Grapnel

By Dave Moruzzi

Captain Ben Bass and his high-tech sailboat Abbondanza become the targets of a sociopath, bent on destroying the man and his machine. His identity is completely unsuspected because he is supposed to have been killed when his own boat blew up during a high-speed chase by the authorities. The man has very deep pockets, world-wide connections and the ability to plan an action that would cause an ecological disaster to an island nation in the Caribbean as a result. While killing Captain Bass is the goal, he might not realize that his actions are being investigated by counter-terrorists who are themselves unaware of the murder plot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365919756

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Grapnel

GRAPNEL

Copyright © 2017 by Dave Moruzzi

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-365-91975-6

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Common Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

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Electronic Books by Dave Moruzzi

Abbondanza

Lulu Press - 2011

Bight

Lulu Press - 2012

Caicos

Lulu Press - 2013

Debonaire

Lulu Press - 2014

Equinox

Lulu Press – 2014

Fathom

Lulu Press - 2015

All Ben Bass Mysteries are available at

Lulu, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Kobo.

Go to: www.benbassmysteries.com

FRONTISPIECE

INAGUA ARENA

LEEWARDS & WINDWARDS

Prologue

Captain C.C. Hawke could have been a successful Bahamian entrepreneur, if it hadn’t been for rum and his mistaken belief that he was the toughest man in Matthew Town; the second vice only surfacing after he had consumed a sufficient quantity of the first.  When sober, he was an accomplished small boat operator who could find just the right dive site among the many that surrounded the island of Great Inagua.  It mattered little exactly what his customers were looking for.  CC, as he preferred to be called, could put his twin-outboard-engine dive boat right over the spot that guaranteed a rewarding and captivating dive.  If you were interested in underwater photography of colorful fish, CC knew the place.  If it was treasure you were after, CC may not be able to guarantee riches but he could find the remains of a number of old wrecks to peak your interest.  His problem was he would always use every last bit of any income he made taking tourists out to Man of War Bay during the day, on copious amounts of rum when the sun went down.  And that’s when the man got into a fighting mood.

CC Hawkes was a belligerent drunk.  Everyone in Matthew Town knew it and, for the most part, they tried to avoid him after dark.  That wasn’t always possible, especially in a small town that housed less that fifteen hundred people; the total population of Great Inagua.  The one colleague CC had was Bart Spinner the barman and owner of HMS Statira, the local pub which honored the 38-gun British leda-class frigate that sunk in local waters in the late eighteen-hundreds.  Bart knew when and how to avoid CC’s nasty moods and did this better than anyone else on the island.  And he did more than anyone else in Matthew Town to protect both citizens and tourists from CC Hawkes’ frequent outbursts.  Try as best as he could, he wasn’t always successful.

Bart Spinner was a retired policeman from the Royal Bahamas Police Force.  He was born and raised in Nassau, but had relatives all over the Bahamas and visited Great Inagua regularly.  He loved being away from the hustle of the capital and relished the relative peace and quiet that the island offered.  When an aging cousin asked him to help him run HMS Statira, the only pub in Matthew Town, Bart jumped at the chance, took his pension from RBPF and moved south.  He was only there two years when his cousin died, leaving Bart sole owner of the establishment.  Bart Spinner wasn’t always tending bar.  Like CC Hawkes and others, he liked to scuba dive the island’s plentiful reefs and occasional wrecks.  If he couldn’t get away when tourists at Spinner’s bar asked for a diving adventure, Bart would send clients to Captain CC Hawkes. 

Matthew Town is a company town with just one main industry – sea salt.  Each year the Morton Salt Company produces a million tons of sea salt in what is North America’s second largest solar saline operation.  Nearly every sole in Matthew Town is either employed in or otherwise dependent upon this industry.  There are only a few people like CC who tried to make ends meet through tourism.  In fact, it was a tourist that tried to match CC in an after-hours drinking bout, and it was the tourist who had a better right hook when the fighting started.  That was when CC lost one of his front teeth.  The tourist wasn’t arrested – the Matthew Town Police were well aware of CC’s antics – but he did end up paying for the gold tooth that enhanced CC’s smile and only added to his daytime charm among the island’s visitors.

When CC went missing, the event seemed almost a blessing.  He surely wasn’t missed by the town’s population, and the fact that his boat was gone only convinced those mildly interested that the captain finally sailed off to greener waters.  Good riddance to bad rubbish was the general sentiment in Matthew Town.  No tears were shed and, almost to a man, a collective sigh of relief was the only epitaph his absence generated. 

