Shadows of the deep, p.16
Shadows of the Deep, page 16
“So you went looking for morphine, with no cash to purchase?” Cutler’s voice was steel wrapped in velvet, pushing, probing.
Joe’s eyes, hollow and haunted, met his. “One of the local dealers, he knew I was cornered, offered me a way out. ‘Simple runs,’ he said. Just me, the boat, and a stash of narcotics from one island to another. It was supposed to be easy money.”
Cutler leaned in, the predator in him recognizing the desperation of a man with nothing left to lose. “But it wasn’t simple, was it, Joe?”
A shudder ran through the older man, memories flooding back. “No, it wasn’t. The first month, everything went smooth. Then they started asking for more—more runs, riskier jobs. I wasn’t just the captain anymore; I was part of their damn underworld Things turned worse when the boss an Aussie turned up.” His voice cracked, the terror of entrapment raw and palpable in the growing darkness.
Cutler could feel the shift, the moment the confession turned from a mere recounting of facts to a living, breathing nightmare. The air around them charged with the electricity of truths too long buried, and secrets that were never meant to surface.
“Spill it, Joe. I need the full picture,” Cutler pressed, his voice shifting from enquiry to outright demand, compelling the truth to emerge from the dark recesses where it hid, trembling.
“I was played, Cutler. Played like a fucking fiddle,” Joe exhaled, his words laced with a mix of fear and anger. “That Aussie cornered me, forced me to mark the luxury yachts. It wasn’t just a request; it was an ultimatum. No deal no drugs.”
“So this Aussie pays you with fuel and morphine, all in exchange for the intel on those yachts?” Cutler’s tone dropped, turning into a menacing rumble, his icy professionalism crystallizing into something far more dangerous with the unfolding revelations.
“Level with me, Joe. The yachts, their coordinates. You handed them over?” Cutler’s interrogation sliced through the tension that hung like a heavy fog, his words keen-edged, carving clarity from a jumble of evasion and murky confessions. “He baited you with the morphine, even had a stash waiting in Bali, I take it,” Cutler added, the pieces starting to ominously click together.
“Damn it, yes,” Joe confessed, his fists balling in impotent rage as if he sought to physically restrain his own demons. “The Aussie, he downplayed it all. ‘A few fancy boats,’ he’d coaxed. ‘Nobody gets hurt. It’s all insured anyway.’ But it was all crap. Nothing but damn lies.”
As Joe’s story unfolded, the cogs in Cutler’s mind turned furiously, the sinister jigsaw beginning to form a ghastly picture. “An Aussie?” he drilled further, his gaze sharpening with suspicion. “You’re telling me Mayan wasn’t the one pulling your strings from Phuket?”
“The Aussie, was my point man in Phuket,” Joe elucidated, his energy waning with every word as though each syllable leached his life force. “But here, it was Mayan calling the shots. I was running on fumes, Cutler. No fuel, no cash, no morphine.”
The atmosphere turned leaden, the full weight of Joe’s predicament, and his entanglement in this nefarious web pressing down on them, oppressive and relentless. Cutler’s resolve solidified, his voice dropping to a steel-hard timbre, each word laden with promise and menace. “Listen up, I need everything you’ve got on this Aussie once we’re through with this mess. Every last memory. My tech is going to strip this network down to the bone. Got it?”
Cutler’s voice dropped, a softer note in the hardened melody of their gritty discourse. “When did Annie pass?” he asked, the question hovering delicately in the air like a fragile truce.
Old Joe’s eyes glazed, his pain tangible. “Two months back,” he rasped, his voice a cracked whisper. “We were at sea, and she… she just slipped away. God, it was just her and me, like it’s always been.” His eyes lost focus, staring into the abyss of his memories. “Couldn’t part with her, not straight away. She was my whole damn world, you know. Together over four decades…”
The cabin seemed to shrink, suffused with a heartache so raw, so profound that even the walls seemed to mourn. “But then,” Joe swallowed, a shudder running through him, “the cabin started reeking of death. I took one of the sails, wrapped her in it. Tied it with reef knots, strong and tight.” His voice broke, tears breaching their banks and streaming freely. “I let her go, into the deep. My beautiful Annie, swallowed by the ocean.”
