Castigo Cay

by Matthew Bracken

  You didn’t need a paper chart or a GPS map to know where to go: Nassau Harbor was lit on both sides like Las Vegas. To port, the Atlantis casino and mega-resort on Paradise Island glowed like Mayan pyramids containing their own power plants. To starboard, a pair of enormous cruise ships competed for the eye’s attention.

  I throttled back to a high idle and switched the exhaust to underwater. Nick stashed our pistols below and prepared our fenders and dock lines. In a few minutes we slipped beneath the twin seventy-foot-high vehicle bridges from Nassau over to Paradise Island. I circled outside a marina complex with a restaurant and club built out over the water. Live reggae music competed with steel drums and hip-hop, thumping and clanging across the water from several points of the compass. All of the pier ends were occupied, with fifty-foot powerboats about par. Glossy fiberglass glistened from recent rain.

  “Find the dock master and see about gas,” I told Nick as I nosed the Pantera up to an exposed corner of pier beneath the bow of a megayacht. It took a few shots of reverse throttle to stop us. He scrambled off our bow and I backed away without touching. In a few minutes he waved us over from the end of the next pier in the same marina. There was no open dock space. Through arm gestures he communicated that we were to tie outboard of the forty-foot sportfisher he was standing near. She was the Don’t Tell, out of Palm Beach. A string of yellow Japanese lanterns dangled from each fishing outrigger. Party lights. The boat was a Bertram, top of the class.

  A dozen people were aboard her, all Caucasian, men up to their sixties and ladies down to their twenties. Polo shirts and khaki slacks on the men, designer jeans and minidresses on the ladies. Lots of high-end bling on fingers, wrists and necks of both sexes. The cocktail party taking place aboard the yacht was not disturbed by our arrival. To say they were all in a fine mood would be putting it lightly. Every hand was filled with a drink, and the aroma of burning ganja was pronounced.

  Though there was no open dock space for the Pantera, the fuel pumps were still open. The Bertram’s owner wanted to lie alongside the pier head for the evening within walking distance of the bar and dance floor. We wanted only to gas up and split. We could both have what we wanted with just a little cooperation. The Bertram already had yard-high white fenders tied along its outboard side for just such eventualities. We came along port-side-to, Nick’s side again, the side with the fuel fill. The happy drunks on Don’t Tell took our lines cheerfully, seemingly considering us more as an addition to their floating party than simply as temporary customers for the fuel dock. I shut the engine down and switched on the ventilation blowers. We were tied cockpit to cockpit, but theirs was a good yard higher than ours.

  A dock attendant climbed behind the Bertram on its swim platform. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the Nassau Harbour Club Marina logo. “How much do you need?” he asked. He was black but he had no Bahamian accent. Many of the men on cosmopolitan New Providence Island spent half their lives in the States, and when they were home they constantly dealt with American and European tourists. Half of all Bahamians lived around Nassau on New Providence Island, but in a way they were the least Bahamian of all.

  I said, “Maybe sixty gallons. Highest octane you’ve got.”

  “We’ve got eighty-nine, and it’s fresh. Eighty dollars a gallon. Give me five thousand now, and I’ll give you change if we don’t pump that much.”

  “That’s fair.” Unlike in Bimini, the water through Nassau Harbor was deep and the channels well marked with lit nav-aids. There was no surrounding minefield of unmarked coral reefs to prevent us from bolting without paying, and if we did, who could catch us?

  I handed him a folded-over packet of bills. He riffled it and stuffed it into a pocket. In a minute he was dragging the fuel hose across the Bertram’s swim platform to our stern, the nozzle’s tip protected by a folded white towel to guard both boats against drips. A first-class operation, even at this hour.

  The partiers on Don’t Tell seemed excited by our urgent middle-of-the-night refueling. A blond in an orange cocktail dress came to the Bertram’s rail, standing a couple of feet above the Pantera. Like all of them, she was more than two sheets to the wind and leaned heavily over the Bertram’s cockpit side, spilling a little of her drink. She looked at all of us but mostly at Kelly, and with a Texas twang she announced, “My boyfriend says you’re smugglers, but I say smugglers don’t take little bitty gals like you out for the ride. Tell me who’s right.” Her right sounded almost like rat.

