Operation Dolphin Spirit

by Kimberli A. Bindschatel

  I lathered on some sunscreen, changed into white capri pants and a short-sleeved, cotton top with a palm frond pattern, grabbed my hat, and I was back out the door.

  Dalton was leaning on the wall, his arms crossed, one foot lazily tipped across the other. Reminded me of a cowboy, leaning on a fence, posing for some Cowboy-of-the-Month calendar. I bit my lip and tried to keep my breathing under control. God, he’s hot.

  “Didn’t want me to come in your room, huh?” he said, arms still crossed, making no attempt to move.

  “I was changing.”

  “Yeah.” His shoulders raised in a little shrug, but his eyes locked onto mine and he lowered his voice. “I’ve seen you naked.”

  “So?” I tried to shrug casually. Was I blushing? Dammit! I was blushing. “Doesn’t entitle you to an all-access pass.”

  “Uh-huh.” He eased away from the wall. “Let’s go.”

  In a two-man kayak from the dive shop—me in the front, Dalton in the back—we pushed off, heading across the bay.

  “Let’s be careful now,” Dalton said. “No fooling around.”

  “Fooling around?” I glanced back at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “In the kayak. Keep it steady and upright. There are a lot of sharks in the bay.”

  I turned around to see his face. “Are you afraid of sharks?”

  “Turn back around and don’t rock the kayak.”

  I giggled. “Omigod, you’re afraid of sharks.”

  “I’m not afraid of sharks. It’s the—”

  “Ha! Garrett Dalton is afraid of sharks.”

  “Don’t call me that.” He voice had lowered an octave.

  I started to turn to apologize.

  “What’d I say?”

  I spun back around to face forward.

  “All right, all right. Sorry.” Another giggle escaped. “I just didn’t know that you’re afraid of sharks.”

  “I’m not. If you’d let me get a word in.”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Didn’t you know that this is a shark sanctuary?”

  “Well, yeah. All of The Bahamas. Since 2011, wasn’t it? They prohibit all shark fishing.” I spun around. “But sharks aren’t—”

  “Will you stop?”

  “Sorry.” I slowly turned back to face forward again.

  “Let me finish. Bimini is home to some of the best shark diving in the world. Lemon sharks, nurse sharks, tiger sharks, blacktips, Caribbean reef sharks, bull sharks and occasionally, depending on the season, great hammerheads.”

  I craned my neck around to look at him. “Yeah, but there’s no reason to fear—”

  “I swear to God, Poppy, if you don’t sit still facing forward I’ll knock you unconscious with this paddle.”

  I shrank. Geez, he was touchy.

  “There are a lot of sharks that hang out right here, around the pier, because the fishermen toss all the fish guts in the water right over there.” He pointed with the paddle. “So many that the dive shop has capitalized on it. They have a shark cage.”

  “Oh!” I froze, facing forward.

  “So now you get my point.”

  I nodded, eyes forward. “Feeding sharks. Not good.”

  “Right.”

  “Now let’s go.”

  I dipped my paddle in the water and he matched my stroke.

  “You know, I kinda like the symbolism.”

  “Symbolism?”

  “Yeah, instead of putting the sharks in a cage, they live free while the people are in the cage. Ha!”

  “You would,” he said.

  I knew he was grinning, but I didn’t dare turn around to look.

  About half way across the bay, I glanced over my shoulder, looking back for any sign of being followed.

  “Paranoid now?” Dalton asked. “You won’t see the sharks.”

  “I’m just…I’m just checking. You know, make sure no one is following us.”

  “You’re still worried.”

  “Yeah, well—” I glanced back again, scanned the shoreline. “Maybe,” I said, and dug my paddle in, heading for the backside of one of the mangrove-covered islands. The coastal bush-like trees rose from the edge of the water, a wall of green. Perfect cover.

  A great egret squawked as it launched from a branch, its huge white wings laboring to keep it airborne.

  “Poppy, I’ve been thinking about it. And what you described, being able to get on a plane like that, last minute, to track you electronically, in real time, would take a level of sophistication that, well, would equal that of the Pentagon. You’re talking about hacking airline data, phones.”

