Wild Card

* * *

“Chopper alpha-one-zero reports a pair of UpLink choppers on a heading for the target vessel,” the radioman said, his mouthpiece pulled slightly away from his face as he glanced up from the console. “The intruders claim sanction from the mainland and our crew is asking how to proceed.”

Standing to his right, Henri Beauchart bent his head toward his chest, closed his eyes, and rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger. What was he to do? Contact air traffic authorities in San Fernando to request they verify or deny the UpLink pilot’s assertions? If the clearances proved legitimate, then those who afforded them certainly had been informed that the approaching helicopters were on an emergency rescue operation. How would he explain his position of wanting to turn them back? Even if he were able to come up with something to justify it, whatever he said would be disputed by UpLink. And the one indisputable fact was that Nimec and his wife had been able to send out a call for help. In the end, it wouldn’t matter whether or not official permissions were given. If they were still to disappear, it could not be explained away. Eckers had staked everything on his accident scenario, and he, Beauchart, had been a willing accomplice — and now the scenario was dead. Along, perhaps, with Eckers.

Beauchart produced a long breath, feeling himself physically deflate. None of his options were good. It was all coming down. No matter what action he took, coming down around his head. A confrontation over the helicopters’ right to approach would only help bury him deeper.

He opened his eyes, raised his head from where it had sunk, and turned to the radio operator.

“Order our pilots to disengage,” he said. “The visitors are to be considered friendlies and allowed full entry.”

* * *

The lead Skyhawk’s pilot saw the Aug pulling off, turned to his partner, and grinned.

“I win the bet,” he said. “Told you my bullshit story would work.”

The copilot looked at him.

“Suckers,” he said. “You gonna rub it in?”

“Just pay up and get me that date with your knockout cousin,” he said. “I promise not to take too much advantage of her.”

* * *

Nimec heard the man in ragged clothes screaming at them from the shore, looked his way, and then turned to Annie. The Stingray had veered off in the northerly direction of its approach, shrinking from sight even as the combined roar of UpLink’s oncoming birds began to drown out whatever the stranger was shouting at the top of his lungs.

“What’s he saying?” Annie said.

Nimec took a glance back over his shoulder as the Skyhawks swept in, then shrugged.

“Don’t know,” he said. “But for some reason or other, I’m sure we’ll find out before too long.”

EPILOGUE

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

“Oil,” Vince Scull said.

“Rogue oil,” Nimec said. “Lots and lots of it.”

“Going to Cuba and North Korea,” Scull said. “Two countries on the government’s long-term embargo list.”

“And they were just the biggest customers,” Nimec said, nodding. “There are others that’ve had temporary sanctions against the import of U.S. fuel products slapped on them. Foreign policy and national security reasons.”

Scull put his hands over his ears.

“Enough, Petey,” he said. “Here I am thinking it’s love that makes the world go ’round, when you’ve got to show up and murder the idea.”

Nimec gave him a faint smile. They were sitting in Scull’s office at UpLink Sanjo, a medium-sized room adorned with photos of Vince at some of the many corporate sites where he’d been stationed over the years. Here he was with the founding crew members in Johor, here with his arm around a pretty female staffer in snowy Kaliningrad, there posing beside a pack mule against the mountain spires at Ghazni… Scull was well-traveled to say the least, his footloose leanings having very possibly worked to the extreme detriment of his three marriages, all of which had come to their crashing ends in acrimonious divorce proceedings.

Nimec had long wondered about the pictures of Vince’s three ex-wives in a heart-shaped frame on his desk, each a smiling head shot. Was their sharing space in a single heart an example of typically crooked Scullian humor? Or could it be a window into something deep and sad?

One of these days, Nimec figured he’d find a tactful way to ask.

“It was some racket,” he said now, and glanced at Scull across his desk. “A fifteen-hundred foot long oil tanker disguised as a container ship sets out from the oil field at Point Fortin with millions of gallons of refined aboard, anchors there in the water near Los Rayos to wait for feeders that’ve been converted to smaller oil barges. They get their fill-ups and head off to banned ports, or to rendezvous at sea with other smuggler ships.” He paused. “We still don’t know how often those runs were made, or exactly how long the operation was going before we caught onto it, or how much oil was moved in total, but the word is that it was all done on a scale nobody’s ever seen. Not from a single producer.”

Scull grunted.

“Gonna make a whole lot of high-priced international lawyers happy for a while,” he said. “Nothing puts smiles on their faces faster than a big cloud of stink in the air, and the fumes from this scam reach from Washington across the Caribbean.”

Nimec rubbed his chin, thinking about that. An oil field holder in Trinidad, members of the Trinidadian parliament, and a top Sedco Petroleum exec… these were just a few of the parties under investigation or indictment in the scandal, and more names were surfacing every day. The facts and figures relating to specific transactions had come from the records of Udonis Roberts, the Los Rayos shipping accountant who’d tipped off Megan in a sudden fit of conscience and gotten murdered for it during an attempt to flee the island… a hack job that left him and the Trinidadian runners he’d paid to take him away by boat stuffed into some Florida-bound air transport crates. The body parts had turned up at Miami International in an episode that made for some lurid tabloid headlines a while back, but it had taken the rogue oil discoveries for authorities to eventually tie the case to Los Rayos. And the connection still might never have been made if it wasn’t for Roberts’s cousin, Jarvis Lenard, hiding out there in the mangrove forest with his knowledge of where Roberts had stashed his evidence. Impressively to Nimec, he’d not only been able to elude the island’s entire security force for weeks, but also a sort of elite ghost squad that did its dirty work — apparently the same group that had tried to off him, Annie, and Blake, then stage the pontooner’s crackup. The information about this so-called Team Graywolf, as well as many of the key names attached to the oil scam, had been provided by Henri Beauchart after his arrest, when he’d immediately started singing to prosecutors in two countries with hopes of cutting deals.

Behind his desk, Scull sucked thoughtfully on his inner cheek a minute or two, then smoothed a hand over the crown of his mostly bald head.

“The thing I keep wondering about is that invite you got to Los Rayos from those Trinidadian officials,” he said. “Between the e-mail to Meg and that islander being on the run from Beauchart’s security goons, it couldn’t’ve come at a worse time for the pols involved in the oil scheme. Or for the guy who gave Sedco distribution rights to what came out of his wells, and is supposed to have cooked up the smuggling operation with his pal on the Sedco board… Jean Claude Whatsisname.”

“Morpaign,” Nimec said, nodding. “I’m with you, Vince, the timing would be some coincidence. And who knows, maybe it is. On the other hand, it could be the invitation came from parliament members that weren’t in the mix, and had an idea what was happening at Los Rayos, and maybe even got the same tip-off Meg did sent to their Inboxes. With all the high level government and industrial types involved, and a corruption investigation sure to come, I can see how they wouldn’t want to be known as finger pointers, and might decide it would be better for