Fiction Week

By Till Andrzejewski

Act 1 – Opening Moves

February 11, 2050.

Today would not be the first time two women, three mothers, seven children, and one grandchild mourned. And of course, not the last time.

United States Coast Guard

The sea lies like amazonite beneath a sky just as blue. USCGC Miguel Diaz cuts a white, foaming scar into the morning Caribbean. On the bridge, Captain John Ramirez stands with his arms folded, coffee untouched, eyes fixed southwest where the AIS shows nothing but silence. His home, Puerto Rico—the 52nd state—is only about 350 nautical miles away.

“Target confirmed. No identification. Thermal signature: three persons plus one heat source, likely an outboard.”

The sensor specialist’s voice is dry. On the main display the fast boat appears—a grey wedge, four meters long, carbon fibre, flat as a blade.

Ramirez nods. “Guardian One, cleared for launch. Maintain distance.”

The drone lifts off from the aft deck—a slender dragonfly, barely more than a stroke against the west wind. Below, five cable lengths off the beam, the sea bulges, then the boat cuts across the line of sight, sprays white, vanishes, surfaces again. No response on radio.

“Warning shot,” says Ramirez.

“Aye.”

From the cutter’s bow the 57-millimeter barks—a short cough and a fountain erupts ahead of the speedboat. The boat jerks, accelerates.

“No response.”

Ramirez lifts his gaze—only briefly. In offense there lies a kind of calm he knows well: those ten, fifteen seconds when decisions, aided by algorithms, no longer feel as heavy as they once did.

“Open fire. Destroy.”

The second round hits. The boat shatters as if made of glass. Something black—a barrel? —tips overboard, rolls, sinks. A body half-bursts from the water, then falls back, vanishes. Smoke lies like a stain on the surface. Cold optics, hot barrel.

“Hit confirmed. Debris field.”

Ramirez inhales. The coffee is cold. On the screen the program begins to place red rectangles around floating objects: a crate, another, a torn-off outboard, a slick of fluid spreading like ink in a bowl.

“Do we recover anything?” asks the executive officer.

Ramirez closes his hand around the mug without looking. “Negative. Mark, report, destroy.”

He knows how that sentence sounds. He also knows it’s the eighth time this year he’s said it. He’s been a Coastie twenty years—since the year the USCG adopted Navy tactics and began blasting apart anything that even vaguely looked narco. They’d saved America that way—or at least its health system. The conflicts with Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil were another matter. And, of course, Europe’s economic decline.

Outside, the 25-millimeter opens up—short, clinical bursts. The crates burst. The sea swallows quietly. On the display, rectangles vanish one by one. At the edge, the drone hovers for a moment before it drifts away like a vulture losing its prey.

Ramirez thinks of Europe—of images from Copenhagen, Munich, Naples; train station squares, madmen snapping in subways; of women who enter apartments and never leave; of men raised on spirals of violence—and remembers the stench of cities.

“Cocaine is cheaper than chocolate now,” a German analyst once said—half cynical, half drunk—at a NATO briefing.

What kind of world makes candy more expensive than cocaine?

He takes a sip of cold coffee and thinks something he would never say aloud:

We choked the routes—and rerouted the currents.

Netherlands Coast Guard

The harbor water breathes slowly, muted. Hr.Ms. Texel of the Kustwacht Caribisch Gebied rests in the cross of sunlight, its white paint still warm. Luitenant ter zee Eva van der Meer holds her pen so the paper barely feels it, beside it a camera, beneath it Form E/9-2050: “Search, Seizure, Preparation of International Legal Assistance.”

“Four containers, route Paramaribo–Willemstad–Rotterdam. Manifests plausible. Owner is a foundation in Belize, managed by a law firm in The Hague. Ship is chartered for single voyages.”

Her first officer reads steadily, then mutters, “Damn Suriname.”

Van der Meer shoots him a look. “We go in. No heroes, no quips. Every recording redundant, each container with dual witness oversight. The Hague wants evidence.”

