The weights were very important. This was what Roberto Alazar used to bill the product’s owner, who usually paid him up to eighty-five dollars a pound for the ride. A wet crossing, making some of the bales saturated and heavier, could easily add five to ten thousand dollars to the bill. It was justice, though. The toll the rough seas took on the crew made it a surcharge worth pursuing.
Having worked many times for Roberto, Pinder knew he was in a very lucrative position. Before the load crossed the threshold of his trailer, there was only a rough count of the number of bales. The crews knew approximately how much the load weighed, but it could vary as much as a hundred pounds either way. It was up to the clavo to get an exact weight of the load and produce the final figure.
Most of the time the bales came over hand-packed in burlap sacks with duct tape securing any loose openings. Pinder had watched many of these pieces come in. His back had strained unloading them from an unstable, rocking boat to the dock, then into the trailer and off to one of the rooms. The job built muscles but it also built ideas. Along with Kevin’s purchase of a cartoon notebook folio, he also purchased three rolls of duct tape.
* * * * *
Facade
With the exception of the unscheduled nap that morning, Joel hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours and lunch was nothing more than a drive-by at a Burger King in Key Largo. He was used to sacrificing meals and sleep for the common objective but this was starting to seem a bit excessive.
Joel and his new partner had driven down what seemed to be every dead end street from North Key Largo to the south end of Long Key, taking up most of the daylight hours. It was the senior agent’s way of communicating a different perspective to him since they would be patrolling the same area by water that night. The two bounced around in Owen Sands’s one-ton pickup truck for the better part of nine hours until Joel had felt every pothole and bump through the truck’s stiff suspension.
During their tour, Sands had detailed all the “hot spots.” These were small, out of the way homes, all seasonal rentals, and all on dark, overgrown lots with concealed carports or garages. Sands seemed to know them all, pointing out the sights of past busts. Sixty-five bales here, five hundred kilos there, Owen would run on, almost redundantly as Joel tried to absorb all the information. There were too many homes to remember them all, but he got the idea of what they were looking for.
As the sun began to set over Florida Bay and the backcountry, their day was just beginning as Owen’s pickup pulled into the parking lot of the Tavernier Creek Marina parking next to the docks. The two agents exited the truck and walked toward the floating docks with Sands taking the lead. They proceeded down an incline to a fixed platform where several boats were moored. For the first time, Joel had a chance to view the small fleet of boats assigned to his new office. He had trained on boats similar to these at Glynnco and remembered what a rush it was to pilot the expensive powerboats with their supercharged engines at eighty miles per hour over the rough terrain of the ocean.
All the boats were lined in a row with their sterns against the dock and all with lettered brand names etched in the sides like Indian, Scarab and Stiletto. Each boat was in its own way distinctive and yet all resembled the same look. Their carefully designed lines made them look as though they were breaking fifty knots while resting at the dock. At the end of the pier was the most impressive boat of the fleet, one he had only heard about at the academy. The Don-Cat, 39-feet long, painted blue and white and called Blue Thunder, she was the flagship of the Blue Lightning Anti-drug Task Force. Her bow resembled the pitchfork of a devil as her hull was split down the middle to allow massive amounts of air into and under the bottom of the boat when she was running at full speed. This feature enabled the boat to go faster with less power. Since she was also wider than the other boats by some four feet, she was also more stable in the rolling seas where agents had to make their dangerous boardings.
She was the brainchild of Aaron Donaldson who had created the Stiletto powerboat line among others, and had parlayed a simple idea into a multimillion-dollar government contract. The brainchild came in the form of one of his earlier creations, a 39-foot deep-V hull that he had saved for himself. Skillfully, Donaldson cut the boat in two, separated the halves, and took a molded impression of the design. The end result was basically the same boat he had built for years but with a catch: a four-foot-wide air tunnel that ran down the center of the craft.
