Brown, Dale - Independent 02

by Hammerheads (v1. 1)

  There was a quick knock on the door to the outer office. Salazar put the atomizer away. “Come.”

  His adjutant, Field Captain Enrique Hermosa, swung open the door. “Did you call for me, sir?” Salazar motioned to the back of the door, and watched as Hermosa retrieved his knife from the thick wood and handed it to him. He slipped it back into his right boot as Hermosa poured strong Colombian coffee for the commander.

  “Has payment been received for the llaho?”

  “As planned, commandante. Two million American dollars in our Cayman Island account. Senor Gachez also sends his condolences for the loss of our crewmen—”

  “Gachez ...” said with disgust. Salazar drained the steaming hot coffee in a single gulp. Hermosa refilled the china cup, then poured one for himself. “We delivered four hundred kilos of high-grade to his nose-picking farmers in Florida, cocaine worth ten times what he pays us. We take the risks and he grows richer and fatter. We lose a new cargo plane and a top-notch crew, and all he can say is sorryP”

  “He sends another message,” Hermosa said. He drank his coffee, relishing the flavor, before finishing the message. He knew his boss’ foul moods, there might not be another chance at the rich coffee for who knew how long ... “He has been in contact with other members of the cartel. They also seem to want to do business with us.” “What? Do you think we’re some peasant taxi drivers? I’ll deliver my reply in a hundred-kilo dynamite letter—

  “If I may, sir,” Hermosa said, “I would suggest you give this matter some thought. We are not working for Senor Gachez ...”

  “You are damned right about that . . .”

  “We contracted with Senor Gachez alone, without any other commitments to the other families of his cartel,” Hermosa continued. “But it is Senor Gachez with the commitment to the cartel—if he has been approached by members of the Medellin families, he has an obligation to provide service to them. On the other hand, we do not. Therefore ...”

  “So we don’t let ourselves be tricked the second time,” Salazar said, leaning back and sipping his coffee. “We were poor starving bush pilots then, we accepted the deal with Gachez because we had little or no choice. Now we are strong, and smarter. We state our new rates for the other members of the cartel—inflation is two, three hundred percent in Cuba, correct? Things are bad all over, eh?” Hermosa was riding high. Salazar was happy, he was happy. “The members of the cartel will not allow Gachez to continue to enjoy contract rates better than theirs—he will either have to subsidize the cartel’s payments or raise his own contract payments ...”

  “Or if he is stupid enough,” Salazar added, “he will lie about his rates and try to swindle the other families. Then we will have enough leverage on him to dictate our own terms.”

  “Sir, I would caution against trying to extort Senor Gachez or any member of the cartel,” Hermosa said. “They are, after all, powerful men. If we ask for a reasonable mark-up for our services it will be considered nothing more than the price of doing business. There are none better than we. They will pay.”

  “You’re right they will pay.” Salazar resisted the urge to take another shot of llaho in front of Hermosa.

  Hermosa was silent for a moment as Salazar turned over the plans for sending his bull to the Medellin cartel. Then: “We do have another option, commandante. Perhaps this game has gone on too long. We do Gachez’s bidding because he could have destroyed you . . .” “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying that you have more than enough savings to escape Haiti and get out of this business. Gachez can’t hold a firing squad or life at hard labor over your head. Not anymore. You can free yourself of this ...”

  Hermosa had hit too close to home, Salazar thought. It was true.

  Two years earlier he had taken a bribe from Gachez worth thousands of American dollars to fly a load of cocaine on a training mission from Cartagena and drop it north of Cuban waters. He had been offered the typical Colombian bribe, plomo o plata—lead or silver, a piece of the action or a bullet in the head—an offer he could not refuse.

  He had wanted to make the drop himself but it would have appeared too suspicious for him to take a plane out over Cuba at night. So he had planned an overwater navigation training leg and a practice tactical mine-laying mission for student training. His students performed well, dropping the six bundles of cocaine sealed inside harbor mine canisters dead on target, dead on time.