The shift was almost palpable, a tangible change in the air as Cutler’s professional facade snapped decisively into place, his empathy receding behind a wall of duty. The question came like a bullet, precise and unyielding. “The LSX 92 Lazzara, the Trench yacht, you’ve admitted to that. What about Ford’s Coca V1? Were you the one who tipped them off? Who did you tell, Joe?”
Each syllable was a cold blade, stripping away the layers of evasion and self-pity that Old Joe might have hidden behind. There was no room for gentle prodding, not with the stakes this high.
The older man seemed to deflate further under Cutler’s intense scrutiny, his soul laid bare by the relentless pressure of those probing, demanding words. There was nowhere to hide now, not from Cutler, and certainly not from his own conscience.
Joe’s voice was a husk, the confession dragging out of him like the worst kind of agony. “I did,” he murmured, almost drowned out by the relentless assault of his own grief. “It was the same procedure, I reported it to Mayan. The contact… I just pressed ‘one.’”
The despair was a living entity between them, but Cutler didn’t let it sway him. This was the ugly side of justice, the part where the lines blurred, where the horrors that men did in the darkness came to light, often carried on the whispers of those who, in another life, might have been simply old men mourning their wives.
Joe, still trapped in the grip of his grief, seemed to fracture further under the weight of confession. “Yes,” he whispered, an echo of a man broken beyond repair. “The contact in Phuket, he handed me a burner phone. Told me to press ‘one’ and report. The voice on the other end, I discovered was Mayan. I didn’t know people would die; I swear. When I heard, it was already too late.” His tears were a silent downpour now, words choked out between sobs. “Annie… she’d never forgive me.”
The air thickened with unspoken peril as Cutler leaned in, his voice a low, fierce growl. “Listen up and listen good. The man who hired us… is Conrad Ford. He’s not the understanding type. He finds out, you’re dead. It’s that simple. I won’t include this in my report, but you keep your mouth shut tight, understand? No more chats, no confessions. Your life’s on the line, Joe. You speak, and there’s no hole deep enough for you to hide.”
“Joe, let me be clear. We have two, possibly four, dead kids, and we are determined to get the killers. You owe them, and you are going to do whatever I ask of you. You seem a genuine guy, who has been caught in a bad situation. I think this is going to eat you up, you need to make amends for what you’ve done. I am a man down; you know this island and can drive. What about it?”
“I know, I hardly sleep thinking about them, I drink like a fish now and get by on gin and biscuits. Whatever you want I will do, I am sure the guilt will kill me off sooner rather than later.”
“I guarantee you, help us bring Mayan and his lackies and you will feel a whole lot better. First, stop drinking today while you work for me, eat properly, and go and get me the contacts mobile phone,” Cutler finished.
Cutler informed the rest of his team and Tuck’s team later that day that they had a recruit. He decided not to share Old Joe’s secret, for the moment.
Time wasn’t just flying; it was racing, each second hurtling into the next as if trying to outrun the very clock. In the relentless march of hours and days, Old Joe found himself caught in a maelstrom of new age warfare—drones, not bullets, cameras, not eyes.
Colton, through the unpredictable hand of fate, had drawn the short straw, becoming the impromptu tutor in drone operations despite his own relatively green experience in the field. He found himself in the peculiar position of instructing a man ten years his senior, a twist that left him both bewildered and inadvertently impressed.
Old Joe, with a legacy steeped in naval mastery, surprisingly pivoted with an almost youthful dexterity to grasp the nuances of this new-age technological battleground. Here was a veteran, his hands weathered from years grappling with coarse ropes and steering through tempestuous seas, now deftly manoeuvring joysticks and parsing data on sleek touchscreens. The old dog was indeed learning new tricks.
However, the journey was far from smooth sailing. Two practice drones, caught in the crossfire of Old Joe’s rigorous education, succumbed to the harsh lessons of trial and error. They plummeted from the sky, one after the other. Each crash, a cacophony of splintering plastic and technology, heralded a leap in Old Joe’s understanding, a costly but necessary sacrifice on the altar of progress.