  “You’re right. I’m being paranoid.” My faced flushed with embarrassment. I raised my paddle and dug into the water. “Let’s get going.”

  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t watch our backs.”

  “I know.” I paddled harder.

  Dalton finally dipped his paddle in and we continued past another island to rendezvous with our teammates on their fishing boat.

  The scent of frying bacon wafted from the stern. Tom stood at the grill adorned with an apron that said, ‘Caught not Bought’ with an overlay of a fish skeleton. He turned the bacon with tongs and, with each flip, tiny flames shot up from the grill in a sizzling whoosh.

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to grill bacon,” Dalton said. “Too much grease.”

  “Nah,” Tom said, waving it off. “It’s thick cut.”

  Mike helped us tie off the kayak and get out. “I’ve got pancake batter ready to go. How many will you have?”

  “It’s, like, noon,” I said.

  Dalton shook his head. “None for me.”

  Pancakes sounded good, but I declined. I was too anxious about the case. “What’d you guys find?”

  “Oh, I’ll make a couple for you,” Mike said. “Gotta fuel up. Going to be a long night.”

  He headed into the galley. I turned to Tom. “What’s that mean?”

  “We’ll lay it all out in a sec.” He flipped another hunk of bacon and the flames shot up from the grill.

  “Well, on my little jaunt, I learned more about dolphins in general. Nothing earth shattering.” I filled them in on my conversation with Skylar and JP while Mike handed Dalton a bottle of syrup and butter to place on the table on the back deck. I left out my suspicions of the potential stalker. Dalton knew and I didn’t want them to think I was paranoid too. “The main point that the students agreed on is that these are trained dolphins, but likely from somewhere else. I did a search online to see if any trained dolphins have escaped their seaside pens, but found nothing.”

  Tom plucked strips of bacon from the grill, dropping them on a plate covered with paper towel.

  Mike emerged with a stack of pancakes and four plates. “Let’s eat.”

  They were irresistible, thick and fluffy. I’d forgotten that Mike was an excellent cook, a redeeming quality. I took two and drizzled a tiny line of maple syrup on top, then cut off a piece with my fork. Ooooh, was it good.

  Tom crammed a big, chewy piece of bacon into his mouth and started with the story. “So, we went out fishing last night, after dark and anchored kinda close to this other boat. Gaspar’s Revenge. The sea was calm as ice. And when it’s like that, you know how you can hear people talking, sometimes across the water, like they’re right next to you? Well, we could hear these guys talking about a meet, out on the water. Could’da been fishing talk, but sounded a lot like something else.” He finally swallowed. “Mike gets the idea to get the hydrophone on and we pointed it in their direction. Seems these guys are making a run to the mainland tonight.”

  “Drugs?” Dalton asked.

  “Didn’t say,” Mike said, cutting his pancakes with the side of his fork. “But I doubt they were talking about fish. They discussed a port and back up landing location. No one needs a backup for anything legal.”

  “Right,” Dalton said. “You get a time?”

  “After dark.”

  “What
do you want to do?”

  Tom held another piece of bacon in front of his mouth. “I think we should follow them. Once in U.S. waters, we pull ‘em over. Board ‘em. See what they’ve got.” In went the bacon.

  “Simple plan, I guess,” Dalton said, thinking. “What kind of vessel do they have? Is it fast? One of those Cigarette boats?”

  “No. Fishing boat, like this one, only newer and faster. All tricked out.”

  “I looked it up,” Mike said. “It’s a Rampage. Tops out at forty point three miles per hour. But I figure he won’t go full speed. Why waste the gas?”

  Dalton thought for a moment. “Engines can be modified. We can’t assume from standard specs.”

  Mike nodded.

  “And how do you plan to follow them? Without them knowing?”

  “We got radar,” Mike said.

  “Okay, but we don’t have jurisdiction until they’re within twelve miles of shore and—”

  “I thought we did for this type of thing.”

  “The Coast Guard does, under an agreement with The Bahamas. But we’re not Coast Guard. And I’m not sure we want to blow our cover for this.”