  For accepting this offer he could not refuse, he was paid well, all in untraceable money in numbered accounts. But it was a bittersweet pay-off, knowing it put him in Gachez’ employ. And there was no way to resign or retire from service with the Medellin cartel. You could take the money and run, but until you tried to spend the money. Then you were dead. The cartel, and in particular Gonzales Gachez, were just too powerful.

  But he had reversed that now. Or was about to . . .

  “How is it you’re so familiar with my savings, field captain?” Hermosa wisely chose not to say what everyone in the cadre knew: Salazar skimmed a percentage of the profits for himself and was not averse to skimming a few kilos off each shipment to sell via his own connections in Haiti, the Bahamas and Mexico. Certainly, Hermosa thought, he could not think that no one, including the cartel, noticed such activities . . .

  “I am a soldier, field captain. Remember that.”

  “Please excuse me, sir,” Hermosa said. “I did not mean to imply—” “Get out of here.” The cocaine hit was beginning to affect him. He felt lighter, more powerful. “Have my helicopter made ready. I will inspect the camp and make an area patrol.”

  Hermosa was happy to get out of there and behind the thick wooden door separating himself from Salazar, obviously high, and his throwing knives.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gulf of Mexico, South of Marsh Island, Louisiana

  0217 CST

  “Position fix . . . now.”

  Commander Russell Ehrlich, skipper of WMEC 620, the Coast Guard cutter Resolute, sipped on a mug of coffee as he tried to relax. The bridge of his cutter was humid with only an occasional breeze drifting through the open steel doors. Outside the slanted anti-reflection windows of the Resolute’s bridge was darkness, with just a hint of light visible on the horizon to the north—New Orleans, maybe even a hint of a glow from Galveston or Houston off toward the northwest. It was a clear, beautiful winter night in the Gulf of Mexico.

  As he scanned the darkness the navigator’s mate centered a set of electronic crosshairs on the center of a radar blip on the bridge’s navigation radar set and pressed a button on his control console. Immediately a series of latitude-longitude coordinates, range and bearing, and intercept information zipped across a small computer monitor.

  “Got it,” McConahay, the navigator’s mate, reported. McConahay was a skinny, bespectacled ensign fresh out of the Coast Guard Academy in New London and sea-navigation training. Ehrlich had to smile—McConahay, an electrical engineer and math whiz out of the academy, looked out of place on the bridge. He was clearly overawed with the hustle of activity on the bridge and seemed to have little desire to look at the ocean at all—content to spend most of his time making lines on his chart and updating his computers. McConahay, it seemed, was trying to lower his rather high squeaky voice when speaking to the captain. Ah, the new Coast Guard . . . “Range thirteen miles, speed perhaps two knots, right on the bow.”

  “Does he have any company, Mr. McConahay?”

  “Radar’s showing no other ships, sir,” McConahay replied, checking the fourteen-inch display, “but we’re at extreme radar range now. They may be hard to see or blocked by the freighter.”

  “Where’s our air cover?” Ehrlich wondered. And to McConahay, “Fix our position with GPS, then verify with Loran. Plot the target’s position. And I want it exact. If we end up hauling this guy into court I want to prove six ways to Sunday that he’s in U.S. waters.”

  “Aye, sir.” McConahay bent to work—but didn’t the skipper know that his position fixes
were always exact?

  The navigator’s mate saved the radar target’s position data in a memory storage buffer, then punched up the Resolute's position on the GPS computer navigator. The Global Position System used information from a ring of geosynchronous satellites orbiting 22,500 miles above Earth’s equator to obtain position, groundspeed and time information with remarkable accuracy—they could record their own position within four feet and get a fix on another radar-identified target within 100 yards.