She straps on her vest, pulls the gloves tight. On the freighter the smell shifts—from food and garlic to laundry and wet steel. The cargo: bananas in reefers, fair-trade, Ghana seal, a smiling boy on the box.

“Container 12C,” someone calls. “Anomaly on scan.”

She steps forward. “Container shifting No. 3. Open it.”

The scanner shows a shadow that doesn’t fit the fruit. Peel back the lining, cut the straps, pull the clips—tension rises. Inside: a second wall, neatly fitted. Behind it, packages bound with plastic banding—tidy, almost tender. Logo: a billiard ball. A knife in, powder meets reagent and blooms blue. Someone says, “Positive.”

Van der Meer feels a burn behind her forehead. You know it’s not enough, she thinks. This is only the finger. The hand is elsewhere.

They photograph, film, weigh. Open samples, record label numbers: “Boxes 1–20: 997 grams, purity 74 percent.” The list fills, the camera hums. Outside, seagulls bark. Inside—the whistle of lungs behind tight respirators.

Later, on deck, she leafs through papers, speaks to the captain who wrings his hands and swears he knew nothing. It’s possible. It’s also irrelevant. She says, “You have the right to remain silent,” and finds the address of the registered agent for the Belize foundation—a P.O. box in Rotterdam where no one has ever worked.

That evening, shortly after a call with her children in Zwolle, The Hague rings. “Good work,” says someone sounding like a tie and cufflinks. “Six-hundred-eighty kilos. Press photo is important. Europe needs to see that…” She stops listening. She knows what she sees: grand words about crimefighting while in a kindergarten in Groningen a five-year-old girl draws her parents with nosebleeds.

She hangs up and keeps writing. The evidence isn’t spectacular. But maybe it pushes the world one millimeter in a different direction.

French Navy

Off Martinique, the blue is deeper than time. Capitaine de frégate Armand Deschamps is in the Caribbean mostly because cigarettes are still affordable here. He rests a hand on the bridge rail; the ship is so quiet you could forget it moves. On the monitors: lines, numbers, tide models, supply routes—drawn with the graphic eye of a program he doesn’t love yet adores for the patterns it gives him.

“The tanker turned off course, west of Grenada.”

The navigator points with his pen. “No reason. No storm. Reduced speed, five hours adrift, then reverse course.”

Deschamps’s eyes follow the track. Five hours is a gap where things happen—rendezvous, dark transactions, a transfer into a belly empty enough to carry secrets. He flips through a folder that smells of toner. Photographs: hulls that gleam at the seams, hatches that aren’t, boats that leave almost no wake—semi-submersibles, narco subs—a fashionable word for 30 years, but one you don’t hear when you stand alone at sea at night.

“They don’t see it,” he says to no one. “They only see waves.”

The French aren’t shooting today, he thinks. They’re painting. With thin lines across charts. With arrows that end in places that don’t exist.

He has no romance for it, but respect. It is as if the sea sends him signs, and his task is not to be a hero but a pair of reading glasses.

Since he lost his daughter to ‘Mont Blanc’—that’s what they call the deadly powder in France—Deschamps has changed. Quieter now. Rarely speaks. His officers appreciate that, unaware of the reason. He has the face of a man who watches the world pretend to be new each morning while only finding new names for old things. And he knows in the end others will act, and perhaps he has just shown them where.

Act 2 – Entanglements

February 13, 2050.

The semi-sub never surfaces again.

Before anyone can read its shape from the corrugated sea, it has swallowed water, lost air, taken two lives. A patrol craft of the Royal Montserrat Border and Narcotics Force spots the large white bubble rising through the blue, then reports several faint echoes—and a ship without AIS, without signature.

USCGC Miguel Diaz catches the message first. Guardian One transmits imagery: a hulking silhouette without a phosphorescent wake. Around it, small craft, diffuse signatures under water. Ramirez is still half-thinking that the Brits always report first and hope someone else will act. Then the thought snaps, he’s in the present again: “Mothership.”

The word is old. It explains almost nothing—and everything.

On the Texel, the fail-safe VHF squawks:

“All units in Sector Yankee November nadazero-bissotou, anomaly detected. Possible sub-surface operation with low signature, likely multiple semi-subs. Suspected mothership on same position. Confirm coordinates.”