  Before I could think of some witty yet non-incriminating reply, Kelly looked up at her and stated, “We’re on a mission from God.”

  The lady shrieked with laughter. “You’re on a mission from God! Aren’t we all, honey? Aren’t we all!”

  Kelly just stared up at her, and after an awkward moment the woman moved away.

  Unlike the thin black hose back in Bimini, the marina’s gas pump was set up for transferring fuel at high speed. Fifty-four gallons of gasoline shot into the Pantera’s main tank in only a few minutes, without using the Baja filter. I told the attendant he could keep the remainder of the five thousand dollars if he brought us three big coffees. He was back with them shortly, in to-go cups with lids.

  ****

  It was almost three a.m. I’d found paper charts of the Bahamas down below, and I was prepared to plot Topaz’s current position and figure out our options for overtaking her. Kelly had the Orbcom turned on; we watched the time blink forward on the GPS as the hour approached. A few seconds after three she said, “Here comes our next message from heaven.” She entered Topaz’s 0300 location on the handheld GPS and zoomed out the tiny screen until it showed both our location and our quarry’s. “Topaz is only twenty-two miles ahead of us,” she said.

  I transcribed the new latitude and longitude to the paper chart and observed, “They’re heading for Exuma Sound. Once she passes the lighthouse at Beacon Cay, she’ll be in deep water the rest of the way.”

  Nick asked, “How far is it to Castigo Cay?”

  Castigo Cay was already entered as a waypoint on my GPS, so before I could measure the distance on the chart with a pencil, Kelly announced, “It’s two hundred forty miles from here, as the crow flies.”

  “That’s too far,” I said. “We’ll need to refuel again, but there’ll be no place open.”

  Seeing the Bahamas from Nassau to Castigo Cay spread across a paper chart helped me to visualize the problem. “We’ll have to stop at George Town or we’ll run out of gas. And we’ll be lucky if we can get them to open up before nine. Assuming they have gasoline for sale. Then two more hours to Castigo Cay. That means it’ll be eleven o’clock or noon before we get there. By then…”

  Kelly asked, “What if we just slow down and don’t stop for more fuel? What if we cut our speed and just lurk on the horizon behind Topaz?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “So far we’ve been in protected water.” I held the folded chart between us while Nick held a flashlight above it. I traced my finger down the chart. “Once Topaz gets past Cat Island, they’ll be in the open ocean. We might have big swells, so big we won’t be able to make thirty knots, much less fifty or sixty. Anyway, we can’t just aim for Castigo Cay with no margin on fuel. If we run out, we’ll be adrift on the open Atlantic.” I traced my finger further down the chart in thirty-nautical-mile jumps. “If Topaz keeps the same speed, she’ll arrive at Castigo Cay around eight this morning. I don’t like the idea of sneaking up on them in broad daylight, not with a clear horizon all the way around.”

  “Well,” Nick offered, “maybe they’ll have their minds on something else by then. Maybe they’ll be too busy to watch the horizon.”

  “Yeah, exactly. They might be real busy. No, I don’t want to wait that long.”

  Kelly said, “So, what are you suggesting?”

  A new plan was hatching in my mind. “It’ll be better to do it at night, and on flat water.”

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Board them.”

>   Nick said, “Board them? Under way? Are you serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious.” We all leaned over the chart. I made a pencil mark at Topaz’s current position. “Look, she’ll be thirty miles further down Exuma Sound in an hour. We can travel twice as fast on flat water. In an hour and a half we’ll be on her.” Using my finger as a ruler on the chart, I put the approximate catching-up point around the bottom of Eleuthera. Eleuthera and Cat Island were each over sixty miles long and separated by only a narrow and shallow gap. In prevailing easterly winds they kept the ocean swell out of Exuma Sound, leaving it nearly as calm as the Chesapeake Bay or Long Island Sound. Any wind chop that built up on the sound would have no effect on the Pantera’s speed.

  “Nick, you’ll drive the boat, and I’ll board Topaz.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Kelly, shaking her head no.

