Mid Ocean

by T Rafael Cimino

  “We wait, Gus,” Alazar said.

  “Yeah, but where is this great crew I’ve been hearing so much about?”

  “They’re all around you. That’s the beauty of our operation. We live, work and play here. My men and their boats blend into the surroundings. See that hole in the water over there?” Alazar asked, pointing to the Cho Chos in the La Pinta, anchored two hundred yards to the north.

  “That piece of shit?”

  “You would never suspect it. These Marimbettos who come in with their go-fasts and loud engines don’t have a chance against the cops with faster boats, much less the neighborhood watches and citizen groups. Hell, even the Coast Guard Auxiliary is in the picture. And thanks to this new TV show Miami Vice, they’re all looking for the same thing: the Indians, Mirages, Scarabs and Stilettos. Don’t get me wrong. Those boats are great for crossing, but from the reef to the Key, we prefer these small pleasure boats. The uglier, the better.”

  “This makes sense. But what about speed?”

  “That’s where the chase boat comes in. If the Feds are watching us on radar, they will automatically go after the faster boat. It’s a proven fact.”

  “Like Smoky and the Bandit.”

  “Exactly. Except we don’t get a Sally Field,” Alazar answered as the others chuckled.

  “Look, Gus, there are no guarantees here, but I think if you look at other operations you’ll see ours is by far the safest,” Del said.

  “Del is right, Gus. We’ve lost some loads…shit who hasn’t…but that’s the risk you take in this business. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and that would drive the price down. That’s no good. Who wants to work for peanuts?”

  “Tell me about Gordo,” Greico asked.

  “Gordo is Roberto’s brother. He is a good man,” Del replied.

  “And he is in charge of the crossing?”

  “He is the crossing,” Alazar said. “My brother insists on doing everything himself. He maintains the camp and airstrip on Andros. He takes care of his own boats. He has never let any of us down.”

  “Gordo sounds like a valuable asset. As a brother though, what was it like growing up with him?”

  “Interesting. You always kept your eyes on your food!” Alazar said.

  “I guess with a name like Gordo, he likes to eat?”

  “Shit, that’s an understatement. When that plane drops its load they had better have a snack on board. It’s kind of a tradition.”

  “And his son is just like him. A perfect clone,” Del laughed.

  “Poor Gordito. I keep thinking I’m going to see him floating along, aloft, held to the ground by a crew of eight holding lines in some Thanksgiving Day parade someday,” Alazar added as the other three laughed.

  Then suddenly, Del noticed movement one hundred yards off the stern of Vibrations.

  “It’s just Red and Stump,” Alazar said.

  •

  Red Moran and his cousin, Able Smith, called “Stump” because of his blunt, muscular build, sat aboard the blue-hulled 26-foot Chris-Craft, dark and hidden in the shadow of the Molasses Reef light. In view just a hundred yards away, lay Vibrations, fully lit, with the three-second pulse of the reef’s warning light shining over her bow. The Chris-Craft, too, was anchored but on the much rougher side of the reef, just before the drop-off of the shelf below. Red disliked mooring on this side. On one trip, months ago, he got the boat’s anchor snagged on the twisted coral structures below and ended up having to cut the anchor rope to set them free. The boat rolled and swayed with each oncoming wave. Despite the obvious liabilities, they were in the perfect position, that of complete stealth. They were close enough to the light that the Fiberglas boat would never appear on even the most sophisticated radar, and if a patrol boat did happen along, the bright lights of Vibrations coupled with the lights of the Molasses tower, would almost guarantee them invisible to the naked eye. Even sophisticated night vision, like that of the U.S. Customs and Alazar’s own counter-surveillance, could not pierce their veil as there was too much light to render them effective.

  Red watched as the 64-foot Vibrations was affected by the waves, even after being buffered by the reef. He felt secure watching the boat’s large six-foot radar antenna spin over the wheelhouse, casting a constantly moving shadow into the rigging above.

  “It sure is rough tonight,” Stump said, trying to break the silence.

  “Yeah, and it’s going to get rougher. Did you bring the shit?”

