Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller) (17 page)

Keller, the station chief for the DEA in Honduras was less than pleased as he strode into what until yesterday had been his office. This had been an excellent post for the past five years-very few surprises, just routine surveillance of any suspect boat traffic coming from the direction of Columbia bound for the US. In the twenty-four hours since Miller, Davis, and Rivera had arrived in Honduras, they had created complete chaos as they commandeered every resource he had available and provided very little information as to what their mission actually was.

It grated on him that there was an operation being run out of his station without him being briefed. When he had complained to Washington, they had told him in no uncertain terms to stand down and give them any requested assistance. Rivera looked up from where he had been intently monitoring the feed from the satellite. “Chief, I appreciate all the resources you guys have provided. We should be finished with our job and out of your way in just a couple of more days.”

“You guys are a pain in my ass,” Keller growled as he chewed on the long dead stump of a cigar. “I just hope whatever the hell you’re doing is important enough to make up for screwing up my little corner of the world.”

“I promise you-as soon as we finish our mission, I’ll bring you up to speed,” Miller said as he subtly eased Keller out the door and locked it securely behind him.

Davis shook his head as he remarked ruefully, “ I don’t think we’ll be having any beers at the local cantina with this guy after work.”

“Probably not, but that’s the least of my concerns,” Rivera said as he returned to the task at hand. The endless examination of the satellite feed brought him to an entirely new level of boredom. Nothing but hours of watching the images slowly unfolding in a hundred mile swath on the monitor and zooming in on the random specks that were revealed to be sailboats or small cargo vessels steaming across the Caribbean. Looking for a needle in a haystack would have been simple by comparison.
Yep, just burn the friggin’ haystack, whatever is left must be a needle…

Today was particularly slow-very few targets showing up on the monitor and those quickly discarded-if it didn’t have sails, it wasn’t a target. Something just coming into view at the extreme bottom edge of the display. Zooming in to a medium magnification, Rivera found himself looking at two small islands in the middle of nowhere. A couple of more steps and he could see one island was completely uninhabited and the other seemed to have some random buildings and antennas as well as a crude landing strip running the length of the island.

Miller and Davis leaned over his shoulder to investigate what had captured his attention. “What’s that I see on the end of the runway?” asked Miller indicating some dark objects that stood out in contrast on the white sand.

The final level of zoom revealed the bodies of several unidentified dead men with weapons beside them. “Let’s zoom out a bit and get more of a ‘God’s Eye’ view,” said Miller as he manipulated the joystick. At about four clicks out, they could see the islands and about five miles of the surrounding ocean. No more than a mile away from the island they could see a sailboat heading on a southerly course and further out could see the distant wake from a powerboat moving at high speed in the same general direction. The powerboat was almost immediately lost to view as it departed from the field of view of the satellite.

They turned their attention back to the sailboat and zoomed in to see the detail. It was a forty or fifty foot sloop. Seemed to at least match the general description of the boat they had been looking for.

“Looks like one guy at the helm sailing solo. If the girl is with him, she must be below deck,” said Miller. He made one more adjustment that took them to the limit of the resolution of the telescope. At that level, they could resolve details as small as four inches. “Hard for me to tell,” said Miller squinting at the screen. “It fits the description of the sailboat and there aren’t many guys built like a linebacker in that area except for Kyle. We’ll send it to the analysts and see if they can pull any more detail out of the name on the stern-I can’t quite make it out. One thing I do see is a SSB antenna on the backstay.”

Rivera threw a questioning look his way. “SSB?”

“Single Side Band. Best way for most offshore sailors to communicate. Closer to a HAM radio than anything else. Sucks a lot of power when he transmits, but a lot of these guys constantly listen in to weather or just to keep up with other boats that are cruising offshore. Not sure if he’s powered on, but it might be worth taking a chance,” Miller said looking for agreement from the other two.

“Nothing to lose,” said Davis. “But how do you communicate with him?”

