Chapter 1
The rusty freighter was twenty-four hours out of Port-de-Paix when the smugglers threw the first Haitian to the sharks.
Wails and desperate shouts came from the open cargo hold as the Haitians yelled up at the square of sunlight and tried to climb out of the steaming, fetid reek of the ship’s interior. Filthy bilge water was calf-deep, and with every movement of the ship it sloshed around their legs, carrying the urine and feces of three-hundred-twenty-four men, women, and children crammed into an area that, at normal capacity, might fit seventy-five. Heat, humidity, and the smell made the hold like a steam room drenched in sewage and diesel. When a crewman closed the hatch lid, people screamed as darkness added to their sense of suffocation.
During the next hours, several children and old ones slipped into unconsciousness. Those related or simply near them helped to keep their heads from sinking below the water’s surface.
A dozen people fought to push open the hold. Two large men finally succeeded and shoved it aside, scrambling onto the deck only to be knocked down by men wielding wooden clubs. Others crawled out and the crewmen attacked immediately. Women who escaped the hold dropped to their knees and huddled together, and were not beaten.
The pilothouse door opened and a loud voice barked across the deck, “Enough!” The Captain was short, stocky, and very dark, even for a black man. His eyes were terrifying. The black irises were larger than normal by half, and he had no whites, only a dark, muddy brown color on the rest of the eyeball.
He turned his attention to the battered Haitians on the deck and told his men, “Leave the women to watch. Any male who comes on deck is unwelcome. They are to be considered trash. Toss the trash overboard.” Two teenage males clambered on deck when he finished talking. The crewmen pounced on them, then drug the two struggling youths to the rear of the ship. One at time, they tossed the boys over the gunwale, into the froth above the propellers.
One made it to the surface, one did not, and the frothy bubbles turned pink. Another woman crawled from the hold, yelling and screaming at the crew, calling them devils. A crewman behind her grabbed a fistful of hair and dragged the woman kicking and crying to the stern where he flipped her over the railing like a sack of garbage. She screamed until she hit the water and went under, then bobbed to the surface like a cork.
There were not enough crewmen to work the ship and guard the hold, so others escaped the bowels of the vessel as it continued to sail. Each one was thrown overboard. In the next eleven hours the crewmen threw forty-six people into the sea. Twelve of them hit the propellers. By sundown the next day, they averaged three an hour, and by then the fins never left the wake of the ship...
~*~
Hunter Kincaid adjusted her bikini bottom as she jumped to a standing position in the Glastron boat, whooping, “I’ve got another one!” Her rod bent into a hard U as the line whirred off the Penn reel, and she arched her back, fighting to keep the tip high.
“How does she do that?” Randall Ishtee asked. “That’s the fourth one.”
“I know. We’re using the same bait and fishing from the same boat.” John Quick said.
“It’s not fair. We are the Floridians here; we should be catching.”
“Will you quit whining and get the net?”
John picked up the net and slid beside her, watching as she worked the powerful ling until it was tired, and then reeling it alongside the boat. John slid the net under it and brought the big fish on board. “That’s a twenty pounder,” he said.
Randall said, “I can’t believe she’s catching ling right here at the mouth of the New River. Have you ever caught ling here? Neither have I. She’s using spells or something.”
Hunter laughed, “Maybe if we eat this one, you’ll feel better?”
“Word on that.”
John unhooked the ling and tossed it into the ice filled Yeti cooler. When he straightened he saw an old, rusty freighter coming their direction from the open sea, and coming fast. “Hey.”
Randall and Hunter looked as John pointed, “That one’s not slowing down.”
Randall said, “Pull the anchor, I’ll start us up.” He started the engine as John pulled in the anchor line. “Might want to hurry, John.”
The freighter listed at fifteen degrees, and the engine belched black smoke, but it came on, with the prow pushing wakes of white foam along its sides. There were far too many people crowded and milling about on the ship. “I think its Haitians,” Randall said. “How are you coming with that anchor? I need to move us, like right now.”
John cleared the anchor from the water and said, “Go!” Randall roared the engines and the rear of the boat humped down in the water for a moment as its bow rose like a rearing horse, then they shot diagonally across the river mouth toward the south shore just as the freighter lumbered and groaned by them. Wide-eyed, desperate looking black people stared at them as the boat passed.
John said, “Another five seconds and we would have been underneath that thing.” He pulled his phone and dialed, “We just had a freighter full of possible Haitian refugees steam into the mouth of the New River. Yes, in Fort Lauderdale. Would you contact the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol about this? What’s it look like? Believe me, they’ll recognize it when they see it.” He hung up and said, “Let’s see where it goes.”
As Randall pulled onto the freighter’s wake, Hunter saw a large, dark shape pass under them in the water. Her scalp prickled and she sucked in a breath. “That’s a shark.”
“Big one.” John said, “Eight, nine feet. A bull shark.”
“In the river?”
“Uh-huh. They like areas where fresh water meets the ocean, but usually they wait offshore, not come upstream.”
Randall said, “They’ve been caught miles upstream in rivers, too. The incident in Matawan Creek where several people were killed by a shark was probably a bull shark, although it was first reported to be a great white.”
/> “That’s the story that Jaws was based on.”
“Uh-huh,” Randall said, “This one’s zeroing in on something; see how fast, and in a straight line? It’s after food. So don’t fall overboard.”
Hunter asked, “Are they in here all the time?”
“More than people think,” John said, “Those, and tiger sharks sometimes. But sharks aren’t really that dangerous.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t pet it.”
“I only meant that they aren’t always looking for humans to eat. People get bit, but if you knew how many people were in the ocean and sharks like that were within twenty, thirty yards of them, and the people didn’t get bit, that’s what I meant.”
Hunter said, “My logical mind understands that, but my desert living, self-preservation mind says you’re crazy, and that if I’m in the water and a shark is in the water, it’s going to eat me.”
John said, “That freighter’s deliberately grounding.”
They watched as the rusty ship lurched to a stop in the shallower water, with the bow two feet from dry land. People poured off the ship on all sides into the water, with a few jumping from the bow onto dry land. Those on land ran in haphazard directions, while many of the ones in the water struggled as if exhausted as they waded ashore to the small strip of sand. One person in deeper water floundered and splashed in an effort not to drown. Randall nosed the boat toward him as John and Hunter leaned over the gunwales to grab him.
He suddenly disappeared below the surface.
Hunter heard sirens coming from several directions, and behind them, she could see Coast Guard ships coming fast up the New River. She started to say something when the man erupted from the water, screaming at the top of his lungs.
She saw the shark’s head, as wide as a small oil drum, clamp on the man’s side and shake him so violently his screams cut off with each jerk of the shark’s head, starting and stopping again and again. The water turned red, and other people in the water screamed as another fin appeared. Hunter leaned far over the side, reaching for the man’s flailing arm.
John jerked her back on the boat so hard it made her teeth click. A shark’s open mouth clacked shut on empty air where she had been an instant before.
“God-o-mighty!” Hunter said, and she looked wide-eyed at John.