  “I can do it. Their swim platform is huge.”

  Nick said, “But they’ll see us on radar.”

  “No they won’t. Especially not when we’re coming up from dead astern. From the front this boat is like a fiberglass arrow. We’ll be like a plastic needle on their radar. Invisible. And when you’re going thirty knots, you think you own the ocean; you don’t care what’s behind you. And how many boats will be running down Exuma Sound tonight anyway? Just Topaz. And us.”

  “Won’t they hear us?” Nick asked. “We can’t use the underwater muffler at thirty knots.”

  “Megayachts are soundproofed like you can’t believe. When you’re inside, you can’t hear their engines even when they’re running full speed. And nobody will be outside to hear us, not at four or five in the morning. You just bring us alongside their stern and I’ll jump onto their swim platform. It’ll work. Really, it will.”

  They both stared at me doubtfully. I didn’t blame them. I had struck out twice on my big gambits earlier that day, at the conference and at the GORP party. I tried my most confident look and pressed ahead. “So, Nick, are you ready to drive?”

  He slowly shook his head as if to say no, but said, “Sure, I can drive, as long as we’re on flat water.”

  “You want to keep using the NOD, or drive with your bare eyes?” Some folks could wear night vision all night long. Some could tolerate it only for shorter periods.

  “I’ll keep it on. This was enough of a break.”

  “Okay then, that’s the new plan: we’ll catch Topaz and I’ll board her. If we can’t, then we’ll have to make another refueling stop and go after them on Castigo Cay. If that’s where they’re going.”

  I slid through the cuddy doors and down below to get ready. This involved maneuvering over the fat fuel bladder. Depending on the sea state, it might be impossible to do anything down below later on. Especially with forty gallons of gasoline in a rubber bag occupying the space just below the cuddy doors. Even with the forward hatch open and the blower on, the cramped bow stank of raw gasoline. A stray spark could send us into orbit.

  I sat hunched on the V-berth and went through my kit bag. I kept on my same tan cargo shorts, black T-shirt and running shoes. I slid my Ka-bar fighting knife’s sheath onto the left side of my nylon rigger’s belt and snapped my Glock’s plastic holster loops over it on the right. Checked the pistol’s magazine: seventeen rounds, plus one in the chamber. My palm-size handheld VHF radio went into the left pouch on the flotation vest. I tried to think of anything else down below that I might need, and then I crawled back into the cockpit.

  If I somehow missed my jump onto Topaz, I would have to tread water until the Pantera picked me up. The sea temperature was in the eighties, so no problem with that, especially while wearing a flotation vest. The little strobes attached to the vest would assure that they found me quickly. I retied my running shoes and double-knotted them. The knobby soles were very grippy on wet decks. They would need to be, when I landed on Topaz’s swim platform.

  ****

  We untied from the big sportfisherman without any notice; the party had moved to another yacht down the dock. One very fat man was left behind, passed out in the fighting chair in the middle of their cockpit. Nick put the brown hockey helmet on, but with the NOD hinged up out of the way above his left eye. There was just too much ambient light all around us to need it yet. Even without night vision, the channel was so clearly marked with lit navaids that the NOD was superfluous. Mariners had been entering and leaving Nassau Harbour at night for centuries before radar, night vision and GPS.

  It was only a mile from the marina out the Eastern Channel until we were free of the blinking channel markers, with eight feet of water under us. We had thirty miles of banks to cross until we reached the deep water of Exuma Sound.

  Nick said, “So, we’re still going to run at sixty?”

  “Why not? Let’s catch that son of a bitch. We’ll slow down once we see her.”

  It was a quarter after three. Nick switched the exhaust to the straight pipes and added throttle in increments while making small course changes, getting the feel of the wheel and rudder. Once again our course was southeast, as it had mostly been since Miami. Kelly resumed her position in the center behind our bolsters. The Beacon Cay Light, the entrance to Exuma Sound, was punched in as our new waypoint. Nick pushed the throttle ahead until we were once again rocketing over the water at sixty miles an hour.

