Though Nimec’s knowledge of dockside transport practices was limited at best, he believed what he’d seen in the yard to this point was probably S.O.P. Had that been all he’d seen, in fact, he very well might have shot away on his scooter over an hour ago.
It was the deepwater rendezvous that had gotten him wondering. Or what happened during the rendezvous, to be entirely accurate.
Nimec decided it might be time to check on the freighters again, and was shifting his glasses with that in mind when he heard the unmistakable whap of helicopter blades slicing the air. The noise was coming from a moderate distance to his right, and seemed generated by more than a single chopper.
Eager for a look, he angled his binocs up at the sky just as a pair of birds appeared above the dark wall of trees marking the northern edge of the island’s wilderness area. They were clipping along in tandem at an altitude of less than five hundred feet, heading northward almost perpendicular to the shoreline. As they reached the harbor, their flight path took a sharp westerly turn away from shore, coincidentally or not toward the anchored box boat and its feeders.
Nimec studied them through his eyepieces moments before they angled seaward. Like the helicopter he had seen the day before, they were Aug 109’s… and now, staring at their magnified images in shades of green, he could definitively tell they were examples of the Stingray patrol variant he’d mentioned to Murthy, conforming to specs that had become thoroughly familiar to him when UpLink had outfitted an entire fleet for U.S. Coast Guard antiterrorism and drug interdiction units. Both had multiple-tube rocket pods under their flared “wings,” FLIR housings for heat-seeking search equipment above their noses, and open port and starboard gunner posts behind the pilot cabin. The pintle guns themselves, he noted, appeared to be Ma Deuces or some lighter weight.50-calibers. Formidable weaponry for safeguarding paradise.
Nimec sighed thoughtfully. What had Murthy said while driving from the airport? The goal at Los Rayos is to make our guests feel secure without their being conscious of security, if my meaning is clear.
It couldn’t have been clearer, Nimec reflected. But he didn’t have to reach further back in his memory than that afternoon and evening for instances on which the security net around the island had been evident to his trained eye. This was his third helicopter sighting, his last one having occurred as he’d piggybacked to shore on Blake the Bronze’s jet ski after his kiteboarding lesson. And later on, when he and Annie were at the beachfront café where they’d gone out for Creole food, he had paid close attention to a Land Rover with black-tinted glass windows that had gone cruising past the parking area, and discerned that it was not only armored but armed… or ready for armaments. There were well-camouflaged firing ports on its side, and the rooftop hatch had been set above its rear seat rather than in front, indicating to him that it was likely equipped with interior machine gun mounts.
Nimec grunted to himself, lowered his binoculars. The Stingrays having tailed off over the water, he wanted to resume monitoring the cargo vessels. They were, he’d estimated, somewhere between a quarter and a third of a mile from his position, almost at the limit of his viewing range. The box boat’s enormous bulk was visible in silhouette to his naked eye — probably a thousand feet from stem to stern, with four towering jib booms lined along one side of the deck. It had dwarfed the three- or four-hundred-foot-long feeders as they’d approached it soon after leaving the quay.
Nimec had watched them begin the process of transferring their containers, a feeder barge pulling up under each boom, the larger vessel dropping its cables, the barge crews securing the containers to their lifting slings, the crane teams hoisting them from the feeders onto the box boat’s sizable payload areas. There again, he’d considered none of it exceptional. Even the late hour at which the job got started had seemed normal to him, since commercial harbors commonly operated round-the-clock and had longshoremen working in rotations.
It had been the running of what might have been fuel supply lines from the huge container vessel to the barges midway through their freight transfer that had perplexed Nimec. Hardly anything to make him cry out from the hilltops about demons and goblins spreading wickedness under the full moon, true, but it still struck him as a little conspicuous. Once the hoses were reeled out from hatches in the hull of the box boat and connected to their opposite numbers on the sides of the feeders, he’d heard a sort of dim, mechanical pumping sound echo over the water in the post-midnight silence. And though he couldn’t claim to know what it sounded like when boats fueled up, Nimec had been around enough airports and landing strips to immediately compare it to the rhythmic pulsations of a jet having its tanks refilled.
His problem with this was that feeder ships didn’t need fuel. Or shouldn’t need it. They didn’t have any means of onboard propulsion. Meaning no engines. Granted he was far from a maritime expert, but to his understanding it was why they were attached to tugboats. And say for argument’s sake he was mistaken… Nimec had never heard of a container vessel that could double as a tanker and carry fuel for ship-to-ship resupply.
He’d been anything but done pondering that apparent anomaly when a couple of closely related ones had started to crop up in a hurry minutes ago. As the unladen feeders disengaged from the box boat, they proceeded to move on past it rather than make a return trip to the harbor. And watching the water, carefully following their progress, Nimec had seen them go outside the effective range of his G4 lenses and disappear into the dark horizon.
But the tugboats hadn’t. To Nimec’s utter bafflement. On the contrary, they were growing larger in his binoculars at that very moment, plying through the channel, returning to port without the barges.
Try as he might, he couldn’t make sense of that. And the more he thought about it, the more it threw him.
Plain and simple, it defied logic.
Nimec frowned. Speaking of returning to port, he was sure Annie would be worried about him by now. He’d seen things here that had added all kinds of questions to those he’d had before, and knew it would absolutely pay to get some of them answered before he went ahead with his snooping.
Reluctant as he was to do so — or part of him was, anyway — he needed to call it a night.
Still frowning slightly, Nimec brought the binocs down from his eyes and climbed onto the Vespa, suspecting he’d have a great deal to occupy his thoughts on his way back to the villa.
Its bark-colored housing placed just below the crown of fanning leaves at treetop level, the thermal imaging camera that had picked up Nimec where he’d stood was one of a great many like it carefully hidden at outdoor and indoor locations throughout Rayos del Sol — under four ounces in weight and small enough to sit on a man’s palm, with a lens that could be covered by the fleshy part of his thumb. Its chip-based microbolometer sensor technology operated coolly, efficiently, and unnoticeably on an internal low-voltage power supply that required infrequent recharges and allowed it to transmit a continuous gray-scale digital feed across the island using a network of compact microwave amplifiers. From the central observation post where the video feed was initially received and processed, it could be relayed to both fixed and mobile secondary monitoring stations via secure wireless internet at a speed almost indistinguishable from real time — blink twice and it would measure the difference between a captured event and its detection by human observers.