just after sundown.

The four hung-over pirates waiting on the sandy beach forced themselves to their feet. Shaky as they were, they retrieved their weapons from their Boston Whaler and watched the floatplane come in for a landing.

None of the pirates wanted to go out on another foray; they’d celebrated last night’s crimes all too well, and now were paying heavily for it.

But when Colonel Cat contacted them and said he had another couple of Conchy Joes, real suckers, who appeared to have money, the pirates—now almost penniless again—knew they had to do the gig if just to recoup some of what they’d squandered the night before.

The floatplane taxied up to the deserted beach. The pirates waded out to it as the plane’s rear door opened. The youngest pirate, nicknamed Jumbey, was assigned to carry the team’s ammo. He had the clearest view of what happened next.

The first two pirates reached the open door and suddenly fell backward into the water. And just as suddenly, that water turned blood red.

At first, Jumbey thought his fellow pirates had hit their heads on the plane’s door or something. But then their limp bodies floated past him, and he could see what had happened.

Both had been cracked on the skull.

Jumbey looked up to see two men standing in the plane’s doorway, do-rags hiding most of their faces. They were aiming huge assault rifles at him and the remaining pirate.

Strangely, one of these men had a hook for a hand. The other wore an eye patch. Both were also wielding nightsticks, the weapons that had dispatched his two colleagues. But Jumbey knew these guys weren’t cops. Not typical ones, anyway.

They look more like pirates than we do, he found himself thinking.

“Come toward us … slowly,” the man with the eye patch told them. “Start f*cking around and it will be the last thing you do.”

Jumbey and the remaining pirate, the senior man known as Crabbie, were so stunned they could do nothing but follow the man’s instructions.

As soon as they got within reach, the masked men dragged them into the plane, took their weapons away and began beating them severely. Jumbey was especially cut up by the hook hand, which the man used to hit him about the head and shoulders, slicing him badly with each blow.

The pummeling ended long enough for Jumbey to look up from the floor of the plane to see Colonel Cat sitting in one of the passenger seats, his face also showing the effects of a beating, his hands tied in front of him with duct tape.

That’s when the plane started moving again.

All Jumbey could think was: Who’s flying this thing?

* * *

BATMAN LOVED THE Arado floatplane.

It handled like a well-preserved 1930s sports car—and it looked like one, too. He’d flown jet fighters before his days in Delta Force, and he’d spent a lot of time piloting helicopters since Whiskey went into the pirate-busting business. But nothing moved through the air like the foldable Arado.

He was behind the controls now as the plane slowly climbed past 10,000 feet, heading east toward the open sea. Its human cargo of two pirates and Colonel Cat, all three bound by duct tape, was stretched out in the back, squeamish and squirming, as the plane rose even higher into the night sky.

Many things had happened in the past twenty-four hours, not all of them expected. Thanks to the information give to them by BABE, Whiskey had boned up on the Muy Capaz, and now knew they were indeed smarter than your average pirate band. In addition to their attention to detail whenever they swooped down on a hapless vessel, careful to leave no evidence behind, the pirate gang apparently maintained a hideout so well hidden, the Bahamian cops had long since given up trying to find it. Even with the promise of a large cash reward, no one had ever come forward to reveal where it was. And while the local law enforcement was sure it was situated somewhere among the hundreds of tiny islands along Bahamas’ outer cays, that’s about all they knew.

Whiskey wanted to complete this gig quickly and then maybe relax a little. So, they knew they had to do what the Bahamian cops couldn’t or wouldn’t do. They had to find the Muy Capaz hideout.

But they had to get on the gang’s tail first. As it turned out, the DVDs BABE had given them also proved helpful in doing this. Not the ones containing information from the Bahamian cops’ database; as Jennessa had said, those were practically useless. It was the information BABE had generated on its own—detailed records on past victims of the Muy Capaz—that held the key.

The tourist agency consortium estimated at least twenty people had met their end at the hands of the pirates in the past year. In their continuing effort to keep the lid on, the Bahamian cops had classified these people as simply missing persons or unrecoverable accidental drownings, basically making them instant cold cases. But BABE knew better.