Despite the setbacks, Colton couldn’t help but marvel at the old sailor’s adaptability, the way old instincts were repurposed for warfare’s modern frontiers. It was a stark reminder that, beneath the wrinkles and tales of bygone battles, lay a tactical mind still sharp as a tack.
The old sailor metamorphosed before their eyes. The wrinkles and liver spots didn’t vanish, but now when they looked at Old Joe, they saw not just an old man, but a drone pilot, his hands steady as he executed intricate manoeuvres, his focus unyielding as he adjusted zoom lenses and camera angles with the deftness he once reserved for riggings in a storm.
The military-grade drone, a beast of a machine that they had brought along, was no longer a sophisticated piece of tech in Old Joe’s hands but an extension of the man himself. It soared and dipped at his command, its electronic eyes his own as he scouted the terrain, they would soon tread themselves.
By the third day, Old Joe was more than they could have hoped for, filling a void they hadn’t realized would be so gaping in Basmati’s absence. They didn’t speak of it, but they felt it—a tinge of awe, a sliver of gratitude, and, for Cutler, a rare sense of relief in the searing tension that coiled around them as D-Day approached. The old sailor wasn’t just making do; he was becoming indispensable.
Chapter 10: Blood Sea
The morning bore down with an oppressive heat, humidity clinging to the skin like a second layer, the sky an unrelenting bright orb. The sea shimmered mercilessly, as if flaunting its untouchable diamonds under the blazing sun. The ironic strains of Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door ripped through the stillness from the loudspeakers of the chalk-white catamaran, a mockery or perhaps a premonition. A specific line from the track, ‘The long black cloud is coming down,’ felt like a chilling prophecy on this deceptive day.
Paccar, the hardened skipper and catamaran owner, expertly steered the sleek vessel, guiding it with calculated thrusts of the engine and deft twists of the rudder. His target: the anchored leviathan known as the Reef Explorer. The distance closed until the fenders grazed its colossal side, a gentle kiss. Romano his son was drying the deck from the sea spray.
From the deck, a figure moved with coiled grace—Guano, his towering frame a silhouette against the blazing day, muscles honed from a life that knew of struggle more than comfort. The Ivorian wasn’t just muscle, though; every movement was calculated, the result of a life forged in adversity. His past was a far cry from the passengers on the cruise ship. Despite his misfortune to born in poverty, he was a seeker of fortunes in a world that offered little to men from places like his.
Guano’s throw was precise, the mooring lines snaking through the air to the waiting hands on the Reef Explorer’s starboard platform. As crew members scrambled, securing the connection, Paccar dialled back the roaring engines to a predatory purr.
Guano, unlike the desperate souls fleeing horror, had been driven by economic hunger, a different kind of desperation. He’d found himself in the anarchic wasteland of Libya, a hell born from a rebellion that Europe had instigated but couldn’t control. After being stripped of everything he owned, he’d been herded onto a floating deathtrap, more coffin than vessel, by remorseless Libyan smugglers.
The nightmare had only worsened when the smugglers, devoid of any semblance of humanity, abandoned them barely half a day into the voyage, leaving them to the merciless sea. By some miracle, more divine than luck, they’d been found days later by the Royal Navy, more walking corpses than men, ravaged by thirst and starvation, and had been ferried to the relative safety of Cyprus. They were the lucky ones who survived the trip.
Now, on this catamaran, Guano stood as a symbol of survival, a far cry from the broken man rescued from the sea’s unforgiving expanse.
Guano had braced himself for the suffocating confines of an internment camp, a limbo of razor wire and watchful eyes. But fate, in a rare moment of mercy, dumped them instead in makeshift shelters—a sea of tents on the outskirts of Limassol. It was a holding pattern, a waiting game for the faceless bureaucracy to either shove them back into the hell they fled from or very unlikely, propel them into the churning mass of the European mainland.
But Guano was a man carved of hard edges and impatience. He thrived on certainties, tangible targets. The indefinite waiting gnawed at him, a slow torture. He knew all too well where he stood in the pecking order—right at the tail end. He was an economic migrant, a seeker of fortunes in the eyes of those holding the clipboard and pen, not a desperate refugee fleeing the scythe of war. His path, he knew, would be choked with red tape, a slow bleed of days, or worse, a ticket back to square one.
