Operation Black Shark Read online

  Maddie frowned. ‘Where’s the Cabibbean?’

  ‘It’s on the other side of the world,’ Josh said. ‘Sort of below America.’

  ‘But the cost and all the arrangements …?’ Nan responded, astonished that this could really happen at such short notice. ‘I was thinking I’d be celebrating my birthday at the tennis club.’

  Smiling, Ben waved away her worries. ‘I’ve got it all covered. I had money put aside for something like this. And because the cruise sails on Friday, the last-minute deal means the costs have been cut to rock bottom. It’s a bargain. I’ve already booked tickets for us all, plus your flights. You’ll be flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, then to San Juan.’

  ‘Flights as well?’ Nan said. ‘Oh, Ben, this is too much.’

  ‘It’s never too much where my family’s concerned,’ Ben replied earnestly. ‘And this is a rare opportunity for us all to holiday together.’

  ‘Aren’t there special visa requirements for entry into the United States?’ Nan asked.

  Ben nodded. ‘I’ve just filled out all the necessary documentation online. It’s a good thing we organised passports for the kids when we made that trip to New Zealand to visit Marie’s family.’ The Fultons had visited New Zealand after the children’s mother, Marie, had passed away some years earlier from breast cancer.

  Nan grinned. ‘You’re well organised, as usual.’

  ‘Military life has made me organised,’ Ben replied. Wherever he travelled he took a slim document wallet that contained copies of all the vital papers concerning the members of his family, such as insurance details and passport numbers. He never knew when he might need to lay his hands on those records.

  ‘That was a lovely trip to New Zealand,’ Nan sighed nostalgically.

  ‘This one will be, too,’ Ben said, ‘though not as sad.’

  ‘Can I bring my fairy costume?’ Maddie asked. ‘Or will it get wet on the ship?’

  Ben smiled. ‘If it fits in your suitcase, princess, bring it along.’

  ‘How big is the ship, Dad?’ Josh asked with growing excitement. ‘And what’s its name?’

  ‘It’s the Kaiser Cruise Line’s Cleopatra, son. She weighs 90,000 tonnes and was only launched a couple of years ago. She’s one of the most state-of-the-art cruise ships on the sea today.’

  ‘That’s so cool!’ Josh said, grinning. ‘I’ll look it up online.’

  ‘Great!’ Ben clapped his hands. ‘Start packing, everyone, and I’ll see you all at the airport on Friday!’

  Nan emerged into the arrivals hall of San Juan International Airport, pushing a trolley loaded with luggage. Josh and Maddie walked along beside her, with Maddie holding onto her grandmother’s dress. They all beamed and waved when they spotted Ben standing at the forefront of the waiting crowd in jeans and T-shirt.

  Maddie let go of Nan’s dress and ran into her father’s arms. ‘Daddy!’ she squealed with delight.

  Ben twirled her around, then set her back down on the ground. ‘How was the trip?’ he asked Nan.

  ‘Long,’ Nan replied, looking weary, ‘but these two were great.’

  ‘I saw three whole movies on the flights, it was so long,’ said Josh.

  ‘Well,’ Ben said, taking over the trolley, ‘you have nine fabulous days of R and R ahead of you.’

  ‘R and R’s military speak for rest and recreation, Nan,’ Josh said authoritatively.

  ‘Yes, dear, I know,’ Nan returned, winking at Ben.

  ‘Where’s Caesar?’ Maddie asked, looking around.

  ‘In a US Marines quarantine facility here in Puerto Rico,’ Ben replied. ‘He wasn’t happy to go into quarantine, which was to be expected, but he’ll be fine. They say he’s always the best behaved dog in quarantine.’

  ‘As long as no one else takes him out again before you do,’ Josh responded, alluding to the time Caesar was dognapped by a Mexican crime lord.

  ‘Don’t worry, that won’t ever happen again,’ his father assured him. ‘Extra measures have been put in place to prevent it.’

  ‘I thought you’d be in uniform, Daddy,’ Maddie said.

  ‘No, I’m off duty and ready for a great holiday. Are you?’

  ‘Yes!’ Maddie and Josh yelled in unison.

  Inside a rundown warehouse on the outskirts of Havana, thirty-three tourists and their driver were herded out of their tourist bus. They looked around, taking in their captors with anxious eyes.

  ‘What do you intend to do with us?’ asked one grey-haired American, trying to control the tremor in his voice.

