Caicos

By Dave Moruzzi

Captain Ben Bass becomes involved in a global intrigue when a Windward Island Bare Boats charter captain is murdered after winning a race and, hundreds of miles away, a family friend is kidnapped. At the same time, natives are being enslaved in equatorial Africa. It is hard to see that these seemingly unrelated incidents are actually all part of a complicated plot that could have world-wide impact on the growing electronics industry. Ben and his friend Jeanne Hoch have only a short time together as they sail Abbondanza into the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the high-tech sailboat becomes a missile target.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312383401

Book preview

Caicos

CAICOS

Revision II

Copyright © 2014 by Dave Moruzzi

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-312-38340-1

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Frontispiece

Prologue

The small equatorial African man stood perfectly still, not making a sound.  He had just escaped his captors and had quickly moved deeply into the forest.  He quietly scanned his memory to recall the image he needed before making his next move.  Julu Mulolo is a member of the Baka clan, one of the large groups of hunter-gatherers that lived in the area of Africa along the equator from the Atlantic Ocean eastward to Lake Victoria.  Non-Africans called them pygmies.  In recent years, the indigenous hunter-gatherers of equatorial Africa have been losing their forest heritage due to deforestation, internecine warfare and misguided public policies. For centuries, Julu’s clan lived in harmony in the tropical forests of what is now eastern Cameroon.  At one time they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but today their population is probably no more than 40,000 or about a fifth of the total number of small hunter-gatherers remaining in equatorial Africa.

Julu is an exceptional man.  In any society save his own, he would have been considered a gifted scholar with an eidetic memory.  But, as a youth, he quickly realized that his capabilities for total recall of any images in his jungle surroundings would have been considered extremely abnormal among other members of his clan.  So he kept his peace, suppressing any attempt to out-hunt or out-fish his fellow clan members.

But that was years ago.  Now, many miles away from his homeland, Julu had been forced to work in the streams and rivers on the margins of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — a lawless area under the control of renegade General Bosco Ntaganda and his band of rebels known as M23.

As he stood in the forest, he submerged himself in the jungle surroundings and closed his eyes to concentrate.  The image he needed was that of the map in the mine foreman’s shack in the clearing where he and the other slaves were kept when not at work.  It showed where he had been taken after his Bantu captors spirited him and three others away from their relocation village.  The other two Baka clansmen had died during their month’s long journey across Africa.  Their health was already in deep decline, primarily for the lack of protein in their diet.  The Cameroon government, in their attempt to remove these indigenous people from areas declared national parklands, had placed them on marginal lands already claimed by the full-sized Bantu.  These lands were being systematically deforested by the Bantu which, in turn, reduced the Baka’s natural food sources.  Casaba may fill the bellies, but it could not meet their dietary requirements.

Julu checked his memory and used his natural abilities to determine which direction he needed to take if he was to return to the surroundings his clan claimed as homeland.  Looking deeply into the jungle, Julu chose an animal trail and quietly moved off into the gathering darkness.  After searching for an hour, he chose an area where a large animal had made a day bed. The vegetation was matted down in a natural depression which provided Julu with a small amount of concealment.  It wasn’t perfect but it would have to do.  In only a few minutes, Julu had covered himself with large leaves and was one with the forest floor.  He gave silent thanks to Ejengi for the forest god’s protection and went to sleep.

Standing at less than five feet, the youthful, fully-grown Julu Mulolo was about the average height of male members of his village.  Growing up as a Baka had been filled with accepting the harmony that was the way of the forest.  He learned to hunt with the other males, always holding back his exceptional gifts because he instinctively knew they would be misunderstood.  When Cameroon officials came to their small village and told them they had to move, Julu and the others had no choice.  The only up side to this was that it provided Julu the opportunity to attend a teaching facility that was run by a well-meaning French religious organization — a holdover from the distant past when Cameroon was French Equatorial Africa.

For the first time in his short life, Julu was exposed to books.  Within the first three years of living in the margins of the African Bantu population, Julu had earned the equivalent of a high school education.  This education provided him other opportunities which allowed him to keep himself and his close family in relatively good health.  But it was also one of the main reasons that he was kidnapped and sold into slavery to the miners raping the Congo basin of its mineral wealth.  In addition to his native language and that of a number of other clans, Julu could speak French and understood English, although his pronunciation was colored by the fact that it was learned from an early King James Bible.  In slavery, Julu worked the river beds with other captives, but was also used to translate the overseer’s instructions into a number of indigenous African dialects.

