by I A Thompson
“I’m sorry, I meant no disrespect, dude.” Bud backed down.
“Dude,” Zach replied. “I’m fine, but I do think you owe the lady an apology.”
“I apologize, ma’am, I didn’t mean to insult you.” Bud even went so far to bow his head in Regina’s direction.
As mad as she was, Regina also knew that his attitude reflected what many men across all age ranges in the South thought to this day, so she faked a smile and said, “Apology accepted.” And then looked up at Zach. “Honey, do you mind if we leave? I suddenly have a headache.”
On their way out, they could hear Jolene chastising Bud for his rude behavior.
16
Regina waited until they were back in the privacy of their hotel room before she unloaded. “That fucking, bigoted, back-wood, hillbilly, dickhead. It’s because of assholes like him that the rest of the world thinks we’re all racist morons just waiting for the South to rise again, And I bet he was already on his third generation of teeth as well!”
“What?” Zach looked confused.
“I mean dentures. From my experience, this kind of attitude has a direct correlation to the number of missing teeth. In other words, he was likely wearing dentures.”
“Livingston, you never cease to amaze me. Cursing like a sailor and doling out stereotypes of your own; you are something else.”
“In other words, I don’t quite fit the mold?” Regina grinned. “By the way, I want to thank you for keeping me cool in that bar; that guy really rubbed me the wrong way.”
“You’re welcome. After all, that’s what partners are for, and besides that, it gave our cover more credence.”
“Since I ruined your happy hour, can I make up for it by taking you out to dinner? I’ve been craving ‘Sideline’s’ wings, ever since we set foot on the island. Do you like hot wings?”
Zach nodded. “Sure do, the hotter the better.”
“Me too. You’ll have to try a batch of ‘Hail Mary’. Hot enough to clean your sinuses, but not so hot that you can’t eat more than three before your brain overheats.”
Two hours later they returned from their dinner, deeply satisfied by the quantity and quality of the food they had eaten and were slightly buzzed from the beers they drank to cool down the wings.
“That was just what the doctor ordered,” Zach said. “I feel like I can take on the world again, as long as it doesn’t include moving too fast.”
“Right there with you, pal,” Regina laughed. “It’s the perfect night for some snooping around. We can cover a lot of ground without having to lift a foot. I’d suggest you cover the law enforcement resources and I’ll do my spy stuff? I’m thinking, a good start would be those Chinese QBZ-97 assault rifles Hernandez mentioned during our briefing, add ‘Niseko’ and Royal Dutch Freight Lines, including the acronym RDFL, to the mix, bounce it against U.S. Gulf Coast and see if something bleeps on the radar.”
“Okay, I’ll also check in with the rest of the team and find out if they’ve gotten any new leads.”
Regina nodded and focused her attention on her laptop as she pulled up Centipede, or CP as she called the program, a query and aggregator tool she had created at the CIA to speed up the tedious task of collecting and analyzing large amounts of data. It was still in its infancy, barely a prototype, but it was better than anything else she had available. She couldn’t help but grin when she thought back to the day when she picked the name Centipede as she visualized hundreds of little query legs reaching out and pulling back data.
CP turned out to be incredibly powerful and stealthy. While it conducted its work, it constantly cleaned up behind itself, leaving no trace of ever having been there. For the time being, it still relied on legitimate system access, but Regina knew she’d eventually break through that barrier.
Regina’s reasons for experimenting with CP were born out of purely selfish reasons. She wanted to put a lid on her supervisor’s ability to take credit for work he didn’t do; Monty Richards would routinely spy on his employees and present their work as his own, so she found a way to shut him out. The only person at the CIA she had confided in was John Treadwell, the Deputy Director of Analytics, which gave her a hunch that it was the reason why she had been assigned to this mission.
