Читать книгу The Soldier's Secret Daughter - Cindy Dees - Страница 9

Two years later

Jagger huddled in the tiny room, hugging his knees, drawing the darkness close around him like a security blanket. At least they were leaving him alone more these days. That was better than the constant interrogations and beatings of his first few months of captivity. But sometimes, in the dark of this endless night, he got so damned lonely he almost wished for the thugs to come back. Worse than decent food, worse than a real shower, worse almost than freedom, he craved human company. Someone to talk to him. Just normal, meaningless conversations about normal, meaningless things.

But he doubted his life would ever be normal again. Eventually, he’d catch some disease, or he’d become malnourished, or maybe he’d just give up on living. Then he was a goner. And not a damned soul would know or care. He figured his captors would push his entire crate overboard into the middle of the ocean and call it good. No more Jagger Holtz.

What kind of life was it to have lived where no one would give a crap if he died? There ought to be someone to care. But that would’ve meant having someone permanent in his life. Like Emily Grainger. A forever woman. But people in his line of work didn’t do long-term relationships. At least not often, and generally not well.

If only he had someone to look forward to going home to. Maybe that would help him endure this unending nightmare.

He glanced at the hole he’d punctured in the corner of his crate when he was first thrown into this shipping container to rot. It served as his only marker of the passage of time. Darkness had fallen outside. Another day gone, which made this the seven hundred twenty-eighth day of his captivity. And that would make tomorrow … he checked the math and a bitter laugh rose up in his chest … New Year’s Eve. Again.

For the thousandth time, he relived that fateful New Year’s Eve two years ago. He should’ve seen the signs. His instincts should’ve warned him. But he’d been so besotted with Emily Grainger he’d never seen the trap coming. He’d let his guard down. Gotten distracted by a woman. No wonder James Bond never let himself fall for any of his many conquests. Ol’ James understood the dangers of losing focus, apparently. Lucky bastard.

One thing he knew for sure. If he ever got out of here, if he ever found the people who’d put him into this hellhole, he was going to kill them all. Slowly and painfully.

Emily winced and looked back over her shoulder at yet another AbaCo facility festooned with those awful metallic Christmas decorations. They must be regulation company issue. At least this office had the advantage of being in paradise. She’d leaped at the opportunity to take this exotic position when it had come along. All part and parcel of her campaign to become Danger Girl for real. Jagger Holtz might have run out on her, but she would never forget how he’d made her feel. She’d been fully alive for the first time. She couldn’t ever go back to the way she’d been before, Jagger or no Jagger.

The Hawaii AbaCo office occupied its own private island at the far western end of the chain of one hundred thirty-seven atolls, islets and islands that made up the Hawaiian archipelago. Although it was more of a refueling depot than an actual office. The Rock, as most of the employees called it, boasted a deepwater dock and underground fuel-storage and pumping facilities, plus a small collection of buildings.

Oddly, the staff numbered close to sixty, even though the lone office building here could probably only hold half that number—standing up and tightly packed. Two dozen longshoremen refueled and resupplied the ships, and the security team accounted for another dozen of the tall, silent men on the payroll. She was told that AbaCo put divers in the water for security purposes whenever one of its container ships came into port, which supposedly accounted for most of the rest of the powerful-looking men that made up the staff.

But in the time she’d been here, the actual work getting done and the number of able-bodied men stationed here to do it didn’t add up. There always seemed to be spare guys hanging around the small AbaCo building, going in and out of Kurt Schroder’s office for hush-hush meetings. He was the site manager.

He’d seemed surprised when she’d shown up, letters of introduction in hand from the North American chief of security for AbaCo. But after Schroder read the letter, he merely shrugged and showed her to a desk. Her job here wasn’t so different from what she’d done in Denver. It mostly entailed tracking shipments, making sure they got to where they were supposed to go on time, that the money got into the right accounts and answering a few phones.

The staff rotated in and out of this remote location. Two weeks on the Rock, two weeks off-duty on a Hawaiian island of personal choice. She’d chosen Kauai. It was everything she’d imagined Hawaii to be and more—tropical, lush and laid-back. She’d fallen in love with it from the first moment she’d set foot on it.

She’d even talked her mother into moving out here with her on this once-in-a-lifetime assignment to hold down the fort at the Kauai condo during the times Emily was posted on the Rock.

“There you are,” a deep male voice grumbled from behind her.

