Castigo Cay

by Matthew Bracken

  It was half-past midnight, early Saturday morning. I steered the Pantera to the waypoint in my GPS, five hundred yards west of the bottom tip of South Bimini. When we reached the spot, I flashed my running lights on and off, one second on, one second off, so there was no mistaking my intentions. After a minute a bright white light blinked back at me—the pilot signaling from shore, I hoped. I circled back offshore, wallowing again in the slight swell at low speed, the exhaust diverted underwater to reduce the engine’s sound.

  “Nick, get our guns.”

  My Glock was already in its black plastic holster, and I shoved it under my belt on my right hip. The bottom of my flotation vest covered it. Kelly’s eyes grew wide when she saw the weapons. She was wearing one of the foul-weather jackets now; it was cold on the water at high speed, no matter what the air temp was.

  I looked at her and said, “Girl, don’t argue with me, but you have to go below and stay out of sight. And don’t make a peep.”

  “Is this place really that bad?”

  “I hope not. It was okay a few years ago. But places can change.” I knew it was a risk going into South Bimini. A microport where it might be safe to conduct black-market business one year might become a den of thieves in another. The thieves would prey on returning customers who did not know that there had been a change in policy from sales to theft. And sometimes the thieves wore the uniforms of the local military or law enforcement branches, so these capricious gray-zone microports had to be approached with great wariness. Kelly scuttled below into the bow without a debate. It was just Nick and me in the cockpit standing against our bolster seats, packing heat. Two white pistoleros in an anonymous go-fast, looking for a transaction of mutual benefit and short duration.

  After we’d circled for about five minutes, a big rigid-hulled inflatable came out: gray rubber tubes and hull. A little bigger than my Avon, about eighteen feet. A black man in a yellow slicker stood at the console, close enough to wave to me. He circled behind us and turned his boat onto a parallel course, converging until our hulls were almost touching.

  You didn’t come into South Bimini at night without a pilot. The coral heads were too numerous and the currents too tricky. These pilots possessed knowledge passed from generation to generation while dealing with purveyors of blockaded weapons, illegal bird plumes, Demon Rum, Mary Jane, coke, unpapered migrants and any other midnight cargo that presented a business opportunity. GPS made it easier and allowed them to retrace their intricate routes through the coral even in total darkness. The pilot dropped back alongside me until our hulls were pressed together and called out, “You want gas, right?” Enough light glowed from the instruments on his console for my night-adapted eyes to make him out.

  “Right, gasoline.”

  He looked at us carefully and finally said, “Okay. Follow me, den you turn where I turn—not before. Den tie against de barge I take you to. All good deep water for you between here and dere, if you stay close behind.” He made the fingering-bills gesture with one hand. “One t’ousand U.S., all right?”

  I nodded, gave him a thumbs-up, and waved him ahead. He made a call on a cell phone or walkie-talkie, and then he steered his boat on a path like the circumference of a puzzle piece across the seamless black water. There was no dramatic rocky inlet to run with white knuckles on the wheel, as is so often the case. There was just a diminishment in the ocean swell and chop until we were on flat water moving at slower and slower speed. In a minute we approached land, marked mostly by some dimly lit houses and a couple of moving vehicle lights. Nick used the time to get our fenders and coiled dock lines ready.

  A few miles to the northeast, the light atop the unseen Bahamas Telephone Company tower flashed its red Morse code B. The light oversaw both Biminis like a winking red star beneath the Big Dipper and the entire Milky Way. The light would be maintained as a trivial benefit for a handful of passing mariners, but only for as long as the BaTelCo tower was needed for inter-island and inter-continental wireless communications. When the communications companies pull the plugs on the big towers and the red light on top goes out, you know you’re entering the New Dark Ages, at least in that region. I’ve been out there past the collapsed infrastructure on the fringes of a couple of continents, and very different rules of conduct apply—or no rules at all.

  Both Biminis were flat, nowhere more than ten or twelve feet above the high-tide line, so there was no background landmass to speak of. The barge became visible as a perfectly straight line of blacker black against the stars. The pilot pulled alongside us, pressing against our hull with his side tube, pointed ahead and said, “Tie up dere and pay me, okay?”

