There was already a sailboat in the anchorage, but the tour boats hadn’t arrived. So, I continued past the shoals to the south and turned into the channel.
While I stayed on the boat, Jimmy went ashore with Peter and his group to explore the old fort and shoot some pictures.
Using my satellite phone, I pulled up the latest storm update on the NOAA site. Unlike the Weather Channel and local news stations, NOAA provided maps, charts, and raw data that were easy enough to understand with a little practice. Best of all, there wasn’t any hype and fluff from reporters trying to sell ad space for the network.
The latest satellite image showed that Irma was a storm of massive proportions. The image ran in a five-second loop, depicting a six-hour span, and showing dawn arriving far to the east, as well as a huge pinwheel, spinning around out in the middle of the Atlantic. If the eye of the storm crossed the northern Leewards, there would be some weather associated with it halfway through the Windward chain, 400 miles to the south, and on Bermuda, several hundred miles to the north. It was that big.
If you lived on the coast it was hard not to keep up with a storm. Living on a sub-tropical island, I always tried to keep a weather eye out for storms. When one was looming, it just nagged at my brain.
Late tomorrow night and into Wednesday morning was when they were predicting the first landfall, somewhere in the Leeward Islands or the British Virgin Islands. And it would strike with wind speeds upwards of 130 miles per hour.
Having experienced a few smaller hurricanes, the most powerful being a close brush with a Cat-3, I couldn’t imagine the terror of one of these monster storms.
When the group returned at 1100, the first thing Peter wanted to know was the status of the storm, which brought on a slew of questions from his models.
I did my best to calm everyone’s concerns, explaining that it was still well over 1000 miles away and would take days before it arrived in South Florida, if it came here at all.
Still, the nervousness was palpable as we pulled away from the dock and headed to our first dive site. For the rest of the day, we anchored near Loggerhead Key and the wreck of the Windjammer, a couple miles west of Fort Jefferson. Again, I remained on the boat as Peter photographed the women, who were wearing what I assumed was the latest swimwear. The models were basically freediving, though they had extra tanks and regulators for when they weren’t posing in front of a reef.
While the divers were down on their last dive of the day, John called and patched me into a conference call with Jack Armstrong.
“Great work in the BVI,” Jack said. “Right person in the right place at the right time.”
“Thanks, Jack. DJ and that young California cop did most everything. What’s happened there since John and I left?”
“The authorities raided facilities on both islands, as well as a new one being built on St. Thomas, and another location in northwestern Mexico.”
“Mexico?”
“They’d bought several thousand acres in the Sonoran Desert,” Jack said. “Outside of Puerto Lobos. They were already past groundbreaking to develop a huge commune and farm there. The Bahamas Defence Force recovered thousands of pounds of marijuana and get this: an estimated twelve-million tablets of MDMA with a street value of nearly a quarter billion dollars.”
“Whoa!”
“My sentiments exactly, Jesse. You did good.”
“Heard anything from Lettsome?” I asked. “What they’re doing about the storm?”
“I just got off the phone with him,” John replied. “They’re already getting the outer bands and are evacuating the low-lying areas along the coasts. Hopefully it’ll turn out to sea before it gets there.”
I didn’t really see that as a possibility. And more to the point, John shouldn’t either. He knew the islands and knew about hurricanes. This one was headed straight toward his house on Norman Island.
“Why’d you really call me, John?”
There was a momentary silence before John answered, “The woman escaped custody. Sunna Johannsdottir.”
“How’d that happen?”
“They were moving the prisoners,” Jack replied. “Nearly fifty of them. They didn’t have the facilities to process so many, and with the storm coming, they put them all on a flight to the Cayman Islands.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Another British territory and out of the path of the storm. And they probably have adequate housing for that many prisoners there.”
“That was the idea,” Jack said.
“And Sunna escaped from Cayman custody?”
Again, there was silence for a moment.