  “Yeah man, but my sister wouldn’t let me use her player so we have to settle for this piece of shit player,” Stump answered, pointing to a crudely mounted AM/FM cassette player installed on the boat.

  “Somehow, I knew this was going to happen. Go look in my bag,” Red instructed, opening the teak louvered door to the forward cabin.

  Stump made his way below the deck, excited at what new toy his cousin had brought with them to help pass the time. Stump was easily entertained. Despite his bold, muscular look, Stump wasn’t very smart. He was tested in the sixth grade and was found to possess an IQ of sixty-four, just high enough to keep him out of the special education classes but lacking in other respects, making his school years difficult and frustrating. After spending two years in the seventh grade and two more in the eighth, Stump walked out of his junior high school, the only student old enough to drive himself home.

  “Holy shit man,” Stump said as he removed a new Walkman player from the black canvas bag. “When did you get it?”

  “Last weekend. I took it off this cokehead dude who needed the money.”

  “You dog! This is awesome!”

  “Go ahead, set it up,” Red suggested as he climbed up on the boat’s padded engine hatch before lying out on the foam-filled cushion. He looked up at the stars that seemed brighter offshore. He lay there, feeling the boat rock from side to side, listening to the waves crashing on the jagged coral rocks less than a hundred feet away.

  “Here it is, GTR,” Stump declared as he slipped the cassette into its mechanized door.

  As the music queued up, the two started jerking and quivering to the beat as Red began to sing in chorus with the lead singer.

  “Mother protect me, protect me from myself. Lately I can’t tell, who really are my friends. Burning the candle, the candle at both ends. Through crowds, across floors. Each night I just pretend… When the heart rules the mind…”

  Red had a talent for singing the newer, heavy metal songs. His raspy, high-pitched voice mimicked vocalists like Axl Rose and Steven Tyler. He had let his bright, orange-red hair grow down his back. The color had remained constant for most of his life, thus his namesake given him at birth when he emerged into the world with a small patch of the fiery color on the top of his head. Unlike Stump, Red was his real name given him by his parents. Both his mom and dad were hardcore bikers who believed that the true test of a man rested in his ability to drive his Harley as fast and as hard as possible.

  As the boat rolled and pitched, Red dreamed of the big stage, flinging his red curls in wild circles as the massive sound churned from ten-foot-high speakers.

  “Sunkist, Sunkist, what are you doing?” squawked out the loud voice of Roberto Alazar over the low powered CB radio.

  “Pepsi, this is Sunkist, sorry I guess we got a little loud,” Red spoke into to the mic as Stump raced to turn down the volume.

  “They will be able to hear you all the way to Key Largo my friend.”

  “Yes sir, sorry sir.”

  •

  Three miles to the west, Jim Plimpton applied some cherry ChapStick to his cold, dry lips. The crisp wind flowed through and around the mangrove trees, slicing over the top of the salty water. Plimpton sat alone on his 18-foot backcountry flats boat. Tied to an extended mangrove root, he had an excellent vantage point of both the North and Taylor Creeks.

  As the son of a prominent Upper Keys insurance broker, Plimpton was raised in a fine home sparing no indulgence. It was now at the age of twenty-four that the si
lver spoon was starting to tarnish. His appetite for the finer things in life would require more than that which his father paid him to manage the menial accounts of the family business. At the age of nineteen and against his father’s objections, he had opted to withdraw from his second term at Miami-Dade Community College. His grades were mediocre at best and he was not at all appreciative of the things that college life had to offer. It was his father who said he would work, go to school, or move out of the family’s half-million dollar mansion in prestigious Port Largo. Thus began his career as a policy pusher. He dealt with all the menial accounts, the clients no one else in the office of twenty-three wanted to handle. There were the drunks who were turned down for their state required SR-22 because of too many DUIs and people like the eighty-seven-year-old widow who had been dropped by another agency because of her failing eyesight. Plimpton closed more of the deals no one else was willing to touch. He had a knack for bending the rules and, despite the fact that his father was not particularly overjoyed, even he looked the other way when it was financially beneficial to do so. Plimpton’s ambitions rose, despite the fact he was paid half as much for work that took twice as long. He was driven by the will of showing his overbearing father that he was in control of his life and his success was not to be determined by the amount of sheepskin that hung on the wall of his cubicle.

