Circle of Bones (51 page)

Riley snapped her eyes open. No falling asleep. Routine. Discipline. That was what she needed. She checked her watch. Nearly midnight. Soon it would be time to enter her position in the log. She stood and checked all around the horizon once more. The coast of Dominica was falling away. Her course was taking her into the channel between Dominica and Marie Gallante. But she still saw no lights or signs of other boats. The moon should rise in about an hour. It would only be a little bit of a thing, but it would still provide more light than these few billion stars.

When Riley climbed back below to check her radar again, she discovered the other boat was only four miles off – dead astern. She set about heating herself a can of beef and barley soup on the gimbaled stove. She kept checking the radar every couple of minutes. They weren’t closing. In fact, they were matching her speed, staying exactly four miles astern. There was no question about it. That boat was following her. Or perhaps stalking was a better word.

She poured the soup into a large mug and climbed the ladder back into the cockpit. She still saw nothing aft. No lights. The hot thick liquid felt good in her belly. She set down the spoon and drank the rest of it down. Stepping back from the dodger, she looked up at the top of her mast. Her masthead tricolor light was showing a bright white light aft.

Okay, she thought when she’d finished her soup. Two can play at this game. She ducked below and dropped the mug into the galley sink. At the nav station, she glanced at the radar again. Nothing had changed, so she flipped the switch to douse all her running lights.

That won’t do much good though if they have radar, she thought, so she climbed back into the cockpit. First, she clipped the line from her safety harness to one of the jack lines running along the lee deck, and then she climbed out of the cockpit onto the side deck. As she crawled her way forward to the shrouds, the deck was rising and falling under her, the black water rushing past her hull like water from a fireman’s hose. With her boat on autopilot, if she went overboard, she’d never be able to pull herself back aboard at this speed. 

When she reached the shrouds, she pulled herself to a stand and wrapped one leg and one arm around the wire rigging for support. Spray from the bow waves splattered across her back. After several minutes effort to untie the knot, she lowered the halyard that supported her radar reflector. Back on her knees again, she carried the bulky thing back to the cockpit then stowed it below. 

Seated once again on the high side of the cockpit, Riley found she was sweating inside her foul weather gear from the exertion of moving around on the heaving boat. She unzipped the top of her jacket to let the breeze in and wondered how on earth they had found her and how they knew which boat out here was hers. Her decision to go up the outside of Dominica put her on a piece of water that very few sailboats would choose to be on — beating up a lee shore in the middle of the night. How did they know she was here? 

She thought back to the first day she had seen that pony-tailed Brewster character, the day after she had met up with Dig in Pointe-à-Pitre. That morning, she had departed from the Pointe-à-Pitre anchorage to sail to the Saintes. She had awakened early because she wanted to put some miles between her and Dig. When she went on deck, she found that someone had returned her oars. She knew that Dig wasn’t much good with boats, so she assumed he had hired someone else to do it. 

Of course, she thought. Her oars. As the realization hit her, she felt so stupid. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t she seen it before? When they’d gone to Dominica on Cole’s boat, they had taken
her
dinghy along. Her dinghy with the set of oars inside it. They’d made it so easy for Dig to find them. There never was a tracker on
Shadow Chaser
. It had to be in one of her oars.

Riley slid aft, kneeled on the seat at the back of the cockpit and reached into her inflatable dinghy that hung in davits above her transom. She pulled out an oar and shook it. It didn’t feel like there was anything inside the aluminum tubing. Shaking the other one gave the same result. She depressed the button that held the two halves together and pulled the oar apart. She grabbed the flashlight from her pocket and shone it into the tubes. Nothing. She fitted the two halves back together and stowed them in the dinghy. She repeated the process with the other oar, only the second time, she saw something that looked like paper in one of the halves. She shook the oar and the wad of paper dropped to the cockpit floor. When she picked it up, a clear plastic bag fell out onto the cockpit seat. Inside was a small, silver stick or tube that looked about the size of a AA battery.

“God dammit,” she shouted, flinging the device out into the black waves. “How stupid could I be?”

