Ruthless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 2) Page 2

  Over the next couple of hours, Charity kept watch on the radar screen, looking occasionally in the direction it indicated the other boat to be. She knew she wouldn’t be able to see it until it was within three miles, but she kept looking just the same.

  During that two hours, the Dancer closed the distance from eleven miles to seven. Charity estimated the boat was traveling at only five or six knots, and she would likely overtake and pass it just about the time the sun went down.

  A man’s voice on the radio startled her. “This is MV Osprey to the easterly sailing vessel approaching our stern.”

  His voice had a no-nonsense professional mariner’s tone. She wondered how he could tell the Dancer was a sailboat. Glancing up at her sails, she realized that although the other boat was too far away for her to see, the Dancer’s mast and sails were probably already visible to the other boat, particularly if it was one of those fly bridge motor yachts.

  Charity plucked the mic from its holder on the back of the starboard bench. “Osprey, Wind Dancer. Switch and answer seventy-two.”

  Replacing the mic, Charity picked up her hand-held secondary radio and switched it on, before turning the little knob to change frequencies. She waited a moment and the man hailed her again. Keying the mic, she replied, “This is Wind Dancer. Go ahead Osprey.”

  “Hello, Wind Dancer. Josh Alexander and family here, out of Palm Beach, Florida. We’re on our way to Grand Cayman, and the engine’s running a little hot.”

  Charity wondered for a moment what it was the man wanted of her. Cruisers were a social bunch, but if he were to break down, she couldn’t very well tow his boat.

  “Hi, Josh. I’m Gabriella Fleming out of Miami,” Charity said, using her alias and a slight Cuban accent. “Also headed to Grand Cayman. I’m not sure how I can help.”

  “We thought about turning back, but dropping back to six knots seems to have helped. I figure you’re going to pass us in a couple of hours, but we should still be in radio range of one another until you get close enough to hail Grand Cayman. Would you mind relaying a message, should we break down?”

  Charity considered the situation. She didn’t like the idea of just sailing past a boat in distress, even if she was able to stay in radio contact with them.

  “I’m in no hurry, Josh,” she finally said into the mic. “Once I catch up with you, I’ll stay with you until we’re both in radio range of help, probably late tomorrow night.”

  A woman’s voice came over the radio, relief obvious in her every word. “This is Tonia Alexander, Gabriella. We’d be very grateful for the company.”

  “Not a problem, Tonia. Glad to help any way I can.”

  The woman stayed on the radio, and they talked occasionally over the next few hours as the Dancer slowly reeled in the slower boat.

  When the radar indicated that they were only three miles apart, Charity took her handheld VHF and binoculars with her as she went up the port side, checking the rigging and equipment. At the bow, she paused. Ahead, she could just make out the Alexanders’ boat on the horizon.

  Through the binoculars, it appeared to be a trawler with a fly bridge and aft-cabin. It had a dark blue hull, white topsides, and a dark blue Bimini top that covered both the bridge and the sundeck over the aft cabin. Charity could make out three people on the bridge; a man seemed to be at the helm, and two women in seats flanked him.

  As Charity watched, a fourth person emerged from the cabin and went up the ladder to the fly bridge—a third woman, it seemed. The woman went to the aft rail and looked back toward Wind Dancer with her own binoculars and waved.

  Charity waved back before returning aft, though she wasn’t sure the woman could see her. Back at the helm, she checked the GPS and saw that the Dancer had traveled nearly a hundred miles since departing Cozumel early that morning. If she maintained this speed, she’d make Grand Cayman several hours before sunrise, day after tomorrow. That meant laying off for a few hours, since the customs and immigration office maintained normal business hours. She could pay the special attendance fee and clear in when she arrived, but few cruisers did that—and not being noticed or remembered was important to her mission. So, slowing down a little wasn’t going to hurt her timetable at all.

