Without A Trace

Lieutenant Nikki Bustillo knew the shrimp boat her Coast Guard crew had just boarded for inspection was hiding something. It was as plain, she thought wryly, as the nose on her face.

She peered through the boat’s rear pilothouse door at the ragged Hispanic crew members lined up in the vessel’s stern. Yep. Definitely something wrong. Beneath the stench of day-old shrimp lay the almost overwhelming musk of fear. It emanated from the deckhands as strongly as the diesel fumes off the hot engines. This wasn’t about having a net with its turtle extraction devices sewn shut, which was an illegal technique that caught more fish but threatened endangered sea turtles.

No, these crewmen were scared to death.

“Problem?” Ensign Rich Mansfield, the boarding team’s rookie member, joined her in the trawler’s pilothouse.

“The Montoya is carrying more than dinner.”

Mansfield gave her a measured look. “How do you know?”

Nikki nodded at the fidgeting shrimper crew. “They look nervous to you?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

The truth was, these men didn’t look any more nervous than any other crew Nikki’s command had stopped in the past three weeks along Florida’s coastline. But to put it mildly, they reeked of fear. Literally. The vessel was definitely carrying something besides shrimp. Cocaine was a good guess.

Mansfield hovered at her elbow as she thumbed through the vessel’s shoddily kept logs. She would’ve had the fresh-out-of-cadet-training ensign pegged merely as a nuisance, except back in February she’d received an encrypted e-mail message from someone called Delphi warning her to watch her back: somebody called Arachne was getting her jollies kidnapping Athena Academy students and alumnae, and Nikki’s name was on the wish list.

This Delphi had never contacted her before, but had known too many students—too many facts about too many of Nikki’s friends—for Nikki to doubt she knew what she was talking about. Behind that e-mail had come a visit from a former classmate, Dana Velasco, confirming Delphi’s assertion. Nikki had gotten the impression she—Nikki could only think of Delphi as “she”—was never wrong.

And Mansfield had a habit of pestering Nikki with a lot of questions she preferred not to answer.

He’d been particularly intrigued by her schooling. The Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women was unusual and he’d wanted to hear all about it. Fair enough. She’d given him the Cliff’s Notes version and moved on to her rapid-fire years at Florida State University studying literature, then to her decision to join the Coast Guard.

The truth was, the Athena Academy was the first place where she’d felt like she belonged. After an early childhood filled with seven raucous older brothers, she’d felt like an all-girls school was somehow coming home. Her orientation group, the Hecates, had consisted of four other girls, each unique, each talented and gutsy and strong. How could she possibly explain her sense of sistership with these women? Especially to someone she didn’t know. It didn’t seem…right…to share that with a stranger.

After graduation, she’d hoped to put her unique strengths to good use: her eidetic memory, her particularly fine eye-hand coordination and her martial arts skills. Those strengths and a late-blooming love of the sea had led her inevitably to the Coast Guard, where she’d screamed up the command ladder, making lieutenant at twenty-three.

Her ability to unerringly locate the bags of cocaine, heroin bricks and pot stashes? Well, that was just a little something extra given to her when her mom’s IVF doctor took a few liberties with her genetic material. It was why she could smell trouble in a man’s sweat, and why she’d chosen drug interdiction as her Coast Guard career of choice.

When Delphi told her back in February that she’d been targeted for kidnapping because of her special ability, Nikki had had to take a few days to get adjusted to that reality. Her parents, who’d simply wanted a daughter instead of an eighth son, had applied to the Zuni, New Mexico, fertility lab in an attempt to have one. As far as Nikki knew, the only special order her parents had placed was for gender. And nothing else.

But with the warning from Delphi concerning Athena students with “abilities,” Nikki had set about methodically reviewing the files of her fellow crew members, just to cover her bases. Then Mansfield had arrived a month ago and started hanging around her like a bad high school crush.

She regarded him now as he shuffled through greasy work orders and pay slips in a console drawer. Maybe he was just an Anglo with a fascination for Cuban women. Okay, so she was second-generation Cuban-American, born and bred in Arizona, but she knew her way around Spanish—vocabulary was a helluva lot simpler when you had a photographic memory—even if her pronunciation left a little something to be desired.

