Free The Night Charter by Sam Hawken Page A

a middle finger to him. He stayed only a moment longer and then climbed down from the flybridge. Camaro could not tell what he mumbled. It didn’t matter to her anyway.
    On the radar she saw a vessel ahead. She swung the boat wide a few degrees to cut an arc around it. If that vessel also had radar, they would know the Annabel was there, but they would never be close enough to see the Annabel’ s running lights. And when the Annabel was close to Cuba, there would be no running lights at all.
    On the deck, Matt complained to one of the others, his voice swallowed up by the sound of their passage and sunk beneath the waves of her indifference.

Chapter Eighteen
    A T TWENTY MILE S out she killed the lights. The boat still churned the water, but it was oily black, marked only by the brief white of disturbance in the wake. The landmasses that enclosed the bay were visible on her screens. Camaro would come close to them, near enough to swim for it if the Annabel went down, and then stop. From there the Cubans were meant to do the rest.
    No vessels had appeared on her radar for the last hour. The sea was empty. Camaro found herself glancing down every few seconds, expecting a blip to appear at the edge of her range, and further expecting that blip to close on their position rapidly, locked in and predatory. But nothing came, and she wasted her imagination on phantoms.
    Finally, she shut the engine down. Where there had been constant noise for hours, there was now silence. Camaro heard the footfalls of the men on the deck and the gentle lapping of water against the hull. There was nothing for a full five minutes, but Matt broke the hush. “Is that it?” he asked.
    Camaro stood over them on the flybridge, looking down on the tops of their heads in the weak illumination of stars and moon. Everything was limned in silver, the color sapped from shirts and shorts and flesh so that things were only light or dark. “That’s it,” she said. “Now it’s up to your Cuban friends.”
    “You sure we’re in the right spot?”
    “This is where you wanted to go,” Camaro said.
    “What time is it?”
    Camaro checked her watch. The dial luminesced in the dark. “A little past midnight.”
    “We wait until two o’clock,” Matt said.
    “That’s a long time from now.”
    “We just wait! ” Matt exclaimed. “Okay? You’re getting paid, so do what I tell you! If they haven’t showed by two o’clock, we turn around and go home.”
    Camaro let his words hang without responding. In the corner of the aft deck, Parker stood looking up at her, his face swept of its tan in the darkness and left pallid. All of them were pale and ghostly save for Soto, who seemed as black as a piece of stone.
    She sat in her chair and turned her back on them. She allowed her attention to be taken up totally by her instruments. On a whim she switched on the fish-finder to see what was going on in the waters below. There was a little activity, but mostly it was like the surface: calm and clear.
    The first hour passed without incident, and occasionally Camaro started the engine to maintain their spot. In the second hour, she saw the boat on her radar. It came directly from the farther shore and headed toward them at a steady twenty knots. The vessel had to skip around the natural obstacles that bordered the bay, but it circled around carefully to reach them, and before long she heard the thin sound of its engine carrying over the surface of the water, pushed along by the breath of a warm and humid breeze.
    Light reflected off something on the approaching boat, and Camaro gauged the distance. The pitch of the other boat’s engine dropped as it shed speed, until it was only coasting on its momentum. After that the pilot at the controls gave little bursts that oriented the boats parallel to each other. They edged closer until their sides were aligned. Camaro started her own engine and joined the dance, bringing the vessels nearly to contact before both slipped