Off the Chart

4

For the next few weeks, Anne Bonny lived the life she’d been named for. They didn’t roam the open seas with a lookout clinging high to the mast, peering through a spyglass, searching for a ship to take. Daniel’s operation used a simple scheme that relied on the shipping industry’s antipirate tracking system, FROM. Fleet Remote Monitoring units were installed aboard security-conscious transport ships and relayed an automated signal six times a day that informed corporate headquarters of their ships’ exact position, speed, and direction. A seagoing LoJack. The system was designed to give the owners an early warning if one of their ships made a drastic change in course and allowed them to track it once it left its charted route and send assistance.

Sal Gardino, Daniel’s young computer guy, had penetrated the system’s security firewall – a worm, a backdoor; Anne Bonny could never keep the hacker jargon straight. But now with a few minutes of work on his laptop, Daniel could enter the site and prowl through the code to determine the exact positions of thousands of different vessels at sea. Freighters, tankers, container ships. Maersk, Hanjin, TransAsia, Global Transport, the entire fleets of dozens of shipping companies were open books to him. Daniel relished the irony of it, using their system against them.

They stayed at sea for four weeks straight. Two boats. The sleek forty-five-foot Hatteras sportfishing yacht that had picked them up from the Cheeca Lodge. High-performance diesels below its decks. Anne and Daniel, Sal and Marty lived aboard that one. And the Nicaraguans and the rest of the crew manned a second vessel, a shrimp trawler that had been outfitted with enough horsepower to stay up with the Hatteras. Both boats were equipped with seven-man inflatables powered by four-stroke Yamahas. These they used as boarding craft. While they were under way, they kept a two- or three-mile cushion between the two boats, moving from location to location through the West Indies, off the South American coast, and through the islands. The Hatteras carried a cache of automatic weapons, the satellite communications system, and the computer that Sal used to crack the FROM site.

With all that shipping data arrayed before them, selecting a new target was a little like going to the track. You studied the program, checked the stats, figured the odds, one ship against another based on what else was racing that day, considered the value of the cargo, the difficulty of disposing of it, and above all you didn’t bet more than you could afford to lose.

Early in April, after hitting four ships in as many weeks, they bivouacked at the Gray Ghost Lodge, a fishing camp Daniel owned. Thirty acres in the Barra de Colorado, on the Costa Rican – Nicaraguan border.

Ten primitive wood cabins, a small dining hall, a marina big enough for half a dozen open fishing boats. Daniel stored his Donzi there, the Black Swan, that playboy speedboat he’d used so successfully to court Anne Bonny.

The fishing camp was bordered on the west and south by dense rain forest, a roadless nature preserve that was well off the tourist track. To the north and east were a labyrinth of estuaries and lagoons and a system of shallow, nearly impenetrable bays that led to the Caribbean Sea.

Partly for appearances, partly for his own amusement, Daniel kept the fishing lodge open during the winter season, hiring guides, cooks, and service help, operating it as a legit business. From November to February, rich anglers paid five hundred dollars a day to stay in the shacks and fish with guides for the giant bonefish and tarpon that streaked across the sand flats.

But in the sweltering spring and summer months, when the rains began and most of the bonefish and silver kings migrated away, Daniel shut down the business and used the lodge off and on for regrouping, making repairs to vessels and weapons, for a little rum and relaxation by the tropical lagoon.

Not far from the Gray Ghost Lodge, hundreds of ships a day passed within striking distance of the coastline. Even with all those easy targets near at hand, it had been Daniel’s custom to lie low when they were based at the lodge. No reason to draw attention to that particular region when there were countless square miles of unpatrolled ocean available. They tried, when possible, to work in international waters. Between the never-ending hunt for terrorists and dope smugglers, the US Coast Guard was spread impossibly thin throughout their own territorial waters, which left much of the rest of the hemisphere relatively free of naval law enforcement.

With his satellite phone and laptop computer Daniel could turn virtually any location into a command and control station – staying in constant contact with his people in Taipei and Rio, Montevideo and Jakarta, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Anchorage. The same network he’d constructed years before when he worked for his father, trafficking in hash and cocaine, now helped Daniel dispose of even the most exotic cargo.

In those few weeks Anne had adjusted to the routine, the guns, the constant movement, the controlled thrill of boarding ships. Whatever daytime doubts Anne developed were wiped away by the long nights with Daniel. His measured calm, his certainty. Not the dashing, risk-taking swashbuckler her mother had dreamed of, but a man on a simple mission – to pile up as much cash as quickly as he could with the smallest possible risk.

‘Some pirates we are,’ she said one night at the fishing lodge. ‘A whole month and we’ve not slit a single throat.’

‘I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur. An adventure capitalist.’

‘That’s a good one.’

‘We’re simply skimming a little of the obscene corporate profits and letting the insurance conglomerates cover the shipping company losses. The daisy chain of high finance kicks in. The big boys passing around the big bucks.’

‘You’ve got it all rationalized.’

‘I have my morals,’ Daniel said.

‘Most entrepreneurs don’t use automatic weapons.’

‘They’re just props,’ Daniel said. ‘Have we fired one shot?’