Joel looked down the side of the boat. The words UNITED STATES CUSTOMS, written in large, white block letters embossed both of her sides. Mounted to the deck near the stern was a tubular arch stretching across the boat’s beam. A disk-type radar dome, remote spotlights and a mirage of antennas were affixed in a row. His heart rate increased with anticipation as he speculated on which boat was to be theirs for the night. This was going to be like no other experience he had lived though before. After a day of monotonous details, he finally felt as though this assignment was going to reveal its perks.
Joel walked up to the stern of the Blue Thunder. On its deck was a raised hatch, exposing the mechanical workings of the boat’s oversized engine compartment. A small man dressed in a mechanic’s jumpsuit stood in the bilge, bent over one of the chrome-covered engines. After making some adjustments to the carburetor, he grabbed a remote switch and triggered the starter. With a burst of power, the engine came to life, startling Joel as water spat from the transom’s exhaust and shot across the surface of the wooden pier, dousing his new Sperry Top-Sider shoes in the process. The mechanic revved the engine as it spewed more wet percussion into the air making the dock below Joel’s feet vibrate as the engine settled down to a rumbling idle.
“Come on hotshot, this one’s ours,” Sands said, pointing to a rundown performance boat moored at the end of the dock. “Load our bags and I’ll make the call,” Sands continued as he headed back up the ramp towards a pay phone that was mounted to a nearby power pole.
Joel looked down at the boat they would be using. It was obviously a confiscated vessel that had been put into service. The boat was mostly white with Renegade written in small black letters on the side. Towards the stern of the boat was a decal of a multicolored Indian chief with a bright, feather-filled headdress and the words Indian 41. It was obvious that the boat had been abused. The poorly applied paint job had gouges the entire length of the boat, something the instructors at Glynnco called freighter burn. This was an abrasion that boats would endure from bumping against the rusty steel-hulled mother ships with their glossy Fiberglas hulls in rolling seas while loads were transferred.
The call to the operations center in Miami was made before any tour of duty and was the high command’s way of tracking its agents in the field. Sands gave the dispatcher some basic information including the boat’s ID number, who was assisting him (Joel in this case), and the area they would be patrolling.
Every organization had to have a home base, some place to report to. For the U. S. Customs Service this was Sector. The military term was C3I, which stood for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence and was the backbone of the Blue Lightning Task Force’s operations center. C3I was divided into two divisions. Centers East and West were each responsible for their corresponding section of the country. Sector West had a distinct advantage as it was located in the same building as EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center in El Paso, Texas. EPIC was a clearinghouse for agents of all branches who desired information on individuals, bank accounts, corporations and any other entity that was involved in any ongoing criminal enterprise. Sector East was located in Miami at Southwest 152nd Street in Dade County’s Metro Zoo Complex and occupied twenty-two acres and a sixteen thousand square foot building. The communications center took up almost fifteen hundred feet of the main building and was comprised of large electronic consoles and radar screens, making it look more like an aircraft control tower than a law enforcement communications hub. Behind the lit consoles sat attentive observers peering at video displays, sweeping radar screens
and other digital imaging equipment. Others sat quietly listening through padded headphones to modified high frequency and short-wave radios for covert transmissions. The lighting was dim. Single shaft fluorescent tubes lined the corners of the room giving it a look of white neon that gave off just enough light to prevent them from tripping over their feet when activities in the center escalated and became dicey. Illuminations of orange, red and lime from the display screens lit the rest of the room. Mounted on the wall was a sixty-inch projection monitor displaying the northwestern quadrant of the Caribbean basin, from Cuba northward to Freeport, and west to Naples, Florida. Inbound targets were tracked and their courses were plotted by computer showing their projected landfall, making this room seem like it should be embedded into the side of a mountain in Colorado rather than the grounds of a public zoo. Altogether, Sector worked as a team and a support arm to the agents in the field.
