Chapter 5

We resumed our scheduled route of green-goods delivery with nary a bobble, but now we had a rep as a badass ship. I didn't say anything at the bar I frequented while on shore but I heard enough to realize that our little encounter had witnesses which had no problem talking about it. We received a few more bids for armed transport jobs but they weren't the bulk of our contracted work. We had contracted with a big chandler to add delivery service for selected offerings. We were doing land office business! (busier than hell)

About a month after we'd completed our diplomatic courier job a case of 1000 rounds of 20 mm HEI showed up at our dock. I thought that it was nice of them to send us a full case and I certainly wasn't going to turn up my nose at the opportunity. Those cases of ammo were EXPENSIVE!

To add flexibility to our operation I polled the crew about buying a 36-foot cigarette cutter that our crane could handle. I found a fast son-of-a-bitch at 48 knots and mounted the little chain gun just beside the pilot's console on a pintle (derived from pin, I believe). It was a heller to pilot and a lot of fun but it drank up the fuel like a bitch. I considered it an armed response boat and had kevlar pads mounted around the cockpit. We kept the chain gun in a locker until it was called for. The boat took up the place of the two half-containers that we could handle on deck but since we rarely if ever had a call for that stowage we accepted the difference in capacity as a cost of doing business. Rather than hanging it from davits we had a custom cradle constructed for it out of laminated marine plywood.

We started accepting more and more contracts along the northern coast of South America. We tied up at Caracas, Venezuela to evaluate a contract servicing several islands with personnel swaps and food deliveries. It was roughly six times the volume that we'd been working further north in the carib. As our captain, Ellen went ashore as our face.

It was eight hours later and we hadn't heard from Ellen. We left Jim at CIC and headed into port in the cigarette cutter. We were armed to the teeth and had no compunction about blowing the hell out of the entire port if need be. I had a case of C4 with me on a rolling cart. I carried my M79 grenade launcher and a vest full of HE rounds. I was the door knocker.

We spread out around the building that she'd gone into for her appointment. I dropped two bricks of C4 at the entrance, backed off a half block and blew the entry to hell. We went in hot and heavy. A couple of guys lived through our knock-knock. We found out that Ellen had been taken to a drug lord's hacienda about 20 miles down the coast. We quickly returned to the ship (before the police arrived) and sailed. We came to rest just offshore from the hacienda. At my request Jim fired off the remaining 920 rounds from our rear vulcan to cut the top off the place. There wasn't much left but gravel and sand. We landed in the cutter and spread out. If it moved we shot it. Room by room we searched the place. We found Ellen chained to a bed, drugged out of her mind and beat to hell. Kim had us transport her back to the ship where she had narcotic antagonists on hand. We continued searching the villa. We didn't find the bastard that took her. We finally left, pissed as hell.

We returned to the ship. Using GPS coordinates I set up my 81 mm mortar and blew the hell out of the place with HE and WP rounds. We left it a wasteland. Anyone in a deep bunker should have died due to oxygen depletion from the White Phosphorus rounds. If I'd had nukes I'd have used them. Be very, very thankful that I couldn't purchase tactical nuclear rounds for that mortar.

That was the last time we delt with anyone from Colombia/Venezuela--in a business sense.

I spent the next day caring for our rear vulcan and re-loading the ammunition pod. The mortar went back into the arms locker. The crew gave me a wide berth for a few days as they chewed over what had happened while I returned to human. We came together a little tighter as a crew after that. Ellen recovered physically but had a hard time psychologically. I offered her a 40 mm glock as a personal side arm. I didn't see her without it much after that. I slept with her once in a while, just to sleep and cuddle. She gradually came back to be the Ellen we all knew and feared.

I corresponded with the U.S. state department about what happened. They didn't have too much of a beef with what happened after I explained how we found Ellen. They agreed that we'd never be welcome in any port in Venezuela and offered us a number to call if we ended up in hot water again. We exchanged email addresses and sat-phone numbers. It was good to have a contact.

