Black Horizon (Jack Swyteck Novel) Read online

  Dedication

  For Tiffany, with love.

  Thanks for twenty years of happy beginnings.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by James Grippando

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Two words, and life changes forever. Nothing new for a criminal defense lawyer. This time, however, Jack Swyteck wasn’t waiting outside a jury room for a verdict of “not guilty.” He was rehearsing his most important line.

  I do.

  Jack straightened the white boutonniere on his lapel and adjusted his bow tie in the bathroom mirror. His hand was shaking as he brushed the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket, shedding the raindrops that he’d carried indoors. He wasn’t sure why he was so nervous. For a guy whose love life could have filled an entire volume of Cupid’s Rules of Love and War, Idiots’ Edition, he should never have expected a wedding without glitches.

  “Plan A” would have been picture perfect: bride and groom standing barefoot on a sandy beach, a canopy of white sails and colorful orchids overhead, the turquoise waters of an underwater national park glistening in the background. Mid-September, however, was the height of Florida’s hurricane season, and their Saturday-afternoon ceremony became a race against Mother Nature. They lost. Just as the mother of the bride was escorted to her seat, Key Largo was hit by a storm straight out of its namesake movie starring Bogie and Bacall. Soaked guests ran to their cars through a wind-driven downpour. Band after band of torrential rain blew ashore, making it pointless to wait out a tropical storm that stretched from Miami to Havana. The ceremony was moved a few miles north, indoors, to Sparky’s Tavern, an old gas station that had been converted into the last watering hole between the mainland and the Florida Keys. The proud owner was Theo Knight, a former gangbanger from Miami’s ghetto who’d survived death row and then named his bar Sparky’s—a double-barreled flip of the bird to Florida’s old electric chair, nicknamed “Old Sparky.” Actually, it was a fitting place for the wedding. Jack had presented the DNA evidence to prove Theo innocent, and the down payment on Sparky’s had come from Theo’s “compensation” for having come so close to execution that they’d fed him a last meal and shaved his head and ankles to attach the electrodes.

  “Ready, dude?” asked Theo. He was the best man.

  “I do,” said Jack. “I mean, yes.”

  Jack led the way from the men’s room, down the hall and into the bar. On saxophone was Theo’s great-uncle Cy, entertaining the waterlogged guests with his jazzy interpretation of the Pachelbel Canon. In his prime, Cyrus Knight had been a nightclub star in old Overtown Village, Miami’s Little Harlem. The music calmed Jack, and it made him smile to see how quickly the friends of the bride and groom had transformed Sparky’s into a worthy venue. The white canopy from the beach had been reconstructed beneath the vintage disco ball. Folding chairs covered the dance floor, bride’s side and groom’s side separated by a makeshift center aisle. Every chair was filled, not one of the seventy-odd guests having decided to bag the wedding to dry off at home.

  Jack and Theo entered from the side, taking their places near a jukebox that hadn’t worked since Reagan was president. Harry Swyteck shook his son’s hand. At the height of his political career, back when Jack was just a newbie lawyer at the Freedom Institute, Harry had served two terms as Florida’s governor, but it was his enduring office of notary public that empowered him to perform a wedding ceremony.

  “Your grandmother is so proud,” Harry said softly.

  Many familiar faces were in the audience, but Jack’s gaze was fixed on Abuela. There were tears in his grandmother’s eyes—mostly joy, but surely some sadness that Jack’s mother wasn’t there. She’d died in childbirth, and it wasn’t until Jack was a grown man that Abuela had found a way to leave Castro’s Cuba. Abuela had made it her mission to give her gringo grandson, “half Hispanic, in blood only,” a crash course in Cuban culture. A marriage outside the Church could bump him down to about a C-minus, but there was endless potential for extra credit upon delivery of great-grandchildren.

  The music stopped, and Sparky’s fell uncharacteristically still for a Saturday afternoon, only the patter of raindrops on the roof. All eyes turned toward the set of double doors in the rear that led to the billiard room. A golden retriever named Sam, the guide dog for groomsman Vincent Paulo, came down the aisle first. One paw at a time, his dark, reddish coat shining, Sam unfurled the runway, a long pink ribbon connecting his collar to a roll of white butcher paper that Theo had found in the storeroom. It would have been fun to pair up Sam with Max, the lovable dumb blond who thought he was Jack and Andie’s first child, but the runway was impromptu, and Max would have freaked in the storm anyway. On cue, Uncle Cy began to play a jazz-laden, spirited version of “Here Comes the Bride.”

  The guests rose, the doors to the billiard room opened, and Andie appeared at the end of the aisle.

  “Wow,” Jack heard himself say, completely involuntarily.