In a glass partitioned cubical sat the only uniformed person in the room. Usually a woman, her job was to coordinate the agents in the field toward the incoming targets and to promote interception. She was “Sector” tonight and her voice, sometimes stern, sometimes sensual, left a wide variety of visions in the minds of many agents working the late night hours in the field. When it was cold and dark and there seemed to be no other soul on earth, it was worth calling in a bogus registration check just to hear a voice, her voice. She worked a standard shift, Monday through Friday, 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. and she was a regular on the midnight airwaves.
Next to a paper can of Ultra Slim-Fast sat a steaming cup of coffee. She motivated her two hundred and eighty pound frame in her chair, taking a sip as the squelch broke on the primary Customs frequency, 165.235 megahertz.
“Papa 1903 to Sector.”
“Sector, go ahead,” she said into the desk-mounted mic.
“1903 and 1925 are ten-eight, on patrol in Zone 32L - Lima.”
Zone 32L stretched from Port Largo at the south to La Potana and Garden Cove in the north. Tonight, this area was Zone 32L. Yesterday it was 68M, tomorrow it would be 21Q or something else entirely; the playbook came weekly. A copy was posted in Sector and distributed to every agent and supervisor in the field.
“Thirty-two Lima, 10-4 1903,” she replied.
She then authenticated the information by entering the transmission code next to the dot on the radar screen and then alerted her terminal with a few keystrokes. A computerized message was then directed to the “heads-up” operator who was watching a bright orange screen in the dimmed out room. The operator then walked over to a transparent partition of Plexiglas, the type seen in complex war rooms and the situation centers of combat aircraft carriers. It was a flat, upright sheet of clear plastic with a map etched in black. He picked up a red china grease marker and drew a series of diagonal lines covering Zone 32L. Next to that, with a green marker, he noted P-1903 and P-1925 Channel One.
The two boarded the boat as Joel took a position in a standing passenger bolster seat.
“What are you doing?” Owen asked.
“What did I forget?”
“You’re driving kid,” Owen said.
Five minutes later, with Joel at the helm, the two idled out the small basin and into the channel. From there they cruised slowly through the winding mangrove-lined waterway of Tavernier Creek. The Creek was just one of the many waterways that flowed from the ocean to the bay. The oversized, white 41-footer moved slowly through the No Wake section, past several waterfront homes. The boat’s twin six hundred and forty horsepower engines spit hot exhaust through the polished stainless pipes protruding from the boat’s transom. The noise echoed from the quiet shores, bouncing off the numerous concrete seawalls.
The boat sat low to the water in the aft. From the deck, an arch was erected, stretching to the aft at a forty-five-degree angle, spanning across a padded rear deck that doubled as an engine hatch. On top of the arch, a radar silo sat perched like an eagle. The flat, disk-shaped object gave the boat a look of stature. Surrounding the silo were four antennas of various shapes and sizes, all pointing skyward. In between the antennas sat a blue strobe beacon and a stainless steel siren horn.
The craft glided over the glassy water as it proceeded under the Tavernier Creek Bridge. The bridge carried the traffic of the Overseas Highway, U.S. 1, the link between the Keys and the real world above. From there, the channel became wider, opening up to the ocean. The serene surface soon turned into a coarse chop with the lapping waves thrashing against the boat’s hull. Joel, firmly positioned behind the helm, pushed the throttles forward, demanding a steady increase of revolutions. The boat’s bow raised off the water as streams of white churning water flowed from the stern. As the boat planed across the water gaining speed, Joel felt the loose skin on his face form against his cheekbones. He glanced down at the instrument panel where the calibrated speedometer registered seventy-four knots, not very fast in a car but exhilarating in a 41-foot boat that started to leap over the three-foot-high waves. The two men were firmly nestled in a pair of stand up type bolsters. These seats were cup-shaped and were designed to hold the occupants securely in place despite the roughest of seas. Tears started to form from the corners of Kenyon’s eyes, pushed out by the oncoming wind.
