Privateers Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2020 Charlie Newton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by BlackType Press, Austin, Texas

  www.charlienewton.com

  Edited and Designed by Girl Friday Productions

  www.girlfridayproductions.com

  Editorial: Ed Stackler, Erin Cusick, Amy Snyder

  Interior Design: Paul Barrett

  Cover Design: David Drummond

  Illustrations: Robert Bucciarelli - RobertBDesign

  Cover Image Credits: © Shutterstock / NataLT; Shutterstock / Vixit; Shutterstock / STILLFX

  ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-7344368-0-8

  e-ISBN: 978-1-7344368-1-5

  LCCN: 2020900870

  First Edition

  “It is a Rotten Bargain that threatens the very underpinnings of our democracy, the unholy union of government, business, and organized crime.”

  US Senator Estes Kefauver, 1951

  Odricks Corner, Virginia

  February 1986

  Thirty degrees and ice.

  Two unmarked sedans are parked on an isolated road. Two men stand at the front fender of the rear sedan, a file open between them. The American taps a gloved finger near an eight-by-ten photograph that would make most men vomit. He says:

  “Gibbets. One-man conical death chambers. Used them to execute pirates back in the 1700s.”

  The Brit at his shoulder shakes his head, says: “Taken three weeks ago.” The Brit’s accent is a mush of Britain’s colonial-era geography.

  The American looks up, then quickly away.

  “Clothes are current. Still have human meat in ’em. There’s a map drawn on the back; shows the airstrip where we think our plane landed. We need to know where; need to get our guy out.”

  The Brit is a “green card,” a private contractor. The American is a direct employee of the US government and bound by all the laws of his agency. At a minimum, his government career will be over if he’s connected to the photograph and its implications.

  The American continues explaining gibbets, buying time for a way out. “Gibbets fit tight, head to toe. If the executioner hangs your cage high enough, birds peck at your eyes while you’re still alive, and whatever else they can reach. Hang it lower, like these unfortunate fellows, it’s the rats and bigger scavengers that do the chewing.”

  The Brit nudges the photograph, refocusing the American on why they’re talking. “That’s the last contact we had with our agent and cargo. Came to us in a plain brown wrapper. We think it’s Cuba. Maybe near Cienfuegos. But we can’t figure gibbets lining the runway as Castro.”

  “Plain brown wrapper” could mean anything from an anonymous envelope to a dead man’s pockets.

  The American uses a penknife to flip the photograph to the map drawing. He inspects the drawing, flips back to the photograph, eyes the horror shot from a different angle. “Definitely not Cuba. I’d say Haiti. Mangrove jungle. Got that vibe.”

  “Haiti?”

  The American frowns, glances at the tree line ten feet away for threat. The Brit would absolutely know what a gibbet is—the British Crown was infamous for using them when the English ruled much of the planet. And he’d know what Haiti looks like.

  Some still refer to men like the Brit as “privateers,” a legal status coined in the 1600s that four hundred years later means the same thing: a private contractor with letters of marque and reprisal—clandestine “permissions” to operate outside the law in specific situations.

  Another substantial difference between the two men is murder. The American, James W. Barlow Jr., is a lawyer, a University of Chicago debate-team valedictorian who killed one man by accident last week in a downtown Buenos Aires crosswalk.

  The Brit has attained no academic honors; his degree is a hodgepodge from the London Day College in Bombay and later Hong Kong, and Appalachian State in North Carolina. His name is Sile Howat. He has killed a number of people, all of them on purpose.

  Barlow checks the tree line again. “Yes. Haiti.”

  Howat shrugs, staying with his story that he doesn’t know from gibbets or Haiti.

  Barlow folds his penknife, then thumbs his gloved fingertips clean of any residue. “In Haiti—if that’s where your photo was taken—there’s a fellow who’d be responsible for that brand of madness. The drum-beaters call him ‘the Gryphon.’ Gibbets have been the Gryphon’s signature since . . . for a while.”

  “You’re sure? Your people would agree?”

