by Tom Corcoran
The wind freshened and easy waves rolled as we left the protected canal. Turk aimed a hand-held spot ahead of us and lighted a green “1” marker. He panned a red “2” triangle to our left, doused the beam, built up speed between the posts, brought the skiff to a plane and continued southeast. For the first half-minute he adjusted his tilt and engine speed to balance the hull to our weight, our positions around the console. Once we reached a rhythm with the waves, the ride was a joy.
The breeze on our nose carried open-ocean smells but no pre-dawn chill. The ocean carries a different flavor when it hasn’t been sunbaked. I’ve always found it easier at that hour to differentiate among fish, seaweed, plankton and salt spray. And a new moon it was, with no moon at all, in that period before dawn when the sky is darkest, the stars brightest, more numerous, more mystical.
After a minute or so Turk angled left to take us east at about thirty-five knots. Engine noise and rushing wind made conversation pointless. Lost in our thoughts, we had no need to chat. The only light south of us was Pelican Shoal’s red flasher. Ashore, to the north, I saw headlights on US 1 once or twice, but little else in that direction either. Then, southeast of us, American Shoal’s automated flashing light popped into sight; and, dead ahead, the flashing white light of Ninefoot Shoal. After about twelve minutes, maybe a half-mile from Ninefoot Shoal, Turk slowed, dimmed the depth finder, scrolled his GPS to highlight our surroundings, and circled slowly back to the west.
“This is good,” he said, keeping his eyes on the water ahead. “It’ll stay dark for at least another fifty minutes. That’s what we want.”
Marnie sat in front of the console, hugging herself as if fighting the chill in her mind, the cold fear of what she might learn on the open ocean. Or what she might never know.
For twenty minutes Turk ran a slow yo-yo, a broad east-west grid. He was quiet except once when he muttered, “This isn’t working,” and reversed course.
During a west leg with the wind to our backs, I said, “Why GPS?”
“Keep us generally north of West Washerwoman. That’s the ballpark, according to the scuttled boat report. I’m looking for at least eight feet of depth but no less than that. Once you get a quarter-mile off the beach, it shallows up.”
“How waterproof is that unit?”
“If you can trust a salesman,” said Turk, “it’s supposed to survive splashes. If I drop it in a fishbox, it’s probably okay. But if it sinks four feet, it’s history.”
“So someone could have trashed the boat, then come back and found it later?”
Turk shook his head. “I’ve been thinking since we first talked yesterday at your house.” He tapped his GPS. “This runs off the boat’s battery. The battery goes under, along with all the wiring, things go to hell fast. There wouldn’t be any GPS.”
“So how do we know if someone sees us on radar?”
“Maybe they’ll come out to see our real live faces.” Marnie had a shiver in her voice. “Can we give it a few more minutes?”
I had learned about underwater listening devices in the Navy, though I’d never heard of any in the Florida Straits. “How about one other thing?” I said. “Set your tilt to make the prop noisy, wake up the barracuda. Maybe cavitate on your turns.”
“What the hell,” said Turk. He pressed his engine tilt switch, brought the lower unit up a few notches but kept his prop below the surface. He turned to starboard, began a slow circle. The propeller didn’t cavitate at that speed but churned loud enough to disturb plenty of fish. Turk straightened his course and motored toward the east.
For the next fifteen minutes, each time Turk turned, the prop burbled loudly, at least to us.
I heard it east of us, the flutter carried by wind, muffled by distance. My first thought made it a helicopter. More careful listening killed that guess. Multiple motors and the metallic slap of its hull against the low wavetops had it coming our way. Not directly at us but within fifteen degrees, honking along quickly. I raised my hand and pointed toward the rumble.
Turk pulled back his throttle and checked the ominous throb. “If he kept his course, he’d pass south of us, right?”
Ten seconds later Marnie and I agreed.
“So right now he’s fishing.”
