Finding the freighter to haul all of this out to the Western Islands wouldn’t be difficult. There were lots of them on the market. Hiring a captain and crew that we could trust was another problem entirely. They had to know where we were going, or we obviously wouldn’t get there. Once we were there, they would know what we had found. We needed people who were either absolutely honest or absolutely loyal to us, because they would be in a position to screw us royally, while making themselves a fortune doing it.
“Dare we try to run the ship ourselves?” I said.
“If it was in good enough shape to begin with, and not likely to break down, I don’t see why not. Navigating a big ship is no different than navigating a rowboat,” Adam said. “Except for the fact that it would be against the law. It takes all kinds of licences and permits before they let you run a commercial, oceangoing freighter.”
“Well, what if we buy a boat registered in Nigeria or Ecuador or something. Doesn’t that get us around the law?” I asked.
“Maybe, I’m not sure. But I still don’t like it. There’s a lot more to running a ship than a sailboat. If we blow it, we could get a lot of people killed. Including us. Tell you what. Let’s go talk to a bonding company. They sell a sort of insurance on people, where if somebody cheats on us, or gives away company secrets like the Western Isles, we get paid a lot, and the crook gets shafted properly.”
So that’s what we did. We got recommendations on a captain, and had the bonding company check him out. Then we told him exactly what we were doing, paid him half again what was usual, and had him check out and recommend the ship to buy. We even let him hire his own, minimal crew, although they also had to pass the bonding company’s muster.
We used the same approach on our security team. Soon, we had our own, well-paid, twelve-man police force. Their leader was Colonel Jezowski, and Major Perkins was his executive officer. Of the other ten, some of them were ex-SEALs, and the rest were ex-Special Forces. They were all retired sergeants or navy chiefs, and all had some civilian police training. And yeah, they were expensive, but this time, Adam and I weren’t going to be beat up, burned out, and chased out of town.
THIRTY-SEVEN
We set sail on a fine morning, under a clear blue sky, which was ordinary enough for San Diego, but a special delight for a couple of men born and raised under the often grey skies of Michigan. With Shirley and her husband holding down the office in San Diego, Adam and I were returning to the Western Islands, and to our ladies fair.
Our ship was fueled, loaded and crewed. Captain Cyrus Johnson was the sort of man who exuded trust and confidence, almost too much of it, with his close-clipped white hair, his ramrod-straight posture, and his impeccably tailored uniforms. He was an Annapolis graduate, had been a career U.S. Navy man, and had spent the last ten years as a merchant captain before he had been forcibly retired at seventy-one. He was physically healthy, mentally alert, and wanted to stay at sea. If some idiot shipping company insisted on letting him go, that was their sad problem. Adam and I figured that we would have been fools to pass him by.
The members of his seven-man crew had similar backgrounds, and they always saluted him in military fashion. It just came natural around the man. Even Adam and I had to restrain ourselves from saluting, genuflecting or kowtowing in some manner. Here he was, working for us, and there we were, working hard at not subordinating ourselves to him. But I could hardly criticize a man for being too much of what we had asked for in the first place. We figured that if we ever needed someone to stare down his grace Duke Guilhem Alberigo XXI, Captain Johnson was our man.
The ship, the James Crawford, was old but well kept. We got it for a lot less than I thought we’d have to spend. Small freighters like ours were no longer economical. They couldn’t begin to compete with the big, fast container ships, but for what we had in mind, it was perfect.
Adam and I toyed with changing the name, since nobody had the slightest idea who James Crawford was or had been. But the captain wasn’t enthusiastic about it, so we let the matter lie.
Our Chief of Police, or perhaps I should call him our Guard Captain, Colonel Jezowski, had a fair amount in common with Captain Johnson. A West Point graduate, with a distinguished career in the U.S. Army, he had been a police chief in a middle-sized Oregon town until he too had been forcibly retired.
This business of hiring retirees wasn’t accidental. We wanted steady, calm, and experienced men, not fire breathers. We wanted to keep the peace, not win a war.
Our police force was fit and well armed. Although we hadn’t seen the need for any heavy weaponry, or explosives, we were strong on detection equipment, bugging devices, and surveillance cameras. Since our enemies on the island were not likely to know of the existence of such things, we resolved to use them discreet(c)ly, and to mention them not at all.
Our new CD library was well stocked in most areas, but not in spy movies and police melodramas. Oh, the islanders would be able to pick up just about anything off the satellite hookup, but having them learn later rather than sooner was all for the better.
Except for the captain and the colonel, we had kept our mission destination a secret from our newly hired people, just saying that it was a remote but healthy place with friendly people. Once at sea, we gathered them together, and Adam, having lost the toss, swore them to secrecy and then told them the whole, true story.
I don’t think one person in ten completely believed us, but via the internet, they’d seen that their pay was being deposited into their bank accounts in San Diego, and that’s enough for most people.
* * *
We had Captain Johnson check out our calculations, guesses really, as to the position of the Western Islands. We showed him Adam’s antique sextant, which he found to be quaint, but accurate, and told him how we checked out my watch, a week or so after the sighting. The captain had us shoot a noon fix, and he couldn’t fault our equipment, our technique, or our calculations.
It wasn’t until we showed him the map we’d gotten on the island that he really perked up. He asked all sorts of questions about it, and even about the “paper” it was drawn on. Eventually, I got the feeling that the good captain was starting to believe that we were telling the truth about the islands.
Maybe we should have showed everybody the crates of agricultural products we’d brought back, instead of keeping everything as secret as possible. Some of the stuff, like Super-Hemp, was as impressive as all hell. The simple fact was that I had never had trouble making people believe me before, and neither had Adam. We had thought that our problem would be to keep the place secret, to keep the profits up, and to keep our promises to the duke. That everybody would think we were liars had simply never occurred to us. If we hadn’t had enough money to convince people to come along even if we were crazy, the whole project would have ended in that smashed-up Mexican hotel bar.
We had some island clothing with us, saved for our grand entrance there, and one day I showed a group of security people my gorgeously embroidered jacket. When they looked unimpressed, I challenged them to rip it up, and once they saw I was serious, five big men gave it their best shot. Not so much as a wrinkle! One of them had a fighting knife at his belt, and I told him to go ahead and cut it up. He tried, without doing anything but dulling his knife.
“So,” I said at last. “Have I made believers out of you?”
A huge ex-SEAL said, “I don’t know, sir, but that’s the prettiest piece of Kevlar I ever saw!”
I picked up my jacket and walked away, my head hung low. Somehow, I’d make them believe.
* * *
We started giving a series of talks and seminars about the Western Islands, explaining their history, their technology, and their customs. We even tried to teach our new employees a bit of the language, simple stuff like “Hello,” “Thank You,” and “Take Me To My Leader, Since I’m Lost.” Attendance was dismal, even when we told people that attending was part of their job.