  Andie Henning was unlike any woman he had ever known, and not just because she worked undercover for the FBI. Jack loved that she wasn’t afraid to cave-dive in Florida’s aquifer, that in her training at the FBI Academy she’d nailed a perfect score on one of the toughest shooting ranges in the world. He loved the green eyes she got from her Anglo father and the raven-black hair from her Native American mother, a mix that made for such exotic beauty. Radiant was probably an overused word at weddings, but it fit. There was nothing like a beautiful woman and a long, white wedding dress in the neon glow of a Bud Light sign.

  Andie walked down the aisle escorted by her father, and they stopped at the front row. Her father kissed her on the cheek and went to his wife’s side. The maid o
f honor carried the train of the dress as Andie climbed the single step onto a small stage where many a local band had played. Her run from the beach in the sudden downpour had left her bouquet battered and shaken, and the ivory bloom of a rose broke off and dropped to the floor. Jack quickly picked it up.

  “Five-second rule,” he whispered, and then he kissed it and tucked it into his pocket.

  “So glad you didn’t say, ‘This bud’s for you,’” Andie said through her teeth.

  Jack tried not to laugh as she joined him beneath the canopy. The music stopped, and the guests settled into their chairs. Harry paused to punctuate the moment, then spoke in a strong voice that beamed with pride.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to join Andrea Henning and John Swyteck—Andie and Jack—in matrimony. Marriage is a very important institution. One built on trust and love. We are here to celebrate their love for one another and have asked you as guests to share in this display of their love for each other.”

  Harry paused. Jack and Andie had asked him to dispense with the anachronistic verbiage from traditional wedding ceremonies, but like all politicians Harry loved to hear himself talk.

  “If there is anyone here who can show just cause why these two should not wed,” said Harry, “speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  The crack of a thunderbolt rattled the room. It was a near miss—too near. The neon beer lights flickered, and the room went dark.

  “Ay, Dios mío!” said Abuela, crossing herself.

  Jack and Theo exchanged glances, the irony not lost; they were, after all, in Sparky’s.

  “I guess He prefers a candlelight ceremony,” said Jack, glancing upward.

  Andie squeezed Jack’s hand. “You mean ‘She.’”

  Jack smiled. “Yes, dear. She.”

  Chapter 2

  The storm system was centered over the Florida Straits, midway between the hundred-mile swath of Gulf Stream current that separated Key West from Havana. Sustained winds of forty miles per hour were barely half those of a Category 1 hurricane, but they were strong enough to churn twenty-foot swells that could pitch and roll the most massive of oil rigs. And they were just strong enough to earn the storm a name.

  “Come on, Rosa! Blow, bitch, blow!”

  Rafael Lopez leaned over the safety rail and punched his loudmouthed crewmate in the chest, but it landed with little more force than the driven rain. The storm’s name was Miguel. Rosa was Rafael’s sister back in Havana.

  “Shut it!” Rafael shouted into a howling wind.

  His friend laughed it off. Rafael was in no mood for jokes. The night shift was just beginning, and he was dreading another twelve hours of horizontal rain that would slap him in the face and soak through his foul-weather gear. Under normal conditions, the rig’s white industrial lighting would set the surrounding seas aglow, but tonight Rafael couldn’t even see to the end of the platform.

  “You two!” the drilling supervisor shouted at them. “Quit clowning around. It’s dangerous out here.”

  No shit, thought Rafael.

  Rafael and his Norwegian supervisor were part of a multinational crew of 167 oil workers who operated the largest exploratory rig in the world for a drilling consortium that included Cuba, China, Russia, and Venezuela. A Scottish company had pulled out, but its name for the rig stuck. The Scarborough 8 was specially built in response to official estimates that Cuba’s North Basin held anywhere from 5 to 20 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. It was problem enough that those reserves lay beneath five thousand or more feet of ocean. “Ultradeep-water drilling” was the industry classification. An added problem was the long-standing U.S. policy toward Cuba that prohibited American companies from participating in any drilling south of the boundary between the exclusive economic zones of the United States and Cuba—roughly sixty miles from Key West. To sidestep Washington’s fifty-year-old trade embargo against the Castro regime, the Scarborough 8 had been built at a shipyard in the Shandong Province of China with less than 10 percent of U.S. parts. At 36,000 gross tons, it was too big for the Panama Canal and had to be transported around the Cape of Good Hope on its maiden voyage across the globe. An Olympic soccer field couldn’t match its astounding length and width. In fair weather, the submerged hull dipped thirty-five meters below the water surface, more than three times the draw of the Queen Mary II. In survival mode, facing the likes of Tropical Storm Miguel, the Scarborough 8 was engineered to rise up in the water, with just a nineteen-meter draft, which elevated the platform above rough seas.

  Not high enough to suit Rafael.

  The spray on his face tasted of the ocean, not of the falling rain. His gaze followed the string of lights that ran up the side of the derrick, a tapered mast of steel framework that was the oil industry’s most recognizable symbol. Rafael was six months away from a degree in engineering, but on this rig he was a derrick monkey, one of several handsomely paid risk-takers whose job it was to support the team of drillers from a catwalk above the platform. His work station, the “monkey board,” was a fifty-foot climb up the side of the derrick.