  “My people? No one I know would set foot in Haiti right now. The entire island is on fire. Fifteen minutes ago, I heard all three sides of their presidential ‘election’ were eating each other.”

  Howat leans closer, as if confused. “But your section’s active in Haiti, isn’t it? Like the Contras are in Nicaragua?”

  “If you mean cocaine, this conversation’s over.”

  Howat swallows a laugh. “I mean one of those ‘presidential candidates’ is your guy, right? Luckner Cambronne?” Howat reaches under the photograph for a sheet of paper. “You’d better look at this.”

  Barlow draws a Browning .22 semiautomatic from his coat pocket and shoots Howat four times in the head.

  Camagüey Breaks, Cuba

  (Twenty years later)

  Chapter 1

  Susie Devereux

  August 2006

  Boyfriends lie but good binoculars don’t. Our 45-foot Hatteras falls down a wave and bucks hard to the lee. We bottom in the trough and the twin diesels dig in. The combination bangs my appendix scar into the galley table and a Benelli shotgun halfway out of its wall clamps.

  I plant two size nines that have sailed oceans of bad water to get here, then retrain my binocs on Cuba’s Cayo Confites. At the cay’s south end, a pile of bleached rubble peeks above the shore break. Right where said rubble’s supposed to be.

  Spindrift splatters the galley windows. I tight-dial the 7x50s to be sure. Bet your ass—screw that, bet your last life jacket. After five years, the good guys have just found an unfindable eighteenth-century lighthouse, forever forward known as “X marks the spot.”

  I shout up through the galley door: “Gentlemen! Believe we’ve done her!”

  A chill stands the hair on my neck.

  I refocus the 7x50s; spread my feet wider. Something’s wrong with this picture. Trap replaces treasure.

  Thunder pounds to the west, then rumbles louder until it booms over us. Shakes the boat like a one-jolt earthquake. Behind the thunder, the horizon line now includes a low three-hundred-mile ribbon of midmorning black.

  Huh? Don’t you fucking dare.

  Major storm was not the NOAA forecast. I recheck the NOAA data, then the black ribbon at the horizon. Higher? Already? On a good day, Cuba’s Camagüey Breaks are treacherous but navigable. On a bad day, the Breaks are suicide. Trap versus treasure officially drops to distant second. I pull a Vectormaster Storm-Runner and recalculate today’s weather implications using what I see, not what was forecast.

  The math on our available fuel and time required to reach known hurricane holes produces one option. It has two parts: Hail Mary and Hold On.

  Both eyes squeeze shut. Why does bad news always add up? In my defense, the NOAA forecast was for a “minor tropical depression.” But based on what
I’m looking at, my forecast is we’ve got two hours. Then this storm will swallow the bottom half of central Cuba, and us.

  The binoculars lower themselves to the galley table; I scan the cabin for ruby slippers I can click three times. When those two hours are up, it’ll be noon; what remains of the sun will be gone. Our world will be full-gale winds, seas as high as a two-story building, and absolute black dark. And being the smartest girl on the block, I sailed us to this very spot on purpose.

  A wind gust rocks us to starboard. I hate being stupid—and I have some experience. And I’ll really hate being dead at forty-two, the new thirty-two.

  My name is Susie Devereux—we probably won’t know one another long, so don’t worry about pronouncing Devereux. For posterity, I’m the American girl who lost the 1994 Rugby World Cup in Edinburgh, and who will now almost certainly perish at sea. Although it’s fashionable to blame one’s parents or one’s neighborhood for life’s disasters, I can’t. I was raised to do what I do.

  I was born in Chicago and lived there forty-eight hours. From hour forty-nine onward, my childhood was the cold water from Glasgow to Rotterdam, the warmer ports from Marseille to Morocco, and the warmer-still from Charleston to the green heat of Jamaica. My parents were captains, contrabanders, and adventurers, and so full of all things fabulous that I never wanted to leave them. They schooled me on the life from the day I could reach a gunwale and name three of the Beach Boys.

