BAY of LOST SOULS

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

We used to have a saying in the Nam, that any day that you woke up on the right side of the dirt was a good day. I was about to find out that it isn't necessarily true.

As I stood in the examination room of my physician's office in Dana Point, California, I had pondered why the hell they can never give you the results of simple lab or diagnostic tests over the phone.

"I'm sorry Mr. Riley, but you will have to make an appointment to see the doctor about your test results."

"Yes Ma'am, will I need to bring my crypto clearance card and my decoder ring?"

Without even skipping a beat, the ever efficient woman told me that the doctor didn't mention them but "bring them with you, just in case." I guess it's easier to get that co-pay in person than it is over the phone.

My thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of my doctor, a small energetic man whose last name contains most of the alphabet plus a hyphen or two and is unpronounceable even by his staff. "Hello Doctor Y. How are you?" I asked.

"I am well, thank you. Mr. Riley, we have received the results of your prostate biopsy and they are positive," he said.

I was thinking, "Positive is a good thing, right?" Not being absolutely sure though, I asked, "What exactly does that mean?"

"It means that you have cancer," he replied. He rambled on with the clinical analysis, Gleason score, treatment options and prognosis, but I didn't hear any of it. My brain stopped processing input at the word "CANCER."

"How could he possibly be right? I was only fifty-nine years old, nobody in my family had ever had cancer, and I didn't engage in any of the behaviors purported to increase my risk of cancer." The bottom line is, I didn't want to have cancer and I didn't deserve to have cancer, so maybe I didn't have cancer.

Pleased with my own diagnosis, I vaguely recalled reading something about the fight or flight reflex in one of my college Psychology texts. The human mind has the unique ability, when faced with immediate threat of injury or death, to go into auto mode, assess the risk and immediately determine whether it is better to stand and fight or to run away. I dismissed the analogy as unrelated to my current situation and returned my attention to Doctor Y. He had stopped talking and was looking expectantly at me so I guessed it must be my turn to say something.

"Well thanks Doctor, I'll think about it and call you."

He gave me that bemused look that I used to get from my instructors when I would answer a Sociology question with information that I had read in my History text. His only response was, "Don't wait too long."

I stepped out of his office into a beautiful fall morning in Southern California. To the west I could see the gulls wheeling over the commercial deep sea fishing vessels in the harbor, voicing their distinctive shrill cry as they search for scraps. The fog was starting to burn off and I could hear the mournful sound of the foghorn on the Dana Point jetty. I took a deep breath and convinced myself that I could smell the ocean rather than the effect that the automatic sprinklers were having on the mulch, the sidewalk, and the street.

As I set off toward the harbor, my cellphone rang. Without looking at the caller ID, I flipped it open and said, "Hello."

"HOO-AH! El Bobbo. Happy Birthday."

The only person to ever call me "El Bobbo", my best friend Command Sergeant Major Jack Thompson US Army (Retired) was on the line.

"Hey Sergeant Major, happy birthday to you too. What the hell you been up to? Are you back in the states?" I asked.

"Hell no!" he replied. "I'm still down in Cabo, doing the security thing. My military retirement goes a lot farther down here. Next time you get some time off you ought to come down and check it out. There's plenty of work for a guy with your skills and I have plenty of room at my place for you."

"Thanks Jack, I may just take you up on that," I told him. "I do have some vacation coming and it'd be nice to get away for a while. Let me tie up some loose ends and shuffle some stuff around and I'll give you a call back."

"Great! I look forward to hearing back from you," he said. The line went dead. We never were big on good-byes or any of that other touchy-feely shit. It's probably part of the reason that both of us are divorced.

Jack and I first met on a joint 5th Special Forces/82nd Airborne Division operation in the spring of 1967, in the Seven Mountains region of South Vietnam. I was a sniper in the 5th and Jack was in explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) for the 82nd. As testimony to his skill, he had all eight fingers and both thumbs intact (and still does). As we sat around talking about home and family, we discovered that not only did we share the same birthday, we were the same age.

In the forty years since then, including another tour in Vietnam for both of us, we've saved each other's lives more than once, taken the lives of others, shared the pain of losing friends in and out of combat, and forged a bond that can only be understood by those who have been there. But every October 3rd, no matter what, one of us will call the other to say happy birthday.

Jack made a career out of the Army, putting in twenty-eight years and accumulating more hardware on the breast of his Class A uniform than I thought was possible. After he retired, he started his own very successful security consulting firm. Currently he is head of all security operations for a large chain of hotels headquartered in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, a sun-drenched resort on the southern tip of Baja California.

I followed a different path, separating from the Army after thirteen years. Much to my surprise, there wasn't a very high demand for my MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) of Sniper in the civilian world. I spent a couple of years with the LAPD SWAT teams and then decided to put my G.I. Bill benefits to good use on a college education. After a BS in Telecommunications Engineering and Networking Technology, I spent the next twenty-five years as a Telecommunications Engineer in the Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) section of the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort George Meade, Maryland. Upon retirement in 2007, and tired of the northeast winters, I moved to Dana Point, California where I intended to start a consulting business. After a severe dose of sticker shock in the residential and business real estate markets I decided to purchase a sailboat and live aboard in the harbor. Sailing had been my passion while living just a few miles from the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, so it seemed a logical choice.

My short walk from the doctor's office came to an end as I reached the C dock gate at the harbor. The fog had lifted and I could see her bobbing gently on an end tie, her sleek white lines contrasting with the dappled blue-black water.

At over fifty-four feet long and fifteen feet wide, she was larger than most of the quarters I had lived in during my Army days. I bought the boat brand new, named her Hawkeye I (Army radio call sign slang for a US sniper in Nam) and outfitted her with every amenity available. From the Kevlar reinforced hull to the salt water desalinator, she was set up for single-handed long distance ocean cruising. I had also installed the best encrypted satellite communications and radar systems for use in my consulting business.

As I climbed aboard, my thoughts returned to Jack's...