  Less than two hours later, with an hour of daylight left, Charity came abeam on the upwind side of the slower-moving trawler. Switching control of the sail arrangement from automatic to manual, she furled a third of the large foresail, which brought her speed down to match the Osprey.

  Tonia’s voice came over the little hand-held radio. “Are you still on seventy-two?”

  “Yes, Tonia. I’m on a hand-held, so I can leave the main radio on sixteen.”

  “I was about to go below and start dinner. Would you all like to join us?”

  Charity had gotten to know the woman a little over the last few hours. She’d learned that the Alexanders were traveling with their two daughters, who had just graduated college and high school. The older daughter was planning a wedding in the fall, and the younger one would be going off to college. The coming summer, Tonia had explained, would likely be the last the four of them could go cruising, something the girls loved.

  Though she’d learned quite a bit about the Alexanders, Charity hadn’t even told Tonia she was traveling alone.

  “I’m a solo sailor, Tonia. so it’s just me. Do you think it’s wise to shut the engine down?”

  “Josh says it’ll be fine. He wants to let it cool down a bit, so he can add some coolant before it gets dark and check the strainers.”

  “In that case, sure,” Charity said. “I was just about to make a sandwich and eat at the helm.”

  “If you’re solo, how do you sleep?” Tonia asked.

  “Short cat-naps at the helm with the auto-pilot engaged.”

  There was a short moment of silence before Tonia’s voice came over the radio again. “Dinner will be ready in about thirty minutes. Heave to when you’re ready, and we’ll come alongside to tie off.”

  A break would be a good idea, Charity thought, remembering her first attempt at a long-distance sail and how tired she’d become.

  Switching off the autopilot, she turned slightly toward the other boat as she keyed the mic. “I’ll be alongside in a minute and drop the sails.”

  A moment later, still a hundred feet away from the other boat, Charity toggled the two switches that controlled the furlers, and the sails came down quickly. By the time they were fully furled, she was only fifty feet away and the Osprey had come to a complete stop.

  Charity went up the starboard side, dropping fenders over the rail, as Josh maneuvered closer. She could now see that it was a Mainship pilothouse trawler, a very sturdy-looking vessel.

  In minutes, the two daughters—both very pretty blondes—had the two boats secured together. Tonia came out of the cabin and met Charity at the rail, extending her hand. “Welcome aboard, Gabriella.”

  Charity took the offered hand and said, “Please, my friends call me Gabby.”

  The compound was quiet. It usually was, during the hours before sunset. Leon Himmel stood on the front porch of the main house, looking out over the vast expanse of the courtyard. It was his job to make sure things stayed quiet—at least inside the fence. Outside, the jungle had full control.

  Situated on the northern end of a huge island in the Cano Manamo, the compound was only two kilometers from the northern point of the island, where the two branches of the river came back together. The other end of the long island was fifty kilometers to the southeast. The Manamo itself was the northern distributary of the mighty Orinoco River, into which most of the smaller Venezuelan rivers flowed. The great delta to the east was nearly uninhabited, save for a few backward indigenous tribal settlements.

  A man approached the front of the house, riding an ATV. He stopped and shut the machine off before mounting the steps. Taller than Leon, he was also much broader in the shoulders. His shoulder-length dark blond hair, two-day beard, and unkempt clothes contrasted
sharply to Leon’s own neatly coiffed appearance.

  “Some of the farmers along the river are giving us problems,” the man said as he stepped up onto the porch. He spoke in German.

  “What kind of problems, Karl?”

  “Cooperation problems,” the bigger man replied, leaning against a post. “The group closer to town, they fear the authorities.”

  “Babo will not like this.”

  “That’s why I came straight over when I saw you on the porch,” Karl replied. “I do not want to be the one to tell him.”

  Karl turned on his boot heels and started down the steps. As he was about to get back on the ATV, Leon’s voice stopped him. “Wait. Was there one farmer out of the group that was more vocal?”