  “What about the gas?”

  “Dey be here right quick.”

  I steered the Pantera in a tight circle to moor facing back out. This put us against the barge port-side-to, Nick’s side. The steel barge extended a yard and a half above the water. There was no fuel pump that I could see. Thankfully, the halfsunk barge was well fendered in the middle, because the Pantera lifted and dropped a good two feet on the surge wrapping around South Bimini. I hitched my flotation vest up and felt the grip of my Glock. Nick tied us off to tug-size cleats, and fit our fenders among theirs to maximize the cushioning.

  The pilot boat nudged back against us and I paid him his thousand. He examined the single bill closely with a flashlight, smiled, spoke again on his walkie-talkie, then moved his inflatable forward and also tied alongside the barge.

  After a few minutes the gasoline entrepreneurs arrived, walking across the barge to loom above us. Seen against the stars, about all I could determine was that they were adult males, and maybe that they were black. They both carried flashlights and courteously didn’t shine them in our faces. The side shine was plenty for us to do business by.

  The taller man said, “You want gas, right? How much you want?”

  I replied, “Maybe a hundred gallons.”

  “Two hundred dollars a gallon, nice round numbers I like. Dot be twenty t’ousand dollar, mon.” He didn’t mention giving back change if we used less than the full amount, and I didn’t ask. Change would not be part of the transaction.

  “How fresh is the gas? What octane?”

  “It’s good gas, mon. Avgas—aviation grade. De best. Let me see de money.”

  I pulled out three wads and riffled the bills. The taller man reached for them but I pulled them back and said, “The gas first.” He grinned, his white teeth gleaming in the reflected glow from our instruments. He wasn’t worried about being stiffed. We couldn’t easily or safely escape without their pilot’s assistance.

  Shifting a hundred gallons of gasoline across a barge onto a speedboat isn’t a trivial task. I shut down the engine and switched on the ventilation blower. Nick slid down below and opened the forward deck hatch. I couldn’t remember how much gas vapor equaled the explosive power of a stick of dynamite, but it was less than a Pantera-full, that much I knew.

  The shorter of the two men disappeared ashore past the barge and returned dragging a long hose. Nick had found the deck key and unscrewed our gasoline filling cap. It was on his side of the boat, on a downward-sloping facet of fiberglass so that any spillage would not run into the cockpit. Into the hole went a “Baja filter” that we’d found below, a giant funnel with a fine filter screen at the narrow end. It wouldn’t purify bad gas, but it would keep out the larger chunks of dirt and rust.

  The hose didn’t have a nozzle like hoses at a gas station, just a cutoff valve. The gasoline was taking its time coming a long distance through the one-inch hose at low pressure. While the gas flowed I dug into the cooler and pulled out a couple of plastic bottles. I didn’t care what was in them and picked one at random, which turned out to be some kind of ersatz lemonade made from powder. I opened a bottle for Nick and surreptitiously tossed one forward for Kelly. No doubt it was made from the tap water back in the Delaneys’ house. It didn’t taste particularly great, but it was potable and it was cold. I toasted civilization and running
water.

  Even though we could watch the fuel gauge’s needle heading toward the F, when the tank was full some gasoline came slopping out of the hole before Nick could cut it off. Filling the forty-gallon fuel bladder was even trickier. We both kept a wary eye on the bladder while it filled. A dim cabin light let us watch the rubber tank go from pancake flat to tick tight.

  Kelly remained all the way forward, sitting Indian-style on the V-berth facing us, silent as a fawn. The gas fumes were oppressively thick in the cockpit, so it must have been nauseating for her. Nick gradually turned the cutoff valve and only a little fuel splashed out at the end. The silence of the night was broken only by our ventilation blower, a distant generator and music from some unseen place.

  The taller man said, “Everyting good now, mon?”

  “If it’s good gasoline, then everything is good.”

  He replied with some ire, “Of course it’s good gas, mon—dot’s our bidness! Be for real, what you think?”