“A flight attendant was found dead in the plane’s lavatory after landing. She was a small, blond woman, new on that flight, and the rest of the crew didn’t really know her that well. She’d been strangled and her uniform was missing.”
With the boat safely anchored off the lee side of the fort, I busied myself in the engine room while I thought about Sunna’s escape. I cleaned the raw water strainers, though both were empty, checked the oil and hydraulic levels in both engines and transmissions. Everything was clean, bright, and full.
With the dead flight attendant looking similar to Sunna, and not well-known by the crew, Sunna might have been able to pose as her and get off the plane quickly after landing.
But what then? Sure, Grand Cayman was a lot bigger and more populated than Tortola, but it was still an island. The Brits would have people looking for her at the airport and every dock. I felt certain that John would be calling me tomorrow to tell me that she’d been recaptured.
After closing up the engine room hatch, I turned and opened the small cockpit fridge to grab a Red Stripe.
“Got another one of those?” Naomi asked, startling me. She was standing on the side deck in khaki shorts and the lime green bikini top she’d worn for the photoshoot.
I reached in, took out another of the stubby brown bottles, opening both using a bottle opener attached to the inside of the trash can cabinet, then handed her one.
“Thanks. I was up on the front, watching the moon come up.”
The moon was nearly full and already several degrees above the horizon, blotting out the stars to the east.
“Come on up to the bridge,” I said, leading the way.
She followed and I turned the helm seats around to face aft, allowing her to move over to the second seat.
“Okay,” I said, “put your feet up and close your eyes.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked nervously, as she stretched her long, tanned legs out, crossing them on the aft railing.
“Nothing,” I replied. “I just want you to see something. Close your eyes.” She complied. “Now keep them closed for about a minute.”
I reached back and turned off all the lights, then stared down at the dark water for a moment, trying to see the bottom. When I looked up, my eyes had adjusted and a billion stars sparkled in the heavens.
“Okay, look up at the sky behind the boat.”
I watched her face. She opened her eyes and gasped.
“Wow,” she said, with a slow exhalation, dropping her feet to the deck and leaning forward.
“People rely too much on artificial light. On a clear night, away from all the light pollution of civilized society, you can see more stars than grains of sand on the beach. And the human eye adjusts, allowing all that starlight to guide our way, literally, astronomically, and metaphorically.”
“Metaphorically? You’re a philosopher?”
I chuckled. “No, Jimmy’s more the philosophical type.”
She looked out over the water again. “I’ve never seen so many stars.”
“Most people today haven’t. You never went out on the Oklahoma plains?”
“I grew up in Tulsa with half a million people.” she said, smiling. “I didn’t get away from
the campus very often. I’ve never seen anything like this. They’re even different colors. Do you know any of them? What they’re called?”
As I pointed out some of the planets, stars, and constellations, the dark-haired girl came out of the salon.
“Up here, Trish,” Naomi called down.
“What are you doing up there in the dark?” Trish asked. “How can you even see me?”
“Look down at the water for a minute,” I replied. “Your eyes will adjust faster. Then climb up and join us.”
A moment later, Trish sat down on the bench, facing aft. “I’m worried about the hurricane. That guy, Jimmy? He said you’d know more.”
“I checked about an hour ago,” I said. “It’s been upgraded to a Category-4 hurricane.”
“What’s that mean?” Trish asked.
“It’s how they categorize hurricanes, based on wind speed,” I said. “A Cat-4 has sustained winds over 130 miles per hour, but less than 156.”
“And you said earlier it was a little over a thousand miles away? That’s ten hours!”
“I’m sorry,” I offered. “A hurricane’s a cyclone. The winds rotating around the center are going 130, but the storm itself is moving forward at about thirteen miles per hour.”
“Ah, I get it.” That seemed to calm her. “So, that’s like more than four days away?”
“Probably closer to six or seven,” I replied. “But don’t be surprised if they order an evacuation of the Keys before that. Probably Wednesday or Thursday.”
