Amanda saw the helicopter from the bridge windows. The bright orange and white colors of the United States Coast guard was a welcome sight to see after all this time. Amanda reached back behind her and keyed the intercom system just like Ansuya had told her.
“Ansuya, I see the Coast Guard Helicopter. I hope you guys are ready.”
Ansuya looked up from her work in the passage way next to the bridge. Getting the dead military types from the hold and back up here had been the easy part. The difficult part had been cleaning the blood and collecting the bullet casings from the various places around the ship. Self-defense could account for some of the deaths but the majority of them had happened here and the story needed to be an attempted munity, something that they had been completely unaware of till the shooting started.
They had used some of their own blood and whatever they could scrape and clean from below decks to paint the walls and splatter the deck plates. The blood spattering had to match the narrative, which was, the military guys had tried to take over the ship, maybe for a bigger cut of money. When the Captain and the crew refused, they had declared war on each other and killed themselves fighting over the ship.
This was an international incident. Thankfully, the whole human trafficking and slave trade angle would prevent the Chinese government from pushing back too hard against whatever story Ansuya crafted. That, and the idea that the port authority and whatever three letter agencies came out to investigate this would want to keep as low a profile on this as possible. Which meant that there was a good possibility that they could just slip away unnoticed. Everyone here was a legal citizen of America and who could say that a bunch of dumb American millennials hadn’t rented a boat from some back alley somewhere and got themselves shipwrecked out at sea? Happened all the time. At least, that was her hope.
Ansuya yanked off the overalls that she had borrowed and threw them at William who was sprinkling bullet casings from the high caliber weapons over the deck. William grabbed the coveralls out of the air and smiled. “I was thinking maybe some dinner first,” He commented with a smile.
Ansuya arched and eyebrow at the inappropriate joke. “William, now is not the time. Burn those clothes, get the others and throw them into the incinerator. We’re out of time. Hopefully our story holds up. Now get Katherine, Nicolas, and the cook, and meet me back up here so we can meet the Coast Guard medical team.”
William nodded and ripped off his coveralls as well and hurried below decks to find the members of his pack. Ansuya watched him go and shook her head. He had become quite the young man since her time away from the mountain. Smiling she ducked back onto the bridge.
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She walked over to the captain and pushed some pheromones towards him. He looked at her with adoration and awe as she came up to him. “Captain, we are going to meet the Coast Guard, and you are going to tell them what happened, aren’t you?” The captain nodded eagerly. Ansuya smiled, “Good, now tell me what happened.”
The captain, in broken English and Mandarin Chinese, retold the tale of how they were honest business people. They had no idea what was in the cargo containers when they were loaded, the manifest said spare parts for industrial machinery and vehicles. The military types were onboard for transport on route to Chile for training operations. Then suddenly, they burst up on the bridge without weapons and demanded that they get a bigger cut of the contract. The captain swore he had no idea what they were talking about, but they would get whatever their government said they would get in whatever contract they had signed before the ship disembarked. The military guys said that they’d be sorry and left. He ordered his men to arm themselves and an hour or two later the two sides clashed with skirmishes through the ship. He had been so scared he had been up in the bridge with a small security detail but was knocked out cold and shoved in a closet at some point and didn’t know what had happened after that.
Ansuya smiled as he finished his story, “Very good Captain, now let’s go tell the nice authorities what happened.”
They moved through the ship toward the helipad aft of the ship. The helicopter touched down and a few people hopped out. Ansuya met them, covering her eyes with her hand from the setting sun. A man in a uniform wearing the silver oak leaf of Commander came over to her and took her arm and yelled into her ear over the whine of the spinning rotor blades, “I’m Commander Simmons. I assume you are Miss Ansuya Das? The one I spoke to on the radio?”
Ansuya put on a fair show of seeming like she was overwhelmed and really nervous, she responded by jerking her head up and down.
Commander William’s nodded, “Don’t worry about a thing, we’ll get all of this sorted out.” As he spoke the helicopter rotor blades started to slow down and the wind and noise gradually ceased, so at least they could communicate without yelling at each other. Commander Simmons continued in a normal speaking voice, “Can you take me to the bridge. I want to be able to tell my medical team where to go.”
Ansuya nodded, “yes, I could, I mean, we could go to the bridge, but like I thought it would be better if we had all the injured people in the same location and we didn’t know where the hospital was or anything, I mean we’re on a boat right? So, we just moved them all to the galley. The captain said that would be the best place. Did we do something wrong?”
Ansuya kept a nervous smile on her face the whole time. It was a little insulting having to put on the air of stupidity. But if your adversary thought you were dumb, he wouldn’t look too hard at the events you retold, because you were probably too dumb to try to hide anything. And she knew she was attractive, being an attractive woman helped a bit too when dealing with men.
The Commander nodded, “That was actually probably a really good idea. Can you show my medical team where it is?”