  “Yes,” Karl replied, sitting down on the seat and producing a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He shook one out of the pack, lit it with a big silver lighter, and looked up at Leon. “The old man who grows cassava on the land between the rivers—about a hundred morgen of good bottom land where the main river curves sharply, five kilometers before Tucupita.”

  “Good land,” Leon agreed, thinking. “What is this man’s name?”

  “Vicente Navarro. He is Ye’kuana, and reputed to be a buyei.”

  “He is the leader of this group?” Leon asked.

  “Not in the true sense of the word,” Karl said. “But as a shaman of the canoe people, he is revered.”

  “Who is his biggest rival?”

  “Rival? In what way?”

  “A nearby farmer,” Leon replied. “Someone who also grows cassava.”

  Sitting back, Karl crossed his arms over his broad chest, his brow furrowed in thought. “The next piece of land south of Navarro’s land. A man called Miguel Anders.”

  “Four men, including yourself,” Leon said. “I will meet you at the dock at sunrise and go with you to meet with both of them again.”

  The corners of Karl’s lips turned up slightly. Not really a smile, but more like a sneer. He turned the key, started the ATV, and nodded to his boss. Then he turned the four-wheeler around and drove toward the rutted road that would take him to the back of the five-thousand-acre compound, where his and the other worker’s quarters were located.

  The compound itself had been built and settled during the mid- 1940s, the whole five-thousand-acre tract purchased outright from the corrupt Venezuelan government. Logging operations had begun immediately, and the northern five hundred acres were mostly cleared in less than a year. The giant caracoli trees, a dense hardwood that grew to over forty meters in height and almost two in diameter, were felled and milled. The lumber was used to build a tall barrier from shore to shore, effectively cutting the land off from the rest of the island. Houses were built, along with a church and school and the small community of Germanic settlers had thrived in obscurity for the next sixty years.

  “Was that Aleksander?” a voice behind Leon asked. He started slightly, then turned to face his boss.

  “Yes, Babo. There is trouble at one of the farms. I am going with Karl in the morning to resolve it.”

  The land baron stepped out onto the porch from the open doorway. A handsome man with brown hair and piercing blue eyes, he looked like an ordinary businessman, dressed in a crisp linen shirt and blue tie, with dark blue slacks. The local indigenous people saw him differently. They saw him as the precursor of pain and suffering, much the same as they’d seen his father before him.

  “What sort of trouble, Leon?”

  “Just a couple of malcontents. I can handle it.”

  The man’s eyes flashed only for a moment, but in that moment Leon was frightened. “I asked what sort of problem.”

  Leon swallowed hard. He’d worked for this man for nearly four years, and for his father for four years before that, until the old man died. The two had known one another all their lives, and grown up together on the compound. They were three years apart in age, but in this small community of only eight square miles, walled off from the rest of the world, there were few secrets.

  “One of the farmers,” Leon replied. “The old man, Navarro. He is resisting.”

  “What is it you plan to do?”

  Leon shrugged. “What we have always done. Make an example of one to ingratiate the other.”

  “When it is done,” Babo said, turning to go back inside before the mosquitoes swarmed, “bring the old man here so I might talk to him further.”

  Early the next morning, Leon was waiting at the dock when Karl arrived. Leon knew the three men in the boat with Karl. He knew everyone in the community; small though it was, there was a hierarchy and these men were the workers.

  The boat was nearly new, one of the benefits of a new business venture the community was now involved in. A custom-built aluminum ten-meter tunnel hull with a powerful jet drive outboard engine, it could easily glide across the constantly shifting sandbars of the Manamo. In fact, it could fly across water so shallow that, if it ran aground, the men would only have to get out; the reduced weight would allow them to push it to the four-inch depth it needed with a thousand pounds aboard.

  Their fathers and grandfathers, who had founded the community, started in the timber business; many of them had been former lumbermen and builders before the war. By the end of the 1940s, they’d moved on to mining in the nearby mountains. For decades, the men and women of the community got rich off the natural resources and the people.