She connected to the data sources she was interested in, fed CP its search criteria, hit the ‘Start’ button and sat back. While she was waiting for her search results, she watched Zach scribbling notes, typing on his laptop, frowning and making faces. She could tell he preferred field work over this type of information gathering. Looking back at the screen in front of her, she saw that CP had completed its assignment and in neat rows, data was arranged by topics.
She discarded the statistics on the Chinese rifles. Nothing there that would be of immediate help. Much more interesting was a dark web chat that indicated someone named ‘Juliana’ would be bringing two tons of ‘Niseko’ to a location indicated by coordinates.
Regina wasn’t much of a boater, hunter or pilot, but having grown up in a town where all three of those pastimes were popular, many of her friends were speaking GPS as fluently as English. Her instincts told her the coordinates in the chat were somewhere close to home. She queried CP to give her the coordinates to the Pensacola Pass off NAS Pensacola, the distance to the chat’s coordinates and the average speed of the most popular fishing vessels in the region. It took CP no time at all to give her the answers she was looking for.
Regina took a deep breath; they had their first solid lead. If she could tie this Juliana chick to the rest of the information, they’d have a mark. She added ‘Juliana’ to her increasingly complicated query and almost simultaneously CP added another line of data to the screen. Sure enough, Juliana was an RDFL ship. But which one.
She looked over the information CP had previously provided about the RDFL ships. She immediately ruled out the ones leaving the U.S. and focused on the inbound ships; it couldn’t be the banana boat going to Texas; she had never heard of bananas being shipped in bulk, and she was reasonably sure, the same applied to electronics. Just to make sure, she checked on the location of both ships and found out that they were bound to reach their destinations within the next day which left the ship coming from Suriname.
“Gotcha,” she said out loud as she turned to Zach. “Are you at a good stopping point?” she asked. “I want to show you something.”
Zach walked over to her and leaned over her shoulder while she walked him through her queries, results and conclusions. Then she waited patiently for him to compute the information she gave him.
“That’s good work, Livingston,” Zach commented. “This is definitely something worth writing home about, even if it turns out to be just a bunch of coincidences, this is the first time we have that many common denominators.”
They crafted a short message, encrypted it and sent it to their task force via Ghost Coms.
17
Regina wasn’t sure what woke her up, although she vaguely remembered being chased by drug dealers waiving around QBZ-97s. She sighed; it was going to be a long day, sitting on the sidelines, watching other agencies doing their job.
She checked Ghost Coms, where she found a response from Hernandez, and after decrypting the string of letters, numbers and characters, she read the short message he had sent late last night.
“CBP to dispatch P3 surveillance plane from Miami at 0700 EDT tomorrow. HIDTA alerted and on stand-by.”
She heard Zach snoring in the other room. Good, she thought. That will give me some time to myself. She put on some workout gear, grabbed her keycard and a bottle of water, made her way down to the beach and started walking towards the Portofino Towers.
With the high tide having only receded a short time ago, the sand was almost as hard as concrete. The air was crisp, a light wind coming in from the ocean that filled her ears as she watched the sky turn purple, followed by reds, oranges and finally the first yellows, as the sun came up over the horizon.
Regina caught herself
scanning the horizon for any sign of the Customs and Border Patrol’s P3 out there looking for the ‘Juliana’ and whatever local boat was going to meet with her. She didn’t really expect to see anything, given that the plane was no doubt significantly further south than she was, but it was fun imagining what was happening 30,000 feet above the un-expecting ships.
Her mind wandered to her and Zach’s challenge at hand. Had they been able to operate in the open, as originally planned, it wouldn’t have been a problem for them to get together with the HIDTA team and simply tag along for the ride that was about to begin. Sure, they had been nice and helpful so far, but would they really want a journalist and his girlfriend coming along on an investigation?
Thirty minutes later she returned to her hotel room, with rosy cheeks, windswept hair and a plan. She grabbed her phone and stepped out on the balcony, so she wouldn’t wake up Zach. She dialed Nick’s number, fully expecting to connect to his voicemail, but much to her surprise, he picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Nick, hi, it’s Regina. Did I wake you up?”
