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Anca Cazacu snapped awake as she lay on her mattress on the floor of the dimly lit room. She sensed it was morning from what she could hear outside the walls of the makeshift holding area she and eleven of her fellow captives shared. It was difficult to tell night from day in the windowless cargo hold of the ship in which they had been confined since their departure from Dubrovnik. Days or weeks ago? Anca honestly did not know. Time had no meaning waiting in this dark, stinking, awful place for a fate that would probably be worse.
It was only a month ago that Anca was in a different world, mid-way through the fall semester of her third year of medical school at Victor Babeș University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timișoara, enjoying the challenges of school and the excitement of city life. Although brought up in a small town in the northern pastoral region of Romania known as Maramureș, Anca was no fool. She knew dangers were lurking beneath the façade of joy and sophistication of Timișoara, particularly for a young and attractive female college student. She took personal safety precautions when going out on the town: she stuck to public places, avoided drinking and drugs, and stayed with the group.
She did not expect to be betrayed by another woman.
Anca had befriended a barista in one of the coffee shops near the university campus. Karla was a city girl, funny and enjoyable to be with, who knew the ins and outs of Timișoara. Unlike many of her classmates and most campus locals, Karla did not look down on Anca for her provincial origin. Anca looked forward to the time she and Karla spent together. She did not think twice when Karla invited her to drinks and a meal at her apartment after several rendezvous at local restaurants and clubs.
Anca knew something was off as soon as Karla answered the door and invited her in. Once she stepped inside, powerful arms gripped Anca from behind and clamped a cloth over her nose and mouth that smelled of chloroform. The last thing she remembered seeing before passing out was the satisfied smile on Karla’s face.
The indoctrination into the hell of sex slavery followed. Anca’s captors hurried her out of Romania, from site to site in Bosnia and Croatia, where, even if she escaped, she would stand out and quickly be recaptured. There were no beatings, nothing that would mar her highly marketable body. Her captors were veterans of secret police goon squads with abundant tools and skills to inflict extreme pain while leaving no marks. Anca quickly realized the futility of resistance and instead concentrated on surviving, watching in the hope of the chance to escape, contact her parents, and hide out until they came to retrieve her.
That hope ended two weeks ago when she was handcuffed, hooded, and taken by van to Dubrovnik and loaded aboard the Miho Dujam with twenty-one other captives. No one knew where they were going, but the fact they were aboard a ship and not in the back of a van or truck told Anca they were likely being transported out of Europe. None of the guards spoke; they just showed the same icy contempt and demanded compliance, enforcing it with pain positions and electrified batons. The possibility of what awaited them filled her with dread.
Anca did her best to bond with her fellow captives when they were locked up. Meals comprised what Anca supposed were Russian army rations in boxes with Cyrillic lettering and water in plastic bottles. They were only allowed out of their confinement in small, easily controllable ones and twos for exercise and toilet use. Still, she learned there were twenty-two of them altogether, dispersed between the two rooms in the cargo hold. They were from several countries in central and southeastern Europe, and a network of translators evolved among the women to cope with the many languages and dialects in play. Some of Anca’s fellow prisoners had been forcibly kidnapped, as she was, and others had been lured into servitude with promises of employment in housekeeping or au pair positions. The most tragic cases were the two young Moldavian girls, aged fourteen and fifteen, who their parents had sold to local pimps.
The two girls were the focus of the event that broke them all. Four days into the trip, one guard had cornered and was sexually assaulting the youngest of the girls when a young Polish woman intervened and physically struck him. The reaction was immediate—she was seized and held. After the women were assembled in the hold, the unfortunate woman was brought forward and given a paralyzing injection. Then, one by one, the seven guards raped her as the other women were made to watch.
After the ordeal, the head guard spoke in Russian, and he paused while his words were translated into the several languages spoken among the shocked and whimpering women. “The drug we gave her left her paralyzed but awake and able to feel everything. We will give her the antidote, and she will recover quickly. Know that we can repeat this with her or any of you as many times as we like without the risk of physical injury or death, although I am sure she and you would rather die. Do as you are told. Do not resist us, or you will suffer the same.”
After the ghastly ritual was complete, the guards returned the women to the two rooms. The guards deposited the Polish woman on the floor in Anca’s room, gave her an injection, left the room, and locked the door. After a minute, when none of the other women had moved, Anca stood and went to see if she could help. The head guard was wrong. The antidote may have counteracted the paralysis drug, but the woman had not “recovered.” Instead, she lay unmoving, staring at the ceiling in a near-catatonic stupor.
Anca called over two other women, and together they moved the Polish woman to one of the sleeping pallets near the side of the room. She remained there, unmoving, since the ordeal. Anca became her caregiver, and she and the other women did their best for her, bringing her food and water and cleaning up after her since she could not use the toilet on her own. After a few days, Anca was convinced the woman would not recover without dedicated treatment, but she feared telling the guards. She knew they would simply throw the poor woman overboard. At least she was eating and drinking—as long as she was alive when they reached their destination, there was a chance, however slim, that she could be saved.
