Perfect Plan by Brett Diffley

Reed Davenport is a board member of family-owned Crude Technologies, the world’s foremost company in oil spill cleanup. With three fleets around the globe, he lives to make a difference, and is always trying to find a balance between man and nature while fighting for both.
The story begins as he tracks poachers in his private sanctuary for endangered and misunderstood animals. Twice he’s close enough to hear the shots and find fresh kills. Then another shot reverberates through the valley. He bolts forward, headlong through the trees, and faces a mortally wounded female grizzly trying to protect her cub. After killing the mother, he’s forced to make the agonizing decision about killing the cub, too. Saddened, and with the poachers are gone, he vows to return and hold them accountable.
Meanwhile, a hurricane is ravaging the Atlantic, and the oil tanker Charleston is almost cut in two by the freighter San Paulo. The tanker carries 120 million gallons of crude and a full crew. Reed’s family–his father John Davenport, sister Sarah, and brother James (also a US Customs lieutenant)—is thrust into a race against time to save the crews and limit the environmental disaster. They quickly coordinate a plan to help both vessels, which are struggling to stay afloat.
After arriving by helicopter, Reed surveys the scene, and realizes it’s a miracle that the Charleston is still afloat. They also locate the San Paulo, which is sinking fast. He spots a man risking his life to open one of the freighters few remaining containers on deck. When the door opens, children’s bodies tumble down the sloping deck and into the water and Reed jumps in to save as many as possible before the freighter takes all her secrets to the bottom.
Reed wakes up two days later in the medical bay of the Arc Angel, Crude Technologies’ largest oil skimmer. Its captain is Reed’s closest friend, True John, known as TJ. He’s a Cheyenne chief and direct descendant of Dull Knife, who played a big role in General Custer’s massacre at the Little Big Horn.
TJ fills Reed in on the oil cleanup efforts and the Charleston, which they’ve managed to keep afloat. He also tells him about the four rescued children, and the other two survivors currently on board; Tom Spears, who helped rescue the children, and Louis Garcia, the San Paulo’s captain.
Reed soon realizes they’ve stumbled onto a human trafficking ring and sets out to find answers. So he calls his friend Sam Cadet, Regional Director of the DEA, about the situation. Sam realizes the case he’s working on is related to Reed’s. Fellow agent Johnny Davidson was recently found brutally tortured and killed after stumbling onto a human trafficking ring, while undercover in a bar called The Tide. Then Reed finds out a company called Corporate Affairs owns the bar, which also owns the San Paulo, and is frequented by Kalib Akmalit whose specialty is torture. And when the Akmalit name’s mentioned, it stirs a long-lost memory in Reed of his late mother, who supposedly died in a traffic accident when he was young.
He continues probing Tom Spears and Captain Garcia, who seem to be at two ends of the spectrum. Spears had signed on as a San Paulo deckhand three months earlier, and his dark background as a mob killer didn’t correlate with the heroism Reed had witnessed on the sinking vessel’s deck. His canted demeanor and sincerity left Reed conflicted. Was he one of the good guys?
Garcia, on the other hand, cared only about saving his own hide, and his hatred towards Tom Spears was obvious. If it hadn’t been for Tom, the captain might have been the only survivor. His other problem was Kalam Akmalit and his brother. They were not only his employers, but ruthless terrorists who ran the biggest human trafficking ring the world has ever seen. Their legal company, Corporate Affairs, was worth millions, but that was nothing compared to the billions brought in illegally through the sex slave market.
Garcia and Tom escape on a stolen lifeboat to shore, but Garcia’s freedom is short lived. Several hours later Tom ties him up in a remote tool shed, looking for his own answers that revolve around an abducted girl named Maggie Klien he’d been hired to find.
Tom’s goes to Texas, following her trail, and finds a small fortress hidden in a remote forest, a farm designed for the human trade market.
Meanwhile, the Akmalit brothers hear about Garcia’s escape and create a net to capture him. They also assign an assassin to kill Angie Stroles, the only witness still aboard the skimmer. Rattled and unsure of who to trust, she preferred to stay in the protective shadow of TJ, who relishes the fatherhood feeling, while authorities try to locate her parents.
TJ moves swiftly when the killer comes aboard in the dead of night, and kills the would-be assassin.
The Akmalit brothers are unhappy with the events that threaten to disrupt their lives and lucrative market. They also hate the Davenports, whose loathsome name was thought long gone from their family tree.
They decide to kill their associate Austra Stampford, a beautiful and intelligent woman whose creative mind had taken the Corporate Affairs slave market global. She believes she is their equal, and has become a loose end because Angie Stroles knows her name. So Kalam drugs her with a special serum he uses on all the new girls, a powerful mind-controlling drug that overwhelms them with a delusional, euphoric state of heightened sexual desire. He kills her in a blood-lust ritual.
When the oil spill clean-up efforts are under control, Reed and TJ go to Texas, and onto Corporate Affairs doorsteps. This delivers him into Kalam’s hands, and in his dungeon-like basement, where he’s tortured. He also finds out the true fate of his mother.
TJ brings the Calvary after following the signal from the cell phone hidden in Reed’s boot. A showdown ensues when Sam Cadet’s DEA agents, along with James Davenport’s Customs agents, surround the complex.
Tom is already on the grounds disguised as a guard looking for Maggie Klien, who disappeared with her best friend Angie Stroles from Germany months before. But after finding her, his carefully thought-out plan changes when he discovers Reed and a host of other captives.
As the battle rages upstairs, TJ and James work their way toward Reed and the others who are struggling to stay alive against overwhelming odds.
Reed kills Kalam, and then the two groups join forces to escape through a tunnel.