“Give me a second,” said Miller as he speed dialed a number on his cell. A quick conversation and within two minutes, the phone in the conference room rang again. Miller clicked it on speakerphone.

It took me a second to realize that the message coming from the SSB was directed at me. Mid-day was not usually the best time for radio-wave propogation and transmissions were often distorted beyond recognition. A quick look at the radar-nothing showing in the twenty-four mile range. A quick visual check overhead-no airplanes or contrails visible.

I took a deep breath, “Eye In The Sky, I’m reading you 5x5. State your position-I don’t have a visual on you.”

Miller thought before giving away too much information on the open airway. “Our name should give you some idea about that. Over.”

I looked up in the sky again with my binoculars-still no sign of any aircraft overhead. “I’d like a confirmation on that if you don’t mind. I’m executing a course change-please verify. Over.” With that, I turned the boat to starboard and gybed through a complete 360-degree circle. At the end of the maneuver, I was back on my previous course.

“You ever hear the song ‘Dizzy’ by Tommy Roe?” Miller asked Kyle with a smile. “I once heard that you’re a fan of 1960’s music.” Miller covered the phone and looked at Davis and Rivera. “I spent some time with Kyle a couple of years ago at an apartment he kept in D.C. The man had an entire wall covered with old albums from every band in the 60’s and 70’s. An absolute fanatic-he still owned an old turntable that he claimed to have paid ten grand for.”

It was like déjà vu. The lyrics just popped in my head- ‘I'm so dizzy my head is spinning, like a whirlpool it never ends’.

“Eye in the Sky. Thanks for that course confirmation. Given my current situation, that pretty well sums things up. Over.”

“Looks like you’re sailing short handed and may be heading into some stormy weather. Would you like to take on some additional crew? Over,” replied Miller.

I mulled over his words over for a moment. “Thanks for the offer, but that’s a negative,” I said. “Hard to find a good crew that I can rely on. Better I just solo for now. Over.”

“Roger that, but if you don’t mind, we’ll keep an eye out for any approaching storms and try to notify you. Over,” Miller said as he finished the transmission.

“That would be appreciated. And thank you for the update. I will continue monitoring this channel if you have any further information,” I said keying off the mike.

Interesting. That conversation told me a couple of things. Whoever was monitoring me had to be with the US government. No one else had the communication and surveillance technology to be able to monitor me from above. Even a high-flying aircraft would have been visible in the crystal blue sky. The only choice that left was monitoring from one of the military surveillance satellites.

Obviously, the guy on the other end was someone who knew me personally. I wasn’t sure where that song had come from, but now I couldn’t get it out of my head. As much as I needed help, I still couldn’t stop thinking about the email from the week before that had betrayed me and almost killed me. Until I knew who was behind it, I couldn’t trust anyone.

Aboard the Lucia Marie, Pedroza had turned south on a course directly for the
Cayos Miskitos, a low-slung group of islands thirty miles off the Nicaruagan coast. The freighter appeared to be a floating derelict that should have been scrapped years before. The main crane for unloading the containers at local docks was an overlapping patchwork of welds and repairs applied over several generations.

Inside the pilothouse, the walls were metal, coated with peeling paint punctuated by the rusting heads of the rivets. The smell was a pungent combination of stale tobacco smoke, unwashed bodies, and leftover food. The two items that stood out in the midst of the detritus were a gleaming new forty-mile radar and sophisticated chartplotter. Carefully hidden under a corrugated metal cover on the foredeck was a three-inch naval gun that had apparently been salvaged from a WWII Russian submarine and supplied by Popov from one of his arms connections.

Pedroza glanced up as Escabado strode onto the bridge and loosed a noxious blast from his ever-present cigar. “How much longer?” asked Escabado as he peered through the film of dirt and salt spray that almost obscured the windows.

“Jefe, we will be at the Cayos Miskitos in another few minutes. Once we are there, we will be met by one of the lobster boats and delivered to the coast.”

