Ben checked the towline to the rescue boat, and David made sure his end was fast to his boat’s prow. The trip back to Knife River was slow, and it took the remainder of the day for the two boats to make harbor.
“Hi, David, Ben,” Jimmy, the manager and primary mechanic at the marina, greeted them as they pulled into docking spaces five, six, and seven. “Took you longer than I thought it would. I heard your call over the radio this morning and expected you by mid-afternoon.”
“I must have lost my rudders,” David hollered from his boat. “We had to go slow, because the boat kept slewing back and forth, and it didn’t respond to the wheel at all.”
By this time, Ben and the others in the rescue boat had secured David’s boat to the dock and were on their way out of the harbor. David climbed up on the walkway and slowly made his way to where Jimmy stood waiting.
“How soon can you get to this, Jim?” he wanted to know.
Jimmy playfully jabbed at his ribs. “I knew you’d be in a hurry. I’ve already got the slings set up. All we have to do is tow Crusader, Too over to the landing berth, and we can lift her out of the water. I’d guess we’re going to be looking at significant damage. Those rocky shoals can really do a job on the drive mechanisms, you know.”
After an hour of maneuvering and jostling the boat into position, the two men were ready to lift the disabled Crusader, Too from the water. Slowly the cables on the crane tightened, and the hull came clear of the water. David stood back, his spirits sagging as he saw the damage.
“Well, you can see right away that both props are gone, but I don’t think that is the worst of it,” Jimmy said without a lot of emotion.
He swung the boom of the crane so that Crusader, Too was suspended over dry ground. Then he climbed out of the crane’s cab, and both he and David walked under the boat’s belly to inspect it more closely.
“Yep, just what I was afraid of,” Jimmy intoned, once again trying not create too much despair. “You see up there? The ends of your shafts are missing. My guess is that when you hit the shoal, you were traveling at a pretty good clip. Must have snapped both shafts completely off and then they pulled out of their housings. They’re laying on the bottom of the lake now.” He couldn’t help but shake his head, and David wondered if he was shaking it because he felt sorry for him or couldn’t believe his stupidity.
Jimmy continued. “Completely knocked both rudders off, too.”
All David could do was stare for a couple of minutes, then he asked the question.
“How long?”
“Two weeks, at least,” Jimmy answered. “I’ll do what I can from this end, but we have a lot of parts to order. We’re a small operation here compared to places like Bayfield. We have to wait our turn, but I’ll see what I can do to speed things up. Sorry about that.”
Up to this time, it hadn’t occurred to David that he had no way to get home. His car was still parked at the Silver Bay marina. That would be a long walk.
“Hey, Jim,” he hollered at Jimmy’s retreating figure. “What time are you off today? I could use a ride into Two Harbors.”
Jimmy turned and smiled. “I thought you might. I’m on overtime right now, so let’s go. I suppose your car is up at the other marina. I’ll give you a ride up there. It’ll be good to have an excuse to go up and scout out the competition,” and he smiled again.
Chapter Thirty-Two
After the successful test run at the old railroad trestle, Zaim and his four companions stayed close to their wilderness shack. A week passed, and no one came calling. It was obvious that their explosion had gone undetected.
“Tomorrow, we are going fishing,” he announced to his cohorts.
“Fishing?” Murad was surprised by Zaim’s announcement. “What has fishing got to do with anything? Last week it was blowing up a bridge in the woods, now it’s fishing. When do we act?”
“Easy, Murad. We are getting close. Tomorrow we will act the part of trout fishermen. The weather is supposed to be calm, and there will be many boats being launched at the DNR landing in Two Harbors. I’ve got an open boat rented. We’ll leave the marina in Knife River and motor up to Two Harbors. We can enter the harbor, and if we act like we’re fishing, we can scout the docks.
The final plan will be to approach the docks in the dark, using the same kind of open boat. This is just a test run in the daylight.”