Eva van der Meer turns the volume up.

“Confirmed. We’re six hours out. Offering reconnaissance and evidence collection.”

So the narco subs are being pregnant now, she thinks.

“USCG here—we’re going in,” says Ramirez. “Keep clear if you don’t intend to fire.”

A pause—then the French:

“Marine nationale: we have movement data. The presumed mothership sits where a tanker drifted two days ago. We’re tracing the drift backward. There is a corridor.”

“A corridor?” asks van der Meer.

“A mental one,” says Deschamps. “It begins south of Tobago.”

“And what does that mean?” asks Ramirez.

“It means,” says Deschamps, “we’re not here by accident.”

The argument between van der Meer and Ramirez mirrors three decades of diverging political instincts.

“We have to secure evidence,” she insists. “Names, routes, logs, communications, encrypted drives, manifests—without that we have nothing.”

“We destroy routes, not hard drives,” Ramirez replies. “Europe isn’t our mandate, and your islands profit from ours.”

“Your mandate changed Europe,” van der Meer says—the word changed sounding as though she meant wrecked. “You rerouted the stream. Now we drown.”

“We saved our country,” says Ramirez, then adds, “If you want to save yours, shoot here—not in the free port of Rotterdam.”

Deschamps says nothing. He lets the lines crawl across the screen, the software run its correlations. In his mind a geometry of the sea unfolds—one without borders. Today, he thinks, we’ll all be right—and all be wrong.

Act 3 – The Hunt

That same afternoon, the sea rumbles softly, as if somewhere a volcano had forgotten to erupt.

Three silhouettes form a triangle—Miguel Diaz to the northwest, Texel to the south, the French frigate to the east, almost within the shadow of its own sonar. Between them lies water that seems made for this single moment.

“Corridor updated,” says Deschamps. “Target twelve nautical miles west of our position. Low speed. Diffuse signature. Possible mothership with deck containers, camouflage irregular.”

“We’re going in,” says Ramirez.

“Negative,” says van der Meer at the same instant. “We’ll begin with reconnaissance. Boarding team, cameras, legal oversight.”

Ramirez glances over his shoulder. Guardian One hangs above the scene like a mosquito over a net. He knows what happens if he waits: another loophole, another route, another later.

He’s seen the faces of mothers who never knew why their sons coughed blood in the mornings—his own mother, his own brother.

“Sécurité broadcast: this is USCGC Miguel Diaz. We will open fire once positive identification is achieved. This is your warning.”

“Miguel Diaz, this is Texel: negative, negative—we’re approaching with helicopter for boarding. Give us ten minutes!”

She knows they’ll need longer.

“Marine nationale: target altering course—slightly. It has detected us.”

Time bends. Ten minutes at sea can hold one lifetime—or the death of three living.

Ramirez sees the gray bulk of the target—no, the enemy, he deliberately chooses the old word—emerge optically on the horizon, like a sea monster rising from literature into the reader’s dreams.

“Open fire,” he says.

The 57-millimeter spits a cascade into the air, like a failed rainshower. Impacts tear bright splinters from the mothership’s hull; smoke thickens, gains shape. Texel screams over the radio, legal articles dissolving in the clatter of guns. The French say nothing—their cameras run, their algorithms drink in signatures, reflections, vectors.

“Effect unknown,” reports the fire-control officer.

“Follow up.”

The second burst finds material eager to escalate—a pressure bubble, a tank, a space that held too much air.

The explosion unrolls from the ship like a torn-open heart. A fragment—perhaps a hatch—arcs into the sea with perfect geometry. Smoke settles; then the hull breaks along a line that had looked like paint. Water rushes in. Somewhere, someone screams—but the wind is faster.

“Target burning, sinking.”

Van der Meer watches the images as if staring into an aquarium where someone had switched off the filter.

“Cease fire!” she shouts. But her words die in VHF static.

“USCGC Miguel Diaz confirms—target no longer maneuverable.”

“You have…” she begins, then the link collapses into crackle—an open space for interpretation.