From then on when we went on land we carried dead man switches with pull tabs anchored to either wristlets or tied to our clothes. A screamer at the CIC console would go off if we pulled the switch. A read-out would identify which person was involved due to the use of a slightly different frequency for each transponder. We each went armed every time we left the ship. We kept in practice, too.

It took a bit of doing but a console was added to the bridge that allowed some of the basic CIC functions to be performed at that slaved station--such as radar monitoring and fire control. Ellen got her alarm and then some. It allowed for the staff for both stations to stand watch with each other, keeping each other awake and allowing one to spell the other for nature breaks.

The crew wanted to know where the money was coming from for all these updates--the brige console, the machine shop, the cigarette cutter and more. While in port I called for a crew-wide meeting. I didn't do the suit-and-tie dweeb thing with powerpoint slides but I did set up a laptop with a projector. I showed spreadsheets and bank balances. We had about $120,000 in our working account after taxes. Since we were registered in the U.S. we were responsible for U.S. income taxes. We were registered as an LLC corporation that paid a negligible income to the partners but paid for pretty hefty expense accounts. This minimized our individual tax burdens I floored them when I showed them the balance of my reserve account at 1.6 million. I didn't mention my personal stash of 150 krugerrands that I kept in a little safe I'd found built into the purser's (my) cabin. It was too bad that we didn't take the time to make a cash withdrawl at the drug lord's compound. Sigh. Missed opportunities and all that.

I talked the rest of them into a grand tour of the gulf, from Key West around the island chains to Aruba, then back up the coast of Mexico, to Galveston Texas and finally back around to St. Petersburg. The ship's chandlery we contracted with had a few odd shipments such as blood replacements and medical gear that needed delivery to some really odd places, and a big-assed Oman generator was contracted for delivery to Baracoa, Cuba. No problem! I taped a big laminated map of the gulf to the wall of our mess and we marked our progress. We stopped off to see every little island we could find and some not so tiny, like Haiti and Jamaica. We got courier visas for Cuba and spent a couple of days taking in the culture and cuisine. We liked Cuba! We'd damned well be back. The culture of Puerto Rico was strange--very Hollywood. Very Miami. I thought Trinidad was a hoot--all those businessmen in suits and shorts! Well, they were called Bermuda shorts, after all. Now, I wonder how they named Bermuda onions?

Aruba was way the hell and gone south but very pretty. We stopped to take on stores and clean up in Limon, Costa Rica. As we had a secured dock we decided to spend a few days there. Again, it was an entirely different culture from what we were used to seeing. Jim and I were fairly fluent in Spanish so we shepherded the rest around town. Carl got greedy at the market, but we let him. We'd be eating fresh fruits and salads for a few days. I bought some hammered silver and some nice cloth prints to hang in my cabin.

Janet wandered off for a while and came back with red eyes and a big smile. "Ya wanna get Hiiiiiiigh?" I grinned, then laughed. I elbowed Ellen, pinched two fingers in front of my lips and sipped air, then pointed my thumb a an obviously very happy Janet. She shook her head and grinned. "How much did you score?" "Ahh, about a half key, and it's reeeealy good herb!" "Okay, while we're secure and in port I don't have a problem. Any other time than that I want it under lock and key in the dispensary, all right?"

"Sure, boss." she replied. "Just let me get happy once in a while and I'm good to go." Jim made her a batch of chocolate chip cookies after we got back on board. I think he got grinnin' good lucky that night.

We continued up the coast of Mexico, stopping at ports offering secured wharfs. We ate a lot of fresh grilled fish and spent some quality time in the hot tub drinking wine and swapping lies. I ended up explaining to the rest of them about accumulating recognizable, standardized gold coin for their retirement funds as it was as inflation-proof as any specie that I could find. After that they all started putting aside a little each month, earmarked for krugerrand purchases.