Murad was appeased, and began preparing supper for the group. He thought, When the time comes, I’ll show them I can do more than cook.
Four-thirty the next morning, Zaim woke the others and ignored their grumbling. After a hasty breakfast of strong, black coffee, bread, and cheese, they headed toward Two Harbors in the silver Land Cruiser that the four men had used before Zaim’s arrival. They motored through the small town to the burg of Knife River, and Zaim turned onto the road leading to the marina. There, they were greeted by the marina manager.
“Good morning,” Zaim said with a warm smile. “I have an eighteen-foot boat rented for the day. We plan to do a little trout fishing near the Two Harbors breakwater. Is the boat ready?”
Jimmy, the manager, looked at the group with curiosity.
“It’s ready. The day should be calm and sunny. No weather in the forecast. Have you been on the lake before?” he asked.
Zaim answered, “Oh, yes, many times. The fishing is always good off the breakwater.” The other men looked away to hide their faces at his comments.
Jimmy helped them down to the boat, noticing that their fishing rods were more suited for ponds and small lakes, and that the lures attached to and wound around the poles in rat’s nests of monofilament were floating Rappalas, not something you’d ever use on Lake Superior.
As the five motored out of the harbor, Jimmy had to smile. Well, the trout will be safe today, at least from that bunch.
Once clear of the harbor, the boat encountered smooth, regularly spaced swells that rhythmically lifted and then dropped the boat every few seconds. Murad leaned over the boat’s gunwale and lost his breakfast.
“It is bad enough that we are stranded up in the woods,” he complained “but now we have to endure this torture. And for what?” he demanded.
“When the time comes, we will be entering the harbor during the night,” Zaim reminded him. “Then you will appreciate what we are doing today. Anyway, get used to this. The night we move may be rougher than this. Then what are you going to do, Murad?”
The other three men took no pity on Murad. They were not experiencing the churning stomach and reeling head associated with seasickness, and they found it fun to add to his miseries with comments about the up and down motion.
As they neared the entrance to the harbor where the ore docks were located, Zaim said “Okay, each of you pick up a rod. Cast out the lure and appear to be fishing. We’re going to see how close we can get to the base of the docks in broad daylight. It shouldn’t be too difficult. There are two other boats trolling near there.”
Each man picked up a rod and attempted to unravel the puzzle of tangled line, and Zaim slowed the motor to almost no speed. The boat glided into the calm water of the harbor.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Including the week before his accident when small craft advisories were up and the week since David ran his boat onto the rock shoal in Castle Danger, he had been on the water one hour out of the past fifteen days. He was tired of being stranded on land, but Jimmy had said it would be another day or so before his boat was ready for the water. His tiny apartment was too cramped, and the Twins baseball team was on a losing streak. He wanted to get on the water again, maybe take the trip to Cornucopia, Wisconsin, he had planned before grounding Crusader, Too.
At sunrise, he decided to take a walk to the breakwater, and he picked up his binoculars from their shelf. He figured he might as well see if there was any action on the docks that morning. The Edgar Speere was supposed to be in port again today to take on a load of ore pellets.
As he walked to the DNR la
nding, he passed by Crusader, his boat’s namesake, and ran his hands over the cypress planking of her hull. She was a museum piece now, propped up on dry land, never to return to the water. The boat was forty feet long with a covered deck and a pilothouse perched at the very rear, and he wondered what it must have been like to work on a boat like that during the heyday of herring fishing on the lake.
She had been out of Knife River then, and each day from ice out to freeze up her owner and his family would take her onto the cold waters of Lake Superior. They would travel up to three miles from shore, in rain, snow, sunshine, or if the lake was calm or churning. There they would locate the buoys marking their set nets and would begin hauling them over the boat’s transom, stripping the silvery, blue-finned herring that were hung up by their gills entwined in the mesh.
