Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller) (18 page)

He hated working with these men, but they had the
lalah
and in the jungles of the coast, cash was king. He tried not to think of the woman in the corner. Seeing her brought to mind a saying his grandmother had taught him ‘Mairin pranika lika ai tawa’ –the glory of a woman is her hair. He had never seen a woman such as her with her long blond hair. Sad to think what these might do to her…but none of his business. He would take the money.

He interrupted his reverie as they approached Cabo Gracias a Dios. ‘Cape Thank God’ had been named by Christopher Columbus five hundred years before when he rounded the cape in his tiny ship having barely survived the ravages of a towering Caribbean storm. Reginaldo cautiously approached the southern entrance to the river. The area was marked on navigation charts, but thanks to the wandering vagaries of the river, shoals were constantly appearing and disappearing, ready to snag the unwary mariner. He breathed a silent prayer after clearing the shallow sandbar at the mouth of the bay and navigating into the smoothly flowing waters of the Rio Coco.

The lower section of the river was uninhabited except for the occasional fisherman working on the river in their colorful wooden canoes. They glided silently past river banks lined with towering trees and an impenetrable maze of undergrowth until they reached a location five miles from the mouth of the river. By this time Escabado and any of the crewmen not working were lounging on the fore deck trying to catch the slightest breeze to escape the oppressive heat. Tasha was still confined to the pilothouse, but Reginaldo had waved her forward so she could see could see where they were going. She watched nervously as he pointed the bow of the boat at a wall of dense vegetation and slowly eased the boat forward. As the bow pushed through the entangled growth, the limbs parted revealing a twenty -foot wide canal extending back into the depths of the jungle. At this point, there was no turning back-there was not room in the narrow confines of the canal to turn the boat around. A quarter mile up the canal the trees opened revealing a deep pool one hundred fifty feet in diameter with the water dyed almost an inky black from the decayed vegetation.

Tasha looked around her in amazement. The entire area was surrounded by old growth jungle canopy creating a solid ring around the pool broken only by the canal that had been cut through. Reginaldo looked at her and she was surprised to hear him speak in English-slurred due to his condition, but still very understandable English. “This old stream once. Man come to village-take many young men for work here. Promise much
lalah
. They never come back again.”

“I sorry Missy,” he said averting his eyes. “Escabado is bad man. He will kill my wife and many children in village if I help you. Hush you now. I dock boat.”

Reginaldo eased the throttles back and bumped into two pilings in front of a ramshackle dock. An Indian on the dock dropped a crude bamboo gangplank to the deck of the boat and Escabado strode off toward the air-conditioned bunkhouse. As Tasha was helped from the boat, she could hear the sound of several generators running that emanated from a series of low tin-roofed buildings with camouflage netting covering the tops. To her left, almost hidden under more jungle camouflage netting was a long cylinder almost completely submerged in the murky water with a cylindrical tower extending from the top. She immediately recognized it as the submarine depicted in the engineering drawings she and Kyle had viewed in Fort Lauderdale a few days before.

It had been almost twenty-four hours since I left Isle Cisne. I was struggling to come up with a plan of action. I thought of ten different scenarios and just as quickly rejected them all. Too many unknowns. At this point all I really had to work with was a set of GPS coordinates on the coast of Nicaurauga. No way to tell if Tasha was at that location or even if she was still alive. My newfound contact on the SSB sounded promising, but I wasn’t sure how they were going to be of any help to me.

“Going to 4429,” I said dialing in the frequency for a little used band that would reduce the chance of anyone casually overhearing our conversation. “Eye In The Sky. Do you have a name?”

“Keep in mind, this is an open frequency. You can call me Derek,” said Agent Miller as he cradled the phone in his shoulder and waved at Rivera to hand him a notepad and pen.

“Sounds somewhat familiar-might have heard that name somewhere before.”

“You have,” said Miller. “I understand your problem. Hopefully it will get better in time. How can we help you?”

