“Is she fueled?”
“Full tank.”
“All right. Let’s shake her down.” Jake checked his phone one more time. No messages from Kurt Jenkins at the Agency. He needed a location or they would be running blind out there. “Think you can pilot this beast?” He asked her.
“I’ll give it a try.”
They got aboard and turned over the motors. Jake cleared the mooring lines and hopped aboard. He went inside the small pilot compartment and watched Elisa familiarize herself with the instruments. But it was pretty bare-bones. Speed, compass, fuel and communications equipment. No sonar or radar. This was a fly by the pants boat.
As they slowly cruised out into the dawn lighting, Jake held his phone in his hand and just then the thing buzzed and he looked to see who was calling. This time it said ‘Starbucks’ and Jake wished they would deliver about now.
“I’ll have a double espresso,” Jake said into the phone.
“You wish.” It was Kurt Jenkins. “Listen, I’m sending the coordinates for an intercept by text as we speak. Let me know you got it.”
Jake looked at his phone and saw the text come through. Then he found the GPS and tapped in the longitude and latitude. “Got it into our GPS. Is that where they are now?”
“No, but based on their speed and heading, that’s where they should be in about an hour. You should be able to close on them sooner than that, though.”
“By then they could have changed course,” Jake reasoned.
“You have a radio aboard your boat? If you don’t have cell service I can contact you with an update.”
Jake gave him their marine VHF radio frequency and channel number. Then he waited for a moment for Kurt to respond.
“All right,” Kurt said. “We’ve got you traveling through the Augusta port. You might want to tell your friend to slow down a little. She’s speeding.”
“Okay, Big Brother. Anything else you have for me?”
Long delay and hesitation on the other end. “Maybe. We have someone aboard the yacht.”
“I know about her,” Jake assured Kurt.
“You do? Great. So be careful when you get out there and start shooting up the place.”
“What, you think I just send bullets flying indiscriminately?”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“Never mind,” Jake said. “Are you sure you just don’t want to call in an air strike? Maybe we have a sub in the area that needs target practice.”
“Remember our asset on board.”
“Right. But after that.”
“We’ll let you know.”
The boat started to rock a little more, shaking Jake about on the bench seat.
“What kind of discretion do I have with this Petros Caras?” Jake wanted to know.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is he still important to the Agency?”
“You’re not sanctioned to kill the man, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m not stupid enough to think you would give me that kind of authority, Kurt. I just want to know if I should be shot at by his men and I happen to hit the Greek billionaire, if you would cry at the man’s funeral.”
“I don’t think anyone from the Agency would be on the guest list.”
“Gotcha. Anything else?”
“No. Remember that the radio goes both ways.” Kurt Jenkins gave Jake the ability to call him with their onboard radio. Then the two of them clicked off. Jake climbed back up to Elisa.
“Everything all right?” Elisa asked him.
“Yeah. I don’t know how in the hell our Agency knows this, but somehow they’re aware of your contact aboard the Greek yacht.”
She looked at him with wonder. “That makes no sense. Even my agency doesn’t know she’s aboard. The CIA is good.”
They could be, Jake knew. But they should have never gotten into bed with the likes of Petros Caras in the first place.
Once they passed the break water, Elisa pushed the throttle and the motors came to life, churning the water behind them and sending the bow higher until they reached a cruising speed and they leveled off. Jake checked out the GPS. They were only twenty miles from the intercept point. That was only about a half hour at this speed, assuming the Greek yacht was still at its cruising speed and course.
Twenty minutes later and Jake still couldn’t see any sign of the yacht on the horizon. He called Kurt Jenkins on the radio and heard the yacht had changed course slightly, vectoring to the west. Kurt could see both of their vessels, separated by just fifteen miles.
“They must be just over the horizon to the southwest of us,” Jake said to Elisa. “Does this beast go any faster?”
Elisa smiled and shoved the throttle all the way open. By now the sun was close to rising, but the cloud cover from the end of the storm would keep it fairly dark on the ocean. In just ten minutes Jake saw them in the distance.
“Christ look at the size of that thing,” Jake said. “It’s like a damn destroyer.”
“It’s over a hundred and six meters.”
“Wow, that’s three hundred and fifty feet.”
They closed on the massive yacht and when they got to within a football field they simply kept pace with the Greek ship.
On board the Greek yacht, the ship’s captain had called for Petros Caras to join him on the bridge. Since it sounded urgent, the billionaire came within a couple of minutes.
The captain handed Petros Caras a set of binoculars. “Sir, we have a patrol boat approaching from the stern.”
Petros Caras looked through the binoculars and saw the camouflaged boat for himself. “What kind of boat is that? It’s not our friends is it?”
“No, sir. It appears to be an Italian Navy patrol boat. But they haven’t used those in decades.” The captain had his own set of binoculars. He pulled them down now and looked at his boss. “Sir, they have two torpedo tubes that appear to be loaded, along with a machine gun on the stern.”
“What the hell do they want? Aren’t we still in international waters?”
“Yes, sir.”
This was confusing to Petros Caras. They’d never had a problem with any navy in the world. Not even when they hauled arms into ports in Lebanon and Syria. This made no sense. “Can you get them on the radio?”
The captain gave orders to his man at the wheel to maintain their current course and speed and then picked up the radio and called to the smaller patrol boat.
Finally a woman came over the radio in Italian. “This is the Italian Navy. Come to a complete stop and prepare to be boarded.”
The captain and Petros Caras stared at each other in complete confusion.
“Under what authority?” the captain asked, switching from Greek to Italian.
After some hesitation, the response came. “The Law of the Sea Convention.”
The captain shook his head. “We are outside the twelve-mile territorial waters of Italy and are authorized innocent passage.”
“Captain, check your charts. Italy owns an island off your port bow and the twelve-mile exclusion extends beyond that island. You have not filed a float plan to pass through our waters.”
The captain looked at his charts, both electronic and on paper, and he wasn’t sure what this Italian sailor was talking about.
“What’s going on?” Petros Caras asked, his eyes cast upon the charts and then off the bow. He didn’t see any island ahead.
“I have no idea.”
While Elisa engaged the yacht over the radio, she had quickly moved in closer to the stern of the large yacht. Meanwhile, Jake was out on the front of the Italian patrol boat waiting for her to get them close enough for him to jump aboard.
Ten feet away now, and the Greeks obviously looking to the port bow for an island that did not exist, Jake felt his gun on his hip and tightened the small pack on his back.