Look into Harris’s eyes and you will see that his enthusiasm is real, his energy level is unbelievable, but that the boy in him disappeared long, long ago.
Reserve officer does not mean that he is a “weekend warrior.” It means he does special assignments. He will sometimes drop off the radar screen, out of sight for weeks, sometimes months, at a time.
In his words, when he’s not “playing Navy,” he is employed as a pilot for the Tampa Port Authority. When most people hear the word “pilot,” they think of airplanes. Around ports, though, the word “pilot” describes a highly trained, state and federally licensed maritime captain who boards and takes command of all incoming and outgoing freighters, tankers, and cruise ships, and makes sure they make safe passage through the tricky, narrow local channels.
Tampa pilots have been operating out of Egmont Key since the early 1800s, yet few people even know their profession exists. What they also don’t know is that, like all pilots worldwide, these pros play an essential role in maintaining the safety and security of the region.
For instance: Tampa is the largest fertilizer port in the world, so ships often bring in highly volatile anhydrous ammonia and sulphur. Tampa is also the import destination for all jet fuel, gasoline, and diesel used from Orlando south to Naples and north to Crystal River. Many millions of metric tons of petroleum products cross Tampa Bay annually.
Put a foreign skipper who is unfamiliar with the waters at the helm of an ammonia tanker or a jet fuel tanker in a raging squall, in a narrow channel, and suddenly, two hundred thousand unsuspecting people in downtown Tampa are at great risk.
To be a Maritime Harbor pilot, you must be a consummate professional, so I’d lucked out by getting my pal Harris to tour me around the bay.
Few men had more detailed knowledge of the area and local waters.
I bowed up to Tampa’s classy yacht club at a little after one P.M., and Harris stepped aboard while I was already backing away. Because it made sense, I slid over into the starboard swivel seat and let him take the wheel.
In my own skiff, it is not something I often do.
I’ve got a 225-Mercury mounted on the transom, but it’s quiet enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice much to say to me, “Are we looking for people or places?”
I told him, “In a way, both. If you don’t mind, I’d sort of like to get an overview first. A general look around. I want to get to know the area a whole lot better than I know it now.”
He nodded. “In that case, I’ll start by showing you how Tampa works; how the port works. For a general overview, the first thing we’ll do is make the loop through the city. The scenic route.” He looked at the silver Submariner on his left wrist. “It’s still around lunch time, so all the beautiful women execs and secretaries will be out strolling the streets. After that, I suppose you have something more specific in mind?”
I shrugged, turned, and opened the live well, in which I’d stored block ice and drinks. I opened a bottle of Steinlager for him, took a bottle of water for myself, and said, “Let’s do the loop. After that, yeah, we’ll talk specifics.”
It is a pleasure to ride with a good small-boat handler. Riding with a poor boat handler is like taking a physical beating. Harris is one of the rare good ones. We had a southwest wind gusting between fifteen and eighteen, but he got the boat trimmed just right, tabs and engine angled precisely, bow down and hull listing ever so slightly to starboard, and we cut our way smoothly toward the skyline of downtown Tampa.
As we neared Davis Islands, he began a steady commentary, pointing out landmarks with a tactical brevity that bore no resemblance to anything typically offered by a sightseeing guide.
“See that point straight ahead, all the masts sticking up in front of that row of beautiful houses? That’s the Davis Islands Yacht Club. They take it seriously, just like the Tampa folks. Real sailors, not phonies. Just beyond is the seaplane basin… and the municipal airport. If you ever get in a real tight situation and need a fast egress-the civilian variety, I’m talking about-I’d make the right phone calls, then make a beeline for this area. Chopper, seaplane, a fast car. If someone’s on your tail, it’d be tough for them to be certain how you spooked out.”
That’s the way it went. Him talking, me listening, making mental notes. Much, much better than hanging around the pool at the Vinoy trying to memorize the chart.
