[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (27 page)

I tested the setup by using my phone to call Shunt.

“Strong coms,” he told me. “They’re not talking to anyone at the moment.”

“Let me know if you hear anything good.”

“Will do.”

I took a few steps back to make sure the wire and device were hard to spot. Shotgun, watching the deck, gave me a thumbs-up between bites of his Twinkie.

“Sea spray adds a little flavor,” he said, unwrapping another.

“Put down the food and let’s find the container with our drugs,” I told him.

“Aye, aye, Cap,” he said, stuffing the snack cake in his mouth.

Not only was
Indiamotion
a relatively modest-sized vessel, but according to the documents that Shunt had tracked down, she was carrying only eleven containers. We had the serial number of the one with the drugs, thanks also to his detective work. More importantly—since I suspected that it might have been switched—Shunt had managed to track down the origin of nine of the other ten containers and determined that none of them had originated in India. He had numbers and even color descriptions for all of them. Worst-case scenario, we could tag the two remaining containers and follow each to its destination.

Or so I thought.

“Say, Dick, I’m not the greatest at counting,” said Shotgun as we moved toward the bow. “But I’m thinking there’s more than a dozen containers here. Like, a lot more.”

Over sixty, in fact. Either the ship had taken on cargo that didn’t appear on its records—imagine that.

Or we were on the wrong ship.

The name was right, at least. While I called Shunt and told him to recheck his data, Shotgun began scrambling up the stacked containers, inspecting each one. The rain and waves made it difficult to hang on, and it was slow going. The ship’s running lights shed little light on the containers, and Shotgun had to be as discreet as possible using the flashlight attached to his wrist.

“That’s the right one, Dick,” said Shunt. “Listen, an Italian navy vessel just hailed them. They’re only a couple of miles west.”

“They ask to board?”

“Negative. But it sounds like they’re going to come real close.”

I told Mongoose over the radio to turn on the radar and track them. He also moved the Zodiac to the other side of the ship.

“How long are you going to be?” he asked.

“We’re going as fast as we can. Slip away if you have to. Just make sure you’re not seen.”

“Roger that.”

Fifteen minutes passed. Shotgun found two of the containers Shunt had said were
not
ours, which at least confirmed that any mistake he’d made was consistent. But our container was nowhere to be seen.

“A thousand to go,” he said.

“Don’t exaggerate,” I told him. “I’ll take the next row.”

“With that knee?”

“My knee’s fine.”

“You’re limping.”

“Nah.”

“That cursing before was just celebrating how happy you felt.”

“Something like that.”

The cargo containers were stacked with about four feet between the rows, and it was easy enough to walk between them and check out the bottom containers. Ours was not among them.

Metal pipes ran straight up and down the fronts of most of the containers, giving me handholds to use to climb. I picked one in the middle and began hoisting myself up. The rain made the pole slippery, and the soles of my sodden athletic shoes (what us old-timers used to call tennis shoes or sneakers) felt as if they’d been greased. The ship’s heaving didn’t help. I finally managed to get to the top of the crate, and shined my wrist light on the serial number of the container at the top.

Not my container.

I worked my way up to the next container.

No joy.

Had the ship been steadier, I might have tried moving across sideways as Shotgun had done. But all this motion and the rain that was kicking up again made for a Murphy party waiting to happen. I backed down to the deck, then moved to the next crate.

“It’s none of the ones on bottom of the next row,” Shotgun told me. “But I did find two of the ones on Shunt’s list. Maybe we should check above them.”

“Good idea.”

“Wanna Twinkie?”

“No thanks.”

“Last one.”

“Shame.”

We moved around the corner to the next row. Shotgun scrambled up the side of the cargo like he was bounding up an escalator.

Show-off.

He was fast, but he had just as much trouble reading the serial numbers on the crates as I did. They were scratched and in some cases obscured with grease and graffiti. He’d gotten about a third of the way through when I heard a very loud crash followed by a scraping sound coming from somewhere aft on the ship.

