Brown, Dale - Independent 02

by Hammerheads (v1. 1)

  Compliments again. They made her suspicious or nervous ... As she stood to leave he struggled to his feet, towering over her. “I’m sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable,” he said.

  “You didn’t.” But he did.

  “May I see you again?”

  She had been half-steeling herself for that question but it still startled her. “This incident needs to be cleared up . . . Take care of yourself, Mr. Van Nuys,” she said, and left.

  She headed for the exit, but at a last-minute thought she turned up the hallway and found the room adjacent to Van Nuys’, belonging to Joseph Hokum. Before knocking she patted the .45 underneath her jacket, knocked on the door, waited a few seconds, then entered.

  Several of the chief s deputies and firemen were clustered around the bed. They had a chart spread out on Hokum’s lap—of what GefiFar could not tell—and several papers and what appeared to be fax or telex message sheets on the bedstand. As soon as she came through the door one of the deputies moved quickly toward her and she could see another pushing the nurse's call button.

  “You’re not allowed in here ...”

  Geffar moved closer to the bed as the deputies scrambled to put away the chart and papers. Hokum’s face was badly swollen—Hardcastle would have been proud, she thought. He was also sputtering to his people to remove her. “Just wanted to check on you, Chief—”

  She was grabbed tight around the forearms and shoved backward.”

  “What a big gun you have there,” the deputy said as he pulled her .45 out of her holster and tossed it to one of the men behind him.

  She was considering a judo move when she heard, “Get your hands off her, Buck.” Standing in the hallway, half-leaning against the wall for support, was Maxwell Van Nuys.

  “Everything’s under control, Mr. Van—”

  Van Nuys reached over and grabbed the deputy’s left wrist, encircling it in his left hand. “I said, get your hands off her.” The deputy’s knees began to buckle under Van Nuys’ grip before he finally released Geffar. “Give her the gun back.” The fireman did. She had to wonder at the sheer power of Maxwell Van Nuys even in his obviously weakened condition.

  “Get out of my sight,” Van Nuys said. His voice was weak with the pain shooting through his back but the message was clear. They both retreated into the chief s room and the door closed behind them.

  Van Nuys groaned and held himself up, his back flat against the wall. A nurse came by to help him back into bed, where he lay flat and motionless.

  “What did you think you were doing?” Geffar said.

  “I might ask you the same question,” glancing at her out the corner of his eye. “Stay away from them. Hokum may be the police chief of a conservative peaceful Sunrise Beach but he runs the place like the marshal of an Old West town. The residents like his tough-guy act.” “This is the man who files your flight plans for you?”

  Van Nuys smiled and gave her a nod. “All right, all right. Message received. I’ll do like everybody else and file directly with the feds. But I’m serious about Hokum. He has the law and a lot of powerful, influential citizens behind him . . . So . . . how about it? Can I see you again?”

  “I told you, there are serious questions that need to be cleared up with your affairs.” And mine, she silently added as she turned and left without another word.

  Van Nuys lay flat in bed, savoring the thought of Geffar, until he heard a knock at the door and it swung open. One of Hokum’s men poked his head through the door. “Sir?”

  “Get out.”

  “Sir, the Chief would like to speak.”

  “Tell him to go piss up a rope.”

  “I’m afraid he . . . insists, sir.”

  Van Nuys sat up in bed, stood, adjusted his bathrobe and without a hint of the discomfort he’d shown Sandra Geffar pushed past the man and stepped through the door connecting their two rooms.

  Chief Hokum was lying in bed surrounded by senior deputies and assistants. He had just downed a shot of tequila. His face was puffy. “That Hardcastle sure did a number on you, didn’t he? Okay, now what the hell do you want?”

  “I want to know what she was doing here.”

  “Visiting me.”

  “Then why was she in my room?”

  “Maybe she stopped by to admire her partner’s handiwork.”

  “Very funny . . . You’d better not see her anymore.”

  Van Nuys, his patented smile in place, stepped over to Hokum’s bedside, nodding—then suddenly reached over and grabbed Hokum’s neck with his right hand. The chief yelled in pain. Van Nuys gave a quick glance at the deputies but none raised a hand.

