High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  I shook my head.

  ‘Show you something,’ he said, smiling and beckoning me back to the chart. ‘See that reef?’ He indicated the Pacific Ocean end of the passage, the southern side. ‘The South Pointers. There’s a big drying rock there and the tug’s gone outside. Had to, of course. But there’s a way through between the reef and Surf Island that’s marked thirty - that’s fathoms on this chart so it’s almost sixty metres deep if I’ve got the nerve to risk it. The fog’s thick out there. Have to do it on radar.’ He was staring down at the chart, using me as a sort of sounding board for his thoughts. ‘Not as bad as the Spider. I took the Kelsey through the Spider once. But then it was broad daylight and good visibility, even the little Fulton Passage quite straightforward.’ He spread the chart out, and I saw the short cut he proposed to take and all the rocks, it looked about as bad as anything I had ever seen.

  But that’s the way we went, and the engines going flat out as we steamed south-west through the litter of rubbish, the Captain glued to the radar giving alterations of helm without reference to the chart, and all the time the single sideband radio squawking last-minute instructions as the Mate reported to RCC that our ETA and visual sight of the tow was now less than fifteen minutes away.

  A few minutes and we were through, the helm to starb’d as we steered seaward. Cornish reached for the mike. ‘Distance off two and a quarter miles, fog fairly thick, sea calm with a slight swell.’ We were in fact rolling quite heavily. He had switched to VHP and was talking to the chopper pilot.

  The next ten minutes seemed to drag interminably. The Mate was now at the scanner, the wheelhouse dark and everybody staring out through the windshield, searching the void, fog swirling round the bows. ‘A light, sir.’ It was the helmsman. ‘Bearing Green 10.’

  ‘Okay, have got.’ Cornish had the binoculars up to his eyes. ‘Steer two-five-o.’ And then he was through to the helicopter pilot again, talking him down over the target. I could see the towing lights now, all blurred by the fog, and as the shadowy shape of a big barge loaded with logs began to emerge the Captain reached for the engine-room telegraph and rang for slow ahead on both engines.

  ‘God!’ the Mate said, peering through the glasses. ‘That’s pretty ancient, that thing. What is it, an old scow?’

  We were passing it close now, moving up on the tug’s port side. ‘Scows are usually wood.’ Cornish reached over and took the glasses. ‘That’s steel,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, steel. And it’s got a wheelhouse - a sort of caboose on its backside. I wonder where they got it - off the scrap heap most like. It’s as rusty as hell.’

  ‘Scows are wood,’ Cornish repeated. ‘And they’re flat-sided for on-deck loading. That’s a barge.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The Mate grinned. ‘It’s a barge - as you say, sir.’

  It must have been at least zoo feet long, very low in the water with a little wheelhouse aft and the logs stacked end-to-end so high that if there was a man steering the thing he would have to be constantly in and out of the wheelhouse to peer ahead.

  We were past the tow, the tug now visible through swirls of mist. Cornish rang the engine-room to reduce revs still further and ordered the helmsman to close the tug’s port side. Then, when there was barely a ship’s length between the two vessels, the lights all haloed and blurred in the seething billows of fog, he lifted the loudhailer mike off its hook and put it to his lips: ‘This is Coastguard Cutter Kelsey. Do you hear me? This is Coastguard cutter Kelsey. You are to heave-to please. I repeat — heave-to. Do you hear me?’

  And back out of the fog came an American voice: ‘I hear you. This is Micky Androxis of American tug Gabriello. I am towing. I cannot heave-to.’

  ‘You can reduce speed gradually and turn to port.’

  no

  ‘Why? Why should I reduce speed?’

  The Mate’s voice cut in then. ‘Captain, I’ve got another blip, just westward of the tow. Looks like it’s heading north.’

  Cornish nodded. ‘That’ll be the yacht, I imagine.’ The men were moving up the starb’d side of the cutter, automatic rifles gripped in their hands. They took up positions in the bows as Captain Cornish repeated his order to heave-to. The tug-master pointed out once again that he was in command of an American-registered ship. ‘As a Coastguard officer you have no authority to order me to stop - or to board, Captain. You understand?’

