ports on the ship, along with several hundred American dollars, over a thousand dollars' worth of Dominican pesos, and a handful of Polish zloty. At first the local police asserted that there was no foul play in Rindzak's death, but following an autopsy, they amended their assessment to "cause of death inconclusive." He had been dead for days, if not weeks.

No other body was ever located. For months afterward, the Tongan police tried to locate Rindzak's next of kin in Slovakia, but were unable to track down anyone who would claim him. As for Ivan Vaclavic, the man the DEA knew had been on the boat, his fate remained uncertain. An investigation by several Slovakian news outlets would soon reveal that Vaclavic was a cover identity of a man named Maroš Deák, a Slovakian mobster who had disap- peared from the country years earlier. (He was rumored to have been fleeing for his life; Deák's brother was later shot dead back home.) In 2011, a man resembling Deák had been stopped in Phuket, Thailand, by local authorities. He was carrying a high- powered Bushmaster rifle that he said he'd bought in the Philip- pines, and a Thai marine captain's license in Vaclavic's name. Now he seemed to have disappeared with the JeReVe.

Bailey, remembering the call that Le Roux had been allowed to make to the boat, theorized that Vaclavic might have killed his fel- low passenger, engineered a transfer off the boat, and left it to drift. "He had blunt-force trauma all over his head and body," Bailey said of the dead man. "It could have been caused by the captain or the boat." The former 960 group agent I spoke with was confident about a different theory, albeit one that seemed to me to contain an equal amount of conjecture: Vaclavic, he said, had been captured by pirates at sea. I suggested that if that were so, perhaps the pirates had later set him free. "Yeah, and I'm Santa Claus," he said.

The Tongan authorities, for their part, seemed eager to put the mystery behind them and let the matter drop. They buried the sailor's remains in a local cemetery overlooking the placid blue waters of a harbor called the Port of Refuge.