Sometimes they would return to shore with as much as a ton of fish, and then they would begin cleaning and salting them, readying them for market. David wondered if he could have done that, or would it have been too much for his physical makeup.
He continued on to the breakwater, stopping where the concrete barrier jettied out into the lake, and he looked down at the algae-covered rocks. He was mesmerized by how the dark-green filaments waved back and forth in the water like green hair. He remembered that the biology teacher in the school where he had taught had told him it was one of the few places where he could get a pure sample of Ulothrix, and he wondered why he remembered such inconsequential trivia as that.
David continued his unhurried stroll out onto the breakwater until he reached the small building on stilts at the end of the concrete that housed the warning light and horn. He sat down and began to scope the docks, wondering if he would recognize any of the workers emptying the railroad cars into hoppers atop the massive steel structure.
When he put the glasses down, he took in the panoramic scene. There were four fishing boats circling back and forth in the dock’s shadow, and one of them caught his attention. Its five occupants seemed to be having a difficult time, and it was apparent to David that they had no idea what they were doing. He lifted his glasses to get a better view.
Jibril had gotten tired of what some people might call fishing. He couldn’t seem to keep the line from getting wound around the eyes of his rod, and because the lure continually skipped across the surface of the lake, it spiraled in a pattern that twisted his line into kinks and coils. He reeled in the lure as best he could, and picked up his binoculars. He thought he might as well amuse himself by watching the tourists on the breakwater through his binoculars.
Just before Jibril lifted the glasses to his eyes, David brought his own binoculars to focus on the open boat and its occupants. At that instant, Jibril’s face was clearly visible, and a hot streak like an electric shock jolted up David’s back. He instantly recognized the make-believe fisherman as one of the people he had smuggled out of the country almost three months ago. He dropped his glasses in disbelief.
Almost simultaneously, Jabril spotted David on the breakwater. Recognition was immediate. Together, they raised their glasses again, and the image they each saw would have been comical if it weren’t so serious. There was no doubt each knew the other had seen and recognized him.
“It’s him! It’s the captain who dropped me off on the Canadian shore!” Jabril excitedly shouted to Zaim.
“What are you talking about?” Zaim demanded.
“The captain of the boat that took us to Cananda, he’s standing on the breakwater. I saw him!”
“So he’s there. So what?” Zaim questioned. “He lives here. I’d expect him to be around.”
“No, no,” Jabril exclaimed in a state of panic. “He saw me. He recognized me. I know it. He was looking at me through binoculars just before I put mine to my eyes. He dropped them down, and then brought them up in a hurry. We were looking at each other face to face. I could tell by his expression he recognized me. He was shocked. I know it.”
Zaim was clearly troubled by what Jabril said.
“We can’t leave in a hurry. That would be a clear tip off, but now I wonder how much he knows. Let’s make one more pass by the docks as though we are fishing. I’ve seen what I wanted to see, so we can leave. We’ll not hurry, and it will give me time to think.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
When Deidre opened her eyes at 5:30 a.m., her first thought was of the conversation she had last week with Agent Erickson. She wondered why she hadn’t heard from him for several days, and even before she rolled out of bed, she resolved to call his office after the deputies had presented the usual morning report.
After her mandatory first cup of black coffee and two pieces of whole wheat toast, she made her way to the office. The morning reports were what might be expected for a small town: a complaint of teenagers loitering under a street light at 11:30 last night, a barking dog creating a nuisance, old Charlie needing a ride to jail so he could sleep off his drunk, and a report of a suspicious person walking in the alley between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Street. It turned out to be Judge Henry looking for his Siamese cat that had made a run for it.
“Are there any other issues that came up last night,” she asked her deputies.
“I think I spotted something that might be of more interest than Judge Henry’s cat,” Ben said, his face serious.
“Just before I came in, I stopped near the breakwater and spotted something we should note.” He went on to relay to them what he saw.
“The lake was calm this morning, and I wanted to see the sunrise. The trout must be biting after the big blow we had a week ago, because the parking lot was full of boat trailers and pickups.
