Privateers by Charlie Newton

Author:Charlie Newton [Newton, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781734436808
Publisher: BlackType Press
Published: 2020-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Windward Passage

Now

Chapter 19

Bill Owens

Anne and I stand the flybridge. The Sazerac Star crashes the waves at full throttle. We’re running east in the high-water channel between Tortuga Island and Haiti’s north coast. To starboard are the lights of Port-de-Paix, Haiti’s main Coast Guard gunboat station on the north coast. The Esmeralda is fifty feet behind us. Dead ahead, somewhere in the black, is Hurricane Lana.

Anne points to Haiti’s coastal lights and yells over the engines’ drone: “Cubans will’ve notified the station. Either we’re inbound for Haiti’s north coast, or running the channel for the Dominican Republic.”

No sirens blare from either side of the channel. We blast past the Port-de-Paix station.

For two hours, we run in the rough water into a blackish electric dawn. Just before we reach Cap-Haïtien and her large bay, Anne veers out hard to avoid the city’s naval fortifications. For ten brutal minutes both our boats are naked to the open Atlantic. The wind slashes and the waves double.

Two miles past the city lights, at the far eastern rim of Cap-Haïtien’s bay, BeBe and the Esmeralda overtake us, then veer into the wide bay. Anne follows him in.

The ocean wind and waves quit. We cut our engines, slow-motor toward deep shadows that hide the bay’s southern rim a mile ahead.

On our far right, two miles west across the bay, lights twinkle Cap-Haïtien’s harbor and shoreline. Anne points there. “Five hundred UN peacekeepers with their backs to this water. Five thousand Ida rebels surround ’em on the land.”

“Sounds like the Alamo. They lived twenty minutes.”

“Same’ll be true here. UN soldiers been plundering every city they occupy. The bunch up at Leclerc was caught running a sex ring with the rebels’ children.”

Those stories are not new, and not just here.

Anne shows me seven fingers. “We’re eight when we get Susie back. Nine if Siri stays the course.” A fatal grin brightens Anne’s face. “Add the police we’ll have to evade as well, and that’s six hundred gunmen for each one of us.”

Six hundred to one, and she’s grinning?

We stop short of the southern rim’s shadowy mangrove thatch. Both our boats bob in the inky water. Taller shoulders an AK-47 at the trees. Anne’s other gunman does the same. They’re aiming at barely discernable bits of colored clothing that mark a lone anchorage. It’s midmorning-storm dark. The bats and birds should be slicing the treetops, but aren’t. Silhouettes of nervous cormorants and terns watch us instead. Low thunder rumbles out of the mangroves, over us, then out into the bay.

Anne squints into the mangroves. “Drums.”

On the Esmeralda, BeBe raises binoculars. Our boat’s gunmen listen to the unseen drums, their trigger fingers keeping time on milled AK receivers. I pat my pistol. Anne points east over Taller’s AK barrel into a dark tree canopy that spreads in every direction.

“The Gryphon is fifty miles into the groves. The hurricane will hit him first and leave him first.” Anne pivots 180 degrees west. “Bois Caïman where we’re going is seven miles west, five past the city lights .

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