“Will you be evacuating?” Naomi asked.
I shrugged. “Depends on the track of the storm. I have to think of my boats. If I think it’s going to hit the Keys, I’ll take this boat north to my hurricane hole up in the Everglades.”
“This boat?” Trish asked. “You have two?”
“I have a few other smaller boats at my house,” I replied. “Jimmy and I will put them on trailers and take them to Rusty’s place in Marathon. If the storm is still headed this way later this week, Jimmy will follow me in another boat that also can’t be trailered.”
“I thought the Everglades was a big swamp,” Trish said. “Can this boat go into a swamp?”
“That’s a common misconception,” I said. “The Glades are more of a wide river than a swamp. And there are some deep-water rivers and creeks that flow out of it. There’s one called Shark River, up on the wild southwest coast. It flows from a large lake called Tarpon Bay, deep in the Glades. There are a number of deep creeks that flow into that lake. That’s my hurricane hole. I get up into one of those creeks and tie off to the mangroves to ride out the storm.”
With a bright moon rising, Peter wanted to get the women back in the water for some night shots. “Right here’s fine,” he said. “There won’t be any backdrop except the blackness of the water. Should make for some dramatic full-body shots.”
The models would again free dive. Peter and Claude, using Jimmy as a target, set up bright lights on the sandy bottom, each light pointing up slightly, illuminating nothing but Jimmy, who hung motionless a few feet above the bottom.
Once Jimmy swam out of the light, I heard the distinctive clang of a tank ball—a hard, plastic ball with a bungee strapped to a scuba tank. Pull it away and release it, and the tank made a loud ringing sound; Peter’s signal that he was ready to start.
I couldn’t see much of anything, except a couple of patches of light on the bottom, and the three divers’ glow sticks. Jimmy’s was green, while Peter and Claude had red ones. The sticks would make it easy for anyone in trouble to identify Jimmy, a trained divemaster. The glow sticks were flexible plastic tubes filled with a chemical and a small glass vial. When you bent the tube, the glass broke, releasing a different chemical that reacted to the first and created a phosphorescent glow that lasted for hours. Jimmy hovered above and behind the two photographers, ready in case one of the girls needed help.
There was a splash at the stern and when I looked down, only three of the women were still hanging onto the swim platform. One of the blondes, whose names were Kate and Vickie, appeared in front of the lights. It was impossible to tell who was who; they wore white and yellow bikinis, which looked the same underwater. She floated there, as if in slow motion, turning and posing, for about ten seconds before starting back up.
We were in fifteen feet of water. For the models to stay neutrally buoyant in front of the lights, they had to arrive there with their lungs about half empty. It was kind of a balance, depending on the person’s body fat, and these girls had very little. Taking a full breath at the surface and slowly exhaling while swimming downward for fifteen or twenty seconds was about all a person could manage.
One by one they each dove into the area where Peter had his lights trained. Each would pause and pose for a few seconds before surfacing. As one came up, another started down, so Peter had a beautiful woman in front of his lens nearly all the time.
After about twenty minutes of solo shots, two of the girls went down together, leaving two at the surface. When Trish and Naomi came up, Kate and Vickie went down, and they alternated several more dives, two at a time. It didn’t take long before I could hear labored breathing from the girls at the swim platform.
All four rested together for a while, then they all dove in unison, moving around in front of the lights. My view wasn’t great, what with the rippling of the surface and the fact that I was mostly looking down at the tops of their heads.
They did two more dives where they all posed together, each taking a longer surface break. Finally, the women climbed up onto the swim platform. I went down and got towels out of the locker for them.
I helped the divers get their equipment aboard as the women headed for the warmth of the showers. Jimmy and Peter stripped off their gear, dried off, and went inside to look at the pictures. I helped Claude rinse all the gear and put it away.