  Van Nuys leaned forward and moved his face within an inch of Hokum’s, maintaining his grip. “You listen to me, scum bag, I run this operation. I say what goes down and what doesn’t. Now I’m telling you. You stay away from Geffar and Border Security. Clear?” Van Nuys released his neck with a snap of his wrist. “I’m interested in what happened to my flight plan and my airplane. If I had a suspicious nature I’d say you sabotaged my plane and didn’t file the flight plan so Border Security would catch me—”

  “That’s crazy, Mr. Van Nuys,” Hokum managed through the pain in his face. “You were carrying five million dollars worth of blow. Why would I want anything else but to see that shipment arrive safe and sound?”

  “Maybe I wasn’t supposed to make it. Maybe you want to take over my operation. You let me get caught with the drugs—”

  “No, no, Mr. Van Nuys. If you get caught I’m implicated right away. They’ll come down on me harder than you. I want to do everything I could to make sure you’re covered. That’s why I kept Border Security away from your plane and foamed it. I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize our operation—”

  “My operation,” Van Nuys said, not entirely convinced, although Hokum seemed panicked enough to be telling the truth. “What happened with my flight plan and Custom’s clearance? Why was Border Security alerted?”

  “I swear I don’t know. I filed the flight plan as you directed. We had it all worked out how we were going to delay the Customs inspector at the front gate until we off-loaded the drugs. We had the proper cargo seals with the copied numbers all ready to go. They must’ve lost the flight plan in the system—”

  “Very convenient—for you. You screw up once more, Hokum, and you’ll find yourself part of a concrete foundation in my new gallery mall on Grand Bahama. And you make very damn sure that plane is sanitized before it’s turned over to Customs.” “He’s crazy,” one of the deputies murmured after Van Nuys had gone and they helped Hokum settle back into bed and poured him a shot of tequila. “He’s going to blow this whole deal over that bitch—”

  “Like hell he is,” Hokum said. He turned to his senior deputy, David Frye. “What happened? Why didn’t that plane go down?” “The charge must’ve been defective,” Frye told him. “Instead of detonating it burned through some wiring and shorted out his alternator. We’re damned lucky he made it back here instead of being forced to land at Opa-Locka or Miami... But if you wanted Van Nuys to get caught with the coke we had hidden on his plane why did you order us to foam his plane and take the stuff off?”

  “Use your head,” Hokum said. “I wanted Van Nuys dead and the coke found in his plane. If he’s alive he can talk, and if he can talk and explain that he had nothing to do with the stuff being in his plane, the attention focuses on us again. This weapons-smuggling operation I’ve spent years organizing inside Van Nuys’ drug smuggling almost went down the tubes because of your bungling. You get one more chance—that’s it.”

  Hokum lay silent a moment, then tossed back a mouthful of tequila and jabbed a finger at Frye. “I want to know all there is to know about this Sandra GefiFar. I want to know where she lives, where she goes, what she does and who she does it with. Use our contacts in the Dade County Sheriffs office and DMV. And keep it quiet.”

  Hammerhead One Air Staging Platform

  Two Weeks Later

  Geffa
r and Hardcastle were, officially, off duty, having finished a twelve-hour day shift, but both were in uniform. They were sitting near the bay windows watching a Customs inspection of a Costa Rican freighter tied alongside the platform’s east docks below the aerostat-balloon-launching area. The ballpark lights that rimmed the platform’s top level were bathing the freighter in stark white light.

  Michael Becker, his earset looped around his neck, cord dangling from a pocket, walked up to their table with his dinner. “Mind if I join you?”

  Geffar stood. “I’ve got to get ready for tonight’s . . . interview. Excuse me.” She looked embarrassed and she was.

  “She’s got a ‘Nightline’ interview in a couple of hours,” Hardcastle told him.

  “I know ... I heard. She makes a great spokesperson for the Hammerheads.”

  “She’s lost, burning it at both ends,” Hardcastle said, staring down at the freighter.

  “You’ve been spending an awful lot of time out here yourself, Admiral. I’ve noticed you missing the chopper back to shore more and more. Why don’t you take some time off? Go see Daniel.”

  “I should . . . hell, I’ll give him a call... You know, Mike,” he said, jabbing a finger at Becker, “after more than six months we’ve only got four fully operational Sea Lion aircraft and only five platform-qualified crews.”

