“It is mooch,” one of the three men replied in his thick French-tinged accent. “Soothes the muscles and calms the nerves.”
The pirates drained their cups and accepted the offer for a refill. Then the three men suggested they take a quick tour of the ship.
Walking along the cargo hold, the three men told the pirates that they could carry anything within the huge containers—tons of drugs, weapons, stolen merchandise. Even an airplane, one bragged.
Whatever the pirates could supply to them could be moved practically anywhere in the world, without fear of being caught by law enforcement because just about anyone they would encounter at sea could be paid off or disposed of.
“More money for you,” one of the three men said. “More money for us.”
The pirates were not only taking it in, they were getting physically excited. Everything the three men were telling them made great sense. By the time the tour was over, the formerly drab ship looked bigger and more elaborate than any seagoing vessel the pirates had ever seen.
When the three men asked if the pirates had any questions, Doggie had only one: He asked if they could have another cup of mooch.
* * *
DOGGIE AND JACKS left about twenty minutes later. They had a deal in place, a half-gallon of mooch in hand, and a bag of money as payment for the guns and drugs: ten thousand dollars in all, mostly in tens and twenties.
They started their boat’s engine and headed off to the southwest.
A minute later, the helicopter known as Bad Dawg Two took off from the Dustboat, hidden on the other side of the cay, and headed in the same direction.
* * *
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Bad Dawg Two was flying at 10,000 feet, extremely high for its type of rotary aircraft.
Batman was behind the controls; Nolan rode shotgun. They were bundled up in heavy flight suits, boots and gloves, essential as the copter’s cockpit doors had been taken off, and it was extremely cold at nearly two miles up.
Gunner and Crash were shivering mightily in the passenger seats behind them. Both were wrapped in emergency blankets, but they were of little help, as each man was wearing nothing more than a wet suit and flippers.
“How did we draw the short straws again?” Crash asked, blowing on his hands, trying to keep them warm.
“I thought we lost a bet,” Gunner replied.
“You’ll be warm soon enough,” Nolan told them over his shoulder.
He was peering into an instrument called an XFLIR. An upgrade on a typical FLIR, or Forward Looking Infrared Sensor, it functioned like night-vision goggles—identifying people, places and things based on their heat signatures, but over large areas. The “X” stood for the device’s extraordinarily long range at night; at the moment, it was maxed out at three miles and change. That was the reason for their nosebleed altitude; they could cover more ground up here than flying closer to the earth.
They were passing over a string of tiny islands called the Sunset Chain. This was where they’d tracked the pirates’ fast boat after it left the Georgia June. They’d kept a visual on the vessel despite their frosty altitude until it disappeared in among the dozens of minuscule islands and reefs in the chain. Somewhere down there, Whiskey was sure lay the Muy Capaz’s hideout.
At first, what they saw was not very promising. The islands of the Sunset Chain looked practically deserted. Lots of oceanfront, lots of beaches, a few villages here and there—but nothing that would qualify as a hideout for a bunch of cutthroat pirates.
But then they flew over an island located about a mile off the northeastern edge of the archipelago, away from the others. Surrounded by thick reefs and rocky beaches, it was appropriately named Craggy Two Cay for the river that ran through it, cutting it in half. And though it was covered with heavy jungle and almost impossible to approach safely from any side by sea, the XFLIR almost immediately started picking up clusters of heat sources on it.
“We might have a bingo,” Nolan declared.
He checked the flight computer’s map and saw that this speck of land barely registered on the grid. There were a lot of boat wrecks on the reefs and rocks around it, however, some marked, some not. This alone ensured most vessels would avoid the place.
Nolan zoomed in as far as the XFLIR would go and started picking up individual heat sources. There were about three dozen in all, human