Off to our right was Hookers Point. There were ocean-going freighters, barges, and tugs moored alongside avenues of commercial dockage, cranes and semis working. On shore were acres of storage tanks, some for liquids, some built as elevators for fertilizer. Many of the containers were painted with seascape murals: dolphins, breaching whales, sharks. Others were industrial gray or green.
Looking as the shoreline swept past, I listened to Harris say, “Tampa is part of a long peninsula that hangs down into Tampa Bay. The Port of Tampa is made up mostly of a second, smaller peninsula to the east, closer to the mainland. Kind of like a miniature Tampa hanging down”-he had a chart out now, folded into a square, showing me-“so it’s an ideal location. The port’s a couple thousand acres, so it’s isolated from downtown and all the residential stuff, but it still has almost instant access to the city and the Interstates.”
He told me about some of the freighters he’d transited in and out recently as a pilot, and the many cruise ships, adding, “The big cruise lines love the city. They’re investing more and more-Holland America and Carnival-because here’s what a lot of people don’t realize: Tampa’s closer to the Panama Canal than Miami. It’s faster access to Havana, too. When Cuba opens up? Our cruise business is going to boom off the scale.”
He ran us up Sedon Channel, the pretty houses of Davis Islands off to our left, and directly into the skyscraper-heart of the city: Convention Center, high-rise hotels with marinas and patio bars, WFLA television station, cars streaming over bridges with plasmic rhythm, condo-sized cruise ships moored off to our right, canyons of steel and glass towering over us now in a narrowing waterway that seemed built for gondolas.
Harris was right about the women. Lots of beautiful executive types in business dresses and stockings.
He continued to name key landmarks. Tall buildings, mostly, that could be seen from far offshore.
At one point, he indicated an eight-story, salmon-colored complex next to the Davis Islands Bridge, and said, “That’s Tampa General Hospital. Did you hear about what happened there last night?”
A woman surgeon, he said, had been abducted as she’d walked from the hospital to her home on the south tip of Davis Islands.
“Her name’s Valerie Santos,” he said. “I’ve seen her on some of the local talk shows. This drop-dead gorgeous plastic surgeon who works in the burn unit, and some asshole snatches her.”
Harris told me that a while back, he and another pilot happened to be first on the scene at a local marina fire that had injured a friend of theirs. The hospital staff, he said, had done a hell of a job saving the guy.
Harris added, “I visited him a couple of times in the unit-half-hoping I’d get to see the beautiful doctor lady in person. Never did. But there were some good-looking nurses that made up for it. Shit, now some freak’s got her.”
Harris mentioning Tampa General-particularly the burn unit-reminded me of another freak, Prax Lourdes, which, in turn, reminded me of the esoteric list of drugs he’d demanded.
Thanks to a good and dear thoracic surgeon friend of mine, I’d stopped on my way out of Fort Myers and picked up the boxes of cyclosporine and prednisone that he’d assembled, plus Neurontin capsules in the highest dosage.
The Neurontin was not so easy for him to get. “It’s an antiepilepsy medication,” he said. “We don’t use it in my field.”
Giving away prescription drugs to someone who’s not a patient wasn’t something he did lightly, and I took it as a testament to his confidence in me that he’d made an exception.
When he asked why I needed the meds, I’d told him the truth
as I’d been told it: The medicines were for casualties of the war in Masagua and were desperately needed. The request for antiepilepsy med, though, I didn’t understand.
Tomlinson had worked his sources, too. He’d already gotten the immunosuppressant drugs Thymoglobulin and OKT3, all in intravenous infusion forms, and given them to me for safe-keeping.
When I’d told him I was impressed he’d secured them so quickly, he said, “With the medical people I know, all the business I’ve done with them? No worries, man. Don’t be vexed at me, compadre, but my doctor pals also threw in a cylinder of nitrous oxide gas. When I get to St. Pete, you should give it a try. Really, Doc. To me, sevoflurane gas is kinda like eating an anchovy pizza, but without the calories. But nitrous, man, is just good, clean fun. Take a couple whiffs, drink a beer. Then just sit back and watch the world get goofy. Next thing you know, you’re crawling around in the bilge, laughing your ass off.”