No one connected CC’s departure with the unexplained explosion that sunk a millionaire’s yacht about twenty miles southwest of Great Inagua the same week his absence was first noticed.  After all, what could the one have to do with the other?  CC was as far away from anyone on the upper socio-economic scale as anyone could be – at least anyone who might own a ten million U.S. dollars yacht like the one that the Bahamas Air Sea Rescue Association reported mysteriously exploding and sinking.  It had occurred just as a pursuing Royal Bahamas Defense Force 198-foot patrol boat came into radar range. When the HMBS Nassau closed on the site of the explosion, all the RBDF patrol boat found was dead fish floating among bits and pieces.  No survivors were found, but they did locate conclusive proof that it was an Italian-built luxury yacht owned by Barry Bristol, a citizen of the Turks and Caicos who was running away from numerous legal charges, including human trafficking.

Weeks later, when Bart Spinner heard that the destruction was of a yacht owned by Barry Bristol, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.  Barry Bristol had visited Great Inagua years earlier looking for a diving adventure and Bart had sent him to CC Hawke.  After that, Bart Spinner noticed there were periods when CC was off the island for weeks at a time.  Then he would show up at Spinner’s pub with tales of antics that he had experienced in the company of Barry Bristol.  Naturally, when CC disappeared around the same time a yacht owned by Barry Bristol exploded not too far from Great Inagua, Bart wondered if the two occurrences were related. 

As time rolled on and CC Hawke failed to return, Bart Spinner became obsessed with the idea that CC’s continued disappearance was connected, somehow, with the explosion of Bristol’s yacht.  When he mentioned his concerns to the local authorities, he was met with studied indifference.  Eventually, Bart learned to just keep his thoughts to himself.  No one was mourning the loss of CC Hawke. 

That was four years ago.  Still, unsettled thoughts were never far from the surface of the former detective’s mind, especially when he could close the pub and slip out to explore the area where the BB Gun was blown apart.  The partial answer wasn’t to occur until long after CC Hawkes was almost completely wiped from local memory.  It was the one-time detective’s aha moment and, while it was an answer to one question, it opened the door to a host of others.

It happened on another glorious day in the Caribbean.  A day when Bart Spinner cast off for a diving trip with three very attractive ladies he knew from his RBPF days in Nassau.  The ladies had visited Great Inagua many times before and when they came they always included a scuba diving adventure with former detective Bart Spinner, for they were all accomplished divers.  Now in retirement, the trio ran a small shop in Nassau that specialized in sea shells, colorful conchs and other trinkets that the tourists seemed to love.  On this trip, they asked Spinner to find a wreck that might include recoverable items they could display in their shop.  Bart settled on the site he had been neglecting lately – the Clarion Bank which happened to be not too far from the approximate location of the debris field from the BB Gun explosion.

Once on the bank, Spinner used his GPS to select a spot on the seamount that he hadn’t looked at before.  The total debris field was wide spread, and over the years, his methodical approach had covered only a quarter of the suspected area where scraps of the large boat rested on the sandy bottom.  Depth here was marginally deep, limiting the bottom time for the divers.  They were technically wise and spent only their allotted time, being cautious with their degassing stops on two dives apiece.  After the second dive, and during a pleasant mid-day meal, Bart decided to cast out his grapnel while recovering the anchor – a practice he had employed occasionally but unsuccessfully at the end of many wreck dives.  His technique was to find the bottom and let the five-pronged grapnel drag along as he worked his boat closer to the point where he could trip his anchor.  He was almost on top of his anchor with the rode hanging nearly straight down when he felt a yank on the grapnel line.

Bart stopped the boat and hauled in on the grapnel, carefully looping the line on the deck.  As the hooks came in sight, Bart saw a most horrifying sight.  One prong had caught a skull; the prong sticking out through the skull’s left eye socket.  He stopped and looked around the boat to assure himself that his friends and clients were all resting casually.

Ladies, we have caught something that will surprise you all.  Please be prepared for a sight that may upset you.

Bart brought the grapnel up out of the water and held it above the gunnel for all to see.  A collective gasp could be heard over the low sounds of the idling outboard engines.  The skull, missing the lower jaw, hung suspended like an apparition from a horror film poster.  As it spun around slowly, Bart could see the bright, gold tooth that positively identified the head of his long-lost buddy.  Captain CC Hawke -- or at least a part of him -- had finally been found.

PART ONE

It took a few moments for New Worlds Ecology Agent Raela 17 to get her bearings.  Intra-space Molecular Transportation or IMT didn’t happen instantaneously.  Some physical laws remained unbendable and it wouldn’t do for the arrival of an IMT traveler to cause a clap of thunder due to an instantaneous expansion of displaced gas molecules.  Rae-One-Seven, as the agent was known to her colleagues around the New Worlds Ecology Bureau, was one of a number of micro-biologists sent to the surface of Red Star Four.  She was a seasoned explorer and used to the slight delay during IMT arrivals.  The time delay also allowed the gravity soles in her synthetic Yalhide boots to measure the attraction between her and this unique new world, and let her select just the right gravitational pull to her personal benefit.  Done correctly – that is to say to her liking -- she would be able to move around with as little effort as possible and still appear to be as stable as anything or anyone else on Red Star Four.