Schroder. Dang. That guy could track her down anywhere. Here she was, parked on the far side of the island from the offices, and he still showed up unannounced to check on her. It bordered on creepy. It wasn’t that he had any kind of a romantic interest in her. Two years ago she might have suspected that. But now she knew better. She’d experienced true chemistry once—and she and Kurt Schroder did not have it.

Of course, look where having it with a guy had gotten her. Maybe chemistry-challenged guys were a better bet if a girl wanted some sort of sane, stable life. Still, she didn’t like how Kurt was constantly popping up unannounced when she least expected him.

“There you are, Emily. Strange place to take your lunch break.”

She shrugged. “I was tired. I thought a hike might wake me up. I still have a little work to do this afternoon to wind things up before the New Year’s Eve party.”

She winced as she said the words. Would she never get past her memories of the fateful New Year’s Eve party two years ago that had so completely changed her life—changed her?

Schroder seemed to accept her explanation. “Be careful out here. The rocks can be treacherous, and they get slippery when it rains.” He cast a grim gaze up at a low cloud bank, which was indeed threatening to wet down the tiny island. The Kona Winds were blowing today, bringing in a heavy, muggy air mass and terminally bad hair to this corner of the world.

She sighed, pushed the frizzies out of her face and followed her boss back to the shipping office. So much for a moment of privacy. A person would think that there’d be plenty of alone time to be had on an isolated rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but that person would obviously have failed to figure in the pervasive eye of AbaCo always watching over its employees.

She was due to rotate off the island the day after tomorrow, and she dared not leave much by way of unfinished work for her replacement, a taciturn ex-German Army man who was about as capable with paperwork as she was with a submachine gun. Which was to say, she couldn’t tell the business end of a gun from the…. whatever the nonbusiness end was called.

She filed the last stack of bills of lading and had all but finished matching the latest round of payments received with their various shipments when the bell on her computer dinged to indicate an incoming e-mail. She swung her chair around to face her screen and pulled up the message.

Zhow Min. 3-6-D-15472.

What on earth? She stared at the message for several seconds trying to make sense of it. There was no greeting, no signature block. The e-mail address from which the message originated was MysteryMom. Not exactly the sort of address one of AbaCo’s shipping clients was likely to use. Was this message even meant for her? Emily glanced at her screen again and saw the message was addressed to her personally and not to the AbaCo office here on the Rock.

What did it mean?

The Zhow Min part was obvious. A supercontainer ship by that name was due in from China sometime after midnight tonight. It was scheduled to be in port for twenty-four hours to refuel and take on supplies. The crew would lay over in the dormitory provided for that purpose until tomorrow evening.

But what were those numbers all about? She pulled up the ship’s cargo manifest on her computer and compared the numbers to the various cargo shipments on the Zhow Min. Nothing even remotely resembled the number sequence. Was 3-6 a date? She couldn’t think of anything special about March 6, and a quick search of the Internet revealed only that it was Michaelangelo’s birthday, the siege of the Alamo ended that day and aspirin was patented on that date in history.

She frowned. Who was MysteryMom, anyway? She’d never heard of the woman.

Bizarre.

She deleted the message, shut down her computer and walked slowly across the island to her room in the employees’ dorm to take a nap before tonight’s festivities. But the numbers continued to dance across her mind’s eye, teasing her—3-6-D-15472.

The cryptic message was still tantalizing her when she finally escaped from the New Year’s Eve party later that night, unable to withstand the memories it evoked any longer. Maybe a walk would help clear her mind.

Frankly, she wasn’t a big puzzle kind of girl. And whoever’d sent her that message had been a tad too cryptic for her. If it was important, MysteryMom would just have to suck it up and send her something that a normal human being could comprehend. She wandered down to the island’s tiny, pristine beach, letting the quiet lapping of waves soothe her troubled thoughts. It was hard to stay worked up for very long in this balmy tropical clime.

“There you are.”

Jeez. Did Schroder have a tracking radio glued to her back that she didn’t know about?

“Why did you leave the party?” he demanded.

As if he really cared about that. She knew darn good and well he wasn’t asking because he took any kind of personal interest in her fun. He just got a kick out of controlling everyone’s life around here.

She considered how to answer him. She couldn’t very well complain about not being with her family when, a, everyone else out here was away from their families tonight and no one else was complaining about it, and, b, she’d volunteered for the holiday work cycle and the double overtime pay that came with it.