“I need information. When I departed the ‘vacation resort’ yesterday, there was some other outbound traffic in the marina. Do you happen to know their destination?”

“Negative,” Miller said leaning back in his chair. “Our last visual of them was southbound making like the Roadrunner if you can catch my drift. Lost sight of them fairly quickly, but it looked like a straight shot to the border between Honduras and Nicaragua.”

“Thanks for the update, I’ll be signing off,” I said as I keyed off the mike. It took a moment to sort through the information. Apparently the go fast boat I saw yesterday was heading straight for the general area where my GPS coordinates were guiding me. A quick check of my chartplotter-currently making six knots and looked like an arrival at mouth of the Rio Coco by noon.

No way the Dolce Vita was going up the river with her almost seven foot draft. I would leave her inside the calm waters of the bay and move upstream by dinghy. I ran through a quick weapons check. I finally settled for one of the MP5s and a pistol for my weapons of choice. The need for speed and mobility ruled out carrying the X25. Tucked a portable GPS unit in my cargo pants to lead me to the location. Loaded my pockets with spare ammo. A lucky break-a pair of night vision goggles found buried deep in the depths of the hidden compartment.

An hour later, I could see the coastline at the border between Honduras and Nicarauga. When I closed to within two miles, I could see the surf breaking on the shallow sandbars ringing the mouth of the Rio Loco. The only passable channel into the calmer waters was to the south and I breathed a sigh of relief as Dolce Vita motored into the bay with inches to spare under her keel.

I walked forward and dropped the anchor. Good holding-the point of the anchor dug deep into the soft sandy bottom as I backed the boat against it to make sure it could withstand the tidal currents flowing through the bay. Moved forward to the dinghy resting in an aluminum cradle on the bow of the boat. I hooked the lifting bridle on the dinghy to a whiskerpole, lifted it off the deck and swung it into the tranquil water beside the boat.

Speed was critical-I needed to be in position in the jungle by nightfall. The darkness and night vision goggles were the one edge I had in a game that was heavily stacked against me. One yank on the Mercury outboard and it came to life. The small motor was so quiet that it could barely be heard from a few yards away. I rolled open the throttle and the lightweight dinghy jumped onto plane headed up the river.

Watching my position on the GPS, avoiding the occasional caiman whose snouts protruded from the flowing current, and trying not to hit any of the rocks barely submerged under the surface of the river required all my concentration. According to the GPS, the location I was looking for was three hundred yards to my right. I slowed and cautiously approached the overhanging canopy that all but obscured the riverbank. When I was within fifteen feet, a slight opening at the bottom revealed a watery channel disappearing into the depths of the jungle.

The lowlying limbs seemed to reach out to grab the rubber sides of the boat. Easing through the wall, I could see what was clearly a man made channel with the exposed roots of the trees still showing the tool marks where men with machetes and shovels had laboriously carved a path through the primeval growth. The sun that had been slowly dipping behind the trees in the west, was almost completely absent under the jungle canopy. I reached behind me and shut off the motor. The low drone of the outboard was immediately replaced by the sound of thousands of cicadas hidden in the depths of the jungle.

I quietly rowed the dinghy for several minutes with only the sound of the water dripping off the paddles breaking the silence until the glow of moonlight revealed a pool a few yards ahead. The pool was completely surrounded by the impenetrable blackness of the jungle canopy except for a couple of dim lights flickering from the recess of some buildings on the left side and a fishing vessel that was tied up to the main dock. I thought about the options and decided to hide the dinghy under the dock to allow for a speedy departure. No one would see it in the darkness and I would either be dead or long gone by the time morning arrived.