  The Resolute, one of sixteen Reliance-class cutters in the Coast Guard inventory, was notable for its adv anced electronic suite and computerized automation of almost every task aboard ship. As a result, where most large sea-going cutters needed a crew of well over a hundred, the 210-foot-long, 950-ton Resolute and her Reliance- class sisters had a crew complement of only eighty-six—with computers and robots doing much of the scut work. From the start the Resolute was designed as a search-and-rescue vessel, only recently being outfitted for law enforcement and drug interdiction. She did carry one radar-guided Mk22 3-inch/50 cannon on her foredeck plus grenade launchers and .50 caliber machine guns that could be brought up on deck from the armory and mounted around the ship. She had a helipad aft of midships large enough to land a single HH-65 Dolphin helicopter rotated in from Coast Guard air stations around the southeast United States; her present Dolphin was borrowed from the Coast Guard air station in Mobile, Alabama.

  “. . . Ship’s position-information updated and verified,” McConahay reported, using a set of Plexiglas plotters on the board to mark the GPS coordinates on the chart, then making a tiny triangle and logbook entry on the chart. “GPS position fix on the target verified as well.” He then checked the position readout on the third navigation computer, the Loran, for Long-Range Navigation, a system that used timed signals from synchronized shore-based radio stations to pinpoint their position. “Loran data recorded. Checks with GPS within a tenth of a mile.” The navigator’s mate would update the ship’s position and navigation computers with the more accurate GPS and use the radar and Loran to check the GPS.

  “I don’t need the whole spiel, McConahay,” Ehrlich said wearily, “just tell me where the hell he is. ”

  “Exactly ten miles south of Marsh Island,” McConahay reported. “Well inside the twelve mile limit.”

  “He got sloppy and drifted into our jurisdiction,” Ehrlich said, now excited. “All these days of tracking that sonofabitch finally paid off. Mr. Ross, find out where our Falcon is.”

  Lieutenant Martin Ross, the officer of the deck, nodded and clicked on his intercom to the communications center. A moment later he reported, “Sir, comm has radio contact with Omaha Six-One out of New Orleans. He says he’ll be on station in five minutes.” “Five minutes? They’re already five minutes late.”

  Just then on the bridge’s speakers a voice blared out, “Resolute, this is Omaha Six-One on Uniform. On station in three minutes. Over.”

  Ehrlich turned toward the voice as if he had heard a sound from the grave; then turned angrily toward Ross. “Is he on the scrambler?” “I’ll check, sir.”

  “Dammit, he better be.”

  “Uh . . . sir?” It was McConahay.

  “Hang on, son.” To Ross: “Well?”

  “He’s on the scrambler now, sir.”

  “Skipper . . . ?”

  “What is it, McConahay?”

  “I ... I think the target is moving.”

  “What?” Ehrlich was off his chair to check the radar scope. “Right after Seven-One checked in, sir. Looks like he’s heading out.”

  “I knew it! Son of a bitch was monitoring our frequencies.” He swung to Ross. “Have the duty-crew on deck on the double. Helm, all ahead full. Let’s go talk with him before he gets away.”

  McConahay stood up from his plotting board on the Resolute’s bridge. “We’re going to move in on him? Now? It’s . . . it’s after 2:00 A.M.—”

  “Are we keeping you up, Mr. McConahay?” Ehrlich made an entry in the bridge’s logbook. “There’s nothing in the book that says we don’t work at night. These guys will be out of our waters in ten minutes. It’ll take us that long to catch up to them. We move in now. ”

  “My engines are all ahead full, sir,” the helmsman reported. “Showing twelve knots and increasing.”

  “If we lose this guy I’m going to shoot that Falcon crew. We’ve spent too much time dicking around with this guy to let him go now.”

  The Resolute crew had indeed been tracking their target—a one- hundred-eighty-foot cargo ship, the Numestra del Oro, a Panamanian-registered freighter—for several days. Almost from first contact this freighter had aroused the Coast Guard’s suspicion. It had only recently requested a berth at Galveston, but then had waited offshore just outside the twelve-mile limit for the last two days— ostensibly so they could make room for her at Galveston. There was plenty of room in the protected bays and intracoastal waterways around Galveston for the vessel to anchor and for the skipper to grant liberty to his crew, but the skipper could choose to wait wherever he wanted. Then, just when a berth opened up, the Numestra skipper had radioed in that he had been ordered by his parent company to take part of his cargo first to Mobile, then turn around and head back for Galveston. True, it was not unheard of for a freighter to wait so far offshore for a berth or suddenly change its port of call, but such moves had alerted the Coast Guard.