  Cornish smiled, lifting his shoulders and his eyes in an expression of mock resignation. ‘Seems he knows all the answers.’ And he added, ‘Something I don’t believe an ordinary tugmaster would be likely to know.’ He told the helmsman to close right in, and repeated his order to heave-to.

  ‘You have to have police on board for me to do that, brother. You don’t give me orders. But I take them from an RCMP officer. Okay?’

  ‘A real sea-lawyer,’ Cornish muttered as a light glimmered through the fog astern and the faint whoop-whoop-whoop of chopper blades reached us as they beat at the thick humidity. ‘Police now arriving,’ Cornish snapped over the loudhailer. ‘Start slowing down — at once.’

  The helicopter was hovering over the barge, lights picking out the piled-up logs and a man being lowered onto the stern, the rotor blades just visible so that it looked like a ghostly dragonfly, everything veiled, the fog iridescent. Our spotlight held the tug in a merciless glare, the froth of water moving past the two hulls gradually lessening as the speed of both vessels decreased. I saw a second man drop onto the barge, unfasten the harness that had attached him to the winch wire and, as it was reeled in, the helicopter emerging more clearly from the fog, whirls of grey vapour as it slanted forward to take up a position over the tug’s long after run, a man swinging down, pushing himself clear of the thick towing hawser, his feet reaching for the steel plates of the deck gleaming wet in our spotlight. Others followed.

  ‘Last man coming down now.’ It was the pilot’s voice over our loudspeaker. ‘I’ll be leaving you then, Skip. I’m at call if they want me. I’m to pick them up at Namu, or else they’ll send an amphibian up for them. Okay — you got that? You’re to collect the bods when they’ve finished the job and deliver them to Namu. The motor yacht, incidentally, is Colombian-registered. She’s hove-to with a Mounty and two customs boys on board. Over.’

  Cornish already had the mike to his mouth. ‘That’s presuming tug, yacht and barge are cleared by the rummage party. What happens if they’re not cleared?’

  ‘Then I guess all three vessels will be under arrest,’ came the answer. ‘Customs will stay on board, so will the police officer. They’ll make for Port Hardy most like. Wherever it is, you and I won’t have to worry about them. They’ll have borrowed their own transport. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, okay.’

  ‘Then I’ll get going. See if I can find my way back in this dirty crud. Ta-ta — let’s both of us hope they locate whatever it is they’re looking for. Out.’ And the big chopper lifted away, swinging its blunt nose westward, its landing lights suddenly cut off. Almost immediately it vanished from sight behind the grey, silvery wall that marked the iridescent limit of our own and the tug’s lights.

  Cornish hung up the VHP mike and turned to the Mate. ‘Curly, have the deckies stand by to go alongside. We’ll hitch onto the tug and give the engines a rest. The sea’s calm enough.’

  Not only was the Angeles-Georgia tug called the Gabriello, but she was manned by an ethnic mixture of Greek, Mexican and Italian Americans. The captain was of Welsh-Cretan extraction, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, truculent little man, who strutted around the deck of his flat-iron of a ship shouting at us, ‘Yu guys are wasting your time. Yu won’t find no contraband on my ship. Nothing. D’yu hear? Yu won’t find nothing illegal. Yu look on the barge. That bumboat’s none of my responsibility. Yu look there if yu think anybody got liquor or drugs. I bring it up empty, yu understand. Empty as a dead man’s arse, but what those timber cowboys put in her besides logs, Christ only knows. Not me. It’s nuthin’ to do with me wot yu find there.’

/>   We were tied up to that tug for almost six hours, right through the night until dawn came and the sun began burning up the fog, our whole world turning from sepia to silver and aglow with the warmth of a hidden furnace. I slept a little. Not much. Tom I don’t believe slept at all; by morning his face was haggard, his eyes puffed and slightly inflamed. Once, sitting beside me with a cup of coffee, he had talked about drugs, comparing the operation that was being carried out now with the attitude of US authorities to liquor back in the 1920s. ‘Prohibition put liquor underground. It was hoodlums and mobsters that handled it then. Now it’s respectable and people accept that there’ll be deaths on the road and mayhem on the football terraces as the result of over-indulgence.’ He was drawing a comparison between drink and drugs and, though he was clearly trying to justify his own use of cocaine, I knew far too little about it to argue with him.