Ships in even a light storm are not exactly places of serene quietude. To hear
anything
above the ocean and the steady thump of the vessel’s power plants meant it was really loud. And loud sounds on a ship are uniformly bad sounds.

My first thought was that one of the cargo containers had come unmoored. I quick-checked the ones where Shotgun was climbing, then went out along the rail to see the others. The containers left a narrow passage along the starboard side of the ship; the scraping noise echoed loudly against the wall of metal, and any second I thought I was either going to be crushed or thrown out to sea.

But neither happened. The containers seemed secure.

Finally I saw what it was: a large metal whaleboat had come off its divots and was hanging against the side of the forward superstructure, flapping like a loose shutter with the wind and the waves. The boat hung by a single line at the bow, and besides clanging it was doing a good bit of damage to the ship’s superstructure. Sooner or later, the crew was going to have to deal with it.

Make that sooner, rather than later—a door a few feet from the dangling boat opened, its yellow light obvious in the blackness. Two figures emerged, took a look, then retreated.

I backed around to Shotgun, telling him what I’d found over the radio as I went.

“Maybe they’ll just cut it loose,” he said.

“Not likely. The boat’s probably more valuable to the ship’s company than the crew.”

That wasn’t a joke.

“Should we hide?” he asked.

I glanced around. There wasn’t much of anywhere to hide. But as long as they were only dealing with the boat, there wasn’t a need—we were well out of their vision.

I told Shotgun to stay put and went back around the side, intending to keep an eye on the crew and the boat. Turning the corner, I saw a pair of men in slickers coming down the ladder and heading in my direction. The captain, wisely concerned that his cargo might come loose and create a
real
problem, had detailed a party to investigate and make sure all of the containers were secured.

(III)

I’m sure the sailors were every bit as unhappy about their assignment as I was. But that wasn’t of much comfort.

I slipped through the open space between the container rows to the other side of the ship. Two men were coming along that side as well, and in fact had made a little better progress.

Retreating, I joined Shotgun halfway up the container stack. He’d curled his arm around a metal pipe and looked a bit like a gorilla—not least of all because he had pulled a banana out of his backpack and was munching it.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“We have sailors coming to inspect the containers,” I told him. “How the hell can you eat?”

He just shrugged.

We could avoid the sailors by climbing to the very top of the containers, but that would expose us to anyone on the bridge. As bad as the lighting was, we’d still be pretty obvious up there. And hiding on the deck wasn’t much safer. We could go over the side, but even then we’d be risking a chance of being seen.

“We’ll hide in one of the containers,” I told him. “You have the picks, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out the small kit. I’m much better at picking locks than he is. Larceny is in my blood; his is filled with cholesterol.

I scanned the nearby containers to see which would be the easiest to get into. There are some very high-tech locks out there these days, with fancy electronic gizmos that alert the owners when they’ve been tampered with. Even the less sophisticated models can be tricky to get around, at least if you’re in a hurry. The two nearest containers had what looked like Enforcer locks, electromagnetic models that would be a pain to tamper with. I skipped them, clambering up to a more battered model that had an old-fashioned steel wire loop and key lock. The steel would have given the wire cutters we had with us a hard time, but the lock itself was easy to pick.

Or would have been, if I could have done it without hanging off the container in the rain while the ship started rolling at an unhealthy rate.

I fumbled badly with the tools, my hands getting colder and wetter by the second. Shotgun came over and leaned over me, providing a little shelter. Finally, the pins gave, and I slipped the lock apart. The whole process might have taken only a dozen seconds, but it seemed as if it had lasted a full hour. What happened next was nearly instantaneous: I undid the latch, and Shotgun pulled the right door open.

And swung out on the pipe as the ship lurched. The door was wide open, easily visible. Murphy was having his little tease. Just as I reached to grab the door back, the ship bucked and the panel came flying toward me. As I ducked, it reversed course, smacking Shotgun against the front of the next container.