Reluctantly, she confessed a piece of the truth. “I’m not a big fan of tight places. And all those people crammed in that one room were a little much for me.”

Schroder’s gaze flickered as if he was cataloging that tidbit for future reference. Not that she could imagine where it would ever come in useful to him. He was always compiling lists of facts, neatly organized, about everything and everyone.

Schroder spoke in tones just shy of an outright order. “Come inside. The food just arrived. Bratwurst, sauerkraut, Wiener schnitzel and good German beer.”

Ah. That must have been the speedboat she’d heard roar up to the pier a few minutes ago. Supplies were often brought over by boat from Lokaina, the nearest inhabited island. It lay about twenty miles away to the east and boasted not only a small permanent settlement, but even a tiny airport. It was from Lokaina Municipal Airport that workers on the Rock shuttled to and from their homes on the big islands of Hawaii, nearly a thousand miles to the east. Tonight’s German feast had been flown in all the way from Honolulu.

Schroder commented as she hesitated to go back with him, “We’ve only got a few hours until the Zhow Min arrives. Not much time to celebrate.”

Current estimated time of arrival on the ship was sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. Reminded of that strange e-mail message yet again, she frowned. Schroder’s brow lowered in determination as well. He must have misread her expression to mean she was planning to refuse his semiorder to go back inside. Although she’d much rather skip the heavy German food and stay out here to enjoy the waves and the isolation, Schroder wasn’t the kind of man to take no for an answer. She sighed and turned to follow him back to the party.

The midnight meal, although tasty, was as heavy as she’d anticipated. She was glad to retire to the big dormitory and tumble into her bed as soon as Schroder seemed to think it was acceptable for her to go. Except sleep wouldn’t come tonight. She lay there for over an hour and finally gave up on it. Those damned numbers kept floating around in her head, taunting her with some meaning hanging just beyond her grasp.

It was probably inevitable that as 2:00 a.m. approached she felt a compulsion to get up and go for a hike around the island. And, oh, maybe she’d stroll over and have a look at the Zhow Min when it came in and see if those damned numbers revealed their hidden meaning to her then.

She stepped out into the humid night. She topped the spine of rock marking the center of the island and was immediately assailed by bright lights coming from the massive pier below. The Zhow Min was gliding the last hundred yards or so to the dock. The top-heavy ship, loaded down with rectangular steel containers in huge stacks from stem to stern, was huge and ungainly and reminded Emily of a pregnant whale. The checkerboard of colored containers—each the size of a semitruck trailer—was brightly lit under giant banks of halogen lights that turned night into day all along the pier.

Emily moved off to her right, away from glare of the lights and toward the promontory that overlooked the pier from one side. The behemoth eased the final few feet into its slip in majestic slow motion and shuddered to a halt. Lines the thickness of Emily’s waist thudded ashore to moor the Zhow Min to pilings the size of small cars.

The same layer of clouds that had provided soft gray cover all day obscured the moon now, and the sea was black beneath the featureless sky. From this angle, the Zhow Min was a building-sized silhouette. One moment Emily saw nothing, and the next, she was aware of several black forms—humans—looking like tiny ants next to the gigantic ship, scaling its hull on invisible lines.

Squinting, she counted three black-garbed figures. Were they doing some sort of maintenance? She didn’t remember any being scheduled, and her master database tracked such things. The men didn’t seem to be pausing anywhere on the hull as if to inspect or repair it. They reached the deck and huddled, then moved off in what could be described only as stealth toward the stern of the ship. She noticed that all of them wore backpacks of some kind. The humps on their backs made the men look vaguely tortoiselike as they crept off into the shadows.

What in the world were they up to?

Then the trio did something even more strange. They commenced climbing one of the mountains of containers. The third clump back from the prow of the ship. They climbed to the fourth layer of containers, and then made their way inward six boxes, to stop at a faded green container. Bemused, she moved farther out the cliff to get a better view. The men were hard to see as they clung to the container in the deep shadows. They were definitely acting as though they didn’t want to be seen.

As she looked on, the container’s door slid open. Her jaw dropped as the men disappeared inside, pulling the door shut behind them. This was not a port of entry! Without Customs present, no container was allowed to be unsealed like that! What could they possibly be doing?

She stepped farther forward, craning to see what the men would do next.

A big, blond man standing on the pier beneath a bank of lights pivoted suddenly, peering in all directions. Schroder.