So he chose the unknown, preferring its sharp teeth to the slow devouring jaws of bureaucracy. Security had been a steel net as they were herded off the Royal Navy vessel, a web of uniforms and firearms. But during the chaotic shuffle to the camp, amidst faces marked with the same fear and uncertainty that mirrored his own, Guano seized his moment. He became a fleeting shadow, leaping from the lurching wagon into the embrace of the wild Cyprus terrain.
Paccar was a man steeped in history, his lineage a tangled root stretching back to the era when the Knights Templar laid claim to Cyprus in the distant year of 1192. The land knew his ancestors’ footsteps, and the stone of his estate, having been in the family for over four centuries, bore the marks of rebuilds and renovations. Paccar himself was a sturdy Greek Cypriot, his frame robust, a reflection to the land that nourished him and a life reaped from the sea’s bounty.
Commanding a modest fleet of three vessels, Paccar carved a living from the turquoise waters, ferrying sun-chased tourists and wide-eyed cruise passengers on excursions into the sea’s embrace. His empire was small but his own, built on sweat, salt, and an understanding of how to ply the delicate trade of tourism.
It wasn’t compassion that stayed Paccar’s hand when he caught Guano, thin and desperate, pilfering one of his chickens. Nor was it kindness alone that saw him offer the man a job and a roof over his head. Paccar was a businessperson, through and through, and in Guano, he saw opportunity. Here was a man who’d cost considerably less than the local labour, a man whose circumstances had honed a work ethic sharp as a cutlass.
The accommodation Paccar provided was humble—a one-bedroom room fashioned from what once served as a storage barn. By the glossy standards of European comfort, it was a shadow of a dwelling. But through Guano’s eyes, it was a fortress, a bastion of safety, and a far cry from the uncertainties that had dogged his journey from the Ivory Coast.
Guano’s earnings, modest as they were, weren’t frittered away on the fleeting comforts of the present. Each coin was a brick in the foundation of his future, safeguarded with the ferocity of a man who understood the true weight of currency. He had left behind a wife, young in years but old in hardships, her body heavy with the promise of new life. He had pledged himself to a singular goal: to toil, to save, and to ferry her from the suffocating poverty that strangled his homeland, bringing her into this new world he was painstakingly building, one saved coin at a time.
Gratitude tethered him to Paccar, manifesting in the relentless dedication he poured into his work. Guano was more than just an employee; he was a loyal, guarding the generosity that had granted him this second chance. Each day, he stood defiant, a bulwark against the tides of fate that sought to drag him back into the depths of destitution.
The blistering Cypriot summers ushered in a thrum of activity, with cruise liners lumbering into port thrice weekly, their arrivals dwindling with the cooler embrace of winter. Yet geopolitical unrest in distant Egypt had rerouted the tides of tourism, and with this shift, Paccar found his docks teeming and his excursions swelling with eager faces. The landscape of opportunity had broadened, and he was poised to seize it.
Guano, a steadfast fixture on the deck for three seasons now, played his part with the precision of a well-oiled cog in this vast machine of maritime commerce. He was the bridge between the behemoth cruise ships and the sleek catamaran, his seasoned hands securing the vessel with an ease born of repetition, his voice a buoyant welcome cutting through the salty sea air.
“Welcome to paradise. Watch your step,” he’d call out, his tone a mixture of warmth and rehearsed courtesy as he ushered twenty-two souls from the cavernous belly of the Reef Explorer onto the catamaran’s sun-drenched deck. They came in search of adventure, of escape, their anticipation palpable as they chattered about the morning’s promises of crystalline waters and the underwater ballet of marine life they’d witness off the island’s southern coast.
Paccar’s fleet, a trio of Italian-crafted jewels, cut through the water with the grace of creatures born to the sea. Fashioned from cutting-edge composites, these multi-hulled marvels boasted a symmetry that promised velocity and assurance in each sleek line and curve. He’d chosen these beasts with a gambler’s cunning and a sailor’s insight, knowing well that their wide beams spelled stability on the capricious sea. After all, tourists with faces turned green, leaning over the side to pay homage to the ocean’s sway, did little for reputation and less for the gratuity they were inclined to leave.
