Finally, they were back where they’d been hours earlier in the night, with two rows of boxes laid over the keel. They waited a few minutes to be sure the unsinkable boat and its captain did not make another appearance. Soon they were satisfied. The Lance was down for now if not for good.
At a nod from Ben, Ellis started the Atomic Four. Ben weighed and stowed the thirty-five pound CQR plow anchor. Ellis shifted into forward. The gearbox roared like an old coffee mill grinding gravel.
Ellis said, “That damn Tucket must’ve pranged Miss Dotsy’s shaft when it struck her from below.”
Ben advised the obvious. “Then take her slow.”
Even with a bomb counting down the seconds just three feet away, there was nothing else they could do.
CHAPTER 9
Before his fateful birthday decision, Chalk and Right Way Moving & Storage were commissioned by Senator Morgan to act as go-between brokers on yet another in a long line of clandestine jobs. They drew this kind of gig from Senator Morgan all the time, but never so luscious.
This one was unique because it was the Senator’s own idea, start to finish. She had a hare-brained scheme that the terrorist enemies of capital “F” Freedom could be brought down by suddenly giving them too much power, too much wealth. They would collapse under the weight of their own corruption. Or so she believed. She had her reasons.
Right Way was to deliver a large sum of gold to a radical terrorist group in exchange for a set of plans, or so the Senator told Chalk. That was simple. Then Right Way was to deliver these plans to a second faction of extremists who had supplied the gold in the first place. Easy-peasy.
True to form, Chalk had kept his own team members ignorant of the nature of the engagement. They liked it that way. The less they knew, the less they could tell, and the longer they would live. Since Richard Willem Blackshaw, formerly Tom Chase, had hauled more than two and a half tons of gold, Chalk surmised that the blueprints the gold was buying were of great importance, but he could only guess about them until Doomsday.
The delivery was supposed to take place two days from now. That’s when Chalk figured the sellers would realize something was wrong. First, a polite inquiry would be made. When Chalk came up empty-handed, all hell would break loose. Word would quickly reach the buyers of the blueprints that the gold was missing. As the man in the middle, Chalk could reasonably anticipate not one but two very unhappy customers gunning for him not long after forty-eight hours into his very dim future. Of course that harpy, Senator Lily Morgan, would be raining hellfire down on his ass all the while. No wonder. It was the biggest deal they’d ever done together.
This was a new situation for Chalk. Right Way always delivered, and never failed. He rarely worried about contingency plans. True, shit sometimes happened. Once, when one of his mules was flying a computer chip for a missile guidance system, his Piper Aztec had crashed in the Mojave Desert. Chalk arrived on the scene within two hours, and found his deliveryman’s remains. Then Chalk went to work with a proctologist’s finesse. It was this personal touch that allowed him to retrieve the pricey component from where it was hidden within several layers of Trojan condom latex, ribbed.
Rescuers, the FAA, and the NTSB had been cleverly delayed by Chalk’s operatives who set up a dummy aircraft Emergency Locator Transmitter signal one hundred miles south of the actual crash site. The authorities never knew that Chalk had gotten there first. That was years ago. An accident. Smooth sailing since then. Accidents, after all, might happen to anybody, but no one intentionally fucked with Right Way. Not like this.
Would such a hands-on technique salvage this crisis? Chalk fantasized, wondering if Blackshaw had accidentally crashed his truck. Maybe he was lying dead, crushed under the gold in some arroyo in New Mexico. He should have been somewhere near Albuquerque at the time he fell silent.
That prompted another question in Chalk’s mind. If Blackshaw was ripping off Right Way, why didn’t he make up false progress reports to buy time? He could have claimed to be anywhere, the way Donald Crowhurst, that round-the-world yacht racer back in the 1960s, had falsified his position reports by radio while he did circles in the South Atlantic. Why didn’t Dick Blackshaw do something like that? Chalk was baffled.
He did not have any telemetry markers on the gold. Some random boob could LoJack his Chevy Nova, and the cops could find the piece of crap in ten minutes by satellite if anybody bothered to steal it. Chalk had decided not to put a transponder on two and a half tons of gold. As he saw it, the problem is this: if he could track it, so could somebody else. And the shipment was so big. It was so heavy. And Chalk was such a notorious pluperfect badass! Who’d dare mess with his shit? Someone very close to home apparently. In retrospect, skipping telemetry was another gross oversight. Really no excuse. Verged on hubris.
Chalk addressed his team in the office. “Friends, unless we move mighty rapido, it’s likely we’re all going to be killed before the week is out. Yes, I predict we are going to have some very unhappy customers.”
“Not necessarily. I’m no profiler,” said Slagget, “But after some further research, I got a sense of the man. He’s still looking for his place at home, like everybody.”
Chalk was nonplused. “That is pure steaming bullshit buzzing with bluebottle flies. If you had a sense of the man, as you put it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation!”
Chalk never tolerated bloviated homilies from uppity contract killers.
Slagget plowed ahead. “We have a better sense of the real man now.”
Chalk eyed Slagget. “I’m all ears.”
Clynch jumped in. Chalk liked that. Clynch was trying to buff up some of his former luster and avoid being plugged by his short-fused chief. He said, “Let’s review what we know. His name is Richard Willem Blackshaw. He was born on Tangier Island, Virginia. Not too far from here out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. But he was raised on Smith Island, Maryland, across the state line a little north.”
Chalk assembled his features into the well-known What’s-It-To-Me? face.
Clynch deferred to the new guy, muttering, “Bill here has some more thoughts on all this.”
Chalk transferred his gaze back to Slagget. “This is worse than a local newscast. You going to throw in a lead about the bad weather? Maybe a pie-eating contest, or a story about a lost kitty-cat finding its way home from Guadalajara back to D.C.?”
Slagget sat up straighter and said, “Dick Blackshaw, a.k.a. Tom Chase, comes from a pretty isolated place in the world. I know it’s not too far from D.C. as the crow flies, but the people there speak differently, live different. They fish, hunt, oyster, clam, crab, what have you. Even had a tortoise-meat industry for a while. But mostly seafood. And waterfowl. Smith and Tangier both have several small hamlets each, but they’re populated by pretty tough individuals. Mostly poor, devout, hardworking, downwardly mobile no-nonsense types just trying to hang on.”
Chalk was only an eyebrow spasm away from downsizing his operation through cold-blooded homicide.
Slagget picked up his pace. “So this Richard Willem Blackshaw, he’s normal enough as a kid. Some run-ins with the cops on the mainland now and then. Nothing serious until he comes back from Vietnam. By then he’s a mess. A Post Traumatic Stress Disorder poster child. Tries to fit in. Marries a local girl. They have a son who still lives there on Smith Island.