‘But they’re loaded,’ Anne said. ‘Guns have a way of going off.’

‘Are you having trouble with this, Anne? You want to go home, back to a safe routine? Say the word, I’ll take you back.’

‘It’s just the guns,’ she said. ‘I told you about my parents. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, what can happen.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But this is different. Your dad was skimming from redneck dopers. This is the other end of the spectrum.’

‘The sophisticated end,’ Anne said.

‘The safe end,’ said Daniel. ‘The smart end.’

When Daniel hit a target, they usually outnumbered the crew, storming the ship in the dark, half from port, half from starboard, taking the bridge first, subduing the captain. Screaming, threatening, bashing defiant crew members with the butts of the Mac-10s, the AK-47s. In those four weeks they’d clubbed a few to their knees, left some heroes bleeding and broken, but nothing worse. Since she’d joined Daniel and his men, they’d taken everything from eighty thousand gallons of flaxseed oil to fourteen hundred new Toyota ATVs and a container ship full of refrigerators and microwaves, and in all that time they’d not fired a shot. The ships were never armed; the men were sailors, not fighters. Not a single chase at sea, not even a close call.

Once they disabled the FROM, they handed off the ship, then one of Daniel’s Latin American accomplices piloted the vessel to a friendly port in Colombia or Venezuela, where the goods were unloaded. What happened to the vessel after that was up to his business partners. Sometimes they simply walked away from the unloaded vessel after pocketing their profit. Other times they turned the stolen craft into a phantom ship. Repainted and reflagged it, picked up another load from a legitimate shipping company, sailed away, and promptly docked at a nearby port where they unloaded the goods. Two loads with one ship.

But Daniel wanted no stake in all that. Hit and run, that was his game. Skim the cream, leave the awkward problem of disposing of the cargo and the ships to others. Even with the camouflage of new papers and new paint, phantom ships were relatively easy targets for the Coast Guard or foreign navy patrols. For Daniel it simply wasn’t worth the risk of being caught aboard a stolen transport ship just to pilfer one bonus load of olive oil.

It was during the first week in April while their group relaxed at the Gray Ghost Lodge that one afternoon Daniel handed Anne Bonny the latest stack of FROM printouts. In the next two weeks there were fifty-seven ships on their way toward the Caribbean Sea, most of them passing within a hundred miles of their location.

‘It’s time you chose,’ he said. ‘You know what we’re looking for.’

‘I thought we didn’t hit ships in this part of the Gulf?’

‘Just this once,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t hurt.’

‘Well, I’m not ready to pick the ship.’

‘Oh, you’re ready.’

Daniel had already shown her the access codes to break into the FROM site, made her practice the steps till she could slip inside in less than ten minutes. Treating her with respect, a business partner on equal footing with him, not simply his lover. So Anne took the stack of papers and went out to the tiki hut beside the lagoon and for an hour she studied the printouts.

‘The Rainmaker,’ she told Daniel later in their cabin.

‘And why that one?’

‘I liked the name.’

Sal Gardino and Marty Messina looked on in silence.

‘You like the name. Oh, come on, Anne. Be serious.’

‘Four or five of these meet our conditions,’ she said. ‘Cargo’s roughly equivalent in value, all headed through the Yucatán Channel to New Orleans or Galveston, an easy shot from here, all with about the same number of crew, so everything being equal, I picked a name I liked. The Rainmaker, like some old Indian chief chanting for the skies to open up. The end of a long drought.’

Sal Gardino smiled, but Marty Messina, who’d been standing in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, grimaced and stalked away.

Marty was a beefy man in his late thirties who only a few months before had been released from prison after serving a six-year term for running drugs for Daniel. Before Marty went to trial, the DEA offered him full immunity, witness protection, a lifetime pension, if he’d inform on the Salbones. But he hung tough, served his time, and came home to Miami expecting, by God, to be Daniel’s chief lieutenant, a role Anne was already filling.

From their first meeting, when he realized the situation, Marty was bitterly polite, all smiles, ‘yes, ma’am, no, ma’am,’ but he was a lousy actor. He damn well wanted to claim his rightful place. To appease Marty, Daniel had assigned Messina the role of maintaining their foreign contacts and cultivating new ones. Though it was a crucial part of the operation, Marty didn’t seem particularly satisfied.

Daniel studied the data on the Rainmaker, humming to himself.

‘She’s a quick study,’ said Sal.

‘Crude oil,’ Daniel said. ‘We’ll have to find a buyer right away.’

‘Guy in Buenos Aires,’ said Sal. ‘With the new refinery. Or the Texan.’

‘You want to make the call, Anne? Negotiate the numbers?’

‘That’s Marty’s job.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell Marty, have him look around, see who’s thirsty. We’ll have to off-load at sea.’

‘Still, it should be easier to get rid of than that damn flaxseed oil.’

He paged through the printouts a moment more, then smiled at her.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘That’s the one. Excellent choice, Anne. The Rainmaker. Now, you know how it’s done. If something ever happens to me.’

Daniel smiled, but there was a shadow lurking in the depths of his blue eyes as if he’d sensed already what no one else had, the gleaming missile on its downward arc.