Sandra Moore - Without A Trace

But with the warning from Delphi concerning Athena students with “abilities,” Nikki had set about methodically reviewing the files of her fellow crew members, just to cover her bases. Then Mansfield had arrived a month ago and started hanging around her like a bad high school crush.

She regarded him now as he shuffled through greasy work orders and pay slips in a console drawer. Maybe he was just an Anglo with a fascination for Cuban women. Okay, so she was second-generation Cuban-American, born and bred in Arizona, but she knew her way around Spanish—vocabulary was a helluva lot simpler when you had a photographic memory—even if her pronunciation left a little something to be desired.

With Mansfield still at her elbow, she radioed her captain aboard the cutter Undaunted and let him know what was going down.

“Another hunch?” Captain Pickens’s voice growled in response.

“Yes, sir.”

“Go with it.”

“Yes, sir.” She turned to Mansfield. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the hold.”

She set two members of her boarding team to stand guard over the trawler’s captain and crew while the rest fanned out and started a search for drugs.

It had begun as a more or less routine stop. The ancient trawler, common to this part of the south Florida coastline, had looked a bit light as the Undaunted cruised into visual range. Normally the bottom paint of a fully loaded shrimp boat lay underwater. This trawler’s bottom paint showed a clear six inches out of the water, suggesting that the concrete ballast used to steady the trawler in rough seas had been replaced with something much lighter. Like cocaine.

When Mansfield yanked open the main hatch, fear musk—a cross between burnt coffee and battery acid—surged from the general vicinity of the shrimper captain.

“Got a problem?” Nikki asked the captain in Spanish.

He shrugged, looking sullen, though his gaze kept darting at the guardsmen disappearing into the hold.

“How long have you been piloting this vessel?”

Nikki asked the usual questions while her squad members poked through the compartments where the shrimp were stored. The captain muttered his answers, which she jotted down in a small notebook. The Montoya rolled gently as fat waves slid beneath her, and the sun glared off the water and steel.

After a few minutes, Mansfield was back, wiping sweat from his face and looking queasy.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You’ve been thorough.” She made it a statement, so he’d understand thoroughness was expected, no matter how bad the job stank.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Nikki narrowed her eyes at the shrimp boat captain. Burnt coffee assaulted her nostrils. The man was scared, and the strength of the scent couldn’t be just because he had more than his allowed catch aboard.

“Look again,” she told Mansfield.

“But—” He caught himself before protesting a direct order.

She leveled a measuring gaze at him. Maybe that was why she didn’t trust him. Because he couldn’t stomach the job. Hell, she knew what that was like, but it didn’t mean she’d cut him any more slack than her CO had ever cut her. “You’ll get used to it. Come on.”

Nikki gripped the edges of the storage hatch, took a deep breath, held it and leaned into the hold. Something hard touched her shoulder; Ensign Artie Jackson held out a heavy-duty flashlight, which she took. Light splashed over the dead shrimp and rusting steel hull. The plastic liner that held the shrimp was cracked and stained from years of use. Stifling heat pressed in on her, bringing a quick burst of sweat to her face and neck. From the looks of it, this shrimp wasn’t a fresh catch.

She let go the breath she was holding and sniffed.

The musk of coffee bored past the acrid, salty smell of dead sea creatures and washed over her in a hot wave. Nikki grit her teeth against nausea. Terror. Terror like nothing she’d ever smelled before. Terror and…grief?

She leaned away from the hatch and squinted into the afternoon sun. “Get me a rake or shovel or something!” The wind lifting over the trawler’s rail cooled her face.

Jackson handed her a shrimp rake. Nikki coughed hard a few times, then shook herself mentally. Get a grip. It’s just rotting critters.

The days-old dead sea life she could handle. It was what lay beneath that had her reeling.

She reached the rake down and scraped a bare spot inside the storage unit, then dropped through the deck hatch. A few minutes of hard work had cleared a broad swath, revealing another hinged hatch immediately beneath her feet. It was roughly two feet by two feet, with a pull handle. She would have smiled at her success, but the bitter scent of fear ratcheted her nerves another notch tighter.

Nikki stepped aside, pulled her sidearm, grabbed the handle and yanked the hatch open.

It was like looking into a mass grave. People in ragged, stained clothing lay piled on each other, huddled, clutching pillowcases or battered backpacks. One, a boy no more than thirteen, stirred and opened his eyes, squinting against the flashlight’s beam but too weak to hold up a hand for shade. The rest were still.

“Shit.” Nikki raised her head. “We’ve got refugees! Jackson! Take the captain and crew into custody. Mansfield, radio the captain. We’ll need a chopper.”

Nikki leaned in and grasped the boy’s hand. “I’m here to get you out,” she said in Spanish.

The boy struggled to keep his eyes open. “America?”

“Sí. ¿Cuál es tu nombre?”

“Eduardo.”

“Come on, Eduardo.”

Nikki tugged the boy through the hidden hatch. The child was weak and thin, as if he’d spent days in the boat’s bowels with no food or water. He could barely move and his skin felt like parchment. Nikki handed him up to Mansfield, who’d called in the mission and was ready to haul refugees onto the deck.

“Ninety miles isn’t that long,” Mansfield muttered, referring to the nautical distance from Cuba to Miami.

“No,” Nikki replied grimly as anger flash-fired in her stomach, “but I’m guessing these passengers weren’t meant to arrive.”

She kept count as they pulled out man after woman after child. Her boarding crew, in full-out rescue mode, worked quickly. Still, it was well over an hour to move the refugees out and give them water.

“One last check.” Nikki held the flashlight out to Mansfield, who blanched, green around the gills. “There may be more people down there. Are you going to do your job or not?”

Mansfield shook his head.

Nikki tamped down her anger-fueled disgust at his cowardice. “Never mind.”

She lowered herself back into the hold and played the flashlight beam over the paint-peeling sides.

“How’s it look, boss?” Jackson’s voice echoed hollowly in the now-empty hold.

“Gotta do it right.”

He grunted as she crawled methodically through the wretched space, which was only three feet high. No wonder the terror had been so great. The shrimper was a death trap—no air circulation, hotter ’n hell, with over a hundred and forty people crammed inside. Toward the stern, the shrimper’s internal bulkheads provided too many shadows and too much cover for Nikki to assume they’d found everyone.

The coffee scent still lingered, as it would for several more days. If the emotion was strong enough—the rage or terror or love—it made sort of an imprint, and the stronger the emotion, the clearer and more lasting it was. She concentrated on that smell rather than what was wafting off the floor she crawled across, avoiding puddles and slicks of human bodily fluids. The detritus of desperation.

And to starboard, deep in the stern, Nikki found the girl.

She might have been eleven years old, maybe twelve, huddled against the boat’s bulkhead, her jeans stained and her shirt torn. As the light splashed across the girl’s face, Nikki was struck by a sense of familiarity. But there was no way she could know this child. She touched the girl’s sweat-slickened hand, glad to find her alive. Barely alive.