  Mike shrugged, agreeing.

  “You’ll need to follow from a distance so you’re not obvious. The radar probably has a range of about twenty miles, so that’s the max. But then you’ll have to cover that distance plus overcome their speed within that twelve miles.”

  Mike thought about this.

  “We’d need a faster boat,” Dalton said before Mike had time to put it together. “Following isn’t an option. We’ll have to coordinate. I could probably take the Zodiac from the dive shop fleet. We could tow it over and Poppy and I could wait inside territorial waters. Then, once they cross the line, we could close the distance much faster.”

  Mike was nodding, agreeing.

  “You’ll need to drop us, then backtrack and wait halfway, watching him on your radar. One of you will have to stay back and give the alert when the boat leaves the bay.”

  Mike looked to Tom. Tom shrugged. “I’ll stay back,” Mike said.

  “In fact, Ron’s got a fishing boat—”

  “Ron?”

  “Captain Ron. Owns the dive shop. He’s got a fishing boat docked down at the next marina. He’s working on the engine, but I bet he’s got radar. You could fire it up to get a fix on our guy as he leaves. I’ll talk to him.”

  Mike and Tom nodded.

  “All right,” Dalton said. “We need to get on it. All the setup is going to take some time. Let’s work out the details. You got a chart?”

  Mike shook his head. “Better. I got a RayMarine chartplotter.” He fired up the navigation instruments and tapped the screen of the chart plotter. “We’re fifty-ish miles from Florida. They could be headed to Miami, Fort Lauderdale, anywhere in between or one side or the other.”

  “Wherever,” Dalton said, “The key will be making sure we’re tracking the right boat on the radar from the beginning. There’s only one way they’ll leave this harbor. Tom, you’ll have to make sure you’re back within twenty-five miles at least, close enough to pick him up for sure once he’s gotten to the outer limits of Mike’s range. Then move with him, no more than ten miles ahead, always keeping him on the screen.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Mike, as soon as you get a trajectory, though, send us their probable destination,” Dalton went on. “Poppy and I’ll head that way in the Zodiac. Tom, you can let him pass you. We’ll need you to stay on them on radar and communicate their whereabouts, particularly when they’ve breached the border, while we try to acquire visual contact. Using the marina radio is too risky. We’re going to need secure communication.”

  “That’s a problem,” Tom said. “We didn’t bring sat phones.”

  “Yeah, it’s fifty miles,” I said. “I bet our regular cell phones won’t work.”

  “Hopefully near shore. We don’t have any other option, really,” Dalton said, snatching the last piece of bacon from the plate. “Unless you brought some sort of tracking device?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “What if they resist?” I asked. “They could turn right around and head back to Bimini. And then they’ve seen us. I mean, who says they’ll pull over for us? Maybe they’ll flip us the bird and keep going.”

  Dalton crossed his arms, sat back. “Yeah, trying to board them isn’t a feasible option. We’ll have to follow them into port. Wait until they’re tied off or otherwise contained.”

  “So, you think these are the ones training the dolphins?” I asked.

  “Not sure, exactly. But the one said something about getting the mules ready.”

  “And you think they mean dolphins?”

  Tom and Mike both shrugged. Tom said, “By the tenor of the conversation, it seemed like that was a future plan, that they wouldn’t have to make these runs for long.”

  “I guess that fits,” I said. “And Skylar and JP seemed to think that if someone was training dolphins in the wild, it would have to be from a boat. Makes sense.”

  I could feel the energy. We had something. But I still wanted to check it out for myself, get a closer look.

  While Dalton went to discuss borrowing the Zodiac from the dive shop, I donned my sunglasses and floppy sun hat and wandered down the road, my eye on Gaspar’s Revenge anchored in the bay. There was no dinghy tied to the stern. Perhaps the men were ashore right now.

  I walked along the stretch of beach near Bailey Town, the closest place to make landfall from the boat, looking for a dinghy pulled up on shore or tied to a dock.