  I glance the photo of my parents on the foredeck of their last sloop, The John B. The conditions that are about to kill me require that I ignore every warning Mom and Dad taught me. I wince at their photo and whisper, “Sorry.”

  Pocket lightning flashes in the storm wall like fortress cannon. Thunder pounds us a foot deeper in the blue water. I should make the SOS call; us wrecking isn’t a 100 percent; small craft have survived worse; God does protect the ignorant. At the very least, I should warn my partners, two of the three “Witches of Eastwick,” who both think I’m lots smarter than I am.

  I radio-call Anne Bonny in Kingston. No answer. Then Florent Dusson-Siri on mainland Cuba. No answer. I radio-click our coordinates, send the SOS, then squint at the poems, maps, and charts strewn across the galley deck.

  Goddammit, if I’m gonna drown, I need to know why; I need the answer so Anne and Siri can survive this adventure, then toast me from their mega yacht that this treasure will buy.

  I squint harder at the papers, try to see the clues the way the author did when he wrote them eighty years ago, thinking he could survive double-crossing a Sicilian crime king who could spot a lie at a thousand yards.

  The poems don’t answer. Why answer a brunette too stupid to be a blonde?

  Their murdered author doesn’t answer either. When he was alive, Eddie O’Hare was a shitheel Chicago lawyer who ran a racetrack with Al Capone. And fancied himself a poet-raconteur.

  My teeth clamp, teeth that an Iraqi detainee broke and I paid plenty to make pretty again. Unfortunately, I was an idiot then and I’m an idiot now. Shoulda been doing nails in a mall, in Kansas, but only with supervision.

  Thunder pounds high and hard. The clues on the deck that are about to kill my friends up top and me down here are clear on only four things:

  Know less than 100 percent of the puzzle—you die.

  The gold “liberated” from Haiti’s Banque Nationale in 1914 was no longer aboard the USS Machias when it ran aground, crewless, outside Charleston harbor.

  Seventeen years later, Al Capone bought the gold at 20 cents on the dollar from two capital-murder defendants. They were represented by Eddie O’Hare and his law partner, James W. Barlow Sr.

  Al Capone never saw the gold. O’Hare snitched him into Alcatraz, then buried it, waiting for Capone’s mafia partners to die off or move on. O’Hare’s poems tell you where.

  “Susie! Boat’s coming!”

  I vault stairs to the main deck. Two sandy-haired, shirtless renaissance men stand the flying bridge above me, both lean, wearing faded military boat shorts, both accustomed to risk in foreign waters. (My head’s still on my neck because they led the team that rescued me from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.) Of the pair, Tommy-the-American is the lesser boatman, but the better diver and fighter. And the man I share my hopes, dreams, and bathwater with.

  Cyril, the Afrikaner, leans into the throttles. Over his broad naked shoulder, he shouts: “Astern.”

  Tommy braces backward into Cyril’s instrument panel, binoculars already focused into the eastern horizon. “Coming high and dead-on. Could be Cubans, circling back from mid-channel—Nope. Hull’s red, deep V.”

  My stomach sinks. “You sure?”

  Tommy shouts above the roar: “Roger that.”

  Red is very, very bad. Think pirate flag, but in the fiberglass era—the devil’s front man. I yell up at Cyril: “Run us for the flats on the backside of Cayo Romano. We’ll get ’em in the shallows. Get the sun or the storm in their eyes.”

  Cyril rams the throttles and veers due west into the wind. Tommy throws me the binoculars, jumps to the deck, then snakes to the stern between the fifty-five-gallon high-octane fuel drums, metal-detection equipment, and diving gear.

  The binoculars confirm the bow of the deep V is a vivid scarlet red and closing.

  Tommy pops the lid on the transom bait box, grabs two rebuilt MAC-10s, four thirty-round magazines, and two metal ammo cans of .45 ball. Each can holds a thousand rounds. He hauls one can up to the bridge, drops it and a MAC-10 with two extra magazines next to Cyril, then jumps back to the deck and bumps my shoulder.

  “The Gryphon?” he asks.

