by Dan Vining
He was blocks away when a deacon brought the satchel to Pastor Lamb in his office. Lamb was out of his purple robes, daubing at his sweating face with a towel. He waited until the deacon had left before he looked into the satchel. He spilled its contents out onto his desk: a great deal of cash, thousands—used money, not crisp hundreds stacked and banded—a half-dozen wedding rings, four heirloom watches, and a small gold cross, such as might be worn by a girl child.
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Bridget Lindgren looked up at her father, overheated, her faced flushed. She clutched his leg, as close to him as she could get. “I don’t like this,” she said, almost without making a sound, almost mouthing the words.
“I know,” Gene Lindgren said. “I don’t either. It won’t be forever.”
It was hard to see her face in the windowless metal box. They were all jammed together—standing—and there was only a single, caged light bulb mounted onto the wall at either end of the burnished aluminum box. The ceiling was just inches above the heads of the tallest of them. The floor was metal, too. There wasn’t anything like enough air.
Somebody draped a denim jacket over one of the light bulbs to try to cool things off. Several of them nodded their approval.
“It’ll probably catch on fire,” a woman said.
“There’s not enough air left in here for a fire,” the man across from her said.
“We’re like biscuits in an oven,” another woman said.
“We’re going to die down here,” a man said, red-faced.
“Don’t say that,” another man said. “The children.”
“It’s true,” a woman said. “This thing’s running out of air, now that we’re down. You saw the tanks when they led us in. They aren’t big enough. There aren’t enough of them. These people don’t know what they’re doing.”
Bridget’s mother, Betts Lindgren—like most of the others—had a fixed look, staring straight ahead, just trying to get through it. A ten-year-old boy was across from them, his back against the opposite bulkhead, staring at the Lindgrens, but not in a harsh way.
“I have to pee, Daddy,” Bridget leaned up and said.
“You just have to go where you are,” he said. “It’s what they’re doing. This will be over soon.”
The girl seemed not to question this queer unprecedented thing, or just let it be added to all the other unprecedented things that had come into her life in California. She watched the urine run down the inside of her bare legs. She was wearing a sweet little homemade cotton dress and slip-on shoes with white socks. Nobody in California dressed like her, that she knew. She looked up at her father again, pulling herself tighter against him. Lindgren lifted her up to one of the ventilation ducts. Unseen motors large and small hummed and buzzed and whirred. The whole place never stopped shaking. Some other kid was crying; some other parent tried to calm him.
Chapter Forty
Both Crows were on the dock, side by side. The lookout in the jumpsuit was gone and the red Caddy with him. Rockett got a screwdriver out of the box on the Crow and came back to where Nate, Cho, and Tucker stood in front of the high corrugated tin door on the enclosed berth. The structure didn’t look like much, but it was tall enough and wide enough to house a good-sized cabin cruiser. Rockett stuck the screwdriver through the shiny new padlock on the door and gave it a yank. The new lock held together but the clasp fell off. Nate threw open the door. Inside, exposed rafters and corrugated walls were held together with rusting nails. There was the walk-in level and a step-down level around three sides of the slip.
“I don’t know what we would have done if it was sitting here,” Cho said. He was on the radio to someone and working his screen at the same time.
“Plan C,” Nate said.
“So what are we not looking at?” Tucker said.
“The Yellow Submarine,” Cho said. “Like The Beatles song, only I don’t think it’s yellow anymore.”
“It never was,” Nate said. “They aren’t stupid.” He jumped down to the lower section of the dock, walking the length of the slip, pacing it off. “Derrick Wallace had it built six or seven years ago,” he said. “He was in the Navy, knew something about subs. It ran to Mexico—heroin, cocaine, and pot, like tons—diesel-powered with backup electrical. We never could find it; then Wallace got sent up and it was over.” He got to the end of the slip. “It’s fifty, fifty-five feet long.”
Nate was already out the door with Rockett behind him.
As the two Crows lifted off again, banking to head south, Baker came on Nate’s radio. “He went to church,” Baker said.