  His point was that it was the outlawing of drugs, the prohibition of them - and he emphasized that he was only talking about cocaine and the coca leaf - that had made the traffic lucrative and driven it underground into the hands of the criminal element. At one time coke had been respectable, the liquors derived from the coca leaf regarded as beneficial as well as stimulating. An Italian had distilled a liquor from it that was like an elixir, sending it to all the crowned heads of Europe, to the President, even the Pope - all had praised it. And there was that great American drink, based on it and still imprinted with the name. ‘No coke in it now. Suddenly the medical boys turned against it and the world became teetotal on drugs, coke in particular. Pity!’ His hands were trembling, the coffee cup rattling, a nerve twitching the muscles of his jaw. ‘If there wasn’t so much money in it, then bastards like that -‘ he nodded towards the ship’s hull plates creaking against the big plastic fenders that separated us from the tug - ‘wouldn’t have muscled in on the towing contract I had.’ He shook his head, his shoulders sagging. ‘I never should have sold that timber. So much money… Jesus Christ! It seemed such waste — the money I needed just standing there.’ Tears of self-pity stood in his eyes. ‘Temptation… The Devil, if you like - God! You lawyers, you sit there on your bums, smug as the last trump, never stepping out of line, conforming and keeping to precedent, turning your nose up at lesser mortals and passing judgment on them for their indiscretions… And now there’s Miriam. What the hell happens to her when they’ve found the drugs and Wolchak hears I was on this bloody Coastguard cutter? He’ll think it’s my fault. He’ll blame me.’

  ‘They haven’t found anything,’ I said, trying to comfort him. ‘They’ve been over three hours at it -‘

  ‘No, but they will. They will.’ He was quite certain this was the drugs route to Chicago. ‘They virtually told me so. Anyway, it all adds up.’

  But the fact was they didn’t find any drugs. One member of the tug’s crew, a Mexican, had a small amount of cannabis tucked away amongst some socks at the bottom of his suitcase. And on the big motor-cruising yacht, which was carrying a package group of hunters from California up to Prince Rupert, they had found one of the party in possession of narcotic cigarettes. But they hadn’t charged either the American or the Mexican, merely confiscating the cigarettes and the cannabis. They had also found three hand guns. But none of this was what they had been looking for.

  Almost six hours they had spent rummaging the three vessels and that was all in the way of contraband they had found. It was the two officers on the barge that finished first. ‘Guess there’s not so very many nooks and crannies on a barge you can hide things.’ The man had smiled ruefully, adding that they hadn’t been looking for the odd little bag of the stuff.

  ‘The tip-off was that the yacht would be carrying big bags or containers of raw cocaine.’ But when the yacht was finally cleared to proceed, and the officers ferried across to the cutter in the inflatable workboat, they admitted that, not only was there no coke on the vessel, but the passengers were all genuine Californian businessmen taking a hunting holiday.

  As one of them put it with what I thought was a touch of envy: ‘Get away from the wife, get as drunk as a coot, talk smut and do what you dam’ well like with nobody around to tell you don’t. Reck’n the company running them hunting cruises got it made. They were all as rich as hell and enough booze on board to give any ordinary fella the shakes in a week.’ All they had managed to achieve in the three and a half hours they had been on board was to collect the bugging device that had enabled the yacht to be tracked by satellite.

  Dawn broke and the last of the customs men came aboard just before seven. They were dead tired and all of them below, drinking coffee and eating into the cook’s supplies of sausages and bacon, as Cornish gave the order to throw off the warps, the engines picking up as we got under way and turned our bows to the north, followed by the complaints and curses of the tug’s dark-haired skipper. He was out on the sidedeck, shaking his fist. Then, just before disappearing into the fog, he grinned at us and made a rude gesture.

  As well as the customs men, and the RCMP officer neat in his uniform of blue blouse and trousers with yellow stripe, there was an American, a short, explosive little man with a crumpled, weatherbeaten face. When I went down for coffee shortly after we had got under way he was holding forth to the others along the lines that the bastards had got away with it this time, but next time they played yachts and barges in Canadian waters they’d be escorted into harbour ‘and I’ll bloody see that all three vessels are taken to pieces bit by bit.’

  ‘Don’t reckon there’ll be a next time,’ the lanky RCMP officer said.