I kept thinking about how much money we might have found at that drug lord's compound. I'd seen pictures of the yields from raids on other drug lords. To this day I don't know if I was greedy or just wanted a heavier pad--more financial security. Either way, I took us from a defensive to an offensive posture. I called the state department number that they'd left with me. I danced around the question of what big-time drug dealers were giving them the worst problems--drug dealers with coastal home bases. I was promised a return call.

The next time we were in home port I recieved a couple of visitors. These guys obviously knew what they were looking at when they spotted the vulcan installations. The size along gave away what they were once you knew that they were sitting on the original weapons mounts. The diplomats that we'd hosted had no doubt described what they'd seen to give them corroborating evidence. I recieved the coordinates and whatever satellite photos that they had on three drug dealers--one near Ensenada Mexico, on the Baja peninsula; one near Puerto Penasco, south of Phoenix; and a big mother outside of Coro, Venezuela. I asked for some munitions to assure that the places would be wiped out. I asked for and got six cases of 81 mm mortar HE rounds, six cases of 81 mm White Phosphorus rounds and plenty of propellant disks. They came unbelievably fast. In four days I had my ammo--more than the arms locker could hold. I had them stashed in the main cargo bay with the markings spray-painted out.

I thought that I'd catch a hat-load of shit over what I'd done, but the meeting was surprisingly quiet. I think that our income accumulation rate had primed them for a little piracy. While sitting around drinking wine I described how I'd gotten the funds to purchase our vessel and later, how I'd procured the cannons. It was an eye opener for most but they understood the concept of acceptable risk. Now that we had the vulcans and the mortar we had one hell of a tool set. If we were going to do this thing we wanted to cover the nearest location first, even though it was considered to have the strongest defense. That was in Coro, Venezuela.

After evaluating the site I placed a call requesting a little air support. I asked for the delivery of three MOAB devices to wipe out the entire compound and remove any active defenses before we went in. A MOAB is a fuel-air explosive device that detonates above the ground twice--once to vaporize, mix and spread the gaseous and atomized liquid components of the explosive out in an area and once again to detonate said components, levelling a substantial area. It stands for Mother Of All Bombs. It must have sounded like a good idea because three B-52s delivered their payloads just as we began station-keeping off the shore of Venezuela. Our vessel --not a little day-tripper of a ship--rocked from the explosions at a quarter mile off the coast. We quickly approached the shore. As before we employed the vulcan cannons to raze the top of the hacienda. Many men died from the concussive shock waves of the bombs as well as the masonry coming down about their heads. We split into two teams--combat and acquisition. The younger troops took on the combat role. I stayed back with the acquisition team. When we were called in we carried carts, hand trucks, banker's boxes and canvas bags.

The place looked like a hell of an earthquake had hit. We searched through the rubble finding copious ammounts of drugs, a huge stash of U.S. dollar bills as well as Euros, a respectable amount of gold in bars as well as enough weapons and ammo to foment a revolution in any small mid-american country. We'd killed the main man when we dropped his ceiling down on him. The recovery was pretty quiet. We retrieved about 47 million in bills, about two million in gold and a couple kilos of black hash. (What's hashish? it's concentrated herb resin. Sometimes it's mixed with opium (it's a variant of black hash.). It's guaranteed to bring a smile to your face and a blank space to your mind.) We left all the cocoa products where they lay. Once we were off-shore the site was sterilized by WP rounds, burning the remaining drugs and bodies to a crisp.

We sat around the galley table and talked about what we'd done and taken in. I suggested that the gold to be split up and go directly into each of our stashes without going through government hands. That motion passed without dissent. Once we dropped that 47 million into the ship's account taxes would take it back to about 31 million but it would be clean money--we could spend it anywhere. Regrettably if we voted to take any as shares we'd be taxed again. I suggested a sub-rosa cash payout of 250,000 per crew member, basically using up the Euros, for spending offshore of the U.S. This vote passed, too. There we were, fat and happy. Should we take on the other two drug dealers? Our cost-benefit analysis said no. We had enough funds so risking crew lives didn't make sense.