  Arms folded, Ricardo Ramos stood with a Makarov semi-automatic pistol in his right hand. ‘Just do as you are told, señor,’ he replied in good English, ‘and you will all live to see your loved ones.’ Turning to his fellow prison escapees, he snapped a command in Spanish. ‘Tie their wrists and ankles.’

  The men took up a sack and pulled out an AK-47 assault rifle, bag ties and lengths of rope. The tourists were made to lie on the grimy concrete floor under the watch of the armed men, before being bound hand and foot. Several among them began to sob.

  ‘Do not cry,’ Ricardo said impatiently. ‘You will not be here long. We will tell the police where to find you.’

  One of the older women saw that a dark-haired female tourist who looked to be in her thirties had not been tied up. In fact, she was standing with their captors. ‘Why haven’t you tied her up?’ the older woman asked.

  A smile crept over Ricardo’s face. ‘Some people are not always what they appear to be, señora.’ He beckoned the dark-haired woman, and when she sidled in beside him, he put his hand around her waist. ‘Meet my girlfriend, amigos.’

  ‘She was on the bus with us when it took us to the prison,’ a German tourist said. Now it dawned on him what the young woman’s real role had been. ‘She helped you to escape!’ he gasped.

  ‘Give the man a prize,’ Ricardo said, rolling his eyes. ‘As much as I would like to stay here and chat with you all, we have an appointment to keep.’ He pointed his pistol at a side door. ‘Let’s go, amigos!’

  With the dark-haired woman trotting on ahead, Ricardo and his men hurried out of the warehouse. An old, battered Ford pick-up truck was waiting for them in the lane. Ricardo and the other escapees clambered into the back of the truck and lay down, and the woman pulled a canvas cover over the top of them before slamming the rear tray shut. She climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. With a gush of oily smoke from the rusty exhaust, the pick-up drove off down the lane.

  On the Boat Deck of the mighty ocean liner Cleopatra, two thousand passengers wearing orange lifejackets formed orderly lines beneath the lifeboats hanging from davits above their heads. Meanwhile, busy crew members in bright yellow vests checked names against the passenger manifest. The ship had yet to leave the dock in San Juan. As required by international regulations, the passengers were being put through a lifeboat drill.

  The Fulton family stood among scores of others at their muster station beneath Lifeboat 008, watching passengers stream by in search of their muster stations. More than half the passengers were middle-aged or elderly. Some were frail and walked with the aid of sticks or walking frames. Several people rolled by in wheelchairs. Of the remaining passengers, many were parents with children ranging from toddlers to teenagers.

  ‘These muster stations are for port-side passengers,’ a crew member called to several passengers who were clearly on the wrong side of the ship. ‘If the muster station number on your Ocean Pass is an odd number, you should be on the starboard side.’

  ‘What’s the port side and what’s the starport side, Daddy?’ Maddie asked.

  ‘Port is left, starboard is right,’ Josh said. ‘Right, Dad?’

  ‘Roger that, son,’ Ben affirmed.

  Josh was taking it all in with an intense curiosity. His eyes followed an elderly man in a wheelchair. ‘Dad, how does someone in a wheelchair get into a lifeboat?’ he asked.

  ‘Crew members would lift them in, Josh,’ his
father replied.

  Looking up, Josh read a sign painted on the side of their lifeboat. ‘Can one hundred and fifty people really fit inside one of these boats?’ he pondered aloud.

  Ben nodded. ‘If necessary.’ Taking his medicine, doing his exercises and keeping away from stimulants such as tea, coffee and alcohol over the past few days, Ben was feeling almost no pain from his back injury. He hadn’t told his family about the problem, not wanting to worry them while on holiday.

  ‘It would be very cramped in one of those,’ Nan said, eyeing the lifeboat above them.

  ‘But at least you’d be safe in there,’ Maddie remarked. ‘Look, the lifeboat’s all roofed over, so waves and rain can’t get in. It might be quite cosy, really.’

  ‘Well, we’ll hopefully never have to get inside one, so we’ll never know,’ Josh said.

  ‘Daddy,’ Maddie said thoughtfully, ‘if we get lifejackets and lifeboats on a ship, how come they don’t give us parachutes on planes?’

  Hearing this, older passengers around them chuckled.

  ‘It’s a good question, Ben,’ Nan said with a smile.