“Of course he did,” Nate said.
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The open ocean water was clearer and cleaner than Nate had expected, and a color there wasn’t a name for, at least not a name he knew. Below him and forward, a school of flying fish surfaced and dove, surfaced and dove, fifty or more of them. There was something about the way they swam that seemed carefree, even happy. Are fish ever happy? At least they looked as if they knew there were no fishermen close by. The two Crows were cruising side by side again, rotor to rotor a hundred feet off the water. They were out of sight of land, flying due south, headed for Ensenada. Tucker had made a stop for fuel at his base in San Diego, then jetted back out. Ensenada was just a guess on Nate’s part but a reasonable one. It was a crowded, chaotic port with several entry points, a lot of liquid real estate filled with sardine and lobster boats, sportfishing rigs, and cruise ships, although now most of the cruise ships bypassed Baja because of new tariffs, now that Mexico wasn’t desperate for the tourist dollar.
But Ensenada was still just a guess, and Nate had less confidence in his guesses than he’d had twenty-four hours ago. The sub—with a top speed of twelve knots—would be approaching Mexico in daylight, probably midafternoon. The traffickers could come in submerged and head to some remote part of the port or into another covered berth, if there was one. There was a high likelihood that the Mexican authorities had been paid off, so maybe they’d just come in on the surface, big as hell. If the plan was to stay offshore until dark, it would add another three or four hours to the run, which Nate didn’t think would be all that appealing to the smugglers. So there was another guess or two on top of the last guess and the one before that. Nate tried to not to think about it, unsuccessfully.
Nate knew Tucker didn’t like flying blind. “We’re headed to Ensenada,” Nate said. “Highway Three comes out of Ensenada, truck route, goes the back way up to Tecate and the farmlands. Any farther than Ensenada in the sub is a rough haul.” Even to his own ear, Nate sounded like a man trying to talk himself into something.
“What if the guy on the dock tips them off?” Tucker said.
Behind Tucker, Cho said, “I had a friend pick him up, hold him out of the system. He didn’t call anybody. Besides, radios wouldn’t work underwater. We didn’t notify the Coast Guard. Maybe we should.”
Nate sorted through his words before he spoke. “These guys could panic if they saw a show of force. They could freak and screw up and put the sub on the bottom in a heartbeat.”
“The Coast Guard can’t go into Mexico, and neither can ICE,” Tucker said. “Neither can we, come to think of it.”
They all stopped talking while they covered another ten miles, all three—four counting Rockett—trying to picture what lay ahead and get their heads wrapped around it. Nate wasn’t going to say it out loud, but he was thinking the sub could also head for Puerto Nuevo, “Lobster Town,” south of Rosarito Beach, up the Baja coast from Ensenada. There was a long dock there with closed berths and not a lot of people nosing around on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. Nate knew that stretch of coastline well. For a year or so—years ago—he’d been down in Baja more than he’d been in LA: surfing, sleeping on the beach or with college girls in their motels, drinking dollar beers, eating lobster tacos and chuck steaks cooked over mesquite fires, riding K-38 and Scorpion B
ay and Shipwrecks and Alisitos, drinking mezcal, smoking weed, learning the Spanish names of constellations. Bodie had called it “The Year of Not Giving a Shit,” but it was the opposite of that, for as long as it lasted.
“Stay on this course,” Nate radioed Tucker. “I’m going to head to Rosarito and slide down the coast, just in case. We’ll meet up at Todos Santos.”
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Moving through the gentle seas, the submarine surfaced just enough to expose the six-foot-tall conning tower, which came to a point fore and aft, shaped to cut through the water and leave almost no wake. On top of the conn was a wide air scoop and a short antenna. It was fitted with four video cameras, which served as a periscope. They were far from land, all but invisible from the side or above. The whole craft—a clunky, crude-looking thing, the engineering and build half homemade and half professional—was painted a color somewhere between the hue of the deep water around it and the blue of the unclouded sky above. It was running full speed ahead, head-down determined, single-purposed, going where it was going like a big dumb animal.
