“What do you think?”
“I think you do what you do. And I admit I was pretty aced when I heard about that bust at Mahogany Hammock. You really blew away a transport? Right out of mid-air?”
“It’s nothing to crow about, Danny. It was something that had to be done.”
“I would’ve loved to see that baby auger in. Those smugglers must have been thinking they were about to get away when boom, they lose power and plow into the Everglades. Ruined their whole day.” Hardcastle said nothing as he continued to lock up classified papers, then locked up the office, logged out with building security and they left.
As they emerged onto the roof of the Brickell Plaza Federal Building, the helipad lights automatically snapped on, revealing the sleek, shiny red chopper sitting in the center of the pad. Daniel unlatched the chopper’s tie-downs as he had been taught years earlier, Hardcastle was pleased to note, even remembered to look up for the rotors and put his hand on the tail rotor guard for safety as he quickly moved around the fuselage.
They had just climbed aboard the chopper and received weather and traffic advisories when Hardcastle saw a member of Brickell Plaza’s security team coming up the stairs to the helipad. “Damn,” Hardcastle muttered. “Harrison. The assistant security chief.” Daniel said nothing. Hardcastle watched the guard for a moment, but he had not yet made any move to wave him down. Sitting back in his seat, checking out the left canopy away from where the guard stood, Daniel finally asked, “Is he still there?”
“Yes. But he’s not saying anything. I don't think I could have left any safes open or doors unlocked . . . starting engines.”
As the engine began cranking up to speed Hardcastle watched Harrison stop near the steps up to the helipad and make a brief comment on his walkie-talkie just before the noise of the engine drowned him out. Now Harrison was moving around to the front of the Scorpion, well away from the rotors but farther left. Suddenly, as Harrison moved in front of the Scorpion, he said something in his walkie-talkie, brought the receiver tight up to his ear to receive a reply, then quickly moved forward toward the Scorpion waving his arms and drawing a thumb across his throat—the shut-down sign. “What the hell...” Hardcastle flashed his landing light to warn the guard away from the spinning rotors, then closed the throttle and killed the magnetos.
“You’re shutting down . . . ?” Daniel asked nervously.
“I got to find out what he wants,” Hardcastle said irritably. “Otherwise I’m liable to slice his head off.”
Harrison was right beside the left door as Hardcastle undogged it. “All right, Harrison, what’s going on?”
Harrison wasn’t looking at the admiral, he was looking at his son. “Sir, I need to ask you and your passenger to step out of the cockpit.” The “please” he added sounded more like an order.
“What’s going on here, Harrison? This is my son, Daniel. You’ve seen him before. Hell, you must have let him upstairs ...”
“Your son was not cleared inside, sir. Please step out of there. Now.”
Hardcastle looked over at Daniel, who shrugged and gave him a weak smile. Hardcastle began unbuckling his shoulder harness. “C’mon, Daniel. This’ll only take a second.”
They came out of the chopper, and Harrison led them from the Scorpion to an enclosed corner away from the stairs. “All right, Harrison. My son didn’t check in with you?”
“No, sir,” the guard replied. “Commander Becker mentioned that he was with you but he didn’t come through the front desk or sign in.” Hardcastle realized that that was true; otherwise he would have gotten a call from the downstairs desk telling him that Daniel was on his way up.
“I forgot,” Daniel said, his face now grave. “I came up to the garage entry door but I forgot it was locked. Someone was coming out and he must’ve recognized me and let me in.”
“I’m afraid there’s more, sir,” Harrison said. “A boy matching your son’s description was seen riding a motorcycle on route 836 toward the city—”
“My son doesn’t own a motorcycle.”
“. . . The motorcycle was reported stolen from a residence in Westchester. We found the bike about three blocks from here in a parking garage ...”
Hardcastle looked at his son—he and his mother lived in Westchester.
“I didn’t steal anyone’s motorcycle—”
“That’s enough,” Hardcastle told him. “Harrison, what’s all this got to do with Daniel? He came up here to see me.”
“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait here for the police. They’ve been notified.”