Then she felt her stomach jump and the soup nearly backed up her throat. Was that a light? To the east, off her beam. 

The stalker was behind her — not off her starboard side. From the glimpse she’d had of the bright white light, it looked like the masthead navigation light of a commercial ship. Again, it appeared for a moment before it slipped behind a wave. She waited, searching the horizon. There it was again, brighter this time. And here she was running with no navigation lights at all. That was all she needed now — to get run down by a freighter.

Riley grabbed the binoculars off the low seat and climbed back up to the high side of the cockpit. She couldn’t see a thing because the binocular’s lenses were covered with spray. She slid back down off the seat, reached around into the cabin and pulled a paper towel off the roll that hung on the bulkhead. She climbed back up and hooked one elbow around the winch to hang on to the heeling boat. The light was growing bigger. She rubbed harder at the glass, but she was just smearing salt water on the lenses in a greasy-looking mess. She looked up again.

And she froze. 

Oh no, she thought.  She felt some of the tension release as her shoulders sagged. Then Riley started laughing as she made out the curving top half of the scimitar moon that was climbing up out of the sea. Already, the sea to the east looked brighter as the bottom of the moon cleared the horizon and began to climb higher in the sky. She looked up at her sails and the laughter died on her lips. Her white main and jib seemed to glow with an inner light, as though they sucked in the moonlight, collecting every last ray.

Riley looked aft. Still no sign of her stalkers, but one thing was clear now. All her efforts of the last hour were for nothing. They wouldn’t need lights or radar or a GPS tracker to follow her now. But if she were to lower her sails and motor, her speed would be cut in half. 

Down at the chart table Riley made her decision. She knew that she wasn’t Dig’s only target. If she was all he wanted, he could have come alongside hours ago. He and his crew of half-wits were following her to stop Cole, and she was not about to lead them to the
Shadow Chaser
and hence to
Surcouf
.

The closest port on the chart was Grand Bourg on Marie-Galante, now about fourteen miles distant, which was half the distance to the
Surcouf
dive location where Cole and Theo were headed. Given her current rate of speed and the need to feel her way into what looked like a very tricky night entrance, she figured she might make it by four or five in the morning. There was a good sized village there. She’d go ashore, find people, knock on doors, get herself out of the picture so Cole and Theo would have time to find what they were looking for by morning. She had a plan.

Four hours later, with the sky starting to lighten in the east, Riley dropped her anchor inside the sea wall off the village of Grand Bourg. Her GPS had brought her through the narrow entrance into this quiet little harbor, and once her anchor was well set, she stood on deck and glanced around the waterfront. No sign of any new boats yet. She figured she had time to try Cole one last time before lowering her dinghy and heading in to the village. She ducked down the companionway and slid onto the chart table seat.

She grabbed the single sideband radio mike and pushed the button to transmit. “
Shadow Chaser
,
Shadow Chaser
, this is
Bonefish
.”

She heard pops and crackles through the radio’s speaker, but nothing more. She twisted her fingers in the coiled microphone cord. There were many different frequencies to choose from and some worked better than others, depending on the location. They had chosen a frequency that was rarely used by sailors because they had wanted to be able to speak without fear of being overheard. Maybe there was a good reason nobody much used this frequency.

She brought the microphone to her mouth, pressed the transmit button and tried them again. “
Shadow Chaser
,
Shadow Chaser
, this is
Bonefish
.”

In the distance, she heard the low rumble of a high performance engine running at idle. The noise grew louder. 

Riley jumped up from the navigation station and grabbed the knife from the scabbard that hung inside the companionway. Just as she reached the top step, she was thrown sideways when a large black racing boat came hard alongside, slamming into her hull with a loud crunch. She saw a man on the other boat, and he jumped, or was half-thrown, onto the foredeck of her boat. She struggled with her bulky foul weather gear to climb out of the cockpit when she heard a man shouting.

“Goddammit, Pinky,” he said, “turn off the engines and tie her up. Can’t you do nothing right?”

Standing on the foredeck of her boat wearing a one-piece full-body red racing suit was Spyder Brewster. He was pointing a gun at her midsection.