As hellish as their treatment had been, things became far worse once the weather turned. Unable to see outside, Anca sensed a change in the ship’s motion that suggested they had moved into a different body of water. Remembering her high school geography, she speculated they had sailed the length of the Mediterranean and passed through the straits into the Atlantic. However, she could not guess where they were ultimately headed.
A couple of days after the sea change, the storm struck.
The ship’s motion had been lively in the Mediterranean, a rolling that made it difficult to eat and walk, and the pitching up and down made some women sick for a day or two. In the Atlantic, it was different—the rolling and pitching were still there but slower. That changed when the storm arrived. As the motion increased, Anca and her companions tied down the Polish woman to keep her from being thrown around and then held on for dear life themselves. Everyone was deathly sick, and soon, every container in the room was filled with vomit.
After the second day of unrelenting violent motion and sickness, the guards stopped coming. Anca deduced they must be sick too, but their absence presented a fresh problem. No one was interested in eating, of course, but, from her limited medical training, Anca knew she and her fellow captives were becoming dehydrated. Without water, death was certain. She stood, made her way to the door, and started pounding on it whenever the deck was level enough for her to stand.
After what seemed like hours, the voice of one guard called out in slurred Polish, “Be quiet, bitch!”
Anca responded in rudimentary Polish, “We need water!”
“Fuck you, bitch!”
“We will all die without water! How will you profit from that?!”
There was a muffled response, then nothing. Anca huddled in despair beside the door for another half hour when she heard the lock removed. The door flew open, and the burly guard pushed two cardboard boxes into the room and slammed the door shut. Anca tore open the closest box, found three dozen water bottles, and shouted, “Thank you!”
Anca took two bottles out of the box and offered them to the women huddled on either side of her, getting dulled looks in return. “Drink! You have to drink, or you will die!” Finally, the two women took the offered bottles, and Anca moved on, dragging the box behind her. After handing each woman a bottle, she took one herself. Her stomach roiled as she drank the water, but she downed the entire bottle without vomiting. Anca turned to the Polish woman and, assisted by another captive, raised her into a sitting position and got her to drink.
The storm lasted for two more days, then the ship’s motion settled to a still lively but tolerable level. The seasickness had passed, but Anca had to breathe through her mouth to avoid the nauseating smell of the room. Eventually, the door opened again, and two guards pushed in buckets and mops. One woman said something about being hungry, and the Polish guard said, “Clean room, then eat!”
Anca could not argue with the logic—she doubted she could keep any food down inside that room in its present state. Two women grabbed the mops and started swabbing the floor as Anca and another captive moved the Polish woman aside. Half an hour later, the guards returned, took out the buckets and mops, and pushed in boxes of food and water. Anca was ravenous by this time, and even the poorly made Russian rations tasted delicious.
The rest of the trip was the struggle of eating and sleeping, with occasional trips to the toilet being the only exercise. There was no night and day in the sealed, dark hold, but Anca could eventually make out the time of day by listening to the sounds around her.
On the fifth day after the storm, the routine suddenly changed. The ship’s motion had settled down to almost nothing, and Anca supposed they must have moved into sheltered water. The ship’s engine, which had been a low and steady thrum, became louder and picked up speed. Anca heard excited shouting but could not make out what was said. She had a glimmer of hope a naval or customs ship would stop the Miho Dujam and find them. Then she shook her head. There would be no rescue—if the inspectors could not be bribed to ignore them, their captors would simply kill them and drop them overboard.
The engine ran at high speed for a couple of hours when there was a tremendous bang, and it ground to a halt. There was more shouting and then silence. After several minutes, one woman shouted something and got to her feet. There was water leaking into the room from beyond the wall. Anca stood, dipped her hand in the water, then sniffed and tasted it. Saltwater! The ship was sinking! Anca stepped to the door and started beating on it as the other women began crying out in panic.
Anca’s terror grew as the water level crept higher in the room. She frantically pounded on the door, then stopped when she heard a voice on the other side. She could not understand what the voice said, but she kept pounding on the door, shouting in Romanian, “We are in here! Please save us!” She heard the lock being smashed off, then the door flew open, and the light of a powerful flashlight blinded her. Anca stepped back involuntarily into the mass of huddling and whimpering women. She did not know who the men with the flashlights were, only that they were not the guards. For the first time since she left Romania, Anca dared to hope.
Ben was over halfway through his morning watch as the officer of the deck, also known as OOD. It was a typical mid-autumn day in the area, warm and humid with bright blue skies and puffy clouds over an azure sea. Kauai was gently pitching and rolling in the light seas as she motored along at a speed just high enough to hold a comfortable course.
Kauai was two weeks into what was euphemistically referred to as a “stretch patrol” at a location well off their usual beat between Florida and the Bahamas. They were holding a blocking position to intercept an expected uptick in illegal smuggling traffic skirting along the eastern side of the Lucayan Archipelago from the Caribbean to the southern U.S. It was a job better suited to a larger medium endurance cutter whose radar and embarked helicopter could surveil much more area per day, but these were in short supply.