Pulling into the dock, I bumped into something just under the surface of the water. I reached over the side of the dinghy and felt a hard smooth surface about six inches under the water. Looking fifteen feet to the right on the edge of the dock there was a small hut built over the water-That would be my first stop. After tying the bow to an old piling under the dock, I grabbed the splintered edge of the dock with both hands and stood on the outside tube of the dinghy to muscle myself up on the dock. That took a lot of effort - had to rest for a minute until my breathing slowed to normal. The night vision goggles illuminated the faint pools of lights as brilliant areas of glare set in the windows. Damn good thing I brought them-trying to walk along the narrow walkway in the pitch-black night was a sure fire recipe for disaster.

I slowly eased down toward the hut a step at a time – every faint squeak from a careless step on a loose board was magnified in my imagination and seemed to echo wildly through the night. Waited a minute to see if it attracted any attention. Nothing; anyone in the bunkrooms was already asleep under the mosquito netting. Took a minute to listen carefully outside the hut-no signs of life, just a low mechanical humming. I opened the crude wooden door and was dumbstruck at what I saw. In front of me was a vertical cylindrical shape about eight feet high with a watertight hatch in the side-this obviously was the conning tower of the submarine that I had discovered in the drawings a few days before.

Only one way to understand what I was up against; I braced myself against the dock and heaved at the wheel dogging the hatch closed. It spun easily and I slowly pulled the hatch open as quietly as possible. There was some faint lighting on the walls that barely illuminated the aluminum ladder descending into the cabin of the submarine-I took a deep breath and quietly eased my way onto the ladder. I could only hope there was no one waiting below for me. Eight rungs down and my feet hit the deck. Taking a quick glance around, I could see I was in a cylindrical tube about twelve feet in diameter that extended back for some distance into the darkness. This tied in with the engineering plans that I had seen earlier that showed the overall length to be around one hundred feet.

A little exploring starting at the bow-this area was largely open with tie-downs every few feet on the deck. The area was roughly twelve feet across and had a flat deck that left room below for the ballast tanks. It was obvious that the builders’ goal was to provide maximum cargo capacity. The safety and comfort of the crew was obviously not their main concern. The interior walls were crudely finished fiberglass-easy to layup and produce in this rudimentary jungle shipyard. The construction also told me that this submarine was designed for relatively shallow depths-descend much deeper than one hundred feet and the water pressure would crush the hull like an egg.

I was wondering how they had designed the ballast system-I had to admire the solution they came up with. Very simple, yet effective. There were twenty scuba tanks on either side of the cabin hooked into a high pressure manifold. When the valves on top of the manifold were pulled to blow the ballast tanks, the high pressure air from the scuba tanks was released into either the main ballast tanks or one of the forward or aft trim tanks expelling the water and forcing the submarine to the surface. The only drawback was that the compressor to recharge the tanks seemed to be driven only from the diesel when they were on the surface. If there wasn’t enough air in the scuba tanks to blow the ballast and reach the surface, the submarine would become a tomb inhabited by doomed men just waiting for their fresh air to run out or the submarine to sink below the crush depth for the hull.

This was still an enormous advance over the semi-submersibles that the Columbians had been using to smuggle drugs up to this point. At a cruising depth of fifty or sixty feet this new submarine would be virtually undetectable to law enforcement except when they were on the surface at night.

Just forward of the conning tower was the helm. The single seat with instruments clustered around it indicated this boat was intended to run shorthanded using probably no more than a two-man crew. Most controls were similar to what I would expect on any surface motor vessel. A wheel with the dual throttles offset to the right. Switches that allowed the vessel to run either from the battery banks or motor. And an unusual feature-a series of valves labeled ballast in Spanish-these would be used to flood the ballast tanks and descend or to release high-pressure air into the tanks to ascend to the surface. There was a commercial chartplotter onboard very similar to the one onboard Dolce Vita. I powered it on and could see a course had been plotted that was almost identical to the one that I had just traveled-looked like their final destination was supposed to be just west of Marathon Key. A favorite among smugglers with its easy access to dozens of small islands and heavy boat traffic to help disguise their movement.