“Where did he come from?” I said. “Little Torch or Big Pine?”
“If it’s the playtoy I think it is,” said Turk, “it was docked last night in that marina at the bottom of Drost Road on Cudjoe. You’re hearing three 225s on twenty-eight feet. All black paint, no hull numbers, no engine cover logos. I didn’t have my tape measure. Might have been thirty-two feet, but born to be mean.”
Turk spun his wheel, nudged the throttle lever, cavitating louder than before. He went a couple hundred yards, did it again, then pulled us back to idle speed.
Thirty seconds later we heard the boat shift course, aim directly toward us. It was still dark, and I glanced at Turk and Marnie, looked at my own clothing. There wasn’t enough light to make us visible at that range. “Did it have radar?” I said.
“Not the boat I saw,” said Turk.
“Are they using night-vision goggles?” said Marnie.
“We’d be a speck on the water at this range,” I said. “I think they were guided by a shore facility, and I doubt they’d put Fat Albert’s radar on something small like us.”
“Alex called it,” said Turk. “The beach crew heard us out here and steered him our way. Somebody’s listening to hydrophones.”
Marnie stared ashore. I saw it, too, the single lighted house on Lower Sugarloaf, west on Old Papy Road.
I spoke so only Turk could hear me: “You think that’s what Sam wanted us to confirm?”
“Yep,” he said. “And, by doing it, our trip here was a success. Now we have to pay the tab.”
A separate, louder flutter approached from the west.
“Shit,” I said. “That’s a helicopter. Did we bite off more than we can stomach?”
“It’s most likely another boat, but it’s pay dirt,” said Turk. He pressed the tilt control. The engine rolled back, the propeller went downward. He brought Flats Broke around slowly to point south and flipped on his running lights.
“We can’t outrun those clowns,” I said.
“We have to act afraid,” said Turk. “They’re coming right at us and they haven’t identified themselves. They’ll make it pretty fucking clear in about thirty seconds.”
I said, “This has something to do with photo ID, right?”
“Everybody hold on.” He double-checked Marnie’s grasp on the console and pushed the throttle full forward.
We traveled less than a quarter-mile, barely got up to speed before the boat approaching from the west blipped its blue light.
The other boat, now behind us, cued a directional loudspeaker. With painful intensity, like a foghorn with words, a voice said, “Police. Stop your boat, captain. Police. Stop your boat.” Two focused spots lighted us like midday.
Turk eased his throttle. He made it clear that he was stopping but he didn’t risk swamping the skiff by screeching to a halt.
“Turn your boat into the wind, captain. Take it out of gear and rev your prop.”
Turk did so.
The boat behind us approached. The one to the west hung back.
“Captain, identify yourself. Did you lose someone overboard?”
Turk remained still. We were all blinded by the brightness.
The voice shifted to a battery-powered hailer. “Shut her down captain. You and your crew on your knees. Hang your arms over the side so we can see them. Hands in the water. We want to see thirty wet fingers, right now.”
“My hands are in sight,” shouted Turk. “I’m a licensed boat operator. You can read my hull number plain as day. Cut down those lights and come over here and tell me what you want.”
“There goes my wild idea of trying to eat lunch today,” I said.
The stern voice, as if two feet away: “We want you on your knees, hands in the w
ater.”
Turk shook his head. “Ain’t gonna happen, Boats.”
Long pause. The men on the dark boat tried to figure out how Turk knew the man’s nickname, the traditional Navy moniker for a boatswain’s mate.
On the hailer: “What are you doing out here, captain?”
“Trying to see who would come out and ask me that question.”
“If we have to do an equipment demonstration, captain, the first shot airs out your bow at the waterline.”
“Which law does that enforce?”
“Failure to identify yourself to Homeland Security, sir.”
They had been well trained to be courteous to everyone and friendly to no one.
“That’s the Border Patrol with a new name?” said Turk. “Do I look like a Somalian pirate, or what?”