When the flames gutter out, only a black carpet remains. Debris floats—no crates, no laptops, no logs—only charred timber, Styrofoam, shreds of cloth. Texel later fishes out a metal plate, hand-sized, three fused letters visible: ARA.

Van der Meer holds it, feels her heart stutter twice and return to rhythm—as if her body had decided calm was safer.

Ramirez steps onto the bridge without a helmet—Kilgore-esque, as if someone had turned the war off.

“They’d have destroyed the evidence as soon as you boarded,” he says into the radio silence. “Or they never had any. There are two kinds of ships: those we sink, and those we haven’t sunk yet.”

On the French frigate, Deschamps leans against the chart house. With his Gauloises he traces a line in the air that leads nowhere, then dissolves. “He’s right,” he murmurs, “and he’s wrong.”

His officer nods. “As always.”

By evening the sea turns gray, lights bloom at its edges like very small harbors.

Ramirez transmits openly on the shared channel:

“For the record: I destroyed the mothership on my own authority. I concluded this was the only way to end smuggling in this corridor. Europe needs what we learned in the States—routes die when you burn them.”

No one answers immediately.

Van der Meer sits in the radio room, staring at her hands—clean papers meaning nothing now.

Deschamps looks toward the horizon and realizes he still finds it beautiful.

Act 4 – Reactions

The steak in Buenos Aires is still steaming when Comandante David Rodriguez of the Argentine mercenary company ‘Libertad’ sets his knife to it.

Across from him sits Maurice Estevez—sleek, a man untouched by heat.

Through the window, the Río Matanza–Riachuelo slides past, sluggish as lead.

“Chile to Canada,” Estevez says, as if naming a holiday. “From there down into the U.S. Ore is our friend. Consistency is a religion, and we are atheists.”

“Routes?” asks Rodriguez.

“Two-thirds by sea, one-third by air. Sea transport’s a joke now—nobody watches the old lanes, the little ports, the coal, the ore, the ferromanganese. Everyone’s staring at the boats, the subs, the Cessnas.”

He smiles. “And when they look, they see only rocks.”

Rodriguez drinks his beer—pale, cold.

“I’ll need more men in the Argentine cities and in Uruguay,” Estevez continues. “We’ve been moving freight to Portugal via Angola for years—nice and far from the uniformed Caribbean. From there, Europe’s a medium stroll. But the gangs are jumpy. Too many cowards. In Montevideo, you don’t die at the docks anymore—you die in the logistics park.”

“Libertad delivers,” says Rodriguez. He says it because it’s the line he has to sell.

In truth, he’s tired of fighting. The mercenary contract gives his men one more chance to claim a slice of the buffet.

“The Americans are making life hard up north,” Estevez says, “but they’ve turned Europe into our promised land—a continent of greed, a continent of noses. The Russians pay if I keep going. The Chinese pay if I stop. I’ve taken both their money. That’s why you get double.”

He raises his glass, knowing he’ll still profit the most.

“To the war of routes.”

Later, when the city outside dissolves into its own light, a news ticker glows above the bar:

‘Suspected smuggler mothership destroyed in the Caribbean. No arrests. USCG confirms operation. European authorities criticize.’

A few patrons glance up, nod, order beer. Then someone starts talking football.

Estevez pays. Rodriguez pockets the receipt as if it were for the tax office.

“You’ve lost,” Estevez says—to the window, the river, the city, to no one at all.

“Who? Our people?” Rodriguez asks.

“Everyone.” Estevez smiles thinly. “Everyone who ever believed the sea could be controlled.”

Till Andrzejewski is a senior police lieutenant with the Maritime State Police of Lower Saxony, Germany, currently focusing on interagency cooperation against maritime smuggling networks. His experience includes leading operational shifts at maritime police stations, serving in a police diving unit, acting as operations leader within maritime patrol units, serving as commanding officer on coastal patrol vessels, and contributing to the Joint Emergency Reporting and Assessment Center Sea (JERACS) in Cuxhaven.

Featured Image: Artwork created with Midjourney AI.