After ten minutes of slow-going progress through the bushes, seeing somewhere along the lines of a hundred lizards along the way and poking his hands and legs so many times with cactus needles that he’d stopped responding to the pain, he lowered his body down into the sand and crawled the rest of the way to the crest.
At the top he looked out over a small cove. Tortola was due south in the distance, and on his left a twin-engine Pilatus was lining up on final at the same airport he and Sherman had arrived in three days earlier.
But he wasn’t here to look at Tortola. No, much closer, in the little cove below him, the Spinnaker II sat right where Clark had seen it two hours earlier. Putting his binoculars up to his eyes, he first scanned along the beach in front of him. The last thing he needed was to be discovered by someone from the Spinnaker II sitting on the shore.
There. Two men sat under a tree in small beach chairs. They each had a pair of binoculars in their laps and bottles of beer in their hands. They looked relaxed enough, but Clark wondered if that was just because there were no other signs of life in sight other than lizards and birds.
Confident there was no way the two men could see him, he began looking over the Spinnaker II. The deck was empty, but he saw two men in the cockpit and another man up on the flying bridge. They all had their shirts off, and they were big, muscular, and relatively young. The man on the bridge was obviously another lookout; he used his binos to glass the waterway to the south twice in the five minutes Clark watched him.
Clark tallied five men: two on shore and three on the boat. They appeared relaxed, but they all looked like they could switch on quick enough and become formidable. They didn’t appear Russian to him at all. One man was black, and another was darker-complexioned than any Spetsnaz guy he’d ever seen.
He had nothing but circumstantial evidence that these men were holding the Walkers, not even enough to go on. He decided he needed more information about what was happening inside that boat.
At three p.m. he turned around and headed back down the hill, planning on coming back at night to set up surveillance.
Clark returned to his Irwin and got a few hours’ sleep. When he woke he cooked a steak on the gas grill on the deck and made a salad in the galley. He sat in the cockpit in front of the helm and ate his dinner, knowing he was in for a long night.
At around ten p.m. he started getting his gear together to move to his hide overlooking the Spinnaker II. He packed water, food, optics, night-vision goggles, bug spray, and a knife.
He also knew there was a chance he might see something on the boat that would necessitate him hitting it immediately in an in extremis one-man raid. While he didn’t like his chances against five men, he recognized the fact that he wouldn’t be able to just watch if one of the hostages was in jeopardy. He packed his swim fins, his mask and snorkel, and his pistol, on the chance he’d have to use them.
At ten-thirty he was ready to go. He was standing in the cockpit, just finishing a bottle of Gatorade before loading the dinghy with his backpack, when he heard the faint sound of a small engine purring across the water. He stepped out onto his deck, walked around for a moment, then realized it was coming not from land but from outside his little bay. Since there were no more boats moored in the bay, and no rational person would take his dinghy all the way across the water from Tortola, he immediately decided he was hearing the dinghy of the Spinnaker II, and it was approaching his boat.
With his mast lights on he couldn’t see well more than fifty feet in any direction, so he pulled a flashlight off a table in the cockpit and stood out on the deck.
His SIG Sauer pistol hung in his shorts on his right side under his T-shirt, a folding knife in the cargo pocket on his left. Extra magazines for both were tucked in his back pocket. He was ready for a fight, but he knew if he stood on the deck in the lights, he’d be exposed to any armed person in the dinghy.
On the other hand, if he ran onto the deck and crouched behind cover, he would quite obviously blow any pretense that he was just some sailboat renter out for a little peace and quiet here in this cove.
When the dinghy came into view he saw two men on board, and he recognized them both as the men he’d seen on the gray catamaran. One waved a hand in his direction as they neared, and he belted out an accented “Evening, Captain!”
They threw their line up to Clark, who took it, then tied it off on a cleat on the deck.
“Good evening,” he said, doing his best to sound chipper and unsuspicious.
As they climbed aboard, Clark saw they were both in their thirties and they were physically fit. One had short brown hair and an impressive beard; the other was completely bald and his arms were inked from his wrists to his shoulders. The bearded man climbed aboard with the confidence and dexterity of someone very accustomed to his actions, but the bald-headed man didn’t seem particularly comfortable with boats; he took a moment to heave himself up onto the deck from the bobbing dinghy, an action that came naturally to a real sailor.
Clark scanned the tattoos on both men, but he couldn’t derive any intel from them.
“How’s it goin’?” the bearded man asked. He was obviously South African, which surprised Clark some. They all shook hands, and the South African introduced himself as Kip, the bald-headed man as Joe.
“Doing fine,” Clark said, still affecting the genial nature of a vacationer. “Welcome aboard. Care for a beer?”
“Always,” said Joe.
Clark went down to the saloon, grabbed three cold Caribe beers, and came back up. As he passed them around to his two visitors, Kip said, “Nice ketch you’ve got here. Out here by yourself, are you?”
“Sure am,” Clark replied. “Just about to shut down for the night, actually.”
The other man looked the boat over slowly. He spoke with an American accent. “You’re renting?”
“Yeah. Just down for a couple of weeks.”
Clark could tell the men were suspicious of him, but only to a small degree. He thought this was odd, because he was certain he’d not been seen earlier on the hill, and he could think of no other way he could have possibly given any indication he was interested in them.
Kip said, “This is a bit of a lonely vacation, wouldn’t you say?”
Clark nodded. “You’re telling me. My girlfriend was supposed to come along, but she couldn’t make it at the last minute.”
Clark was wearing his wedding ring, but a married man with a boat down here talking about his girlfriend wasn’t going to raise suspicions.
The pair just stood there on the deck, facing down Clark without speaking. He realized the men were trying to be intimidating, and to the average man in his mid-sixties, Clark imagined they might have been able to pull it off.
Clark, on the other hand, had a plan to kill them both if necessary. He wasn’t intimidated, just annoyed.
That said, his cover persona, a semi-sleazeball retiree down here for a few weeks of recreational boating, would be easily intimidated by a pair of men looming over him like this, so Clark swallowed hard and let his mouth twitch a little, as if from nerves.
“You know,” said the man called Kip, “there’s a pretty nice marina and yacht club over there at Scrub Island. Only about twenty minutes from here. Seems like a guy down here by himself would do well to pick up a mooring ball over there, wander up to the bar, and meet himself a nice, mature lady.”