Escabado nodded and sat on the ragged couch at the rear of the pilothouse as they continued to their destination. After a few minutes, he could see what appeared to be a low lying cloud just off their starboard bow that quickly resolved itself into a series of shacks perched on rickety stilts surrounding an island that at high tide barely emerged from the surrounding sea. Tied to each house were narrow dugout canoes powered by antique outboard motors bobbing in the brilliant blue water.

Approaching from the west from one of the deep coral reefs in the area known for their spiny lobster was a seventy foot lobster boat filled to overflowing with scuba tanks and the small boats that the divers worked from. The Liwa Mairin tied to the Lucia Marie and the young captain laboriously struggled aboard. He limped to the wheelhouse and began speaking to Pedroza in a slurred voice.

Escabado shook his head in annoyance and looked at Pedroza. “What the hell is he saying? I can’t understand his fuckin’ mumbling.”

“My apologies, Jefe. He is a Moskito and only speaks Creole. And like his brothers before him, he was hurt in the lobster diving. Too deep, too many times…and the bubbles get him. Dumb Indians think they are cursed by not paying proper respects to the Liwa Mairin, the goddess of the deep. After he hurt, he name his boat after her.”

“I could give a fuck. Let’s load up and go,” snarled Escabado as he strode from the bridge. Within a few minutes, Escabado, Tasha and a couple of crewmen had transferred to the lobster boat and were on their way to the coast. For this trip, the boat only carried four crew, but it normally held twenty divers who would live on the boat while at sea. When not sleeping they would dive up to twelve hours a day in search of the red gold of the sea. Escabado noted that almost half of the crew limped like old men or had slurred speech similar to the captain he had met earlier-obviously a risk of the job that went with the territory.

He puffed furiously on the cigar and spent his time admiring Tasha who had been tied with rope and thrown roughly on some duffel bags in the corner of the wheelhouse. The shorts and the tight top she had been wearing were filthy, but did nothing to diminish the raw sexuality of the woman.

“You and me-maybe we spend some time together. Have some drinks. Some good time. I think maybe you like this better than what Popov do to you when he get here.”

For his trouble, she glared at him with a look of pure hatred. Too bad, he might still keep her for a while-a lot of spirit in this girl that would need breaking, but should be some fun while he was in the jungle. And when he was finished with her, she could entertain his men. He was after all, known as a generous man.

Reginaldo Garcia, the captain of the Liwa Mairin detested the man seated behind him. Although they had never met before, he knew the type. Twenty years before, the Spanish speaking Sandinistas has run roughshod over Nicarauga while Reginaldo and many of his Miskito brothers had joined the Contras and fought against them with help from the CIA.

A tenuous peace had finally come to the area, but the economic resurgence in Nicaragua after the war had largely bypassed the Miskitos. In the early 90’s, they cashed in on the worldwide demand for lobster and it seemed at first like a godsend to the poverty stricken people. The problem came when the supply of lobsters in shallow water began to dwindle and the divers started going to depths of over one hundred feet to find the treasure. That was the beginning of the sickness.

Reginaldo counted himself as one of the lucky ones. The day of his accident, he had been working at a depth of one hundred twenty feet and the lobsters had been plentiful. He dove from early morning until the sun was beginning to fade from the sky and had used ten tanks of oxygen through the course of the day. When he crawled exhausted from the water at the end of the last dive, he was hit with a pain that felt like his body was immersed in a bed of red-hot coals. Within minutes he was completely paralyzed, barely able to move his arms or speak.

After a year of not being able to walk, he gradually improved to where he could at least run a small boat for his cousin. One day, on the most fortunate day of his life, he was twenty miles off the coast and discovered ‘la langosta blanca’, the white lobster. It was a bale of cocaine probably thrown overboard by a drug smuggler being pursued by the Americans. He traded the bale for the lobster boat and named her the Liwa Mairin to honor the goddess for his good fortune.