  ‘It wouldn’t be practical to have parachutes on a passenger aircraft,’ Ben explained. ‘It takes a lot of training to use a parachute properly and safely.’

  ‘And if anyone should know about parachuting, it’s Dad,’ Josh said proudly.

  An elderly, white-haired gentleman standing in line beside them spoke up. ‘Have you been skydiving?’ he asked Ben in an American accent.

  Ben smiled. ‘Yes, a little,’ he said, giving Josh a cautionary glance. For security reasons, the Fulton family had been schooled by Ben not to tell people what he did for a living.

  But at that moment Maddie had forgotten this rule. ‘My Daddy goes on ops,’ she volunteered. ‘And Caesar goes too.’

  The elderly gentleman frowned. ‘What do you mean by “ops”, little lady?’

  ‘Hops,’ Nan quickly interjected, at the same time squeezing Maddie’s hand to silence her. ‘My son hops all over the world for his job.’

  ‘Is that right?’ the gentleman said. ‘What line of business are you in, sir?’

  Ben was about to give his usual answer to such a question – that he was a consultant to the United Nations – when a voice came booming over the ship’s PA system.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.’ The man’s voice was friendly and laced with a foreign accent. ‘The muster drill is now complete. Thank you all for cooperating with your crew in this drill today. You may leave the Boat Deck as I announce your muster station numbers.’

  Soon, the Fultons and those around them began to move towards the glass double doors that led from the deck to the ship’s interior.

  ‘That was fun,’ Maddie said, fingering her child-sized lifejacket. ‘I like my lifejacket. Can I keep it?’

  Nan chuckled. ‘They have to go back in our cabin, sweetheart.’

  ‘Oh,’ Maddie said, disappointed.

  ‘Of course,’ said the elderly gentleman, who was walking behind them with his wife, ‘most ocean liners have done away with the use of lifejackets during lifeboat drill. Personally, I think it’s a great idea to get passengers used to putting them on. Don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ Ben agreed. ‘It makes us all take the drill seriously.’

  ‘Exactly,’ the gentleman said. ‘The Kaiser Line is very conscious of safety. I like that.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve cruised with Kaiser before,’ Ben said, as they reached the doors.

  The man and his wife exchanged smiles. ‘Oh, yeah, plenty of times,’ the gentleman said.

  The two families passed through the glass doors and went their separate ways. The Fultons took a lift down several decks to their cabins on Deck 3. Ben could have booked them cabins with balconies, higher up on Decks 7 or 8, but he didn’t like the idea of the children possibly being out in the open and unsupervised while at sea. Instead, he’d booked them two adjoining cabins lower in the ship, around about the middle, on the port side – Cabins 3034 and 3036. From his experience aboard naval ships, Ben knew that the lower they were in the ship and the closer to the middle, the smoother their ride would be and they shouldn’t have to worry about seasickness. Ben and Josh shared Cabin 3034 while Nan and Maddie took the one next door. They all had single beds, and each cabin had a bathroom as well as a large rectangular porthole for them to look out of. With wardrobes, a sofa and a TV, their cabins were much like hotel rooms, only this hotel floated from one country to another.

  The Cleopatra was one of a number of big cruise ships in the Kaiser Line’s fleet. All were named after famous queens from history, following the custom of referring to a ship as a female. The name of each Kaiser ship dictated its theme and decor. The Boudicca, named after a British Celtic queen in Roman times, featured Celtic and Roman interior designs. The Dido had a North African theme; the Zenobia, a Middle Eastern theme; the Isabella, a Spanish theme. The Cleopatra was named after the queen of Egypt who had famously been involved with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony in the first century BC.

  Josh and Maddie excitedly led the way on an exploration of eleven of the ship’s dozen decks. Deck 1 was a restricted area because it contained the crew quarters. The ship had a Nile Dining Room and specialty restaurants, including the Alexandrian and the Canopian. There was the Luxor Theatre, entertainment and gaming areas called Caesar’s and Antony’s, and a dance club called Crocodile Rock. There was even a small shopping centre, the Delta, with duty-free stores. As they toured the vessel and discovered its delights, Nan decided she would book into Cleo’s health and beauty spa, while Ben planned to put in time at the Pharos, the ship’s gym, which was named after the ancient lighthouse that once stood at the entrance to Alexandria’s harbour in Egypt.