With Mansfield still at her elbow, she radioed her captain aboard the cutter Undaunted and let him know what was going down.

“Another hunch?” Captain Pickens’s voice growled in response.

“Yes, sir.”

“Go with it.”

“Yes, sir.” She turned to Mansfield. “Let’s see what they’ve got in the hold.”

She set two members of her boarding team to stand guard over the trawler’s captain and crew while the rest fanned out and started a search for drugs.

It had begun as a more or less routine stop. The ancient trawler, common to this part of the south Florida coastline, had looked a bit light as the Undaunted cruised into visual range. Normally the bottom paint of a fully loaded shrimp boat lay underwater. This trawler’s bottom paint showed a clear six inches out of the water, suggesting that the concrete ballast used to steady the trawler in rough seas had been replaced with something much lighter. Like cocaine.

When Mansfield yanked open the main hatch, fear musk—a cross between burnt coffee and battery acid—surged from the general vicinity of the shrimper captain.

“Got a problem?” Nikki asked the captain in Spanish.

He shrugged, looking sullen, though his gaze kept darting at the guardsmen disappearing into the hold.

“How long have you been piloting this vessel?”

Nikki asked the usual questions while her squad members poked through the compartments where the shrimp were stored. The captain muttered his answers, which she jotted down in a small notebook. The Montoya rolled gently as fat waves slid beneath her, and the sun glared off the water and steel.

After a few minutes, Mansfield was back, wiping sweat from his face and looking queasy.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You’ve been thorough.” She made it a statement, so he’d understand thoroughness was expected, no matter how bad the job stank.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Nikki narrowed her eyes at the shrimp boat captain. Burnt coffee assaulted her nostrils. The man was scared, and the strength of the scent couldn’t be just because he had more than his allowed catch aboard.

“Look again,” she told Mansfield.

“But—” He caught himself before protesting a direct order.

She leveled a measuring gaze at him. Maybe that was why she didn’t trust him. Because he couldn’t stomach the job. Hell, she knew what that was like, but it didn’t mean she’d cut him any more slack than her CO had ever cut her. “You’ll get used to it. Come on.”

Nikki gripped the edges of the storage hatch, took a deep breath, held it and leaned into the hold. Something hard touched her shoulder; Ensign Artie Jackson held out a heavy-duty flashlight, which she took. Light splashed over the dead shrimp and rusting steel hull. The plastic liner that held the shrimp was cracked and stained from years of use. Stifling heat pressed in on her, bringing a quick burst of sweat to her face and neck. From the looks of it, this shrimp wasn’t a fresh catch.

She let go the breath she was holding and sniffed.

The musk of coffee bored past the acrid, salty smell of dead sea creatures and washed over her in a hot wave. Nikki grit her teeth against nausea. Terror. Terror like nothing she’d ever smelled before. Terror and…grief?

She leaned away from the hatch and squinted into the afternoon sun. “Get me a rake or shovel or something!” The wind lifting over the trawler’s rail cooled her face.

Jackson handed her a shrimp rake. Nikki coughed hard a few times, then shook herself mentally. Get a grip. It’s just rotting critters.

The days-old dead sea life she could handle. It was what lay beneath that had her reeling.

She reached the rake down and scraped a bare spot inside the storage unit, then dropped through the deck hatch. A few minutes of hard work had cleared a broad swath, revealing another hinged hatch immediately beneath her feet. It was roughly two feet by two feet, with a pull handle. She would have smiled at her success, but the bitter scent of fear ratcheted her nerves another notch tighter.

Nikki stepped aside, pulled her sidearm, grabbed the handle and yanked the hatch open.

It was like looking into a mass grave. People in ragged, stained clothing lay piled on each other, huddled, clutching pillowcases or battered backpacks. One, a boy no more than thirteen, stirred and opened his eyes, squinting against the flashlight’s beam but too weak to hold up a hand for shade. The rest were still.

“Shit.” Nikki raised her head. “We’ve got refugees! Jackson! Take the captain and crew into custody. Mansfield, radio the captain. We’ll need a chopper.”

Nikki leaned in and grasped the boy’s hand. “I’m here to get you out,” she said in Spanish.