“Of what? Dammit, you need proof before you can accuse someone of something like this, Harrison. What’s gotten into you? Daniel didn’t steal a motorcycle.” He turned to his son, and when he saw his son’s face averted and his hands stuffed into his jeans pockets, he knew something was terribly wrong. “Daniel . . . ?”
Before he could answer, a Dade County sheriff's deputy trotted up the stairs, followed by another security guard. The cop came over to Hardcastle carrying a large flashlight in one hand and a metal notepad case in his other. “Admiral Hardcastle? Sergeant Kowalski, Dade County Sheriff’s Department. Sorry to disturb you, sir. May we have a word with your son?”
“Go ahead, but I’m sure—”
“In private?”
“No.”
Kowalski nodded, holstered the flashlight, opened the notepad case and turned to Daniel. “What’s your name, son?”
“Daniel Hardcastle.”
“Address?”
“Five-five-oh-one Ridgecrest . . .”
“Miami?”
He paused, then muttered, “Westchester.”
Kowalski nodded. “What time did you leave Westchester tonight?” “About nine.”
“How did you get downtown?”
“Hitchhiked.”
“Did you get a ride right away?”
“Yes.”
Kowalski looked at Daniel for a moment, then: “You sure you hitchhiked into town, Daniel?” Kowalski’s radio was now crackling to life. He stepped a few paces away to answer the call, made a reply, then returned.
“We have a set of fingerprints off the motorcycle,” Kowalski said. He turned to Hardcastle. “An off-duty deputy gave us an exact description of your son on the stolen motorcycle, Admiral. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask your son to come with me.”
Kowalski reached out to take Daniel’s arm, and Hardcastle was forced to watch his son being led away with his head down like a common criminal.
Dade County Sheriff’s Department Headquarters
Hardcastle had been waiting for a half-hour when a detective walked in. “Admiral Hardcastle? Detective Sergeant Lewis.” Lewis laid two fingerprint cards on the table in front of him and motioned for the admiral to look at them.
Hardcastle was no forensics expert, but even the most casual glance between the two told the obvious—the prints matched. Hardcastle looked back at Lewis, who looked back at Hardcastle to be sure that he understood the obvious.
“Are you the boy’s guardian?”
“No, he lives with his mother.”
“Visitation rights?”
“Weekends,” Hardcastle said, his throat dry and raspy.
“How are relations between you and the boy’s mother?”
“Fair to poor. She doesn’t approve of my choice of career, and especially doesn’t think it would be a wise choice for Daniel—” “I’ve heard that one before. How about between the boy and his mother?”
“Good, so far as I know.”
Lewis wondered if Hardcastle really knew. “Well, he seems to think highly of you. Was more afraid of disappointing you than going to jail.” Hardcastle fought a shudder of dread at the word “jail.” The detective picked up the fingerprint cards, folded them in half and stuck them in a pocket. Hardcastle looked at him in surprise.
“You’re lucky, Admiral. When the owner heard that Daniel’s father was the Coast Guard district commander he dropped charges.
He has his bike back.”
“I’m grateful,” Hardcastle said.
Lewis nodded. “Besides,” he said, “the prints don’t quite match the boy.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“Well, I got one set of prints of a motorcycle thief,” Lewis said, “and I got another set of a pretty decent high-school student, a flying nut, good grades, accepted at the University of Miami, maybe a baseball scholarship. They don’t exactly match. What I need to know, Admiral, is this kind of thing going to happen again?”
“I’ll do my damndest—”
Lewis held up his hand. “I see this every spring, Admiral. The script is pretty much the same. But when I dig a little deeper, what I find are parents that see their son or daughter as a grown-up, someone they don’t have to deal with anymore because soon they’ll be out of the house and on their own. They slack off. What happens is that the happiest time of their kid’s life becomes the saddest. I blame the parents most of the time ... I can do that because I’m a parent and I see it happening to me too. But it’s no excuse.” Hardcastle stared at the tabletop. He was being lectured at by a cop at least ten, fifteen years his junior—but he also knew he was right.
“Do you hear me, Admiral?” Hardcastle nodded.