  “Any chance we’ll shut down tonight?” he shouted.

  The supervisor chuckled and shook his head, as if to remind Rafael that the Norwegian engineers on the Scarborough 8 had all earned their drilling stripes in winters on the North Sea.

  “It costs a half million euros a day to lease this rig from the Chinese. A little wind and rain are not going to shut us down.”

  It was more than “a little,” even if the storm had weakened considerably since making landfall on a northwesterly path of destruction across Cuba. Management had counted on the island as a storm barrier that would keep the system from becoming a hurricane, making evacuation of the rig unnecessary. Rafael could only wonder if his tiny apartment in Havana had survived.

  “Hi-ho, hi-ho,” said the supervisor. “Off to work.”

  Rafael wiped his goggles clean and started up the ladder. The rungs were slippery, so he gripped extra tight. Forty pounds of wet gear—raincoat, boots, flashlight, radio, helmet, and more—didn’t make it any easier. Below him, the day-shift workers disappeared into the dormitories, glad to take shelter. They’d return in twelve hours; the Scarborough 8 never slept.

  Wind gusts intensified as Rafael climbed higher on the derrick. It was best not to think too much about the danger, but he’d checked the status board at dinnertime, and he couldn’t erase the most current drilling data from his mind. The Scarborough 8 was in 5,600 feet of seawater, and the titanium drills had cut through 14,614 feet of layered rock beneath the ocean floor. Also on his mind—it was posted all over the rig, from the cafeteria to the cinema—was the fast-approaching deadline to find petroleum and gas in quantities that qualified as a “commercial discovery.” Just five days remained on the consortium’s forty-five-day lease of the only rig in the world that was both 90 percent free of American parts and big enough to tap Cuba’s North Basin. Rumor had it that next in line was a Brazilian-Angolan-Vietnamese consortium, with a Spanish-Indian-Malaysian group behind them. A strike by any of them on the Scarborough 8 would earn the Cuban government half the profit.

  A blast of wind rattled the derrick. Rafael stopped climbing, hitched his safety strap to the rail, and held tight. He was on his way to the monkey board, some twenty-five feet above the platform, more than a hundred feet above the raging ocean. His supervisor’s voice crackled on his radio.

  “You okay up there?”

  Rafael turned his face away from the wind and rain to speak. “Couldn’t be better.”

  The derrick rattled again, a deep vibration that started in his feet on the bottom rung of the ladder and coursed all the way up through his body. The radio crackled again with the voice of his supervisor.

  “Stand by, Rafael.”

  It was hard for Rafael to tell in a raging storm, but something about that last jolt didn’t feel like the wind. The follow-up from his supervisor only heightened his concerns.<
br />
  “Rafael, come down!”

  The lights on the derrick blinked off, then back on.

  “What is going on?”

  “Get down—now!”

  Red-flashing emergency lights were activated, and an alarm sounded. The workers below were suddenly in “all hands” mode. Day-shift workers rushed from the dormitories, pulling on their gear as they raced through the rain toward the derrick. Rafael unhitched his safety harness and started down the ladder quickly, then stopped. Again he felt that strange rumble in the metal rungs.

  Suddenly the rain seemed to reverse course and spray up from the platform, but Rafael knew it wasn’t rain. It was the industrial “mud”—a mixture of clays, additives, and water—that in the normal course circulated through the drill pipe to clear away the cuttings and cool the equipment. Another alarm sounded. More lights flashed. Rafael held tight.

  “Rafael, you—”

  His earpiece crackled, and the voice of his supervisor broke off. Rafael pressed the receiver more firmly into his ear, but he couldn’t hear anything but the driving wind, pounding rain, and pulsating alarms.

  The sound that followed was like a sonic boom. It rocked the derrick and nearly knocked Rafael from the ladder. Fighting to keep his balance, he glanced down toward the platform. From his vantage point, high on the derrick and in the blurring rain, the chaos below was like a swift kick to an ant mound. Men were literally running for their lives, pulling on inflatable vests and scrambling toward the lifeboats at the platform’s edge. The crew had trained for disaster at sea, but no amount of preparation could erase the sense of panic that attended a bona fide emergency.

  Rafael felt another vibration beneath his feet, more powerful than the previous one. A wave of heat rose up from directly below him, a rush so intense that he could feel it through the soles of his work boots. Again the deck lights blinked on and off. The red and yellow flash of emergency beacons seemed to highlight the swirl of confusion below him. One man went overboard, and another followed. It wasn’t clear if they had jumped or if they had been swept from the platform. Either way, Rafael knew they were caught up in a force more powerful than the storm. Another vibration, another intense wave of heat, and a blinding flash of light told him so.