“No, I got a call from the office; I’ve got to go in early. What about you? You’re up awfully early too.”
“I wanted to ask you for a huge favor, but first you’ll have to promise me not to breathe a word to Zach.”
“That’s ominous. Can I get a hint before I make a promise like that?”
“Well, the hint is ‘rich content’.”
“Doesn’t tell me much, but I’ll be willing to take the chance and promise.”
“Thank you. Well then, here it goes. Zach’s editor seems to think Zach’s article is lacking pizazz. It’s too factual and not enough action if that makes sense. What he needs is to walk a mile in your shoes. Is there any way at all that he can shadow you for next forty-eight hours or so? Of course, it would be nice if I could tag along, but I’d understand if that’s not feasible.”
Nick was silent for what seemed an eternity. Then he drew in a sharp breath before he spoke again. “I wish I could say yes, Gina, but that’s way above my paygrade. I’ll be happy to ask, but don’t get your hopes up too high.”
Regina smiled. His reaction was a dead giveaway that he knew about the ‘Juliana’, what a catch the shipment would be and that he was mulling over the costs and benefits of the publicity Zach’s article could give the team if he was embedded with them during the raid.
“That’s all I can ask for,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
“Sure thing, I’ll give you a buzz once I hear something.” Nick disconnected the call. Twenty minutes later he called back. “You guys are in. We’ll meet in an hour in the same conference room we all met in the other day.”
“Thank you, Nick. We’ll be there, donuts and coffee included!” Regina hung up and opened the door to Zach’s room. He was still sleeping, his face looking relaxed and peaceful. She turned the TV on and raised the volume until he opened one eye.
Seeing her standing in his room, Zach jolted upright as if she had struck him. “What the hell? What time is it?”
“Just after six; we have to be at the Sheriff’s office in an hour.”
“Why?”
“Because the CBP has a surveillance plane tracking the ‘Juliana’ and our mystery boat; we get to observe.”
Zach looked at her with a blank stare, trying to comprehend what she had said. And then it clicked, his eyes widened. He lifted his bedspread to get out of bed and dropped it immediately. “Out!” he pointed at the door. “Out! Now! I’ll be ready in ten minutes!”
“Aye, aye, sir!” Regina saluted and left his room, grinning from ear to ear as she shut the door behind her.
She was still working on suppressing her giggles when they arrived at the Sheriff’s office fifty minutes later. The HIDTA team welcomed them enthusiastically and had set out two large cans of coffee to compliment the two boxes of assorted donuts Zach and Regina carried.
The TV screen on the wall showed an interactive map of the Gulf of Mexico and the northern part of the Caribbean Sea. Several dotted, yellow and red lines were displayed, along with a seemingly random red X in the middle of the ocean. To the right of the map were two smaller pictures, one showing what looked like a wall of blinking lights, the other a small-scale control center.
“What’s going on?” Zach asked.
Shelby Turner, the CBP agent, walked up to the screen and pointed at the dotted red line that began northwest of Jamaica and headed north-north-west towards the red X. “This is the Dutch freighter ‘Juliana’. We were alerted by Interpol that she is suspected to carry two tons of drugs that are supposed to be handed over to a U.S. based boat at the rally point indicated by the red X.”
She pointed at five dotted yellow lines zigzagging through the northern part of the gulf waters. “We are monitoring these five vessels which are all registered in our HIDTA territory, have the necessary cargo capacity and reach, and are moving in the general direction of the target coordinates. We’re expecting the exchange to happen at some point within the next seven to ten hours. The closer we get to that time, the more accurately we can identify which one of the five boats is the recipient of the shipment. We currently have a P3 from our Miami station in the air to provide us with updates. That’s them in the small picture in the top right corner. If something interesting happens, they’ll tell us. At the bottom right is Miami station’s control center; they’re coordinating while their plane is in the air. The CBP’s P3s have a range of about 5,000 miles and can stay in the air close to sixteen hours. The plan is that the Miami based P3 will stay with us through the exchange and that a New Orleans based plane will take over surveillance afterwards.”