  Time had passed and Plimpton needed bigger challenges, greater adventures, and most of all, more money. He met Bobby Alazar at a backcountry fishing tournament in Islamorada. After a six-month friendship, the younger Alazar brought Plimpton into his family’s business. Plimpton’s job would be counter-surveillance. As he soon found out, this was the best job of all in the drug trade. He anchored close to the routes of the incoming boats and reported what he saw. He didn’t have to touch anything and the closest he got was twenty yards. When he was paid, it was done so in a handsome fashion.

  At first, Plimpton was rusty. He talked too much on the radio and he was always anchored in the wrong place at the wrong time. On one occasion, an incoming boat almost swamped his sleek, low profile boat, anchored in the middle of the channel. A quick turn by the captain averted a near-collision, and Plimpton was wiser for it the next time.

  He began to enroll in more flats fishing tournaments and won so many contests he was renamed by his colleagues “The Redfisher” for all the red snapper that seemed to be drawn to him like mice to the Pied Piper. Redfisher was painted on the sides of his boat in a swirling, crimson script. This tag accompanied him into the local newspapers that featured articles and a weekly column depicting the week’s fishing exploits. Even the Upper Keys Inquirer, better known as the “Mullet Wrapper,” carried a weekly column called “The Redfisher’s Snapper Spots.” The articles featured Plimpton’s pick of the week for attractive fishing holes and other sundry information about local fishing.

  Plimpton had handcrafted his talent into a new species, even drawing the admiration of his father on several occasions. Within a year of purchasing his boat, it was paid for. He was well on his way towards making a living as a sport fisherman and as a clandestine, counter-surveillance expert who would never be questioned, even by the greenest of agents, as to his intentions anchored in the North Creek at 3:00 a.m.

  As he put the cherry flavored ChapStick back under the boat’s console, the whine of his Zebco Model 318 reel rang out, startling a small flock of egrets roosting in a nearby hammock of mangroves. Another red. That made six sloshing about in his Fiberglas live well and it wasn’t even 10:30. Now it was time to do some real work.

  The sonic charge whined as the infrared optic cylinder charged to a state of readiness. Within seconds, Plimpton’s eyes filled with a bright, lime-green light. The device was held tight against his face with a headband type harness that gave him the option of holding the glasses as regular binoculars or wearing them to aid in piloting his boat at night. The cat’s eyes, as they were called, had the ability to magnify objects in a wide field of view, ten to fifteen times greater than normal and were gyro stabilized for use in rough water. The cat’s eyes emitted no light other than the green glow from the bilateral viewfinders that could be seen if they were not held directly against the user’s face. They did not replace daylight but gave the effect that the world was one well-lit parking lot.

  Plimpton purchased the cat’s eyes from Gene Latrell, the owner of L & L Electronics, a spy shop in Miami. Latrell assured Plimpton that they were the same model used by U. S. Customs agents in the field. This impressed Plimpton who didn’t give a second thought to paying the price of seventy-seven hundred dollars. He considered it an investment.

  Roberto liked the fact that his man in the creek was so aptly equipped. Besides the cat’s eyes, Plimpton possessed a multi-band scanner, capable of storing four hundred different frequencies. Frequencies were like gold to the Marimbetto. Local electronics shops like Radio Shack maintained lists of current frequencies and were usually updated on a weekly basis. Plimpton took this one step further. His home was equipped with two large base station scanners, both of which stayed on twenty-four hours a day. They were connected to a large antenna that towered thirty feet over his house. The scanners continually searched the VHF and twelve-meter bands. From 150 megahertz to 350 megahertz, the devices would search, not scan, starting at a given frequency and climbing five to fifteen hertz at a time, ascending up to the desired range and then repeating the task until it received a usable transmission. In Plimpton’s spare time, he could listen to the scanner and rate the transmissions as relevant and then match them to the frequency.