“All right, I can’t release Daniel to your custody so I’ve called his mother. She’ll be down shortly and I’ll have a word with her too. Then Daniel is free to leave. This time.”
“Can I see him?”
“I’ll bring him in. Admiral, I’d be real disappointed if I saw either of you in here again. It would mean I was wrong about you . . . and him.”
“I understand ...”
“I hope so,” Lewis said as he left the room.
His son, arrested for stealing a motorcycle. The kid had always followed his own way, not afraid to take a chance or do something off-beat, but he’d never broken the law. This was a whole different side—
The door swung open and Daniel entered. His eyes were puffy and dark. He looked at his father and swallowed.
“Sit down, Daniel,” Hardcastle said, motioning to a chair across from him. He wanted to take him in his arms, he wanted to give him a shot. Anger, love, all mixed up . . .
“Dad, I’m sorry about this, I didn’t mean to embarrass you—”
“I’m not embarrassed,” Hardcastle said. “I’m angry, upset . . .”
“I know the guy who owns that bike,” Daniel said. “I know he leaves the keys in a holder under the seat—”
“Bullshit. That doesn’t make any difference.”
“I know, I know, it was stupid. I wanted to see you, I was told you were working late, mom wouldn’t let me borrow the car and I didn’t want to hitch. The guy’s had that bike stolen a half dozen times. I wasn’t going to wreck it or ditch it, I left it in a safe place in that parking garage—”
“Still bullshit, Danny. You’re trying to rationalize this? You stole a motorcycle, you could be in juvenile detention for six years. Let’s talk about the future. You’re still my son, now I’ve got to learn to trust you all over again—”
At that moment the door opened and Jennifer Leslie Wagner- Hardcastle came into the room. Dressed in a light blue dress with matching shoes, a light silk jacket, and carrying a white handbag, she was a striking woman in her late forties, with dark hair touched with silver-gray highlights, a trim body, and deep dark eyes. By now it was after eleven o’clock at night, she was coming to get her son who had been arrested and she looked as if she was ready for a business conference.
Hardcastle rose but said nothing as she squinted with seeming distaste at his thin frame, the deeply etched lines around the eyes and short gray hair. She turned to her son. “Daniel, wait outside for me.” The boy left quickly.
“I have just been lectured by a policeman about how to raise my son,” she began. “I have a son old enough to be his brother, and he is lecturing me on how to raise my son.”
“He knows what he’s talking about.”
“Why? Because he blames this whole thing on me?”
“I’m not in the mood for a fight—”
“Why didn’t you wait for Vance to come down here?” she asked him. Vance Hargrove was Jennifer’s attorney, the one who had handled her divorce. “It was wrong to say anything to the police until an attorney was present—”
“The police did the talking, Jennifer. They showed me the fingerprints—”
“How do you know they were Daniel’s fingerprints? How do you know that the fingerprints they said they took off that motorcycle were really—?
“Daniel said so. The police got the owner to drop the charges, they kicked Daniel loose. Stop trying to bury this in legalese. Danny screwed up. He broke the law. Now what are we going to do about it?”
Jennifer seemed to straighten her back. “Well, he must be punished, of course. He’ll be restricted to the house, except for school. No more use of the car for I don’t know how long—”
“You really don’t get it,” Hardcastle broke in. “He’s so tied down now it won’t matter if you put a few more temporary little restrictions in place—if he feels the need to sneak out of the house again he’ll do it. You already restrict him on weeknights and after ten on Friday and Saturday nights. You won’t let him have a job. You don’t let him come downtown, he’s not allowed to stay overnight at my place . . .”
“When you decide you have the time to see him, that is.”
“I know, I’ve screwed up too,” Hardcastle said. “It’s us that have to change.” He paused, then said, “I want him to spend the weekends with me at my place in Pompano Beach. And I want him to spend the summer with me before he goes off to school—”
“Could we please talk about this some other lime?” she said. “You can’t duck it, Jennifer. We’ve got to—”
“I think we’ve all been through enough for one night. At least Daniel and I have.” She pulled the door open and left without another word.
A few moments later the door opened again and Sergeant Lewis came back in the room.