“Cool!” Zach exclaimed and scribbled notes on his iPad. “So, what’s going to happen after the exchange?”
“That depends largely on which boat is picking up the shipment,” Shelby replied. “We’re currently working out a variety of plans ranging from a take-down at sea, to letting the shipment go through so we can zero in on the distributors.”
“Why not take them all down at the location of the exchange?” Zach asked.
Shelby smiled. “As much as I personally would like to control all the seven seas, the reality is that our jurisdiction is limited. The crooks on the ‘Juliana’ are smart enough to stay outside of our reach. By the time she reaches New Orleans, she’ll be so squeaky clean, not even our best drug-sniffing dogs will find a whiff of the drugs she carried. Our only chance is to snatch the guys picking up the cargo. Sooner or later they’ll have to come home and then – snap – we’ve got them.“ She performed a picture-perfect Florida Gator Chomp, right hand over left.
“You’re a Gator?” Regina asked.
“Yes, born and raised, orange and blue. How about you?”
“Crimson and white, all the way.”
Zach glared at Regina. “Can you keep your college rivalries under wraps for now and let us focus on the job at hand?”
Regina and Shelby smiled from ear to ear, rolling their eyes in mock aggravation for not being able to indulge in one of the region’s favorite rituals; trash-talking rival football teams.
Armed with coffee and donuts, the team discussed and flushed out their different approaches, periodically interrupted by updates from the surveillance plane and its command center. They ordered in lunch mid-morning, and as the hours slowly passed, the number of boats monitored gradually decreased until only one was left.
The 67-foot steel trawler ‘Mellie’ was registered to Jack Wilson of Milton, Florida. She was large enough to hold 60,000 pounds of fish in her ice hold, yet small enough to easily navigate in narrow and shallow waterways. Although she was approaching thirty years of age, she was in immaculate condition, equipped with the latest and greatest electronics and gadgetry that made operating her feel like child’s play.
Jack had learned everything he knew about fishing aboard the ‘Mellie’, his father’s last fishing boat, named after Jack’s late mother. Jack inherit
ed ‘Mellie’ when his father unexpectedly passed away five years ago. He and his family then moved into his parent’s old home on Heron’s Landing in Milton and took over the family business.
There was nothing in the public records indicating that Jack had ever been in trouble with the law. Dashingly handsome in his youth, he seemed to live on the sunny side of life, having married his high school sweetheart and now raising two teenage sons.
Had they not known what they had to look for, the CBP plane and the HIDTA team would have very likely missed the handover of the drug shipment; the whole transaction was over within fifteen minutes. The pictures transmitted from the P3 were fuzzy, but it looked like the cranes aboard the ‘Juliana’ simply dropped a series of packages overboard without the ship ever slowing down or veering off its course. The ‘Mellie’, travelling in the opposite direction, picked up the packages and continued its journey for another hour before turning back towards the Gulf Coast, closely watched by the circling P3.
18
“I can’t believe this is actually happening,” Regina said to Zach between two bites of Hawaiian pizza. The two were eating lunch at a small pizzeria in Milton, while the HIDTA team staked out the area around Heron’s Landing prior to the ‘Mellie’ returning home.
“What do you mean?”
“For once, I actually get to see the fruits of my labor, not just a line in a report saying ‘target eliminated’. You have no idea, how satisfying this is.”
“Trust me, being part of the action tends to be overrated with a lot of hurry up and wait, an adrenalin rush and before you know it, it’s over.”
“I’m okay with that; I’m just happy I’m not stuck behind a computer screen in an office. So far, this is as close as I’ve ever come to fieldwork.” Regina pointed at the 1950’s decoration.