  What I did come across, was a pile of shells at the water's edge that must have numbered in the tens of thousands. It was right next to Joe’s Conch Shack, an open-air grill covered by a dilapidated roof and decorated with years of tourists’ graffiti. The place was surrounded by tourists in flip flops holding styrofoam bowls in their hands as they stood, scarfing down conch salad with plastic forks. From the size of the crowd, this was definitely a popular spot.

  Eighties music blared from a dented speaker of the same era.

  I sat down on the edge of a picnic table and looked toward the boat. It was too far away for me to see what may be happening onboard. Were we really on to something? It didn’t feel right.

  In the water, something moved. Was it a dolphin? There it was again. If only I had my binoculars. I kept an eye on the moving object as it came closer. It was a man, swimming to shore. He’d come from Gaspar’s Revenge.

  Once in shallow water, he stood and waded toward shore, running a hand through his hair to push off the excess water. September. Of the Cowboy-of-the-Month calendar. Oh yes. He could definitely be September.

  No way a drug runner looks like that. Drug runners look like…well, not that.

  I caught myself staring.

  This man was ruggedly handsome. Probably about six-foot-three and an extremely fit two hundred, twenty-five pounds. His sandy-brown hair was streaked by salt air and sun with a little gray around his ears and on his chin. I guessed he was around fifty years old.

  If he hadn’t wanted to make a grand entrance, he’d failed miserably. Every woman within a two-hundred yard radius had eyes on him.

  He looked over the crowd the way Dalton would—with razor-sharp acuity disguised as a casual glance—and moved toward the shack, digging a few soggy dollars from the pocket of his blue swimming trunks.

  I rose from the picnic table, took my hat off and pushed my sunglasses on top of my head as I moved to get in line behind him.

  Sliding up close, I could see an ugly scar on his back and another on the top of his left shoulder, both stark white compared to the rest of his tanned body. On his right forearm, he had a tattoo. It was a skull with an old-style scuba regulator in its mouth and crossed oars and wings behind it. It looked military. I made a mental note to ask Dalton about it.

  If it was military, he’d seen some action. Explained the way he had assessed the landscape. Yet, somehow he exuded a warm presence, al
most zen-like.

  “Got your famous Scorch conch today?” he asked, dripping on the sand.

  The man at the grill—Joe, I assumed—simply nodded with a smile and served up a bowl.

  “And a Kalik,” he added as a young girl in braids took his cash.

  I leaned on the wooden bar beside him. “What’s the Scorch conch? It looks good.”

  The man turned to answer me and stalled, his eyes quickly traveling down to my knees, then back up to meet mine.

  Dude, you’re good looking, but you could be my dad. I gave him my best coy smile.

  “It’s hot,” he said with a raise of his eyebrows. “Really hot.”

  “How hot?” I said, teasing. Oh geez.

  He seemed to gain control of himself, taking his change from the girl and stuffing it into his pocket. “Joe here makes the hot sauce himself, with locally grown goat peppers. Believe me, it’ll knock your socks off. But try it at your own risk. It packs some serious heat.”

  I grinned. “I think I can handle it.”

  That made him smile. Setting the hook.

  I turned to Joe. “And a Kalik as well.”

  The man dug some more money from his shorts. “Let me get that.”

  “No need,” I said. Gotcha.

  “It would be my pleasure,” he replied. “If you’d care to join me?” He gestured toward a picnic table.

  I hesitated, then nodded.

  “I’m Jesse,” he said.

  “Poppy,” I replied, waiting for the usual response. But he showed no opinion, one way or another. Hm. Okay.

  Joe plopped a second bowl in front of us. Jesse tucked his beer under his arm and picked up both bowls. “After you.”

  I turned toward the tables. Crap. I don’t eat conch. Any seafood. How was I going to handle this now?

  The young girl nudged me with a cold bottle of beer.

  I took it from her with a thanks, then led Jesse through the crowd to a table with one end vacant. We sat across from each other.

  “So, Poppy,”—he said my name as though he were trying to be respectful—“what brings you to this tiny island paradise?”

  I took a sip of my beer, trying to work up the nerve to swallow a piece of a giant snail. “I’m a marine biology intern. I’m an ornithology major, but I got rotated into an internship here.”