His first opportunity to escape his captivity came when the camp was being prepared for an important visitor.  Julu had no idea who was coming. His only consideration was that the distraction provided him an opportunity to slip away from the work detail, throw away his collection of small, grey pebbles and move off in to the forest.

He knew the forest.  It was his home for many years.  It mattered little that he was hundreds and hundreds of miles away from his Baka homeland.  Anything was better than scouring the river beds for pebbles or for living in the relocation village among people that considered him chattel. He was resolved to return to the Baka lands of his ancestors and felt in his heart that he had the knowledge to make this journey.  His first task was putting a significant distance from the mines and doing it without leaving a trace.

PART ONE

SMALL, MEDIUM AND LARGE

Chapter One: The Odd Trio

No one on the campus of Auburn University in Alabama would have ever thought that Farris Digby, Neal Brown or Terry Anderson would be best buddies and inseparable colleagues.  They had almost nothing in common.  Digby was a jock and on the first string of the Auburn Tigers during his junior and senior years.  As a student of Materials Engineering in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, he was adequate but far from brilliant.  After graduation, Farris found a position in the computer industry, working on substrates that form the basis for computer chip manufacture.  His primary claim to fame was that he married his college sweetheart, the well-endowed leader of the Tigers’ cheerleading squad, Tracey Bowen.

Neal Brown came from a wealthy family, but was something of a computer nerd.  Bookish and bashful, Neal generally kept himself to himself.  It was only in the company of Farris and Terry that Neal ever came out of his shell, even if it was only for a minimum of exposure.  That he withstood being the brunt of Farris’s harmless but annoying practical jokes was astonishing.  Nothing that Farris ever instigated, no diabolical trick or personal embarrassment, ever seemed to bother Neal.  He still assisted his best buddies in their studies and it was suspected but never proven that Neal even wrote some of Farris’s term papers.  After his graduation with a Business Administration degree in Supply Chain Management, Neal joined his father’s paper company as a clerk who was expected to move up the management chain. He settled down with a young wife and soon became the father of twin boys.

Terry Anderson was a real college rake.  He didn’t participate in sports beyond running an illegal betting book, and dating as many of the cheerleading squad that his close association with Farris would allow.  Terry was always on the very edge of flunking out, but always seemed to squeak by.  It wasn’t for the lack of intelligence — Terry was really very smart.  But he displayed a laziness that was almost criminal, with just a hint of real larceny thrown in.  After leaving university with an Education degree, Terry opened a night club not too far from the Auburn campus and just south of Opelika.  He catered to both the university crowd but also benefitted from being not too far from the US Army’s Fort Benning, Georgia.

There were only two things that this unlikely trio shared in common.  They all enjoyed sailing.  Over their university years and to this very day, Farris, Terry and Neal enjoyed all forms of sail boating.  As undergraduates, they raced one-design boats on Mobile Bay whenever they could get away from campus.  And after they had embarked on their individual life works, they continued to sail as a group as often as they could.  Over the last few years, they had gravitated to single-handed competition.  It wasn’t always easy to find identical design sail boats available for bare-boat leasing, and when it wasn’t possible, they would spend hours hammering out a handicap system.  But their real joy was in head to head competition in boats of the same design.

Their only other shared trait was, as undergraduates, all three were in lust with Tracey Bowen.  And, truth be told, all three had slept with the campus beauty before her marriage to Farris put an only slight crimp in that.  Neal was married now and definitely out of the picture, but Terry was still single.  He felt no compunction and, as long as the woman was willing, he took advantage of Tracey’s natural appentency every chance he got.  The pair was very cautious and, as far as they were concerned, Farris didn’t have a clue.  In fact, Terry and Tracey would agree on a tryst that would occur as the three men were in route to their latest sailing adventure — a one-way race from St. Martin to Charlotte Amalie Harbor, Saint Thomas, using identical cruising sailboats from Windward Island Bare Boats (WIBB) out of Anse Marcel.

- ————— -

Sam Ko, the Windward Islands Bare Boats owner, returned his Port de France office at Anse Marcel on St. Martin after a quick visit to the recently opened location in the Bay Islands of Honduras.  Earlier in the pre-season, Ko had been to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and he seemed satisfied that conditions could not be better for a company with thirty two one-design cruising sailboats.  It should prove to be a good season. 