Twitch found the pattern they were looking for. After going over the records of the missing victims, he noticed that more than half of them shared two things in common: one, they were leasing boats in the Bahamas at the time of their disappearance; and two, there was no record of how they got to the Bahamas in the first place. No tickets bought from regular commercial airlines, no evidence of passage on any cruise ships or ferries. But because these people were going to pick up their chartered boats, they had to get to the islands somehow.

A charter flight was one way to do this. So Twitch started a search of every small airline flying between Florida and the Bahamas. A whiz at busting through firewalls and hacking files from the Internet, he got into the flight records at Fort Lauderdale airport, and one name kept popping up: Colonel Cat.

It turned out that on more than a few occasions over the past year, Cat had flown customers to the islands shortly before the Muy Capaz struck—in some cases, just hours before a pirate attack.

More damning, though, was that on those same occasions, the very thing Cat had tried to avoid—leaving a paper trail—actually tripped him up. Scuba divers, deep-sea fishermen, people wanting to fly over the mysterious Bimini Road—all these people paid him freely with credit cards or checks.

But the passengers Cat took up around the times of the Muy Capaz’s crimes? They must have all paid in cash, because there were no receipts. No paper trail. The absence of evidence was the evidence itself.

Cat had outsmarted himself.

By connecting the dots on dates close to a Muy Capaz crime wave, Twitch estimated twelve of the pirates’ victims might have been on Cat’s antique airplane at some point.

That was more than half, and that meant it was more than coincidence. After that, the rest was easy. Whiskey hired Cat’s plane, then beat the shit out of him, and he eventually sang like a canary.

So far, so good.

But then they realized not everything they’d heard at the BABE briefing was adding up.

For instance, while interrogating Colonel Cat, they’d discovered—much to their surprise—that the Muy Capaz had hit three more yachts just the night before, each time with Cat’s help.

But there was no full moon the previous night; in fact, the moon was barely waxing at half. So much for the “Wolfman Complex.”

Even stranger, at one point, when they were beating the daylights out of Cat, and Batman asked him how deeply was he involved in voodoo, the pilot actually laughed in their faces. He told them the only voodoo he was involved with went up his nose or into his veins.

Well, no matter, Batman thought now as he pushed the old airplane past 12,000 feet and continued to climb. Every mission had its twists and turns, its intangibles. Timeline or not, voodoo angle or not, they were still on a good pace to wrap up these Capaz monkeys, get paid by BABE, and then spend a little time enjoying the fruits of their labor on a warm beach somewhere.

So what if it didn’t come all wrapped in a bow?

What in life did?

* * *

THE PIRATE NAMED Jumbey had never flown so high.

He’d been on Colonel Cat’s plane on four occasions, going to and from raids on the yachts or while they were taking care of witnesses. But on those flights, he could clearly recall looking out the plane’s observation blisters and seeing the ocean or land just below him, no more than a thousand feet away.

Now, they were flying so high, he couldn’t see the earth—land or water—below him at all. It was also cold inside the airplane, and it was rattling and coughing and seemed to be bouncing all over the sky.

But creature comforts were the least of Jumbey’s worries at the moment.

He was lying on the deck of the passenger compartment, still bleeding from his wounds, his hands and legs tied with multiple strips of duct tape. His head was jammed up right next to an observation blister; this was how he knew how high they were flying. But he couldn’t move. He could barely turn his head.

At one point, though, he realized by the voices bouncing back and forth in the cabin that the man with the hook hand was flying the airplane. He also knew that, besides the man with the eye patch, there were three other masked men in the cabin with him. All five of them were huge, wore military suits and carried large weapons and nightsticks. Beyond the cold, the rattling and the terrifying altitude, it was these men themselves who were scaring the shit out of him. They seemed capable of anything.

Colonel Cat was tied up on the floor right next to him.

“How did they know about us?” Jumbey managed to whisper desperately to the pilot. “We were always so careful to keep it all secret.”

“How the f*ck do I know?” Cat spit back at him. “Maybe they’re f*cking psychics.”

At that moment, Jumbey heard the man with the eye patch give an order to the three other masked men. Straining mightily to turn his head, Jumbey saw one man open the rear hatch of the airplane, while the two others grabbed Crabbie and dragged him over to the doorway. Jumbey and Cat were horrified.