“How did it go?”
“Bad.”
“It usually does,” Lewis said. “But don’t give up, Admiral. Not on either one of them—”
The door was pushed open farther and Commander Becker came in. He motioned to the door, where Marine Corps Major Pamela Darwin, the District’s legal counsel, was standing with a folder of papers in her hand. “Major Darwin’s here to help out but we’ve been told the charges have been dropped.”
When Lewis turned to leave, Hardcastle thanked him, “for everything.”
Major Darwin entered the room, closed the door and stood in front of Hardcastle as if making a formal report: “I’ve received statements from security personnel at Brickell Plaza, sir. There was a security deficiency on their part. We may have a cause of action against them as well as the sheriff s department for unreasonable search—” “Forget it, major. I’ll file a report with you and Area Headquarters in the morning. Up-channel your comments to my report to Area as soon as possible. That’s all.” He turned to Becker. ‘ Mike, if you wouldn't mind . . .”
“I’d be happy to drive you home, sir.”
Hardcastle took a sideways glance at Darwin as Becker escorted him out of the conference room. She looked back at him with . . . pity? Was she sorry for an old seahorse because he couldn’t even keep track of his kid?
Cut it out, he ordered himself. The pity is self-inflicted. And you need all your energy for your equally important job of being a drug- buster. Get on with it.
Customs Air Division, Homestead AFB, Florida
Sunday Morning
Sandra Geffar was standing on the aircraft-parking ramp. It was a cool Sunday morning in south Florida, with huge dark thunderheads surrounding the entire area.
Almost as dark and stormy was the mood of Customs Investigator Curtis Long, a Citation interceptor pilot at Homestead and Geffar’s chief of enforcement. Long also acted as Geffar’s R and D officer, checking
out new weapons and evaluating new tactics for possible use by the agency. Long was scarcely five feet tall, broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist. It was generally acknowledged at Homestead that Agent Long’s lack of size was more than compensated by his intelligence and physical strength. He was also one of the most mild-mannered of men. There weren’t many things that could wind Curtis Long up . . .
The Coast Guard was one of the things that could. “This deal is going to be a big waste of time,” he was saying.
“You never even met Hardcastle,” Geffar said.
“Iknow his rep. He’s a loose cannon, wants to make points by coming up with flaky ideas. Why did you agree to fly with him?”
“Because . . It was a good question. Hardcastle could put her nose out of joint too, but he was also dedicated in his work, intelligent, forceful and not afraid to rock the boat. And right now the guy had something up his sleeve.
“I want to stick close to this man, that’s all,” Geffar said coolly. “He’s got his boss’ ear on this project, whatever it is, and apparently he’s gotten hold of some pretty valuable equipment to play with. If we have any chance of keeping up with whatever the Coast Guard is doing, this is it.”
That wasn’t her whole answer. Hardcastle knew that neither Customs nor Coast Guard was really suited for the expanded role being forced on each of them. The Coast Guard didn’t have the skills or the intelligence apparatus to conduct major law-enforcement activities, and the expanded drug-interdiction role was probably unsuited for the Coastie’s lifesaving mission. As for Customs, it didn’t have the global authority or the firepower. Hardcastle was a guy ready and waiting to break out of the rut. It might just be the time to give him a break . . .
“You’re not exactly keeping an open mind about this,” Geffar told Long.
“The Coasties got nothing I want. And neither of us have the time to watch a dog-and-pony show—”
A strange sound interrupted, something that could only be described as a combination of propeller and jet engines. Long and Geffar turned to see what had to be one of the most unusual aircraft in the world make a steep banking turn scarcely two hundred feet overhead. It resembled a twin-turboprop small transport plane, not as big as the Air Force’s C-130 cargo plane but still large for a prop job. The plane was about seventy feet long and twenty-five feet wide, with a wing mounted high on the fuselage and a cantilever tail with twin rudders. The turboprop engines were unusual; large and spinning a very large propeller at a remarkably slow speed, and the engine nacelles were mounted directly at the wingtips instead of on pylons nearer the middle of the wings.
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