“A few of the fishermen were trolling past the docks on their way out to the big lake, except for one boat. It kept weaving in and out of the slips between the docks. The men in the boat were the worst fishermen I’ve ever seen. It was almost like a cartoon, but I don’t think they were interested in catching anything. They weren’t breaking any laws, but they sure didn’t belong out there.”
“Thanks, Ben. I’ll relay that information to my contact at the FBI.”
Deidre took the reports into her office, not in too much of a hurry to re-examine the details other than what Ben had reported. She was about to dial the FBI office in Duluth, had her hand on the phone, when it rang.
“This is Sheriff Johnson,” she answered.
“Hey, Deidre. That was quick. You must have been sitting with your hand on the phone, waiting for me to call.”
In a moment of playfulness, Deidre asked, “To whom am I speaking, please?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “This is John, John Erickson, Special Agent John Erickson.”
Deidre let out a giggle. “Hi, John. As a matter of fact, I did have my hand on the phone. It’s been awhile since we talked, and I’m wondering if anything’s happening we should know about on this end.”
“Have your deputies noticed anything that might make you wonder if something’s going on?” John wanted to know.
“Well, that’s what we needed to talk about. One deputy reported that he saw men early this morning who match the description of those up in Brimson. They were in an open fishing boat down by the docks. Seems they weren’t having too much luck with their floating lures and pan-fish rods.”
“Did the guys in the boat see your deputy watching them? That would throw up a red flag right away.”
“No. It was Ben who saw them first. Lately, he’s turned out to be one of my best people on this case. He stayed well away from the shoreline the whole time, used his binoculars, and kept an eye on them. He said there never was a time when they looked up to where he was sitting, said they were more concerned about the people on the breakwater than anything else.”
Deidre heard an audible escape of air from John’s mouth, then a pause.
“My boss talked to our informant this morning. Evidently, he saw the same fishermen Ben did, and he said the same thing you’ve told me. They really weren’t fishing, hard
ly knew which end of the rod to hold. We’re sure they were making a trial run in the daylight. When they carry out their plans, it’ll most certainly be at night. The word I get is that whatever’s going to happen is going to happen sooner rather than later.”
“John, can’t you tell me who this informant is? He must have a room or something in the area if he has been able to observe the docks. It’d help us to know.”
Without hesitation, John lied. “I don’t know who he is. The upper level won’t share that information with me, because they say their source is too vital to this operation, and they don’t want his cover blown. Sorry.”
Deidre knew it was no use pushing any further.
She was about to say goodbye when John asked, “Have you been keeping David Craine in your sights. We have an idea of what he’s up to, but we want to make sure you don’t get so involved with this other issue that you let him slip away.”
That was a sensitive issue with Deidre. “We have a close watch on him. Don’t worry. It’s been pretty easy lately. He piled his boat up a week or so ago, and it’s in dry dock in Knife River. About all he does is hang out down by the breakwater and have a beer or two at Dunnigan’s.”
“Good,” John responded matter-of-factly. “Just make sure you know where he is.”
Deidre didn’t like the sound of that, but there was nothing she could do.
“John, I have to go. I’ve got a couple of meetings with board members this morning. Keep in touch, please.”
“Sure will,” John replied. “Say, any chance we could meet for supper sometime after work? Maybe the place that served those great hamburgers,” and he chortled.
“That’d be nice. Let’s do that sometime. We’ll talk later.” And Deidre hung up the phone.
She leaned her elbows on her desk, resting her head in her hands for many minutes. With all that was going on in her usually quiet county, she felt like a piece of driftwood being carried downstream, and she realized there was little she could do except go with the flow, keep her guard up, and be ready to react to whatever developed. She wished she could go on the offensive, make the first move. This idea of waiting for the shoe to fall and then reacting was unnerving.
Convergence at Two Harbors Page 14