The sub had a crew of three. A scrawny, mixed-race, terminally-tattooed jitterbug, Perry, twenty-six, who referred to himself as “The Captain.” An older Mexican man they called “Víbora,” whatever his real name was. Víbora meant “viper.” Víbora was Inca. The third man was Nix, the Black who’d stomped around pointing at people in Derrick Wallace’s living room, he who’d run the Twenties while Wallace was in prison. Perry and Víbora wore navy-blue jumpsuits that looked as if they’d come from Wardrobe. In Perry’s case, the cuffs were tucked into unlaced Converse All-Stars. Nix wore what he considered business attire, a beige leisure suit with a chromed .45 stuck in the belt. All three men were armed with handguns. They’d all taken a mix of tranquilizers and speed to make the trip tolerable and had glassy eyes and unpredictable responses. Clamped onto the bulkhead were a pair of shotguns and four full-auto rifles. And a signal-flare pistol, not that they’d want to draw attention to themselves if anything went wrong. It would be an enormous surprise if none of the guns had been fired when the day was done.
Inside, the conn was the size of a shower stall, with inch-thick Plexiglas windows on three sides, facing forward. The helmsman drove the sub in a standing position—standing on the floor of the boat—with a truck steering wheel at crotch level and four pedals underfoot. The bulkheads were fitted with twelve tanks—six on each side—air supply for when the sub was completely submerged and unable to suck in outside air. There was a bucket to piss in. Perry and Víbora spelled each other at the helm. Nix never touched the wheel himself but occasionally pushed aside whoever was on the helm to look out the windows or glance at a rack of screens showing the flickering feed from the vid-cams. The conning tower opened onto the “cabin,” an eight-by-twelve cell, just barely tall enough for the men to stand, though Nix mostly stayed put in his white plastic Target lawn chair. Of course, Nix thought he was the captain.
This was their first run with human cargo. Aft of the cabin was the cargo hold, an aluminum box. A pattern of holes—in the shape of a peace symbol—had been neatly drilled into the door, no doubt in the pot-running days. Sometimes, from the back, moaning or an angry shout could be heard, but the human noise had subsided once they’d partially surfaced and the outside air had begun to circulate.
“We’ll stay up ten minutes, then take it down again,” Nix said, not even getting up.
“That sounds about right,” Perry said, instead of aye aye.
“Put on some music,” Nix ordered Víbora. “Something soulful, none of that Mexican shit.”
Víbora went over to a shelf wedged into the ribs of the curved hull and flipped through a shoebox of discs left from the old days. He steadied himself with a hand against the low ceiling. His eyes wouldn’t focus. The whole ship never stopped vibrating. It was like one of those electric massage chairs in the airport, only there was nothing relaxing about it. It made Víbora wish he’d taken a double hit on the cocaine back in Long Beach when the Twenties ganger had offered it.
“How far out are we?” Nix asked Perry.
“I’d guess two, two and a half hours.”
“Send up the ball antenna,” Nix told Perry. “We have to link up, tell ’em we’re coming in, give them an ETA: estimated time of arrival.”
“I know what it means,” Perry said, instead of kicking a hole in something.
“Release the balloon.”
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US Feds flew forty-year-old Twin Rangers, but their Mexican counterparts rolled in full-on gunships, brand-new two-rotor helos built by the Israelis, who knew a thing or two about borders. And there was one of them, dead ahead above the Baja coastline, blocking Nate’s way south, just waiting for him. It was like a bull pawing at the ground in the corrida de toros.
Nate cursed. He was still fifty klicks above Ensenada. He’d come in at Rosarito Beach as planned, then flown down the snaking coastline, just offshore, waiting to sight a conning tower, an unexplained wake, something, anything. He’d already flown over a dozen famous surf spots, famous to surfers anyway. The beaches were uncrowded, the water empty. Nate had wondered why until he started seeing the sharks offshore. He was just below La Fonda, a restaurant and hotel, when he started getting pinged—somebody forward of him. Now he was close enough to see the black-clad soldier-cops inside. Rockett cursed, too. The kid was learning.