“That’s the loss of your federally-issued captain’s license on first offense.”
“Oh,” Turk said to us softly. “I guess we can take that as adequate jurisdiction. But don’t put your hands under the surface.” He switched off the engine.
We knelt and hung our arms over the side.
“I just made it to page one,” said Marnie. “Tomorrow, above the fold, for good or ill. I’ll either have the byline or be the topic.”
We were less than 2,000 yards at sea, in Florida waters. I was close enough to the beach to hear cars on US 1 or at least imagine that I could. I felt very close to knowing an illegal alien’s desire and desperation, except I had every right in the world to be where I was. At least the Navy allowed me to believe they held a vested interest in my right to life. The men with automatic weapons and black boats with their blacked-out numbers and motor logos had been trained to make me believe the opposite. Their presence assured me that I had no rights at all.
They flipped off one of their million-candle-power zappers and aimed the other one into the water astern of us. There was still enough light to play a softball game. I could make out at least five silhouettes aboard the large craft. Two held weapons pointed directly at us.
“Now, what are you doing out here, captain?”
“We came out to drift around,” said Turk. “Enjoy nature.”
“We worship the sunrise,” said Marnie. “We come out here often. Do you want to interfere with our religious freedom?”
“We’ll get to you in a minute, ma’am. During the past half hour, captain, you were running a pattern, like a search pattern. We think maybe you were waiting to rendezvous with another vessel. We’ve got some great equipment here. Is there anything we can help you find?”
Leading question, I thought. They know about the half-sunken boat.
Turk shook his head.
They drifted to within fifteen feet of us. Another man said, “Where do you live, captain?”
“Rockland Key.”
“And your first mate, there?”
“Key West, Florida, USA,” I said.
The man exhaled, disgusted. “A wiseass. And the lady?”
“Key West,” said Marnie.
“Where do you work, ma’am?”
“I’m a news reporter. The Key West Citizen.”
“Would your publisher be happy to know that you’re out here?”
“My boss loves good stories,” she said. “If he learned how I’m being treated by government employees, he would be overjoyed.”
“Captain, we have you coming out of Varadero, departing the Cuban coastline a half-hour after midnight. Can you prove that you haven’t spent the past five hours crossing over from Cuba?”
Alibi-free, Turk was silent. I pondered and rejected the idea of tossing Beth Watkins’s name into the mess. She didn’t deserve to be dragged down by our folly.
Marnie came through. “I can absolutely prove where I’ve been,” she said. “I didn’t have any cash with me.”
“Okay, honey, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was in Circle K—the one on the corner of Kennedy and North Roosevelt—at about 4:45 this morning. Four Key West police officers saw me and they all know me. I didn’t have any cash, so I paid for three coffees and Danish with Visa. I keep all my receipts.”
No one said a thing.
After a minute or so, the primary speaker said, “As you were.”
“What does that mean?” said Turk.
“Belay my previous commands.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Stand up and stand easy, captain. Identify your point of debarkation.”
“Jesus.”
“Sir?”
We all stood and Turk looked around his boat. “I don’t think I have one.”
I wanted to laugh at Turk’s expense but let the men on the black boat do it for me. They turned down their spotlight and maneuvered to come alongside.
“You want to protect your hull, put out fenders, captain.”
Turk lifted his seat cushion and I removed two oblong vinyl-coated tubes. Each had a length of fender line looped through an eyelet. I secured them to mini-cleats under the starboard gunwale and adjusted them so the big boat wouldn’t crunch Turk’s side rail. Two of the other boat’s crewmen used boat hooks to grab Flats Broke, to snug us toward them and keep the boats from banging together. When I stood I could see a younger crewman making entries to a laptop. It had a screen dimming overlay so only the person facing the monitor could see what was on it.
The honcho barked his standard speech. “Driver’s licenses, passports if you have them. Boat papers, captain. Copy of your most recent Coast Guard inspection.”
