Piranha

Linda brought up the list and they compared it to the numbers on the phone list. She gasped when she saw how they matched up.

The numbers weren’t a progression. The lieutenant was keeping track of how many crew members were on each ship.

Alpha 17—Cantaura, a containership lost off of Portugal with seventeen crew.

Beta 19—Tucupita, a tanker reporting missing with nineteen crew members as it was rounding Cape Horn.

Gamma 22—Santa Cruz and its twenty-two men disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic.

All of them belonged to Cabimas Shipping. The first two didn’t broadcast any kind of Mayday or indicate anything was wrong before contact was lost. They simply vanished.

“Three ships disappeared in three months?” Linda asked. “That can’t be chance.”

“I’m sure Leal’s insurer is saying the same thing. They must think he’s deliberately sinking his ships or they’ve become so ill-maintained that they’re falling apart. Either way, it would make him uninsurable. Without insurance, no one would send freight with his company ever again.”

“Do you think Ruiz is targeting his ships?”

“It’s possible. If she has political ambitions of her own, what better way to get rid of her biggest rival than to bankrupt him?”

“He must be teetering on the edge of that now,” Linda said.

“One more sinking might do it,” Juan said. “Check the crew complements on the rest of his ships to see if we get a match.”

The answer came back immediately. Only one Cabimas ship had exactly twenty-three crew: a car carrier named Ciudad Bolívar.

“Where is she now?”

Linda queried the Marine Traffic database. “She departed Veracruz, Mexico, two days ago with a load of cars and construction equipment. Her destination is Puerto Cabello, Venezuela.”

“Which would put her a few hundred miles due south of Jamaica,” Juan said. “We just found our answer.”

“To what?”

“To the question of why someone was trying to kill us,” Juan said. “Ruiz is pla

Maria Sandoval was nearly done with her daily inspection of the Ciudad Bolívar’s vehicle decks. As the master of the ship, her responsibility was to make sure her cargo arrived safely, so she regularly checked the condition of the interior to make sure there were no leaks in the fully enclosed decks that could allow salt water to damage the shipment and to verify that everything remained in its proper place.

The Ciudad Bolívar was the pride of the Cabimas fleet. At 700 feet long and eleven stories high, she could transport up to five thousand cars, primarily serving the growing South American market. Her current load had significantly fewer vehicles because the ceiling of deck 10 had been hoisted to accommodate large construction equipment—graders, backhoes, mobile cranes, dump trucks, bulldozers—all destined for Brazil. The deck below this one was dedicated to cars and SUVs bound for Venezuela and Argentina.

The total value of her shipment was over one hundred and fifty million dollars, and Maria took her responsibility for its care seriously. Her short dark hair and round face made her look younger than her thirty-eight years, and burly new crew members tended to underestimate her when she met them, in her nondescript trousers and unrevealing light sweater. She ran a tight ship, for her first command, driven by the pressure to succeed as the company’s only female captain. With the loss of three Cabimas vessels in the last three months, the crew was edgy, and Maria had spent plenty of restless nights worried about her ship, so she was especially attuned to anything that might pose a hazard.

The construction vehicles stretched out in long rows, parked side by side with inches to spare, maximizing the usable capacity in the cavernous, well-lit interior. Maria was the sole occupant of the hold. Even with the vibration of the ship’s engines and the rumble of the air-handling system, the lack of any other sound in the gigantic space was eerie.

She tested the tie-downs on random vehicles, which had been driven into place on the roll on/roll off ship. She knew her men inspected them on a periodic basis, but she liked to go over their work to ensure that their reports were accurate. If any vehicle came loose in heavy seas, particularly ones like these that weighed upward of fifty tons, it could wreak major damage on the cargo or start a fire.

While the smaller vehicles were secured with canvas straps, those for construction were cinched down with heavy steel chains. Nothing short of a Category 5 hurricane would be able to budge them, and the forecast called for smooth sailing until they reached Puerto Cabello.

Maria finished her assessment and was pleased with the results. She expected a lot from her crew and they never let her down.

She was walking toward the stairs to the bridge when she heard a grinding sound. But it wasn’t coming from the engine. It seemed to be emanating from the hull itself.

Before she could move, the shipwide klaxon shrieked, causing her to instinctively cringe. Instead of short bursts indicating fire, the horn sounded in lengthy peals.

There was a hull breach. The ship was taking on water.

The list would have been imperceptible to anyone not as familiar with the ship as she was, but Maria could feel the slightest tilt to port. She raced to the stairs, pulling the walkie-talkie from her waistband.

“Jorge!” she yelled over the wail of the klaxon echoing in the stairwell. “Report!”

She pressed it to her ear and could tell that Jorge, her executive officer, was responding, but the klaxon drowned out the words.

“All stop!” she shouted, and didn’t listen for an answer.

Maria sprinted up the ten flights and flung the bridge door open, panting from the exertion as she entered. The ship was slowing, the controls set to stop as she’d ordered. Three men were on the bridge: Jorge; the navigator, Miguel; and the helmsman, Roberto. They were moving efficiently, no panic evident, but stress oozed from their pores.

Jorge, a balding man ten years her senior with a potbelly and a goatee, looked at her in utter confusion.

“What did we hit?” Maria asked.

“Nothing, Captain,” he said. “There aren’t any other ships in visual range, and the depth is steady at over two miles. We couldn’t possibly have hit a reef.”

“Rogue storage container?”

“Not likely.”

“How big is the breach?”

“Breaches. We have compartments flooded in eight different locations of the ship.”

“What?”

Jorge showed her the plot of the breaches. They seemed to be concentrated on the port side.

“Did anyone see what happened?”

“A crewman who saw a breach in the bow compartment said it was six inches in diameter and looked as if it had been bored with a drill.”

Maria was astonished. That simply wasn’t possible. A single large gash she could understand. But eight smaller holes opening in a double-hulled vessel was unprecedented.

“Was he able to patch the hole?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. The pressure was too great. He had to seal off the room. I’ve also shut the watertight doors to the engine room. We got major flooding in some of the holds before we were able to seal off the rest of the damaged compartments, but those closed-off areas are still filling with water.”