Nate banked into a kick-out turn to starboard, heading out to sea again. “Yeah, it’s your country, but these are our gangsters.”
The bull just watched him go.
Nate called a number. Carlisle. “Thanks for last night,” he said. She was out by the pool in a bathing suit, the screen propped against her knees.
“You make it sound like a date.”
“A cop date. Sad as that is.”
“What do you need?” she said.
“A margarita. Or a good-sized boat and you to ride shotgun. I’m off Ensenada.”
“Did you find them?”
“Yes and no.”
She said she’d see what she could do.
“Something fast,” he said.
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Red-striped lighthouses marked the ends of the Islas de Todos Santos as unmanned lights that came on at dusk or when a black storm rolled in. Isla Norte, the smaller of the two islands, was a quarter-mile long, flat-topped, with a rocky strand extending out from one end. From above it looked like a stingray, the strand its stinger. Out off the strand was where Todos Santos’s monstrously big waves erupted four or five times a year, a deepwater break that since the sixties had been called “killers.” At least by the North Americans. Los Asesinos? The islands were twelve miles out from Ensenada Bay. Today the surf was ordinary. And empty. Nate came in hot and orbited the lighthouse on Isla Norte. Tucker’s Crow was on the ground near the beacon, the hatches scissored up, Tucker prone beside it, apparently doing pushups.
“Come on up when you’re done with that,” Nate said.
Tucker keyed his mic, “You see anything up the coast?”
“La Guardia Civil.”
Cho was sitting on a rock, working a screen. He looked up in Nate’s direction.
Nate sped off to the west. Tucker climbed into his Crow. Cho got back in the gunner’s seat just as the hatches came down.
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They got lucky. They were ten air miles out from Todos Santos—the two Crows flying nose down at a thousand feet, fanned out, a half mile apart—when Rockett spotted something way below.
“There,” Rockett said. “What’s that?”
It was a balloon, three feet in diameter, blue-gray, just a dot ten or twelve feet off the surface, bobbing along.
“You got young eyes,” Nate said to Rockett.
“What is it? A balloon?” Tucker said.
“Camouflage blue. With a line hooked to something that’s moving.”
“It’s a ball antenna,” Cho said. “It’s snagged, not fully deployed. It’s got to be them.”
“I see it and then I don’t,” Tucker said. “Let’s drop in, get a real look.”
“Wait,” Nate said. He’d seen something below. Or guessed at something.
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Nix said, “Try again.” Víbora was at the helm. Perry was messing with a radio. “Use the other channel.”
An Okie pounded twice on the door with a flat palm and shouted something. The sub had been fully submerged for an hour and the air was stale and thin.
“Shut up!” Nix turned and said to the door.
There were more shouts from the compartment, more pounding. Nix snatched up off the floor what looked like a fire extinguisher but wasn’t. It was a tank of gas with a hose attached to the valve and nipple, a red funnel stuck on the end of the hose. Nix stepped over to the door to the hold and opened the valve on the tank. It started hissing. He pressed the mouth of the funnel against the peace sign holes. Immediately, a different kind of shouting came from the compartment, more hands slapping the aluminum door.
“I’m not shutting it off until you all shut up!” Nix said to the door.
They quieted but it wasn’t clear if they were responding to Nix’s demand or whether the gas—whatever it was—had stilled them. A child coughed violently. Nix kept the funnel pressed against the door. Perry and Víbora looked at each other.
“I tried all three channels,” Perry said. “The signal’s not getting out.”
“Then what the hell, surface,” Nix said. “See what’s wrong. We’re still twenty miles offshore.”
Víbora had his hands on the wheel but was big-eyeing Nix. Perry had gone back to fiddling with the radio, now with a new kind of desperation.