  I handed him the three wads of cash; he counted them quickly and checked a few at random with his flashlight. I said, “We have a little navigation work to do. Just a few minutes and we’ll take off.”

  “No problem, mon. Take your time.” The two men disappeared across the barge, dragging the black hose behind them. Nick had found an old towel below and used it to mop up the spilled gasoline, then tossed it onto the barge. I told Kelly she could come out from below, and she returned to the cockpit without complaining about the stink of fumes. She was holding the Orbcom, its screen lit up.

  She said, “I just got the one a.m. location.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “How should I know? I just have the coordinates.”

  ****

  She turned its screen to me, and I entered the latitude and longitude into the GPS. Topaz was sixty-five miles ahead. We could nearly double her speed, but we’d still need to fuel up again before we caught her. I set my next two waypoints on the handheld GPS and drank more bottled water from the cooler. Our new course would first take us sixty miles across the shallow Great Bahama Bank. Then it was fifty miles of deep water to Nassau and, I hoped, our next refueling stop. I wondered if you could still find a gas dock open all night in the capitol of the Bahamas. I hoped so. In my experience, most economic activity usually gravitates toward the national capitols. The rest of a country might be going completely to hell, but things are usually all right in the capitol, relatively speaking.

  While we were still tied up to the sunken barge the pilot boat circled and came alongside, bumping against the Pantera’s fiberglass hull with its soft tube. The pilot said, “Where you heading for now?” He eyed Kelly, our newly conjured crewmember, but said nothing.

  “East, to the Berries.”

  “Dot be very tricky, mon. Very tricky. Not easy, like coming in from de Stream.”

  “I already paid you.” I stared at him; his face was softly lit from below by the backlit instruments on his console.

  “Dot was for comin’ in, mon. Not for gettin’ out.”

  I sighed but didn’t press it. I still had plenty of greenbacks to spread around. And once I’d crossed an ocean or two, I’d be hard-pressed to find a bank or money changer that would accept my unspent paper U.S. dollars. And if they did, the conversion rate would be an atrocity. Around the world, King Dollar had become a redheaded stepchild.

  “How much?” I asked him, resigned to paying a second time.

  “A t’ousand. De same like before.”

  I handed over the bill. It disappeared and the pilot boat slid ahead of us. I had given him the Berries as my destination because he needed a rough direction to steer away from South Bimini. Finding the channels through the coral that led east to the Great Bahama Bank required a local guide, no way around it. But I didn’t want to be truthful about my next refueling destination in case informants were part of his circle of friends, knowingly or unknowingly. Any information gleaned by the DEA would wind up on Frank Bloomfield’s computer screen or smart phone in due course. If they heard I’d gone to the Berries and were intent on finding me, maybe they would expend some resources looking for me on the dozens of isles and cays that make up that minor galaxy of Bahamian islands.

  The pilot led us on another coral-dodging pretzel course. After a few minutes he dropped back alongside and called over, “All good water east from here.” Our depth meter showed only six feet. I waved a salute, and he turned away and disappeared toward his home island. We were on our way again at one-fifteen in the morning. The last dregs of moonlight had disappeared behind us. Starlight under a one-eighth overcast wasn’t much of a substitute.

  The boat handled differently with six hundred pounds of raw gasoline in her belly, but we’d be running mostly in flat water for the rest of the night. We could make it to Nassau and maybe even further with just our main tank. Nick had the helmet on and the NOD down, and he pronounced the horizon ahead to be clear. Even without the moon there was just enough light for me to make out the ocean ahead of us with my fully night-adjusted human eyes.

  I flipped the exhaust to the straight pipes and nudged the throttle ahead until we were making a little over sixty at an even 4,000 rpm. Our depth gauge read mostly in the teens but sometimes showed as little as six or seven feet of depth. Six feet of water could deepen to ten or disappear to zero in a blink. At sixty miles an hour, you’d strike a lurking coral head long before you ever noticed it on the depth sounder.

