in the SEALs’ tiny boat with relief. They might be a cork in this vessel, but it was better than being aboard the doomed Anna Belle.
They untied their mooring lines and motored away from the big ship. Nissa had never breathed so big a sigh of relief to be away from the Anna Belle.
“Nearest land?” Cole asked from his position at the tiller.
“Louisiana coast. Nearly a hundred nautical miles,” Bass answered.
Yikes. Even traveling at twenty knots, it would take them hours to make shore. Hours for the storm to intensify around them.
They’d been lucky to catch a ride outbound on a big Coast Guard cutter heading into the gulf to take measurements of the approaching storm, but they’d made no arrangements for a lift back to New Orleans. The plan had been to sail the Anna Belle back.
“Do we have enough fuel to make it?” Ashe asked practically.
Oh, hell. Now she had running out of gas to worry about.
“Close, but enough,” Cole replied casually.
Jeez. What else could go wrong?
“Give me a course heading for the nearest land,” Cole ordered Bass.
While Cole steered, the other two men put up a framework of curved poles and stretched a tarp over them, lashing it down tight. It created a low clamshell covering over the vessel. It didn’t keep out all the rain, but it knocked down the worst of the water and wind. They still had to use a motorized pump to empty water out of the hull, and the ride was rough as all get-out. But after the rolling of the Anna Belle, this freezing-cold misery was a boon. And their boat wasn’t trying to capsize.
Until Bass, on the radio again, shouted something directly into Cole’s ear off headset that put a grim look on the man’s face.
Cole ordered over the radio, “Everyone don a life vest and let’s go ahead and put Nissa into an exposure kit.”
An exposure kit turned out to be a body-sized pouch of some slick neoprene-like material that encompassed her entire body and attached to the donut-shaped life vest the guys inflated around her neck.
“What’s this for?” she asked as Cole checked the connections around her neck.
He paused at his task to gaze at her from a range of about one foot. Lord, he was gorgeous with those lean cheeks and firm jaw. His voice rumbled comfortingly. “If you end up in the water, the kit provides a layer of insulation to extend how long you can survive hypothermia by hours or days. It also protects you from sharks. They can’t smell you through the material. In pockets attached to the interior of the bag are water, rations, a small desalinization kit, a GPS locator beacon, a mirror and an emergency radio. My team and I know how to climb into one in the water and bail out any seawater. But since you haven’t had the training, we’re popping you into yours now, to be safe. Try to think of it as a sleeping bag, and it won’t freak you out so bad.”
“Thanks.”
How did he know that being wrapped up in this giant condom was scaring her half to death? She’d always struggled with claustrophobia, and this situation wasn’t helping matters one little bit. She fought like crazy not to hyperventilate and hung on by a bare thread to the ability to breathe.
She muttered under her breath, “Please, God, don’t let me need this stupid contraption.”
Cole cracked the first smile she’d seen from him. Even in the dark, it was dazzling. “It’s purely a precaution.”
But when he had all four of them lash their safety harnesses together with rope and bungee cord, she had to wonder just how unnecessary a precaution it really was.
They finished the Boy Scout knot project before she asked on radio, “Does someone want to tell me why we’re suddenly preparing for disaster, here?”
Bass answered, “Jessamine has gone from a Category 1 to a Category 3 hurricane in the past few hours. Weather service is now forecasting that she’ll spin up into a high Cat 4 or Cat 5.”
“Isn’t that just special?” she responded sarcastically.
Everyone laughed.
Seriously? They could laugh while sailing around in the middle of a hurricane in a rowboat with motors?
The SEALs took turns at the tiller, wrestling the ocean until they became exhausted and had to switch out. The interminable journey settled into a steady-state nightmare, and the team chatted on headset to pass the time. The good news was the hurricane wind at their backs was blowing them landward at an impressive clip, shaving hours off their journey.
Ashe took the radio from Bass and had an earnest conversation with someone at the other end that culminated in him saying, “Let me know when you’ve run the numbers.”
Ashe piped up after a few minutes, “The Coast Guard has pulled the Anna Belle’s manifest and compared it against what we saw on the ship. She definitely left New Orleans with a belly full of wheat. But sometime in the past twenty-four hours, the ship’s crew must have dumped all of it overboard.”
That made everyone frown. The weight of the wheat low in the ship’s belly would have been critical to making the ship safe and stable.
“And,” Ashe continued, “the Coast Guard checked with the harbormaster. She left the port of New Orleans loaded three deep in containers across her entire deck, not six deep, all fore of the beam, like we found her. The crew of the ship moved the containers after they sailed. They intentionally built a high-profile stack that would catch the most wind.”
“Were they trying to sink the ship?” Nissa blurted.
Cole answered grimly. “Seems so.”
“And then there’s the missing crew and sabotaged engines,” Bass piped up.
“And no distress calls,” Cole added. “The crew definitely intended to scuttle the ship.”
“Oh, they’ll succeed,” Ashe responded. “Once Jessamine cranks up another ten feet of seas and another twenty knots of wind, that huge wall of containers is going to catch a gust and take the Anna Belle right over.”
“Assuming she doesn’t drift crossways of a couple big waves and break her beam first,” Bass commented. “Either way, that ship’s going down in the next few hours if she’s not already sunk.”
“But why?” Cole asked.
Nissa had an idea why. The others speculated, but discarded every idea they came up with. When they all fell silent, she spoke up reluctantly, “What if this was all an elaborate scheme to fake Markus Petrov’s death?”
The team turned as one to stare at her. “It’s a hell of an expensive ruse,” Cole replied. “Twenty million dollars plus or minus for the ship, several million dollars’ worth of wheat, and who knows what other cargo in the containers. Then there’s the cost of paying off the crew, and of making them all disappear. Something like a fifty-million-dollar escape route? That seems pretty improbable.”
“But that’s the point,” Nissa replied. “Markus Petrov is obsessive about secrecy.