  ‘Oh, yes there will. For these guys there’s always a next rime. Once they’ve got the smell of the money up their nose, you’ll see - nothing will stop them.’ He was from the State of Michigan, too angry at their failure to find what they’d been looking for and too wrought up not to argue, his feelings running deep. I had barely filled my cup before he was talking about the drugs situation in Chicago and how it had grown as a result of two rival groups of the same mafioso family — the Papas and the Mamas - fighting it out in the streets.

  v I was on my way back to the wheelhouse, but then he suddenly mentioned the name Wolchak. It was such an unusual name that I stopped, listening as he told how this fat little Polish-Lithuanian Jew, who was the financial brains of the paternal gang, the Papas, had been away in South America organizing the supply side of the drugs racket when the fighting broke out.

  ‘Most of the famiglia, both Papas and Mamas, got themselves burned, so when little Josef returns there’s only pieces to pick up, and as finance director that had always been his job, picking up the pieces. Jeez! I’d have given anything to have found the little guy right there on board that smug-looking Greek’s tug.’ And he went on to say there had only been one occasion when anybody had come near to pinning anything on Josef Wolchak and that was long before he had anything to do with the Chicago gangs, when he was trying to raise the starting price to buy in to a half-bust real estate company. He had come in to Idlewild airport - ‘it was Idlewild then so you can tell how long ago it was. He had flown in from BA. He had these walking sticks with him, half a dozen of them, the wood all beautifully carved. Souvenirs, he said, and as luck would have it the customs officer dropped one. Then, as it lay, one end on the edge of a weighing machine platform, a motorized trolley drove over the other end of it, snapping it in half. The stick was hollow and a white powder ran out. That was the only time the authorities ever came near to nailing him, and the only time, I guess, he ever ran anything himself. After that he was too big.’ I ‘How did he get away with it?’ somebody asked.

  ‘Story is he threatened to sue them for the price of the stick. Said they were valuable antiques, made by the Quechua Indians up in the mountains of Bolivia, the powder nothing to do with him and probably just lime put there by the Indians to fill the hollow interior and make the sticks heavier and more solid. Maybe it’s apocryphal, but even if it is, it’s in character, for he’s bluffed his way right up to the top of a very nasty, very
dangerous heap. And not just bluff. He was the first of the gang bosses to recruit out of South America.

  But it’s like I say; once they smell money, then greed takes over, and if they’ve got away with it once, they’ll have another go at it.’

  ‘Have you got a picture of Wolchak?’ I asked.

  He swung round from the table, his little eyes narrowed. ‘You know him?’

  ‘I’ve met a man named Josef Wolchak, that’s all,’ I said. ‘It’s an unusual name.’

  ‘Not so unusual.’ He peered at me. ‘You’re a Limey, aren’t you?’ And when I nodded, he asked me where I’d met this man Wolchak. In the end he took my name and address, scribbling it down in his notebook, the connection between the Wolchak who had bounced into my office and the origin of the logs that filled the barge making me even more convinced that the narcotics division had been deliberately set on a false trail.

  He asked me a lot of questions, but as I had only met the man that once, and for a very short time, my answers were not very helpful. He promised to send me a photograph so that I could check it against my recollection of the Wolchak who had visited me in my office, and after that I made my excuses and returned to the wheelhouse. By then we were back in the Hakai Passage, having passed seaward of the South Pointers reef, the sun burning up the fog and the salmon leaping. Twice I sighted bald eagles, once in the distance, diving from a dead tree lookout post to seize an unsuspecting fish in its claws, the second time as we rounded Kelpie Point — there were two of them, juveniles Cornish said, standing on the rock right beside the flashing beacon, watching us with complete unconcern. We were so close I could have cast a line at their feet. ‘God bless America.’ The Mate put his hand over his heart, grinning as he posed to attention.

  The big, corrugated iron packing sheds and the power station at Namu shone bright silver in the sun as we ghosted in to lie alongside the wooden jetty and say goodbye to the customs men and the RCMP officers, the American Drug Enforcement officer going with them. They went glumly, knowing their search had been one hundred per cent thorough and yet with the uneasy feeling that somewhere, somehow, they’d been fooled. When they had gone, all of them heading for the hotel, Cornish stretched his arms, his mouth opening in a great yawn. ‘Well, that’s that. Anybody coming for a walk?’