Owen reached over and made some adjustments to the boat’s trim tabs controlling the boat’s elevation over the oncoming water. He pushed more buttons. Suddenly, a small screen lit up in front of Joel. On it, the sweeping band of the radar started to turn in a clockwise rotation. A distinct pattern could be seen with every revolution of the screen. Like an electronic map, the radar sent high frequency radio waves to islands, navigational markers, and other boats, bouncing back an image that appeared on the screen. Below that, the boat’s updated longitude and latitude appeared at the bottom of the screen from a patch between the radar and the boat’s onboard global positioning system. The same system sent updated position reports to the onboard transponder that relayed them via repeater to C3I East in Miami.
As they headed toward the Gulf Stream, the setting sun behind them lit the sky on fire with a pink and orange glow. Owen hit one more switch activating the boat’s stereo system. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones’ “Give Me Shelter” began to play. As Joel began to feel more comfortable in his new surroundings, he turned the wheel and the white missile banked to the north and disappeared into the night.
The radar surveillance training Joel encountered while in Glynnco prepared him well. The first contact appeared as a small, two-millimeter dot moving south, reappearing with every sweep of the imaginary clock-like hand that circumnavigated the green screen sixty times a minute.
“I’ve got something here. Moving south. He’s making close to sixty knots with a two knot closure,” Joel yelled over to his partner.
“What’s our intercept heading?” Owen asked, not expecting an answer for at least a few seconds from the rookie.
“At this speed we should assume 078 and maintain.”
“Good work Joel, you’re learning,” Owen answered with the trace of a smile on his face.
The white missile banked to its right at almost a forty-five degree angle. Owen held fast to the grab rails as Joel gripped the tightly padded wheel. The boat turned until the dash-mounted compass read a heading of 078 degrees.
“We should make contact in about three minutes,” Joel said, watching the screen again. He then attached his night vision goggles. They were a small and compact model and looked more like a small pair of binoculars one would take to a day of horse racing.
The seas off the Alligator Reef light were relatively flat. Joel could hold the goggles with one hand and the wheel with the other as the Indian sliced through the light chop, occasionally looking down to view the lime green screen of the radar. With a quick switch of the range, the screen changed from a three-mile view to that of less than a mile. The millimeter dot tripled in size, appearing more prominent, moving faster now and fleeing. It maintained its course to the degree making a straight line down Hawk
s Channel, the navigable route that ran between the Keys and the barrier reef line. They were within a half-mile of the target and closing fast. Sands activated the exhaust silencers. A vacuum pump mounted in the engine compartment produced negative pressure suction that, through a series of rubber hoses and baffles, created a muffle effect, cutting the noise emissions by two-thirds. The straight pipe headers now acted more like something one would get from a muffler shop. This had its drawbacks, including a loss in power. The boat slowed a little, realizing its drain of over forty horsepower from each engine. The craft still maintained its closure on the target with power to spare.
Joel continued to peer through the night vision goggles. All was a light green haze. The waves were visible, as was the momentous foredeck of their own boat and in the distance, a small speck of light moving across the water. It was too far away to associate any type of scope with the light. It could have been a boat or a low flying airplane for all Joel could tell. It was too dim to be a running light and too bright to be coming from the dash gauges. Nevertheless, it matched the position of the target and Kenyon followed it very carefully. With all the devices he was using, Joel was amazed that Owen used nothing. He knew exactly where he was at all times. It was as though he had been given a pair of feline eyes at birth that enabled him to see impeccably at night. This man was incredible, Joel thought to himself.
Owen watched closely as Joel brought the Indian in behind the target as their boat bounced in its white wake. They followed like a stock car racer drafting the laps at Daytona. For the first time, Joel got a chance to view the boat they were chasing, a go-fast Stiletto type. Its operator was a large man wearing a flannel shirt and blue jeans. The speck of light came from the man’s lit cigarette in his mouth. Besides that, the craft was running dark. Not a light to be seen onboard.
Mid Ocean Page 12
