I stare at Cam in dismay as he lounges against the back rail of the Phantom. Robry and I talk with him while Ara and Den finish tying down tonight’s load of barrels and empty fish boxes.
“You’re not serious about hijacking a freighter, are you?” I ask him.
“Well, no one is going to give or lease one to men like Rath or Scarn,” Cam replies. “So, yeah, they’re making plans to steal one.”
“Have you ever stolen a ship before?” Robry asks, looking as dismayed as I feel.
“Actually, we have hijacked some smaller vessels. A freighter will be a bit more challenging, but the process is pretty much the same. We need to sneak on board, deal with the crew, strip the vessel of all ID markings and signals and sail off with it.”
“Exactly how do you ‘deal with the crew?’” I ask, a sick feeling growing in my belly.
Cam’s mouth tightens. “We don’t murder them, if that’s what you’re thinking. Usually they’re so worried for their own skins, they surrender right away. If they fight back, then it can get ugly, but no one’s been killed when I’ve taken over a ship. We mostly hit vessels that smuggle black market items that are sold to those hypocritical technocrats who run the Western Collective.”
“It’s nice to know no one gets killed,” I say, trying to act like it’s no big deal to find out that Cam is a pirate as well as a smuggler now, but his expression hardens. Obviously he realizes he’s shocked both Robry and me.
“You should be grateful we’ve had some experience hijacking ships,” Cam says coolly. “You’re about to get some experience, too, because we’re going to need you and your friends down there,” he jerks a thumb toward the water. “Rath was very impressed by the effectiveness of your fish tranquilizer, and I’ve been telling Scarn that your dolphins are better than radar for keeping track of Marine Guard vessels. With your help, we’re more likely to be successful in hijacking a big ship and less likely to hurt anyone doing it.”
“I’ll talk to my team and my dad about helping you,” I say, trying to hide my trepidation. Stealing a freighter sounds like one dangerous proposition.
“First we launched a rescue mission against guerilla fighters,” Robry says with a wry smile, “and then we became marine salvagers, and now it looks like we may become pirates. Guess it’s all in a day’s work for us.”
Ara comes to the stern and clears her throat. “We should get going with this load if we want to unload it before daylight,” she says to Cam. Cool and capable, Ara doesn’t glare anymore when I come aboard, but she definitely speaks to Robry more often than she does to me.
“By the way,” Cam says as I stride to the rear platform, “who’s the guy who hangs out at the surface watching us every time you talk to me? He always looks like he’d like to put a spear dart through my heart. Is he your boyfriend?”
“That would be Dai,” I say with a sigh. “And no, he’s not my boyfriend.”
“Sure acts like one,” Cam says under his breath before Robry and I dive back into the water.
If Dai were my boyfriend, he’d trust himself to be alone with me, but we only speak now when there are others around us, and we never touch. In the meantime, I’m growing more and more concerned about him. During the day he works hard wrestling barrels and containers out of the wrecks we salvage, and then at night, he and Ton patrol constantly around the sea caves where we camp. His eyes red and shadowed from lack of sleep, Dai won’t talk to me about his fears, but I can guess he’s desperately worried about his father and what he’s planning to do next.
My dad is very concerned about Kuron, too. “I don’t think it’s good news that there are so few transmissions for Robry to decode these days. Kuron’s playing a waiting game,” he tells me one night when I climb aboard the Carly Sue for a quick visit. “I feel better about Safety Harbor knowing Kuron’s down here, but I worry about you and your salvage teams.”
A month passes, though, without us seeing Kuron’s sub or his shredders. At the end of that month, we hear from Dad and Cam that the first shipment of c-plankton is ready to load and send out to sea. Which means it’s time for us to help Cam and his fellow smugglers steal a ship.
~~~
Scarn picks a moonless evening for our mission. At midnight, our entire team and all our dolphins meet up with Cam, Ara, Den and several smugglers riding on zodiacs with powerful engines near the old port of LA. While Penn and Thom inflate pontoons that will convert our tows into surface vehicles, Cam goes over the plan with us a final time.
“Do we have to go all the way up to the port?” Dai interrupts Cam skeptically. “It sits five miles inland now that the seas have risen so much, and we could get trapped in that narrow channel.”
“No, we shouldn’t have to travel that far inland to grab a ship,” Cam replies, looking irritated by Dai’s comment. “Because the facilities are limited compared to legal ports like San Francisco or San Diego, freighters anchor offshore. Sometimes they wait days for their turn to be unloaded. We’re going to help ourselves to one of those.”
My stomach winds up tighter than an anchor chain when I catch a glimpse of a lean man with scarred cheeks piloting the first zodiac.
I swim closer to Cam’s zode. “I’m surprised to see your boss is here tonight,” I whisper after he finishes the briefing.
“I’m not,” Cam whispers back. “There’s big money in this for him. He gets to keep the ship’s cargo.” It’s hard to read his expression because he and the other smugglers have darkened their faces and hands, and they all wear black.
“I hope he picks the best ship for us and not the best ship for him in terms of cargo,” I mutter under my breath.
When our tows are ready, we climb onto their pontoons and motor after the two zodes. A brisk wind kicks up white caps as we head out farther from the coast. Even in the dim light, we can see a dozen freighters anchored offshore, waiting their turn to be unloaded. Scarn heads straight for a smaller freighter away from the others.
Our tows stop a hundred yards out from the freighter while we slip into the sea to oxygenate. As the two zodes continue on to the freighter, I whisper good luck with my heart and my mind to Cam.
:Your friend has guts. I have to give him that,: Dai says as we watch Cam fire a carbon fiber grappling hook up and over the top railing of the ship. Then he scrambles up that rope followed by his fellow smugglers.
:Especially since he knows that if he’s caught, the Western Collective will send him back to a prison camp or execute him,: I reply, a sob catching in my throat. I’m surprised when Dai reaches out and squeezes my hand gently.
The next ten minutes seem to pass horribly slowly. I listen hard, afraid to hear the sounds of fighting or an alarm being raised, but the raid continues in total silence. Soon Cam’s squad lowers ten unconscious men, bound and gagged, in a cargo net and stacks them between the pontoons of a zode like firewood. Within minutes, the craft motors silently away to the south.
:Th-they aren’t going to kill the crew, are they?: Kalli asks me as she looks after the zode.
:No,: I reply. :Scarn said he’d hold them for a few weeks so they can’t report back to the ship’s owners, and then he’ll let them go.: I hope.
A bass chugging rumbles through the water as Scarn and Cam start the ship’s engines. Then a deep clatter echoes in my ears as they winch up the anchor on its massive chain. The nav lights all over the ship wink out.
The darkened freighter slowly pivots to the northeast and gathers speed. Rad’s tow is on its starboard side, we take the port side, and Thom drives the extra zode straight ahead of the vessel. The dolphins range in front of us, watching for danger as they race through the black sea. We have a thirty mile voyage out to Catalina Island where we need to have the freighter tucked away in a cove by dawn.
We’ve only been underway for a half hour when Mariah contacts me.
:many big ships traveling together head your way from the north,: she says, her mental voice worried.
:Shells, it must be a Marine Guard convoy heading down to San Diego!: Which means they probably have sophisticated radar. I stare out into the dark, windy night, my heart pounding in triple time.