“What’s your voodoo name?” one masked man asked Crabbie. But the pirate had no idea what he was talking about.

The man smacked him hard across his face.

“Why didn’t you wait until the full moon this time?”

Again, Crabbie was totally baffled by the question.

“I do not know what you mean,” he told the masked man.

The masked men didn’t ask Crabbie any more questions. One simply said to him: “You shouldn’t have killed all those people, mon. You shouldn’t have killed those cops.”

Then the largest man of the three simply picked Crabbie up off the floor and threw him out the open hatchway.

There was a look of complete bewilderment on the pirate’s face as he went out the door. Even as he was falling, everyone on the plane could hear him scream: “What cops?”

Then the masked men turned toward Jumbey.

The young pirate started crying.

“What do you want from me?” he yelled. “I’ve only been hooked up with these guys for a month!”

“Tell us where your hideout is,” the large man demanded of him.

Jumbey became hysterical. “I don’t know, general. I’ve never even been there. That’s just for the senior crumbs.”

The large man started dragging Jumbey toward the open door.

“Better talk now,” he yelled at him.

But Jumbey could barely breathe, never mind talk.

“I don’t know!” he screamed again. “I’ve never been there! I’m just a new fish. That guy you just tossed? He was a senior man. He was there all the time!”

At that point, all the masked men looked at each other. They just realized they’d thrown the wrong guy out of the plane.

“So much for wrapping this up quickly,” one of them said.

The large man pulled Jumbey even closer to the open hatch. The wind was blowing madly. Jumbey looked down on the dark clouds and was terrified that he would have to pass through them before smashing into the water or the earth that he knew was somewhere way down below.

“Last chance,” the big man told him. “You must know some way we can find your boss.”

Jumbey looked out on the clouds again and, to his horror, imagined he could see Crabbie flying alongside the aircraft like a bird, bloody and laughing at him.

“I don’t,” he said, trembling. “I’ve never met him.”

The man pushed Jumbey halfway out the door.

“You got three seconds,” he growled. “One … two…”

“I don’t know!” Jumbey cried again. “I’m just a minnow. A little fish!”

“Good-bye,” the large man said.

He picked Jumbey off the floor and started to throw him out the hatchway.

“Badtown!” Jumbey finally yelled.

He was almost as good as gone—but then he felt the huge man pull him back in again.

“Badtown? What is that?”

“It’s a slum,” Jumbey said, trying mightily to catch his breath. “In Nassau. The whole city is a mess, but people call the worst part of it Badtown.”

“Your hideout is in Badtown?” the large man asked him.

“No,” Jumbey replied, still shaking all over. “Senior crumbs just hang out there sometimes when money is good.”

“Where in Badtown do they hang out?” another of the masked men demanded to know. “It must be a big place.”

Jumbey hesitated again—and the large man pushed him back toward the open door.

Finally Jumbey yelled, “The Tainted Lady.”

“Tainted Lady?” the large man asked. “What is that? A boat?”

“Don’t tell him!” Colonel Cat suddenly bellowed. “He’ll kill us!”

“They’ll kill us!” Jumbey yelled back at him.

He looked up at his would-be executioner.

“The Tainted Lady is a blind pig! A saloon, mon. There’s a hidden room upstairs where the top guys hang out sometimes. That’s all I know.”

* * *

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, the floatplane landed in rough water next to an outer island so small it had just a single palm tree on it.

The masked men dragged Jumbey and Cat out of the plane and threw them, still bound in duct tape, onto the tiny beach. Then the masked men sloshed their way back to the airplane and climbed aboard.

Cat started screaming as he and Jumbey fought to rip the tape from their hands and feet. But there was so much of it, it was impossible.

“You can’t leave us here!” Cat yelled. “When the tide comes in, this place will be gone!”

“Climb the tree then,” one of the masked men told him.

“But … but we’re so far out, no one will ever find us!” Jumbey yelled.

The large man yelled back. “Them’s the breaks, mon.”

“But—my plane!” Cat screamed.

The large masked man yelled from the open door. “Oh yeah—thanks! We’ll take good care of it.”

With that, the Arado turned back toward the ocean, and with a burst of smoke and sea spray, took off and flew away.