The business model he had followed emphasized not only local bare-boat cruising, but also the ability to hire a WIBB boat at one location and leave her at another.  He even accepted reservations that allowed the customer to stop and drop off at almost any other Caribbean port, provided of course that the customer covered Ko’s costs to return the boat to the original location.

The prevailing winds, for the most part, were southeast across these latitudes. This made bare-boat sailing much more comfortable for cruising sailors and their families.  In theory, it was possible to lease a boat at Martinique and sail on a single starboard tack northward to hundreds of locations with no need to beat into the wind.  And the one-design concept made it interesting for avid racers as well.  Where else could you take a vacation and enjoy time-trial competition to a new location?  Sam had three new reservations on the books for one-way, bare-boat leases, and one of these reservations, the one that originated at Ansel Marcel, St. Martin and ended in Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas, was for three solo captains, each with a WIBB boat.  According to Farris Digby, the captain that made the reservations, the three had been in friendly competition for years and they were going to see who could get to the US Virgins the fastest.

Ko’s number one assistant was Ben Bass.  Ben looked after many of the details required to run a bare-boat charter business and had been with WIBB for years.  Bass was a former Air Force fighter pilot who had gravitated to sailing after retirement.  For a number of years he demonstrated sail boats for Boynton Boats in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but left the company after a fatal accident, the responsibility for which he had been completely cleared.  But even though he was not responsible, Bass left South Florida and found a new home in the Caribbean.  It was there that Ben Bass acquired a storm-damaged boat he named Abbondanza.  After hours and hours of hard work, the Secure Passage 78 became a completely different boat.  She was a ketch-rigged, pilot house motor sailboat and a test bed for advances in propulsion, sail navigation and control.

Abbondanza’s accommodations below were luxurious.  Her forward cabin was a spacious area, with its own head and shower.  She had double berth crew quarters and a navigation station to starboard amidships with a galley to port and a complete larder in the center. Aft of this area there were three water-tight compartments.  The first was an engineering area with a generator, air compressor, scuba equipment and a direct access to the sea.  The next area contained twin diesels for propulsion.  The aft compartment was a ‘garage’ where Ben kept two jet skis and other gear.  Both compartments were accessible from the deck and the garage opened up at the stern with a sea ramp for launch and recovery of the jet skis.

On Abbondanza’s upper deck there were four steering stations, two on the open after-deck and two in the pilot house.  There was also a huge bunk area forward of the helms and immediately under the large forward windshield.  All ‘glass’ areas of the pilot house were made of a projectile-resistant laminate — one of the many features Ben installed when he rebuilt the storm-tossed ketch.  Ben also removed the fixed keel and added a retractable dagger-board.  The boat also had an automatic water ballast system to aid in stability.

Ben Bass really didn’t need to be employed.  The tragic death of Sally Boynton, daughter of the original owner of Boynton Boats, left the entire company to Ben.  Sally’s uncle had tried to wrest control of the company from Sally but was found dead just as the US Justice Department was about to indict him for trafficking in drugs. His death was declared a suicide.  That made Ben a wealthy man with a huge management problem.  He really didn’t want to be tied down to the east coast of Florida, when he had the ideal vocation sailing the Caribbean on a well-founded boat almost at will.  The solution was to leave the day-to-day operations in the very capable hands of two brothers, Tommy and John Pascal.

- ————— -

The call came through on the secure combination satellite and cellular telephone Ben’s son Grant had provided.  Grant, a brilliant engineering student doing graduate work in University of Virginia’s Emerging Technologies Laboratory near the Dulles International Airport, was also the supplier of most of Abbondanza’s high-tech computer systems.

Hello, Dad.  How are things in the sunny Caribbean?

It’s good to hear from you Grant. The season is just about to start and I have to do a number of check-outs this morning.  What’s on your mind?  Ben knew that Grant had been updating Abbondanza’s computer system via satellite, and was anxious to hear what had been done.

"Well, I have completed the download of a voice-activated control avatar.  The avatar is addressed as ABII, which stands for Abbondanza’s Basic Intelligent Interface, and pronounced Abby, Grant explained. Did you get the box I sent you last week?"

Yes.  A container was delivered the day before yesterday, but I haven’t opened it yet.

"When you do, Dad, you will find a collection of wireless transceivers.  These transceivers are digital CCDs — charge coupled devices that pick up and transmit audio as well as all-light-level video information within their field of view.  I have had them constructed to disguise their function.  I most cases they will appear to be a normal part of the boat’s construction.  They are wireless and powered