“Comm, Captain.”
“Find me someone to talk to at CINCLANT. Somebody who’s working on Safari.”
Rick Chambers had driven the full length of Florida, on the Gulf side, and he was getting tired. He hoped to hell that Malgard was right about this. By the time he found Kevin McCory, he was going to be in a mean mood.
Since February of 1987, when the old man died, McCory had worked, or holed up, in six different marinas. So far.
He was living aboard an old home-built cruiser named the Kathleen, and he worked a few charters or got himself a job on the docks for a few weeks before moving on.
It hadn’t been easy. Chambers had followed a dozen false leads. “Guy named McCory? The Kathleen? Damn, seems to me ol’ Cap’n Eddie said he’d seen him over ’round Siesta Key. Might try there.”
It got so Chambers didn’t know whether the good old boys were putting him on or not. Most of them kept their jaws clamped tight. They didn’t talk to Northerners who weren’t buying a charter. He was certain some of them had sent him on deliberate wild-goose chases.
After a while, though, he learned to chat up the younger women hanging around the marinas. More often than not, Becky or June or Melinda would remember the handsome young master of the Kathleen and be happy to talk about him. More often than not, also, Chambers would see the yearning in their eyes. Pissed him off, is what it did.
He took the Tamiami Trail across the city to the Atlantic side, turned north on Biscayne Boulevard, and pulled into the first convenience store he found. He got out of the green Taurus, stretched, and headed across the parking lot for the public telephone.
Chambers had learned to search out the low-end marinas. McCory didn’t go for the world-class stuff. The trouble was, the yellow pages didn’t tell him what was first class and what was crumbling. Every advertisement pictured or narrated a state of the art marine operation.
He ripped the pertinent pages from the telephone book, folded them, and stuffed them in the pocket of his beige suit jacket. It was pretty wrinkled, he decided. He was going to have to stop somewhere along the way and get both of his suits pressed.
He figured he could reach Malgard in his Washington office that time of the afternoon, so he used his credit card number and dialed the AMDI office number. Malgard didn’t often go out to his manufacturing plant. Chambers figured him for being more interested in being a wheel around Washington than in building boats for the Navy.
“Advanced Marine Development.”
“Cheryl, this is Rick Chambers. The boss around?”
“Hold on a moment, Rick.”
It took nearly four minutes for Malgard to drop whatever he was doing and pick up the phone.
“Where are you at, Rick?”
“Miami.”
“Christ! You haven’t found him, yet?”
“Hey, I just got here. I’ve got maybe a hundred marinas to check out. You sure McCory stole your boats?”
“Not on this phone, damn it! Yes, I’m sure.”
Chambers sighed and patted the yellow pages in his pocket. “Okay, Justin. I’ll get on it.”
“Get on it fast, damn it! He’s had damn near six days now.”
“Maybe he sunk them?”
“He didn’t sink them. He’s got them somewhere, and he’s going to want big bucks for them. I’m not paying.”
“Yeah, okay. You can pay me instead.”
Chambers hung up the phone and turned around to stare at Biscayne Bay. Jesus, there were a lot of boats.
But what he needed was to find a young lady.
He found her three hours later, in the twelfth marina, up near the northern end of the bay. Her name was Elaine, and she was relaxing in the cockpit of a small sloop named Lainie’s Choice. She was in her mid-thirties, tanned the color of cashews, and dressed in pink shorts and a man’s white shirt. Chambers didn’t think there was anything under the shorts and shirt but Elaine.
He leaned on the railing of the dock and looked down at her. A big cruiser moving out of the marina created ripples that rocked the small sailboat.
She looked up at him, frowned.
“You Elaine?” he asked.
“Who’re you?”
“Name’s Davis. Harold Davis.” He pointed his thumb toward the shore end of the dock. “The manager back there said you might know a man named McCory.”
There. That little shift in the eyes, thinking back on pleasurable thoughts.
“Why you looking for this McCory?”
“I’m with Marathon Equitable Insurance. We’ve been trying to find Kevin McCory so we can pay him a settlement.”
“What kind of settlement?”
“It has to do with his father. Can’t say much more than that.”
“I haven’t seen him in almost two years,” she said, her blue eyes remembering every lost day. She used the back of her hand to flip the long, bleached blonde hair away from the side of her face,
“You have any idea where he went?”
“Not really. He talked about Tampa Bay, once.”
Chambers had already been there. “Anywhere else?”
“Fort Lauderdale, maybe.”
“Has he still got that cruiser? The old one?”
“It’s a motor yacht. Custom-built. The Moran. Yes, he still had it when he was here.”
That explained a couple of big gaps in McCory’s itinerary. He’d changed the name of the boat.
“Well, thanks, Elaine.”
“Sure. I hope you find him.”
“Oh, I will.”
Ted Daimler felt sick, but it was not the flu.
It was the carnage he had viewed on television.
All of the networks had abandoned their scheduled programming, which was not much of a loss, and gone to North Carolina, first with affiliates, then with their own reporters as they arrived on the scene. The twisted wreckage of armored personnel carriers and trucks was a favorite scene. Gaping holes in structures and burned barracks came in second. Subreporters were stationed at the doorways to hospitals in Camp Lejeune, Jacksonville, Wilmington, and Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where a number of bad burn cases had been flown.
The government had been noncommittal for most of the day, but finally in the early afternoon, the Navy conceded that the stolen stealth boat was likely behind the attack. Ibrahim Badr was profiled.
The fatality count stood at sixty-one. There were 194 wounded.
Daimler had gone to the office in the morning but was back home by ten o’clock. He called McCory a dozen times but only left a message with Marge Hepburn.
Finally, just as Reba started talking about a dinner he did not feel like eating, McCory called back.
“Worst possible scenario, Ted.”
“Do you really think so?” Daimler asked. The sarcasm could not be more evident.
“Shit, I’m aching, man.”
“Oh, hell, I know you are.” Daimler found himself pushed into his counseling role. For most of the day, his world had been self-centered, knowing that he had a part, however small, in the whole drama. “We have to keep in mind, Mac, that this isn’t us. It’s not our script.”
“I appreciate your use of ‘our,’ Ted, but it’s me. I started this thing.”
“Not necessarily. If we hadn’t knocked on the door of Pier Nine first, this Badr asshole would have two boats.”
“Maybe.”
“What surprises the hell out of me,” Daimler said, “is that the SOB hung around. I thought he’d be knocking off supertankers in the Persian Gulf by now.”
“Which offends your Republican sense of justice.”
“Sure, but losing oil is better than losing Marines. But, Mac, what I called about. I think it’s time I approached the Navy. We’re not going to get anywhere with this Malgard. Let’s lay the whole thing out — the drawings and your notes, and give them the boat back.”