“Hey bitch,” he shouted over the deep rumbling of the racing boat’s engines. “Wassup?”

At the moment, the breeze had pinned the racing boat to the side of her boat. She knew they would soon swing apart. “Get off my boat!” She gestured with the knife toward the other boat.

“You ain’t happy to see me? Drop that knife for your boy here. You and me, we gonna party.”

The strangest looking man Riley had ever seen emerged from the powerboat’s cockpit in a matching red suit carrying a coil of black line. His hair looked like a cumulous cloud, and though he had a broad nose and African features, his face was white aside from freckles across his nose and a few patches of darker skin. He wobbled and held on to the windshield for support, and since he was upwind of her, she got a strong whiff of vomit as he steadied himself.

“Dammit Pinky,” Spyder shouted. “Gimme that line. I told you to shut down the fuckin’ engines.”

The odd man ignored Spyder, then knelt on the deck of the racing powerboat, and cinched the two boats together.

Spyder waggled the gun in her direction. “Hey bitch, the knife. I said, drop it.” 

“I’m not dropping anything, you idiot.”

The man jumped a step toward her and thrust the gun forward, holding it sideways like the gangsters in the movies and aiming it at the center of her forehead. “Don’t call me an idiot or I will fucking blow your head off,” he shouted.

From where she was standing next to the cockpit dodger, she heard radio static, then a faint voice. “
Bonefish
, this is
Shadow Chaser
, do you read me?”

Riley erupted with noise and Spyder staggered back a step. Waving the knife, she began shouting at both men to get the hell off her foredeck. She kept shouting even as Spyder grew red in the face. He screamed at her, “Drop the knife or I’ll shoot you, bitch!”

At least they couldn’t hear the radio.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Aboard the Shadow Chaser

March 31, 2008

5:10 a.m.

“We’ve been at this three hours now, Cap,” Theo said, his arms leaning on the bulwark at the stern of
Shadow Chaser
. The big trawler was operating on autopilot while the two men paced the deck. “We’ve covered more than a square mile with the magnetometer, and we haven’t even had any false readings. Maybe your man’s information wasn’t so good after all.”

“This is the spot all right. I can feel it. It’s not like the guy had a hand-bearing compass when the sub sank under him. He was treading water and sighting positions off landmarks miles away on shore.”

Theo looked up at the sky. Most of the stars had disappeared — only one bright planet remained visible. “Gonna be light, soon,” he said. 

“Yup,” Cole said. A thin band of gray had appeared on the eastern horizon. “I wish we’d hear something from Riley, though. I’m worried that the reason she’s not calling is because she
can’t.
”

“That’s my captain – seeing trouble whether it’s there or not.”

“This guy, this Diggory. Theo, he scares the shit out of me – you weren’t there in DC.  This is real, Theo. Too real.”

“Yeah, mon, I know. I saw the look on the man’s face when he took Riley at the Indian River. Man must have a heart of ice to lie to her like that.”

“I never should have left her alone out there.”

 “Her choice, not yours, mon. Besides, you know how unreliable single sideband radio is when you’re this close. She could be calling but we can’t pick her up. With cloud cover like this, who knows what kind of skip we’re getting. Riley knows how to take care of herself. And we’ve got a submarine to locate.” 

Cole walked to the stern of the vessel and tested the tension on the tow cable that connected the sensor to the boat’s network of electronics. “Feels like the darn thing is fouled again,” he said. Cole began to haul in the cable hand over hand.  

They had great equipment, thanks to Theo. He had designed the proton sensor casing with sleek dolphin-like hydrodynamic fins, but the blasted thing still got fouled by this Sargasso weed. Cole had nicknamed the silver fish-shaped object “Flipper.” 

Floodlights lit the water behind the boat, and Flipper broke the surface skipping between two waves, its nose trailing a beard of yellow-green seaweed. Cole pulled it to the boat and shook off the debris. Then, he tossed the long silver magnetometer back into the water. “Okay, Flipper.” He waved both hands back over his shoulders then pointed out to sea mimicking the motions of a dolphin trainer. “Go get me a submarine, boy!”