  “Don’t want it to be. She’s fast, though, whoever she is.” I duck from the deck to the galley, stuff the maps and poems into a waterproof chart bag, then a .45 Auto into the waistband of my jean shorts. I sling a bandoleer of shotgun shells over my shoulder, then unclamp the pistol-grip Benelli 12-gauge.

  On deck I brace into Tommy, rescan with the binoculars, then yell up to the bridge: “It’s him. The Gryphon.”

  Cyril points starboard and shouts: “Two more.”

  Tommy frowns hard at the three boats. “Eleven goddamn days and a world full of ocean . . . he’s not here by accident.”

  I agree. “Part of the last clue must’ve been fake, a plant. Fucking monster put us here to rob and kill us. Storm’s his enemy too, though. Get the weather between him and us and we have a chance.”

  Tommy slides his two extra magazines into his shorts, drops to both knees, and opens his can of .45 ammo. Cyril yells down, “Give the bastard the file.”

  Chop buckles my knees. “Won’t be enough.”

  Tommy drops the bolt on his MAC. He spent five years in the Teams and three in Delta, and offers no argument.

  I flip off the Benelli’s safety. “Our partners in Chicago made a deal for our heads—Barlow Jr. or Grossfeld. Promise me you’ll kill ’em both if I can’t.”

  “Never did like those guys.”

  I kiss Tommy’s cheek, then the Benelli’s barrel, then pull a big-bore derringer the Afrikaners call a “suicide special” that I go nowhere without, check the chamber, slide the derringer back into my front pocket, and tell the three boats charging at us: “The Gryphon’s hands never touch me again.”

  Tommy yells over me to Cyril. “Make the fucking boat go faster and we don’t have to give him anything.”

  Our Hatteras crashes west across the channel. The Gryphon’s three chase boats close to shooting distance, running hot on the same high-octane avgas we are. One chase boat splits to port, one stays dead astern, one splits to starboard.

  Fifteen rounds rake our water to port. Another fifteen rake to starboard. Tommy opens fire on the starboard boat. His first five-round burst walks up the waves; his second burst rips the boat’s hull and bridge.

  Cyril opens fire to port. That boat fires back, hits Cyril three times, then explode
s in a fireball. Cyril tumbles eight feet to the deck.

  Tommy rams a second magazine and empties it dead astern at the middle boat.

  The starboard boat rakes bullets across our bow. I climb to the bridge, jam the throttles, ram a full magazine into Cyril’s MAC, and fire to starboard. We’re almost to the reef. Tommy pivots to the starboard boat and empties his third magazine. The starboard boat has three black men firing full-auto from so close their faces are clear. Their boat hits a reef, flips, rolls airborne, lands, and disintegrates on impact.

  I spin the wheel left, then right, crush the throttles, and kick my last magazine down to Tommy on the deck. We slug deep into a wave that knocks me into the windscreen and slices my temple. I re-right the wheel. Bullets rip through the instruments and windscreen. I yell, “Shoot back, Tommy! They can’t risk hitting the avgas drums.”

  Tommy’s down, leaning against the transom. Blood streams his face and splatters his chest. Our engines cough. The last chase boat is fifty yards back and closing. Tommy wipes at the blood, mouths, “Love you,” kisses at me in the air, uses both hands to push the MAC under his chin, and pulls the trigger. Empty.

  He blinks; his eyes try to focus, rise to me . . .

  I point the Hatteras straight at the rocks of Cayo Romano, jump down, pull the derringer, and kneel inside Tommy’s knees. My lips kiss his until he smiles. I put the barrel under his chin, say, “Know I loved you, all I could,” close my eyes, and bend backward. “Godspeed, baby. We’ll dance together on the other side.” I pull the trigger.

  The bow of the chase boat rams our stern.

  My Hatteras hits the reef, goes airborne as it splits down the centerline, explodes below deck, and blows me over the side. The avgas drums ignite and the fireball kills everyone above water.

  Johnny’s Icehouse, Chicago

  (Three years later)

  Now