More seriously, he added, “After what I told you this morning, maybe it’ll help us be friends again.”
Still in my skiff, we headed away from the city, out toward the shipping channels of Tampa Bay. Without mentioning the e-mail from Lake, I’d told Harris that I was looking for an area of land and water in which I might find a specific combination of wildlife.
I’d written the list on a sheet of hotel stationery and handed it to him: reddish egret; monk parrot; monk parrot nest; mature bull gator; a place where toads or frogs might lay eggs.
He read it, squinted, then read it again. The sidelong look he gave me would have been hilarious if the situation wasn’t so serious.
“Please don’t tell me we’re out here because you’re on a freaking snipe hunt or something, Doc. What the hell is this all about?”
I said, “It’s no game. There’s not much else I can say. I’m looking for someone. Finding this person is as important as anything I’ve ever done in my life. I wouldn’t tell you that much if I didn’t trust you. But I can’t ask for your help or anyone else’s beyond a certain point, and I can’t involve law enforcement.” I let that sink in before adding, “I suspect that you’ve been in the same situation.”
He thought for a moment before nodding. “Yeah. So let me look at the list again-” He did. Studied it for a moment, shielding the paper from the wind before saying, “O.K. But what you need to remember is, I’m not the biologist. So you’re going to have to help me out. An alligator? Sure, I can take you to a couple places where we might see a gator or two. But those birds-a red egret? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. How the hell would I know?”
So I tried to describe the sort of area it might be: a place where brackish water meets freshwater. A place where mangrove fringe transitions into buttonwood, then changes to live oak or piney woods upland. There also had to be a creek or river that connected to a bay.
I told him, “It’s not on the sheet I gave you, but there’s also a reference to tadpoles in the data I have. I didn’t write it down because I don’t understand it. A place where an egret was seen feeding on a mature tadpole, that was the context. But it doesn’t seem to make much sense because all frogs and all toads lay eggs that develop into tadpoles, and you can find frogs and toads all over Florida. Plus, when tadpoles mature, they’re no longer tadpoles. So the reference seems to be from out of left field.”
Harris didn’t want to let it go so quickly, though. He asked, “What’s the difference? I always wondered that. Between a frog and a toad, I mean.”
I said, “A frog spends most of its mature life in water, a toad doesn’t. A frog’s skin is slimy, a toad’s skin is dry. A frog’s designed to jump, most toads hop or walk. Little things like that. A toad has poison glands behind its eyes, frogs don’t. But they all hatch out as tadpoles.”
He said, “So a mature tadpole could be a toad or a frog?” “Uh-huh. That’s the source of some of the confusion. Which is why I think it’s best we concentrate on the elements we do understand.”
But he continued to ponder the subject a little longer before he asked, “The way you got this list. Was it oral, or written, or some other way?”
I reminded myself I was being questioned by a top naval intelligence officer as I said, “It was in an e-mail.”
“The person who sent it, could they give information freely? Or were they trying to stick information between the lines?”
“Surreptitiously. It was a dangerous situation with no room for error.”
“Was the other data good? Accurate, articulate?”
“It was better than good. It was great, really brilliantly done.”
Harris said, “So what you’re telling me is-I’m talking from my own experience here, in these kinds of situations-all the other words in this list have meaning but one. So, to me, it’s a little flag waving. And what I’m wondering is, maybe the person who sent the e-mail tried to jam a little extra meaning into what he was telling you. He or she couldn’t use the exact word they wanted-it would be too obvious-so they shoot for a double meaning.”
The man had something on his mind; a specific angle. What?
I said, “Well… the person I’m discussing was trying to communicate a location. I’m sure of that. And, yes, it’s true that every reference but one seemed to have an intended meaning. So the problem is probably on my end, I agree. Is there something I’m missing here, old pal?”
He ignored the question, still deep in thought. “Doc, what’s the exact line from the e-mail? Are you allowed to tell me?”