With everyone back aboard and exhausted, I assigned bunks, giving the private staterooms to the women, and pulling the convertible out of the sofa for Peter and Claude. Jimmy took the dinette and I rolled a mat out on the foredeck.
I’ve slept under the stars nearly as much as I have with a roof over my head. The sea was calm, the moon and stars were bright, and I could see the water’s surface all the way to the horizon. I felt very secure, and quickly fell asleep.
Early the next morning, I went into the salon to find Jimmy on the laptop. “Cat-5,” he whispered, holding up a hand, fingers spread wide. “It’s about 125 miles from Antigua. Isn’t that where Sara is?”
I poured a cup of coffee and took a sip. “No, it’s where we met a couple weeks ago. She’s aboard Ambrosia, down in the Grenadines. What’s the new projected path?”
Jimmy clicked a few keys and turned the laptop toward me. The cone reached all the way into the Gulf of Mexico, with a dot just south of Marathon, labeled 2am Sunday. But the cone itself engulfed all of Cuba and southern Florida, all the way up to Orlando, plus a huge swath of the southeastern Gulf.
“I think we oughta bug out, man.”
I ran the numbers in my head.
Leaving now, it’d be early afternoon before we got back to my island. It’d take us two days to fully secure everything there, move the smaller boats to Rusty’s place, put them on trailers—one of which I didn’t have—and park them in Rusty’s yard. I only had trailers for three of the four smaller boats. His house was the highest ground in the Middle Keys; eighteen feet above sea level, built on an exposed limestone ridge. Add a day for finding a trailer for Knot L-8, and another day to get the Revenge and Cazador up to Tarpon Bay, and we’d be well into Saturday. That left us with a full day’s buffer. What could go wrong?
“Yeah,” I think you’re right. I turned toward the stern, where Peter and Claude slept back-to-back on the sofa bed. “Peter, wake up.”
By the time we got the Revenge back to my island, Irma was clocking sustained
winds of 185 miles per hour, with gusts over 200. Since our first stop after my home was going to be the Rusty Anchor, Naomi decided to come with us. She’d ridden with Peter to Key West in his big nine-passenger van and it was cramped with all the gear.
“If Category-5 starts at 157 miles per hour, and this one’s already up to 185…” Naomi shook her head. “What’s after that?”
“The crushing hand of the Almighty,” Jimmy said, stepping down into my little Maverick and offering Naomi a hand.
She accepted it and smiled at him, but she still looked a bit skeptical. “Seriously.”
“Might as well be,” I said, starting the engine, then stepping over to Kim’s Maverick and starting it. “There really aren’t too many things that can withstand a constant 150-mile-per-hour wind. Some block walls and a few bushes might remain, stripped of roof and leaf. A high storm surge will decimate low-lying areas and alter coastlines. ‘Head for high ground’ isn’t just a saying.”
“Rusty’s place is eighteen feet above sea level,” Jimmy said. “It’s never flooded.”
He might need all that and the pilings his house sat on, I thought, as I tossed off the lines and pulled away from them.
We ran fast through the narrow cuts to the southwest, Jimmy right behind me. Once in deeper water, we spread out and headed south toward the bridge, only the arch visible on the horizon.
I hadn’t seen Finn in nearly two weeks. Jimmy had left him at the Anchor before going down to Key West. As I slowed and entered the canal to Rusty’s place, Finn came bounding down the dock and leaped over the stern of the end boat. He belly-flopped into the water, creating a massive splash, and began swimming toward my boat.
After shifting to neutral, I headed to the stern to help him aboard. Once in the boat, he was thoughtful enough to shower me before having a meltdown at my feet.
A person has never experienced true exuberance unless they’ve owned a Labrador Retriever and left their dog alone for a while. Black, yellow, chocolate, it didn’t matter. If you leave them for an hour or a month, it’s the same. They’re thrilled that you’re back with them, and they show it.
Rising Water Page 18