“I just had that inspection last week,” said Turk.
“Didn’t see your running lights.”
Turk looked baffled. “Maybe we were down in a trough between waves. I know my battery’s running low. You saw them when you got closer, right?”
“You were transiting southward when we blue-lighted you, captain. Where did you think you were going?”
“We thought you were pirates coming to hijack our boat to use for highly illegal activities.”
Marnie and I gave our licenses to Turk. He reached out to hand the paperwork to the main man. That man, in turn, passed our IDs to the kid with the laptop.
I spoke up: “What makes you so certain that we came out of Varadero and so clueless to our departure an hour ago from Geiger Key?”
The man hesitated, then said, “When was the last time you had an all-American knee in the balls?”
“Two years ago,” I said. “Wouldn’t you know, it was a law enforcement officer. Poor guy lost his job. When he tried to hire on with JIATF, they turned him down.”
The Joint Interagency Task Force, based in Key West, coordinates at least fifteen federal agencies and military branches to fight illicit trafficking. They’re our big fist against incoming drugs and illegal aliens. I had no doubt that the ugly black boat worked with the task force.
“What do you know about JIATF?”
“Their phone number,” I said, “for starters.”
He turned back to Turk. “Any weapons on board, captain?”
“The gaff, if you use it right,” said Turk.
“I’ve got a knife,” I said.
“We’ll have to take that.”
“Bullshit. I’ve owned it for twenty years and never harmed a human.”
“Sir, we’ll have to…”
“I keep it for personal safety, like every boat captain and fishing enthusiast in the Keys. You want to go on record as depriving me of safety equipment?”
“Religious freedom, safety on the high seas,” said Marnie. “Anything else you gentlemen wish to revoke this morning? It all makes for a better headline.”
The kid with the laptop spoke up. “Skipper, slight glitch here. You want to look at this?”
The pair with the boat hooks kept their eyes on us while the other three black-clad men huddled around the computer. Only then did I notice the matte-black weapon held by the shortest huddler. I was no expert but it looked in the dark to be an automatic rifle. Nasty and
lethal.
The agent in charge quit studying the monitor and approached Turk. “We’ve got a case of mistaken identity, captain. We’re going to have to ask for your understanding in this matter.”
“It’ll cost you.”
“Pardon me, captain?”
“My friend here wants an explanation of another topic.”
“We’re not in the explanation business.” He turned and smiled at me like I was a long-lost friend. It was all self-pride. I was a mouse on downers and he was a six-pack of cats.
I asked anyway: “That underwater music festival at Looe Key every year… Do you have to put plugs in your underwater ears?”
He handed Turk the sheaf of boat documents and our licenses then faced me. “Don’t ask that, bubba. I mean, you have every right to ask but, if I gave you the answer, we’d have a long day ahead of us. You folks enjoy the holy sunrise.”
18
That half hour before sun-up, a pale cyan haze of vacant sky and light-chop water, no visible horizon. Nasty and full of thunder but hauling less emotional punch, the black boat roared eastward. Its wake a pale, turbulent strip in the monotone ocean. The agents had their job to do and we weren’t it.
Turk restarted his motor, slipped it into gear, idled slowly toward Geiger Key.
“Not to be unladylike,” said Marnie, “but what the fuck was that? Those faux-ninjas called me ‘lady.’ Ladies are dumpy old broads in grainy movies who wear bowl-shaped hats with veils. The other bastard called me ‘honey,’ like he’s buttering up some waitress in a diner. Or talking to one of his daughter’s playmates.”
“They protect our nation’s coastline,” I said. “Did you copy their chatter?”
Marnie yanked a zipper, pulled out the digital voice recorder then an earpiece from another pocket. She fitted them together and tested. “I got every word. They sound like they’re on the boat with us, but I’m not too sure I got a story. Your all-American knee in the balls, however, might go to the Sports page.”