Better him than me.

He kicked himself away from the container, reaching his hand toward me as he swung in. I grabbed it and pulled him into the interior of the container. He squeezed past me; I wedged my foot against the opening and held the door in place, a narrow crack of very dim twilight filtering through from the ship’s lights.

“What are we going to do if they come up and lock it?” asked Shotgun, squirreling back around.

“We push the door out and clobber them,” I told him. As much as I wanted to complete our mission without being detected, I wasn’t about to spend the next two days locked in a cargo container with Shotgun.

I leaned over and peered through the crack. There just wasn’t enough light to see to the deck, and so I had no idea how the search was progressing. Meanwhile, Shotgun began a search of his own.

“Oh my God!” I heard him say in a barely muffled voice. “These are boxes of peanuts. I
love
peanuts. And cashews! And look at this—dried apricots.”

He’d stumbled on a culinary nirvana, or at least the trail-mix version.

*   *   *

We spent about twenty minutes in the cargo container, probably about fifteen minutes more than we needed to. The metal interfered with our radios, and I couldn’t get Mongoose or Shunt. Not that they would have been helpful: Shunt didn’t have eyes-on, and Mongoose had pulled the Zodiac far enough away to keep from being spotted. Finally I slipped the door open and looked around, clambering down to the deck while Shotgun filled his ruck and every pocket he had with goodies.

The crewmen who’d been sent to deal with the whaleboat were still at it, trying to secure it to its divots on the side of the superstructure. From where I was standing at the edge of the cargo area, the proceedings looked a lot like an outtake from a Three Stooges movie, with Emil Stika as a guest star. The two men would raise the boat up, then lose it as the ship lurched. They weren’t quite strong enough to get the job done.

I was tempted to send Shotgun over to help them. But I don’t like to bother the boy while he’s eating.

Meanwhile, the Italian destroyer had drawn near the port side of the
Indiamotion.
Mongoose was now nearly two miles away, with the ship between him and the Italians. He was worried about fuel; fighting the storm had meant burning more than we’d planned.

“We’re going to be a while longer,” I told him, glancing in the direction of the Italian ship, whose mast loomed between the containers. We had to be careful moving around the port side of the carrier because it was so close. “What the hell are the Italians doing, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Shunt said they were radioing back and forth for a bit, warning them about pirates and talking about soccer,” said Mongoose.

If the container was aboard, it was in the row closest to the bridge—about par for the way our luck was running. I scanned the bottom while Shotgun, trailing nuts and dried fruit, started to climb.

I found another of Shunt’s containers, but not the one we wanted. One of the containers on the far side of the ship was slightly undersized, and because of the way the lights fell, there was a shadow where the space was. Shotgun used this to climb up. I lost sight of him for a few moments. The next thing I knew, a war cry pierced my eardrum.

“Found one,” he said.

“Good. Plant the tracker and move on.”

“Yeah, OK. Still got the rest of the row to check for the other. But you know, we went through all this trouble—don’t you think we should crack it open and take a look?”

“Guns, plant the device.”

“Shunt says the Italians are sending a boat over,” warned Mongoose. “They just radioed that they want to see the papers.”

*   *   *

In the interests of protecting my readers with sensitive ears, I’ve deleted the page and a half of curses that followed in real time.

*   *   *

Shotgun planted the tracker, then dropped to the deck and met me in the space between the containers. I didn’t want to risk hiding in one now—it was one thing to surprise unarmed sailors, and quite another to take on a boarding party, even if they were Italian.

I considered abandoning ship. But we were still one container short. And given everything we’d been through already, there was no way I was settling for a fifty-fifty chance of success.

We hid in a space roughly a foot and a half wide between containers in the third row. It was a tight squeeze even for my girlish figure. Shotgun had to hold his breath for the entire hour or so it took the Italians to check the papers. By the time they scrambled back to their destroyer, the sun was edging at the horizon.