  In compensation, the water was flat calm and driving the boat meant just steering after I’d trimmed her out with the tabs. The GPS’s glowing arrow pointed the way, always straight ahead as long as I kept the Pantera on course. The Great Bahama Bank was a superhighway with no lane dividers, no shoulders and no guardrails. A liquid Bonneville Salt Flats, on a much vaster scale. I could see in my peripheral vision that spray was shooting out on either side in flat sheets of glowing phosphorescence, but not a drop touched us. There was no autopilot on the Pantera, but if there had been, it would have been able to keep the little rocket on course across the table-flat water.

  After we’d been screaming along at sixty-plus for an hour, Nick pointed ahead and yelled, “See that? The first waypoint is coming up.”

  “I don’t see a light,” I replied just as loudly. The safe exit from the shallow Grand Bahama Bank onto the deepwater Northwest Channel was marked by a navigational beacon. It should have been showing a flashing white light visible from eight miles away. But I didn’t really expect to see it. These isolated navaids were low-hanging fruit for any passing boater who wanted a free solar panel and the deep-cycle marine batteries that powered the lights at night. Most governments had quit replacing them. To think that there had been a time when people had been so fat, dumb and happy that big solar panels and banks of batteries could just be left unguarded, out in the middle of nowhere! And not a single passerby would take them away! Those times had obviously come and gone in the Bahamas—and, to be frank, in most of the world I’d visited recently.

  I held my course and Nick said, “Come a little starboard, just a few degrees. How close do you want to pass it?”

  I yelled back, “Just don’t let us hit it.” I could only dimly see the water by natural starlight. Then a vertical black hulk sprang into my view, became the shadow of a skeletal tower about thirty feet high, and flashed past us down our port side close enough to be wet by our spray. We hooted and howled and screamed. An hour of acutely focused attention and sensory deprivation does funny things to your perception of mundane objects like steel towers. Especially when passing close by them at high speed, at night.

  It’s the realization that if we’d been obliviously roaring along just thirty feet to the left, we’d have been instantly pulverized and shredded upon collision with the unlit beacon’s steel tower legs. And then turned into barbeque flambé atop a hundred gallons of exploding gasoline. But we didn’t hit the iron skeleton, so instead we experienced a rush of adrenaline. It was like getting shot at and missed. So
mewhere I’d read that a young Winston Churchill had appreciated the perverse fun in that, all the way back in the Boer War.

  I glanced down at the depth sounder. Its numbers flashed from the twenties through the hundreds, and after five hundred it just flashed zeros. After five hundred we were “off soundings,” meaning our fathometer didn’t have the punch to send its pings all the way to the bottom and hear an echo.

  Five hundred feet, five thousand or even deeper, it didn’t matter. Anything that sank out here was gone for good. On the positive side, we no longer had to worry about running into random coral heads or unlit navigational aids. I braced for an increase in wave height, but there was no appreciable difference from back on the shallow bank behind us and I was able to keep her at over sixty. Nick informed me of some thunderheads and squalls near our course that might affect us. I could sense them only as a further blackening of a dark sky by the blotting out of the stars. We flew on through the darkness. The air and water temperatures were both in the eighties, but it was always cold at high speed in an open boat. I could handle most anything for a couple of hours, and I knew Nick was the same way. I took a quick glance behind me. The hood of Kelly’s slicker was cinched down to a tiny donut hole.

  2

  Our next waypoint was the light on the western tip of Paradise Island. The three-mile-long island lies just north of Nassau and forms its harbor, with entrances at each end. I spotted the Paradise Island light with my eyes when the GPS said we were eleven miles out. We found the Western Channel with no trouble. Everything was on the GPS, matching what we saw.

  New Providence Island, where Nassau is located, is only twenty miles long, but half the population of the entire Bahamas lives on it. This meant that almost two hundred thousand people were on this one island, only about the tenth-biggest by area in the Bahamas. Besides being the capitol of the country, Nassau was the social and economic heart of the Bahamas and therefore, I hoped, a place where I could find fuel in the middle of the night. Our approach course brought us slanting down across the amply lit north coast of New Providence. It could have been Florida. The lights built to a blaze as we approached the environs of the capitol.