IMT from an orbiting shuttle was considered the safest way for ecology agents to arrive on an as-yet unexplored planet as it didn’t transfer anything other than that which was contained in a completely sterilized space suit.  Later, after being cleared by the ecology team on the surface, the orbiting shuttle would land on Red Star Four and serve as an interim, planet-based, research facility until it was time for the ecology team to depart.  That would be in about seven earth cycles time.

An excerpt from Red Star Four, a work of fiction by Cecil Kholradd

Chapter One: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

The nimble, light jet accelerated quickly as Ben retracted the gear and cleaned up the flaps.  He had been cleared by Isla Grande Tower for takeoff on runway nine with instructions to climb to twelve-hundred feet on a heading of zero nine five degrees, and to contact San Juan Departure Control on frequency one, one, nine decimal four.  Ben preferred Isla Grande Airport – the old San Juan Airport – to the always-busy Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport a few miles east.  Isla Grande was much closer to the original capital with all its old world charm, and it was much less crowded.  Once on departure control frequency he was given radar vectors around traffic in the pattern at the international airport and cleared to climb to flight level three five zero – thirty five thousand feet.  It was the second time in two weeks that he had flown in and out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, but this time it was definitely different.  This time he was alone.

Captain Ben Bass had inherited the Boynton Boat Company nearly a decade ago, but it didn’t impact his chosen occupation with Windward Island Bare Boats (WIBB), where he assisted the owner Sam Ko manage four sailboat leasing locations in the Caribbean.  Sam and Ben were also partners in Debonaire Cruises, which operated three Chesapeake Bay Schooner look-alike sailing yachts that accommodated eight to ten guests in four large staterooms, plus a crew of four.  Meanwhile, Boynton Boats, located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was managed by three of his closest friends, allowing Ben to spend his time sailing his own ketch-rigged sailboat Abbondanza, or flying in the Aereo Cavallo LJ, an Italian-built very-light-jet Ben acquired about the same time he met Harriet Jacobs.

Harriet was an original crewmember aboard Halo Dolly, the Debonaire class cruiser located at St. Croix.  She had recently graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and was so successful in her position of ship’s cook that Ben and Sam gave her a position as the Chief de la Cuisine for the entire Debonaire Cruise Lines.  With this new position came a move to WIBB Headquarters on St. Martin where she developed a bare boat provisioning scheme based upon standardized menus which featured the locally available, fresh foods that abound in the Caribbean.  This scheme was also applied to the fare offered on the Debonaire Cruises boats, each with her own sailing chef.  Not incidentally, she and Ben eventually became very good friends and lovers.  Over the past years, the pair often sailed together, either aboard Abbondanza or on one of WIBB’s thirty-seven foot bare boats.

Harriet’s culinary skills had caught the attention of numerous sailing and cruising aficionados over the years.  As a result, she was recently offered a new position with Tropical Cruise Lines, which was relocating their headquarters from Miami to San Juan.  The move created a number of openings.  Many of the Miami-based managers declined Tropical’s offer to relocate to Puerto Rico; the head of the cruise line’s food management division was one of them.  It was an opportunity too good to refuse and one that gave Harriet many sleepless nights as she wrestled with her decision.  She confided in Ben and the two of them faced the ultimate choices with open hearts.  In the end, it was Ben who convinced Harriet that they could remain long-distance paramours when, in their heart of hearts, they both knew privately that it wouldn’t work. 

Two weeks ago, Ben and Harriet flew to San Juan for an initial interview with Tropical’s CEO and their head of personnel.  When they returned to WIBB Headquarters on St. Martin Harriet only had to wait for ten days before she received a formal offer of the position that was even better than the one she interviewed for.  It came with the provision that she report to San Juan within the week, and even offered air fare from Princess Juliana International Airport, Sint Maarten, at the Dutch end of the island.

The light jet had completed her climb and was cruising on autopilot when Ben contacted St. Thomas Flight Control.  He was cleared to the Saint Thomas VOR and to join high altitude airway B520.  With a forecast of clear weather over St. Thomas, Ben’s plan was to fly B520 to the JUICE high altitude waypoint where he would cancel his instruments flight plan with Saint Maarteen Flight Control and then fly visually to a landing at Saint Martin’s Grande Case airport.  In the past few days, he had gone over the situation in his mind and felt he was in no position to stand in the way of this talented lady.  She deserved the chance to make the very best of her opportunities, and bumming around the Caribbean with a man nearly twice her age wasn’t the answer.  In the end, Harriet agreed and even accepted Ben’s offer to return her to San Juan.  All that remained aboard the light jet was her memory and the most recent science fiction novel she had downloaded onto Ben’s electronic reader.  It would be days before he came across this subtle reminder of one of Harriet’s endearing habits.

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