  The creek was clear, flowing at a slow, steady pace under his anchored boat. Small fish occasionally skipped out of the water, splashing in the coolness, leaving ripples across the nearly flat pane of glass. Plimpton laid the cat’s eyes on the seat next to him and picked up his idle rod and reel, cranking the stainless handle, click-click-click.

  The line sprang taut as the twenty-pound test monofilament line pulled a mullet-baited hook from the creek’s sandy bottom. Plimpton reeled in a few feet and then let the bait fall to the bottom.

  •

  Five hundred yards from Plimpton’s position was Kevin Pinder who sat with his partner, Gil Lindback, inside the clavo. This spot was convenient for it was adjacent to the winding channels and tributaries of the North Creek and its spin-off, Taylor Creek, all of which fed fresh seawater from the Atlantic into the inner sanctum of the John Pennekamp State Park.

  The trailer was set off the street, a dark street to begin with. The nearest light pole was over four hundred feet away. The trailer was seventy feet long and fourteen feet wide, longer and wider than the other trailers on the street. It was built after the Reagan administration deregulated the interstate trucking industry. Mobile home manufacturers had started to cash-in by offering the larger, more comfortable mobile mansions.

  The street was long and narrow, much like the homes installed on it. Its name, Grouper Lane, was sometimes referred to as “Square Grouper Lane.” At the end of the street, the pavement ended and the water began.

  Out the large bay window, Pinder watched up one side toward Taylor Creek, occasionally glancing back to the left to watch the adjacent smaller canals that ran parallel to his corner lot. He kept a lookout for anyone who might notice their operation: nocturnal fishermen, restless neighbors who needed fast relief from midnight heartburn, and busybodies with nothing better to do. All it took was some retired military officer, a model citizen who was observant and the block captain for his area’s neighborhood watch to maybe see a boat cruise go by sitting heavy in the water and return, lighter and higher. He could jot down the address, possibly the vessel registration numbers posted near the boat’s bow and then call 1-800-BE-ALERT, the national U.S. Customs hotline. He could secure up to a twenty-five hundred dollar reward for the right tip. It wasn’t the money he was after, though. He was doing his duty. Just like the one he bestowed upon himself by raising the Stars and Stripes up his homemade flagpole, anchored to the s
teel tongue of his mobile home, or the duty of igniting his four-way flashers on his 1974 Ford Pinto while driving through a school zone. Forget the fact that Grouper Lane was called Square Grouper Lane and not crack alley. Pot, crack, or heroin, it was all the same to him. A retired military officer, he was at war again, the war against drugs, and, as the 10:00 news reported, the government had declared zero tolerance.

  All was quiet and dark, so dark Pinder could see the glowing embers of a barbecue fifty yards away. A family reunion had taken place down the street earlier in the afternoon. They were all drunk and probably asleep, he thought to himself. Pinder was starting to feel comfortable and thus confident. He looked down at the seawater flowing through the mangrove roots, lapping against the concrete dock constructed at the base of the mobile house. How much was Roberto bringing in? Where would they put it? he thought to himself. Two thousand pounds usually went into the trailer’s eight-foot-by-ten-foot bedroom with space to spare. One night though, they were surprised. Four different boats delivered over twelve thousand pounds. They stacked it in the halls and the bathrooms. They had to go outside to pee. To get from one end of the trailer to the other meant crawling on one’s hands and knees and rubbing their back against the ceiling, trying to stay clear of the trailer’s cheap light fixtures. Roberto rewarded them well.

  Those days seemed to be over, though, and Kevin Pinder’s expenses were starting to take control of his life. He had a hunger for high-maintenance girlfriends that had an even greater hunger for cocaine. The two were taking a toll on his finances. Tonight was going to be different.

  In the corner of the kitchen at the base of the refrigerator was a common floor scale with a bright red digital dial for reading in the dark. The bales were weighed as they came in the front door. They were then marked and listed on a crudely sketched inventory sheet. This one was a child’s notebook folio adorning a group of popular cartoon figures on the front cover. It was the only thing Kevin could find at the last minute at the Seven Eleven store on the corner.