  Two years before, Babo had said that the forestry and mining operations were too visible and required the people of the community to mix too much with outsiders. Upon seeing that there was a world outside the dangerous waters of the river that surrounded them on three sides and the wall to the south, many men—and some women—had left the community.

  Karl turned the boat and came up alongside the newly constructed dock, where Leon waited. Without a word, Leon stepped down into the boat and went forward to stand beside Karl at the helm.

  Karl pushed the throttle forward and the long, wide boat leapt out of the water, all five men holding on. In seconds, the boat was skimming the flat brown surface at high speed, weaving through the curves, headed upriver. With the boat’s ultra-shallow draft, the only sandbars Karl had to worry about were those on which the crocodiles had hauled out to wait for the morning sun.

  The trip up-river only took twenty minutes, and soon the boat slowed, settling into the deeper water in the middle of the river.

  “This is Navarro’s land,” Karl said, sweeping his arm toward the west.

  With the boat barely moving against the great current, Leon looked out over the fields. The whole island was a flood plain, the soil rich in nutrients brought down from the mountains. It had been over twenty years since the last really big flood, though smaller annual floods were a way of life, and the cassava plants flourished.

  “And this other man? Anders? Where does his land start?”

  Karl nudged the throttle and the boat moved a little faster against the current. They reached a point of land where the river bent toward the west. Just off the point, Karl slowed the boat until they were again motionless, matching the current.

  “This point is the boundary between the two farms,” Karl said, motioning toward the fence line. “Anders’s spread is a triangle. The fence between the two goes southwest from this point.

  “How far inland are the two men’s homes?” Leon asked.

  Karl shook a cigarette from his pack and lit it, blowing the smoke upward before answering. “Just a few hundred meters. They are very close to one another.”

  “Family? Workers?”

  “Navarro lives alone. Two young men from town come out every morning to help him in the fields. Anders has a family—a wife, three sons, and a daughter. The oldest son and a boy from town help him.”

  “We will go ashore here,” Leon said, “on Navarro’s side of the point.”

  Turning and angling the boat toward a deep spot near shore, Karl advanced the throttle a little. A small dugout canoe was pulled
partway up onto the low bank in the small cove, sheltered from the current.

  “Run it over,” Leon instructed.

  Karl did as he was told—not that he had to be told. He had intended to crush the canoe anyway. Just before making contact with the side of the dugout, Karl hit the throttle, and the bow rose up over the side of the much smaller boat.

  The crack of the dried wood as the side caved in sounded like a small-caliber rifle shot. Karl pulled the throttle back to neutral, just as the big aluminum boat’s bow rode up onto shore. He killed the engine as two of his men climbed up onto the bow and jumped down to the riverbank. Within minutes, the men had the boat tied off to two small trees, though it was unnecessary. The boat was resting on top of the dugout, which sat submerged on the mucky bottom.

  “Take two men,” Leon said. “Go to Anders’s house and bring anyone you find there to the fence between the two houses.” He pointed to the largest of Karl’s three men, a man he only knew as Rolph, and said, “You come with me.”

  They split up, Karl and his men crossing the fence and heading inland on one side while Leon and Rolph made their way toward a low hut on stilts.

  Walking toward the thatched shanty, between the rows of newly planted cassava, Leon looked all around but saw nobody. When he and Rolph reached the hut, they still had not seen anyone. The structure itself sat on pilings, with the floor about two meters above the ground. Its walls were a hodgepodge of materials, some corrugated tin, some bare planks, but mostly saplings no thicker than a man’s wrist, cut to length. The low roof was made of palm fronds, less than two meters above the floor on the four sides and perhaps four meters at the center.

  “Navarro!” Leon called out to the stilt hut.

  Hearing shouts from the south, not far away, Leon turned toward the sound and saw Karl and the other two men approaching. They herded a small, half-naked woman carrying an infant, with two other children walking in front of her.