We were in the middle of Hillsborough Bay now, riding south in growing swells, beneath a scudding gray sky, my skiff seeming to shrink as the bay widened around us. I thought about it for a moment, trying to recall the sentence exactly, before I said, “The person wrote to me that he saw a reddish egret feeding on a mature tadpole. No, wait”-I paused to correct myself-“the wording was odd. The person wrote that the bird was feeding on the mature tadpole.”
“On the mature tadpole.”
“That’s correct.”
“Any other odd errors like that in the letter?”
“Nope. That was the only one.”
My savvy intelligence officer friend smiled, seemingly pleased with himself. “O.K., then maybe the wording’s not so odd after all. So try this: Replace the word ‘tadpole’ with the word ‘toad.’ And if that doesn’t make any sense, try ‘frog.’” He nodded suddenly, his smile broader. “Yeah. See, that one really works. Better yet, try replacing the word with ‘bullfrog. ’”
I said, “Why? What the hell are you talking about?”
Harris had the chart atop the console. Without looking at it, he tapped his index finger on a section of mainland around the little town of Gibsonton. “You’re looking for a place where saltwater meets fresh. A place that’s got creeks and rivers and gators. The red egret? Like I said, I don’t have a clue. But there’s a little spot here where someone could watch a bird feed on the frog. The person who wrote the e-mail couldn’t come right out and use the word because it would be too obvious.”
He tapped the chart again. “Take a look, Doc. Probably doesn’t mean a thing but what the hell, we’ll give it a shot. And if it’s not this one, there’s another one we could try.”
I lifted the chart closer to my glasses and saw what he meant. Just south of Gibsonton was a winding blue ribbon of water named Bullfrog Creek.
TWENTY-SIX
The narrow mouth of Bullfrog Creek was shaded with mangroves, sable palms, Brazilian pepper. Mounted in the water on a piling was a red-and-white sign that read DANGER.
Probably to relieve my own anxiety, I said, “That seems a touch dramatic, doesn’t it?”
Harris had my skiff in idle, drifting, looking at the sign, the bay, and the skyline of Tampa behind us.
“Depends,” he said. “Not if you do what I do for a living. Almost seems appropriate-especially if you’ve ever tried to run a freighter down that channel we just crossed.”
He’d already told me about the commercial channel north of the cree
k. It was the waterway into the Alafia River, a narrow, east-west shipping lane that my master pilot pal had described as the “scariest three miles of water in the entire bay.” As a pilot, he often had to make the run to get freighters to the phosphate plant located up the river at Gibsonton.
Now Harris nudged the skiff into forward, and we idled into the creek past the DANGER sign, as he said, “What it probably means is, the creek’s not marked. There’re no channels. Or someone’s trying to keep it private. That kinda fits with what most people think about Gibsonton. They’re not right. But it’s what they think. Do you know anything about the place, Doc?”
I knew about Gibsonton. Knew more than most, anyway, because Tomlinson had a fondness for it. He’d told me his daughter had been conceived in what may be the quirkiest little town in a state that’s known for quirkiness. Conceived there in some 1950s-retro motor court with his renegade Japanese feminist girlfriend who now despised him, and who’d had numerous restraining orders served on him.
Even so, I sat back and listened to Harris tell me about the oddball little town of Gibsonton as we motored up the creek, my skiff’s bow transecting then shattering the mirror reflections of overhanging trees that crowded in around us as we wound our way inland.
Since the 1920s, Gibsonton-or Gib’town-has been the favorite winter home of circus, carnival, and sideshow people, both performers and support staff. What attracted them was the weather, the good fishing on the Alafia River, and also a population of locals who didn’t seem to have the usual prejudices against carnies or sideshow attractions such as giants, monkey-faced women, human pincushions, dwarfs, and other curiosities. Instead of staring, the locals accepted them for the good and decent people they happened to be.
In time, county officials made Gib’town even more attractive to that small nomadic society by granting the village “show business” zoning, which meant residents could keep Ferris wheels, trapeze gear, or even caged lions on their property. The post office installed a special mailbox for the ever-increasing population of midgets.
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