  At 0400 we were blasting down Exuma Sound with our running lights turned off. The fathometer was flashing zeroes again, and from my chart study I knew there were thousands of feet of water beneath us. Despite the great depth, the water was smooth enough for us to flat haul ass without fear of being launched airborne. Nick’s face was lit by the glow of the instruments and the NOD resting against his goggles.

  The digital steering arrow on the GPS read 125 degrees true, based on Topaz’s projected route down Exuma Sound to the bottom of Cat Cay. That was where she was most likely to head out onto the open Atlantic for the straight run to Castigo Cay…if that was indeed her destination.

  I turned and yelled, “Nick, we need the GPS. Can you use the compass?”

  “No problem,” he yelled back. The big pathway arrow on the GPS screen was easier for steering at night. But there was also a backlit magnetic compass on the instrument panel floating in a glowing glass orb as big as the top half of a grapefruit. While the GPS could do many tricks, the magnetic compass knew only one, but it was a damned good one and it didn’t require batteries.

  Behind me, Kelly had the Orbcom ready for the new check on Topaz’s position. She yelled out the latitude and longitude and I entered the numbers into the GPS. I clicked back to the map display and called out, “She’s only six miles ahead!” I zoomed out the GPS map screen until it showed the unseen islands around us as we flew through the blackness. We were about ten miles west of the southern tip of Eleuthera.

  Nick said, “I see a steady light in front. It’s got to be Topaz.” While underway at night, motor yachts are required to show a white stern light as well as the red and green bow lights. I guessed that Topaz was burning her running lights as a matter of self-preservation, not because of maritime law. On a black night like tonight, the moon long gone, it would be easy for two unlit boats on a crossing course to collide unseen.

  Radar was greatly overrated for spotting small wood or fiberglass vessels. If ships and other big vessels turned the gain up high enough to show every possible small craft, their display would be cluttered with false images. This was why I wasn’t overly concerned about sneaking up on Topaz from behind. I gestured for Nick to ease back on the throttle and yelled, “Let’s try fifty.” Six miles behind Topaz, our low-slung racer was still over the horizon from them.

  The Pantera’s motion was more comfortable at fifty than at sixty, and the engine was noticeably quieter. After a few more minutes I could see the white stern light with my bare eyes. It was time to get ready. I turned behind me and pulled Kelly forward, pressing against her as we passed in the tight confines between the bolsters and the cuddy doors. I took my position on the starboard side b
ehind the driver’s seat and hung onto its grab handle with my left hand. Nick, on the wheel directly in front of me, would have the best view of Topaz’s stern and swim platform, so I was leaving from his side. Plus there wasn’t a big Igloo cooler strapped onto the starboard side of the bench.

  A mile behind Topaz we could smell her diesel stench. Her pair of 4,000-horsepower MTU turbo diesels drove a vast amount of exhaust gas out astern, below her waterline. The exhaust system was designed to shunt the hot gases underwater for quieter operation, but Topaz would still make quite a roar. I couldn’t hear it yet over our own engine’s sound, but I hoped it would be enough to mask our approach, especially when you factored in her luxury-yacht level of soundproofing.

  Topaz’s stern light grew in brightness as we approached, but we didn’t need it to find her. Her wake was a glowing highway fifty yards wide, as billions of phosphorescing microcreatures were tumbled and swirled into a bioluminescent comet’s trail. Its laser straightness ahead of us told me she was running on autopilot.

  I was standing behind Nick and no longer had to yell over the engine. “Okay, slow down—we’re catching up too fast.”

  Nick eased the throttle back until the analog speedometer showed just under forty miles an hour. He was doing it all by feel, not looking down, his NOD-boosted left eye locked on Topaz. At 3,000 rpm our engine was quiet enough for almost normal conversation. “How’s this?” Nick asked.

  “That’s good.” I began to be able to make out the hulk of her shape blocking the stars. We continued our approach at what seemed like a walking pace. The smell of her big diesels grew stronger, and I began to hear her engine’s throb. I leaned over the bolster to talk directly into Nick’s ear. “Stay out of her prop wash. It’s mostly bubbles and you’ll lose steerage. We have to expect a lot of spray. It’s going to be wet. Just bring her in until we’re alongside her swim platform.”