Richard Johnson - Deadly Cargo - A Chilling Naval Terrorism Thriller

He reached for his left wrist, found the watch and pushed the button to illuminate the face. It read Nov 1 and the hands showed that the time was 8:41, but he didn’t know if that was morning or night. Not that it mattered very much. It had been weeks since he lost contact with the five-time each day ritual of his prayers. Not knowing which direction it was to Mecca, he had fallen into almost total neglect of the very thing that held his life together since childhood. The thought made him sad and angry at the same time: sad about what Allah must certainly be thinking about him now, and angry at the situation that brought him to this regrettable point.

The weight pressed down against him, and he pushed back, bracing himself against whatever the hard object was behind him, and shoving with arms and legs. The soft heaviness that weighed him down moved easily. With his fingers, he probed the surface until he found an edge, and then he recognized it as the mattress. I am against the ceiling and the bed is on top of me.

In his mind, he rehearsed the layout of the trailer. The bed was all the way at one end, with the bathroom, then kitchen between him and the living room at the other end. Beneath the weight of the mattress, he turned and crawled toward the open space. His feet were surrounded by rubble, and he kicked it aside and stood in the utter blackness, reaching out to steady himself as his world pitched and rolled. The motion was different somehow – faster and more pronounced. Through the walls of the trailer, he thought he heard the sound of water sloshing about.

His hand found the rocker switch on the wall, and he flicked on the lights. The scene was chaos, and it took a moment for his mind to adjust to his inverted world. Down the hall, he saw the cabinet and sink, suspended from what appeared to be the ceiling. He opened the door next to him, and stared at the upturned toilet, and paper unrolled and swimming in six inches of sewage that apparently found its way back through the plumbing from the holding tank.

He pushed the door shut, thankful that the wall above the top of the jamb would constrain the filth of that room. Down the hallway ahead of him, the rest of the trailer looked like a junkyard. But even though the trailer was upside down, and everything in it had been thrown out of place, he decided that he could make do. The food and water would still be okay, he reasoned, and the small table and the comfortable living room chair could be turned over and used on the ceiling, which was now the floor. If his watch was correct, and it was now the first of November, he would soon be in Miami. But what has happened to the ship? Why is the trailer upside down? The thoughts troubled him, but without any answers and without any control over the situation, he could do nothing except wait to see what happened next.

He gritted his teeth. “Nice trick!” he yelled into the darkness. It was his first informal communication with his god, and he hoped that even though he was not facing Mecca and perhaps the time was not according to tradition, Allah would hear him. “But I will not be broken. I am Husam al Din, Sword of the Faith. It is my destiny,” – he slammed his fist against the thin lauan wall, driving a hole through the paneling – “and I will carry it out. Test me if you must, but I will not fail!”

Captain Klaus Pfister looked up from his desk, as the door opened and Josh was escorted in. “Sorry we lost a day, but I’m just glad that’s all we lost.”

Josh took a seat. “Yeah, I got the report.”

Pfister nodded. “No serious casualties. I guess that’s why the refueling team wear their fireproof space suits. The chopper can be repaired, and the cutter is undergoing a refit. And there’s the obligatory investigation into the cause of the fire. I think they’ll come up with a grounding problem and an errant static spark, but we’ll see.”

“The ride back on the cutter wasn’t all that bad,” – Josh flipped open a notebook – “but it gave me a whole new appreciation about being a land mammal. Here, my boss requested this.” He handed a small stack of papers across the desk.

Pfister quickly leafed through them. “Yeah, I ordered the same stuff from NOAA. Trying to figure out the set and drift of normal currents is pretty straight forward, but things get all out of whack when a storm the size of a hurricane comes into play. It’s going to be a crapshoot. The play of wind against whatever portion of the container is still above the waterline has to be factored against the influence of currents below the waterline. Not having reliable data about either of those factors will make the task exceptionally difficult. Some of the data buoys were destroyed, either blown off station or sunk outright. We’re doing all we can to determine where any surviving containers might have drifted, but we’ll need a large dose of luck.”

“Well, this is all we have to go on right now. I’ve been following the reports about Yolanda. Sounds like she hooked north and scrubbed the west end of Cuba pretty hard.

“The good news is that when she headed across land she lost strength and came out the other side a marginal category 2 and dwindling. Looks like she’s going to continue to downgrade before finally going ashore south of Tampa.

“The Gulf Coast dodges another bullet. After Katrina, everybody along that coast holds their breath when a southern Caribbean storm heads up through the channel.”

“Yeah,” Pfister said, “It’ll take years to recover from that one.”

“Well, to help prevent any further disasters, I’d like to get in the air as quickly as possible.”

A serious look crossed Pfister’s face. “Last time I took you anywhere, one of our choppers nearly blew up. You think I’m going to trust you again?”

It took a moment, but Josh finally detected a crack in the captain’s straight face. Looking as serious as he could, he retorted, “Last time I let you take me anywhere, you dang near killed me. You think I’m going to trust your airline again?”

“All right, I guess that makes us even. Go grab a helmet. I’ve already got a pair of C-130s flying patterns based on the best LKPs we could extrapolate for the string of containers lost in the 30-some-odd hours Desdemonda was fighting the storm. We might as well fly a third pattern in a Dolphin.”

November 2nd

“Hey dad?” The voice came from over his shoulder, as Dan sat on the wide captain’s seat scanning the horizon with a binocular.

“Yeah, Cadee, what is it?”

“I’m just looking at the chart plotter and I noticed that we’re heading toward San Luis Miguel.”

Without taking his eyes off the horizon, Dan absently fielded the question. “Yeah, so what?”

“Well, I hope we’re not going to land there.”

“Why not? I thought it might be a good place to refill our water tanks.”

“Maria Elena told me that there are pirates in these islands, and that we should stay as far away as possible.”

Dan put the binocular down. “Now how could that little girl know such a thing?”

“She said they steal everything, even children, then sell them. She told me that they will kill anybody who tries to stop them. They have machetes and guns, and she said they have no soul.”

“Pirates without a soul? Sounds grim,” he said, then grabbed her for a hug. “I won’t let anything bad happen to us. I’m the master and commander, remember?”

“Yeah, but dad…”

He picked up the binocular again and stared out across the water. “No yeah buts, I promise we’ll be careful. Besides, Maria Elena might just have a very active imagination.”

“I don’t think so, dad. She’s very mature for her age.”