  Previously the Numestra had been inspected by a Coast Guard C-130 patrol plane while it was en route from Panama, orbiting over the freighter long enough to verify its flag, its identification and speak to the skipper by radio about his cargo and destination. It also had been briefly inspected by a Coast Guard Island-class patrol vessel east of Nicaragua, but the inspection of the ship’s documents, and cargo, were cursory. The Numestra, it seemed, was carrying a mixed cargo—remanufactured engine blocks from Mexico, coffee and rattan furniture from Brazil, scrap metal from Venezuela and the usual ferry mix of cars, busses and a few passengers that made up the bulk of most freighter manifest lists—none of the ferry passengers was of American citizenship. Its decks and holds had been crammed with sealed forty-foot cargo containers, all with the proper seals. The Coast Guard had the authority to open the containers for inspection if permission was granted, but an Island-class boat had only eighteen crewmen—hardly enough to carry out an extensive search of a larger freighter.

  After inspection the Numestra was released and the Coast Guard had relayed the information to the U.S. Customs Service, which checked with the Numestra’s destination ports to verify that the ship was on legitimate business and that the proper manifests had been filed for entry into the United States. Everything checked. The next step would be to send a Customs Service cruiser out to inspect the ship before it reached its port—presumably to expedite clearance through Customs but really to check the ship again for contraband before it had a chance to off-load. But because the Numestra stayed so far offshore Customs had not yet checked it over.

  It was soon obvious that the Numestra had no intention of docking. Any ship so reluctant to pull into an American port immediately came under suspicion, and so the Resolute had been sent to shadow the freighter. When the Resolute first caught up with Numestra well outside the twelve-mile limit it had detected several other ships hovering near the freighter. The smaller ships had immediately scattered when the Resolute moved within ten miles of the Numestra, which told Ehrlich and his crew that the freighter’s surface-scanning radar had at least a ten-mile range and that the freighter was receiving guests that didn’t want any run-ins with the Coast Guard.

  It also told Ehrlich that the Numestra was very probably dealing in a cargo other than scrap metal and coffee—like drugs.

  Since the Resolute’s HH-65 helicopter had no night-tracking equipment Ehrlich had requested support from Coast Guard air units out of New Orleans as well as a fast patrol boat. The patrol boat, he was told, could not be spared but the C-130 would cruise by twice a day in its patrols, and a scanner-
equipped Falcon jet was assigned to operate with the Resolute for a few nights while the freighter was in the area.

  But the freighter had stayed out of U.S. territorial waters, out of direct Coast Guard jurisdiction. Boarding a foreign freighter was illegal in international waters without clearance from the skipper or the country of registry, so Ehrlich had been obliged to request permission to board the Numestra from the Panamanian government. After two days the request was still “being processed.” Translation: they were being stonewalled. Not a refusal but a definite stall. And it was a certainty that the skipper wasn’t going to give permission to Ehrlich to board his ship a second time, so Ehrlich had decided to stay just outside the freighter’s radar range to watch and wait, with the Falcon jet scanning the area for small boats trying to rendezvous with the freighter.

  After three days of shadowing the Numestra, however, no small boats had been detected returning to the freighter. Resolute began to lose the use of their Falcon for longer and longer periods of time when it was called away for other, presumably more urgent jobs. The investigation was going nowhere, and Ehrlich had begun to feel pressure to get on with his patrol when he noted the Numestra was beginning to creep toward shore again. A few ships also started to move toward the freighter, gradually at first, then noticeably closer each day. He would hang in. Something was going down . . .

  But if the Numestra moved out into international waters there was little Ehrlich could do if the freighter’s skipper decided not to stop for inspection. And Ehrlich wasn’t about to open fire on the freighter—the Coast Guard couldn’t fire on anyone unless they were under attack themselves, and even then firing on a ship on the open seas was politically and diplomatically explosive stuff.