It dawned on her that she was completely exposed up here on the cliffs like this. Emily dropped to the ground, flattening herself in the shadows behind an outcropping of low stones and praying he hadn’t spotted her.

As she peered out from behind the scant cover of the rocks, Schroder held his position on the pier. Surely he’d have barged up here to check out the unauthorized observer if he’d spotted her. She exhaled in relief. Nonetheless, she stayed right where she was, hidden behind her shield of black volcanic pumice.

Within a minute or two, the container door opened again. The men emerged. They retraced their steps in as much stealth as before, rappelling down the stack of containers and sprinting along the rail to where they’d left their ropes hanging overboard. Something was different about them … then it hit her. All three men had lost their backpacks. They must have left them in that container.

What could those men possibly be smuggling in AbaCo containers? A drug shipment would be more bulky than that, wouldn’t it? Illegal weapons would also be bulky and heavy. Jewels would be smaller than the three backpacks. Money, maybe? That might explain it. As she pondered the possibilities, the men shimmied down the hull almost too fast for her to keep sight of, slipped below the edge of the pier and disappeared from sight.

Interestingly enough, Schroder strode off the pier then and headed back toward the office. It was almost as if he’d been acting as a lookout for the men who’d broken into that container. What was up with that? It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that something fishy was going on around here. The question was, could she contain her natural curiosity and steer clear of trouble as any sensible person would?

She watched the Zhow Min for a few more minutes, hoping to catch sight of the men once more. But they were gone. Schroder didn’t return, either.

Frowning, she made a mental note of exactly where on the ship the container she’d seen them enter was located. She ought to be able to find it in the ship’s load plan the next morning. She could cross-reference that with the ship’s manifest and see what was in that box they’d tampered with. It was the sort of thing she might do in the course of her regular job duties. If somebody noticed her poking around, they wouldn’t think anything of it.

It wasn’t as though she could report what she’d seen. Schroder was clearly in on whatever was going on around here, and he was the guy she’d have to report the incident to. If and when she found evidence of anything suspicious, then she’d have to figure out if Schroder’s superiors were in on the racket out here. She could always call Customs—but they’d want hard evidence, too. Better to look into the matter quietly on her own and not make any waves for now.

She turned around to head back to her bed. She’d taken maybe a dozen steps when a dark shape emerged out of the rocks ahead to loom in front of her. She lurched, violently startled. “Kurt! I didn’t hear you coming!”

Schroder was maybe a dozen yards away from her, striding toward her angrily, his eyebrows slammed together furiously. “What are you doing out here?” he demanded.

She blinked, alarmed. “I couldn’t sleep after all that heavy food. I came out for a bit of fresh air.”

He looked over toward the Zhow Min and back at her suspiciously. “What are you doing up on this cliff?”

She was a lousy liar, so she stuck to the truth as much as possible. Meanwhile, alarm bells clanged wildly in her head. “I stopped for a moment to enjoy the view. She sure is a big ship, isn’t she?”

“How long have you been here?”

He asked that as if there was a definite right answer and a definite wrong one. More internal alarms and sirens warned her to answer evasively, “I just got here.” As he continued to eye her angrily, she added, “Too bad it’s not daytime. I can’t see much in the dark. I’d love to watch one of the big container ships dock.”

The stiff set of his shoulders eased fractionally. “A couple more are due in next week. Take a few minutes away from your desk and watch one. It’s a surprisingly delicate maneuver considering how big and clumsy those ships are.”

She nodded and then said lightly, “Well, I’m off to finish my hike around the island before I turn in. Wanna come along? I’ll race you back to the dorm.”

“Since when are you a runner?”

“New Year’s resolution to get into better shape,” she replied cheerfully.

He made no comment, nor did he make any move to join her as she turned to trot back toward her room and some privacy to think about what she’d witnessed and figure out what to do about it.

The next morning, she was no closer to an answer. She opened her cargo tracking database as usual and casually typed up the manifest for the Zhow Min. Third stack back. Sixth column in. Fourth layer high … and then it hit her, 3-6-D. If letters were used to designate the layers of containers, that was the exact location of the container she’d seen those men climb into. The cargo manifest said the container was a climate-controlled box—commonly called a reefer in the shipping business—with a self-contained ventilation and cooling system. This particular reefer was listed as carrying salmon, caviar and live lobsters to San Francisco. Nothing to inspire a middle-of-the-night break-in there.

She frowned at her screen.

“Something wrong?” Kurt asked from the doorway as he entered the building.