  Josh and Maddie found a special place called the Pyramids Kidzone, where children could hang out and participate in activities such as dancing, singing, painting and drawing. Maddie immediately liked the idea of Kidzone and decided she would wear her fairy outfit the first time she went. Up top, the Cleopatra had two swimming pools, a water slide, a rock-climbing wall, a video arcade, a maze and deck games.

  At six o’clock that evening Maddie and Josh led their father and grandmother up to the top deck for the Cleopatra’s departure. As the ship reversed from the dock, shepherded by a pair of tugboats, passengers lined the rails, taking selfies and photos of the dockside and San Juan’s historic Old Town below. The ship slowly turned and set a course for the open sea, making its way across the harbour. Crowds waved from a ferry, enviously peering up at the liner’s passengers.

  ‘We’re special, aren’t we, Daddy?’ Maddie said.

  ‘We’re very lucky to be sailing out to sea on an ocean liner, princess,’ Ben replied.

  Nan squeezed Ben’s arm. ‘Thank you, darling. This was a wonderful surprise. I never imagined I’d be on a Caribbean cruise for my birthday.’

  Ben smiled and kissed his mum on the cheek. He could have told his family that they had a bunch of Antiguan gangsters to thank for their cruise. Instead, he said, ‘Just you wait. It’s going to get even better!’

  That evening, as the Cleopatra ploughed west through a low Caribbean swell at a steady eighteen knots – the equivalent of thirty-three kilometres an hour – the Fulton family arrived for the Nile Dining Room’s first sitting. As the seating was pre-planned, the waiter escorted the Fultons through the vast, crowded room to their table, which was laid for ten people. Already seated at the table were none other than the elderly couple from the muster drill.

  ‘We meet again,’ the gentleman said as Ben sat down beside him. Reaching out, he shook Ben’s hand and introduced himself. ‘Oscar Lindoni, from Miami Beach, and this is my wife, Lindy.’

  Names were exchanged all round, before the table’s four other diners joined them. They were made up of English honeymooners Bob and Courtney Skivington, and a middle-aged couple, Don and Tory Banks, from Vancouver, Canada.

  ‘Table 122 is
a real United Nations,’ Oscar said cheerily.

  Nan smiled knowingly at Ben, who gave her a wink. The table was soon abuzz with conversation as their waiters took their food and drink orders. Courtney Skivington talked to Maddie about fairies while Josh became engrossed in Bob’s stories about designing ships. Meanwhile, Oscar and Lindy Lindoni were deep in conversation with Don and Ben about their best cruise experiences.

  At one point Ben glanced over at Nan, who was talking enthusiastically with Tory Banks about growing roses, and smiled to himself. This surprise holiday was working out even better than he’d expected. Then he heard Maddie mention Caesar’s name to Courtney Skivington. She was telling her how she had once put fairy wings on Caesar. Ben smiled even more widely. His thoughts went to Caesar, hopefully asleep now in his US Marines ‘doggy hotel’ back in Puerto Rico. Ben never liked leaving Caesar behind, but Australia’s strict quarantine regulations were good for Caesar’s health as well as for everyone else’s. Ben consoled himself with the thought that he and his canine partner would soon be reunited. Little did he know under what dramatic circumstances that would occur.

  High on the Cleopatra’s navigation bridge, Captain Karl Gustarv, a tall blond man with a neat beard, sat in his padded leather chair, looking out into the black night. Beside him, the helmsman sat at a steering wheel just like the kind used in an average family sedan. He also had control of three throttles, like the type used by airline pilots, for the ship’s three engines. The engines were suspended in pods beneath the ship’s hull. The central pod was fixed in one position, but the two outer pods moved to the right and left when the helmsman turned the wheel. So, instead of having a rudder like most ships, the two wing engine pods steered the Cleopatra. For extra manoeuvrability, the ship had a pair of smaller thruster engine pods in the bow, and these could be used to help turn the ship even when it was at a dead stop, which was especially helpful alongside a dock.

  Captain Gustarv’s eyes dropped to the radar screens in front of him, studying them carefully. The navigation officer had entered the ship’s course into the Cleopatra’s computer, and the computer was steering the ship. At any time, the helmsman could override the computer and take manual control, but right now he was sitting with his arms on the armrests of his chair while the wheel turned to the left as the computer changed their course to the southwest. Should another vessel appear in the Cleopatra’s path, the navigation radar would automatically set off an alarm to alert the bridge crew.