There was a Coast Guard surge operation working to cope with a considerable upswing in illegal immigration from Haiti to the United States. On those rare occasions when economic conditions were particularly desperate in that miserable country, people sallied forth in every maritime conveyance available, from coastal freighters to rafts, even hollowed-out trees. The hope was to slip by unnoticed to land their human cargo in South Florida. Few made it. Some died en route, and the rest were intercepted by the Coast Guard and repatriated to Port Au Prince. With their ample flight deck space and more plentiful food and water, the larger cutters could readily support the hundreds of migrants interdicted each day while they awaited repatriation, and they were soon diverted from other duties.
Because of this migrant surge, the regular smuggling routes via the Windward Passage and Mona Passage on the western and eastern sides of Hispaniola were saturated with ships and surveillance aircraft. As the humanitarian crisis persisted, intelligence held that surpluses of illicit drugs would eventually push an increase in traffic along the longer but less crowded routes to the east. Kauai and other patrol boats had to pick up the slack with every available large cutter involved in surge operations.
Ben completed a round with the binoculars and stepped over to check the radar. They were idling about twenty miles north of Grand Turk Island, close enough to pick up any illicit traffic skirting the islands from the Lesser Antilles plus any Windward or Mona leakers sneaking through the Turks Island Passage. Commercial ship traffic was light through this area. The shortest routes from Europe to the Panama Canal were east of here through the Mona and Anegada Passages, and those from the Continental U.S. were west via the Windward Pass and Yucatan Channel. Anything passing where they were was either a local freighter or a target of interest.
Ben glanced at the left-hand console seat, where Chief Deffler monitored the UAVs. The UAV capability was limited—no radar and a narrow field of view camera that Deffler likened to “looking through a soda straw”—but it was far better than no aviation support. Ben, Hopkins, and Deffler had worked out a picket fence tactic with one or two UAVs orbiting at the edge of Kauai’s visual horizon, with cameras trained southeast along the threat axis. It was a simple solution that effectively quadrupled the ocean’s width they could scan, allowing them to pick up anything between the shoreline and twenty-five miles seaward. But contacts were scarce, and some watches, like Ben’s current one, had none. Warm, not hot weather, clear blue skies, and mostly calm seas made for a pleasant, uneventful watch. It was boring, but Ben would take boring any day over the soul-crushing grind of alien migrant interdiction operations.
Ben turned to look as Williams came through the door. “Joe, what’s up?”
“I’m meeting Ms. Reardon to do soup-to-nuts on fire control, XO,” he chirped. Williams was the expert on the integrated fire control/command and control or FC3 system. It was unique to Kauai in the Coast Guard but was being evaluated for retrofit in some form on the newer FRCs. Williams loved working on the system and showing it off.
“Right. Well, don’t scare her off with the details. OK?” Ben said with a wink, returning to his watch.
Williams walked over to Electronics Technician Third Class Darryl Bunting, who had the navigation watch and was sitting at the console, and tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s going to get crowded up here, bud. Let me take the watch for you, so you’re not just standing around.”
“Thanks, Joe!” Bunting said with a smile, then began a handoff brief.
The stretch patrol was an excellent opportunity for Haley to learn the ins and outs of the new command and get a feel for the boat. Ben felt odd working closely with Sam’s replacement on an operational mission, but he liked what he had seen of her so far. She was leaning into Williams, Hopkins, and Drake, soaking up knowledge of the new systems while she was just another officer and not yet the skipper.
Haley was close to Sam in terms of seniority, having graduated from the Academy about six months after Sam’s graduation from OCS, but was closer to Ben in age. Despite this, their first meeting was a little awkward: it took several minutes for them to work out how to address each other to avoid hiccups after she took command. But they then settled into detailed discussions on Ben’s unique dual role of second in command and tactical lead. Ben found her pretty different from Sam in terms of personality. Friendly enough, but not much for small talk, even when off the Bridge. Ben understood—working into a close-knit team like Kauai’s had to be difficult.
Haley arrived soon after Williams. She was wearing the same dark blue operational utilities as everyone else, but still wore her Sector St. Petersburg ball cap. She scanned the Bridge, then came straight over to Ben. “Good morning, XO. How’s it going?”
“Another quiet one, ma’am. No contacts.”
“That’s how it goes sometimes. If you have no objection, I asked Williams to give me the FC3 one-oh-one this morning.”
“Not a problem, ma’am. If you like, I can clear it with the captain to spin up the main gun for dry runs.”
“I’d appreciate that, thank you.”
“No worries, ma’am.” As Haley stepped over to Williams, Ben called Sam.
“Captain,” Sam answered after two rings.
“OOD, sir. Nothing to report on the watch. Ms. Reardon is going through fam on the fire control, and I’d like your permission to power up and exercise the main gun.”
“That’s a good idea; permission granted. Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Right. See you at chow.”
“Yes, sir.” Ben hung up the phone and turned to Williams. “Joe, the captain has OK-ed powering up the gun. Make the usual announcements.”
“Will do. Thanks, XO.” Williams nodded and went back to his instruction.
As Ben was relaying the permission to Williams, he noticed Haley giving him what he thought was a cool look. I wonder what that’s about? He decided it was just his imagination and continued his rounds with the binoculars.