  “We have two Sea Lions on the platform and one at Homestead, plus one for training. Congress has been screwing around with our funding from the very start. They delayed the next six Sea Lions for two months, waiting for public reaction, according to Elliott, who’s doing his best. Also, having this big shot Van Nuys testify on how effective and how heroic the Hammerheads are was a good move—”

  “Yeah. Van Nuys,” Hardcastle said, shaking his head. “Our new buddy, our very own socialite-playboy-spokesman for the

  Hammerheads. I could do without it, without him . . . ”

  Becker said nothing, but understood Hardcastle was less than pleased by the apparent friendship between Geffar and Van Nuys.

  “Mike, we should be flying the hell out of the crews, the Sea Lions and the drones. We should be making our presencefelt. We’ve got to get this station on the damned track.”

  Again, Becker kept his mouth shut. Because this was between his boss and GefiFar. And because he believed his boss was right.

  The camera’s lights created a spot of daylight at the edge of the platform, even brighter than the illumination of the ballpark lights on the east side of the huge facility. A camera crew was set up on the Hammerhead One upper deck, positioned so that the camera could swing freely from Geffar on deck down to photograph the activity on the deck of the Costa Rican coastal freighter moored alongside the platform.

  Geffar, with one finger covering her right ear and another holding the earpiece secure in her left ear, strained to listen to the question from the TV interviewer. “Miss Geffar, thank you very much for joining us tonight.”

  “My pleasure. Beautiful night out here. Glad you could join us.”

  Hardcastle, in his office beside the command center on the third deck, shook his head as he half-listened. Talking about the Hammerhead’s main operations platform as if it were a white sandy beach in the Virgin Islands . . . ?

  The intercom on his desk buzzed, and he touched the button without taking his eyes from the TV screen. “Yes?”

  “Dolphin’s ready to head on back to shore,” Becker said. “They’re waiting for you.”

  Some people think they’ve got time, he kept thinking. When the smugglers start coming in force . . . damn it, we’ve got to make sure they don’t succeed when they begin to make their move . . . “I’ll catch the morning chopper, Mike.”

  “You’ve been hitting it pretty hard.”

  “I’ll catch the next one out.” he said, clicked off the intercom and went back to watching the interview.

  “What’s happening out there tonight?” the interviewer was asking.

  The camera slowly swung out over the railing and down toward the freighter as GefiFar said: “We’re helping the Customs Service on a special vessel search. In this case, apparently intelligence was received that this freighter might be carrying a large amount of contraband, so the ship’s crew was directed to stop at our Border Security Force platform for a search before entering U.S. waters. The Customs Service comes on board the platform, we take the crew off the freighter and Customs conducts a compartment-by-compartment search. They use fiber optic probes, dogs, electronic sniffers, ultrasound detectors and thermal-neutron analysis to search each cargo container.”

  “Isn’t it rather unusual to conduct a search such as this?”

  “No, the Coast Guard conducts dozens all over the world. Here on this Hammerhead platform we have better facilities and can keep better control of a situation than conducting a search on the high seas. It adds a new dimension to controlling our borders. We have the facilities out here, we use them.”

  “Has anything been found on this freighter?”

  “Nothing yet . . .”

  “Does that mean your intelligence is faulty?”

  “Intelligence isn’t an exact science. If the smugglers found out that we knew, they may have arranged to pay off or procure another vessel, or cancel the shipment altogether. Maybe they threw it overboard when we ordered them to stop at the platform. Either way, just by having this facility here we’ve stopped another suspected shipment of drugs from entering the country. And every time we force them to change their plans, it's one in the plus column.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “Let’s say there was a thousand-kilo shipment of drugs coming in—over a ton of cocaine. They take that ton of cocaine and, say, pack it in creosote or stuff it into vegetables or sink it in barrels of tomato sauce. That one ton of coke packed in three tons of stuff. Now they get word that we found out which vessel they’re going to try to smuggle the stuff in. The smugglers have to unload it or dump it, unravel the mess they made and then repack it to send it out some other way. It costs them time and money. And if they try to ship it anyway, we’ll be waiting for it.”

  “So instead of shipping it through the Caribbean they truck it overland through Mexico or Texas or Arizona?”

  “Maybe, but what we’ve done is force them to spend time and energy in their operation. And by increasing our vigilance, establishing tight control in the Caribbean and south Florida frees up more agents in the south and southwest. Soon the Border Security Force will establish control over the south and eventually move into the southwest itself—”

  “Are you saying that one of your major objectives was to force the smugglers to go somewhere else?”

  “No, that’s putting it in the worst light and oversimplifying.” She tried to swallow the anger rising in her throat. “The FBI reports that the street price of cocaine is up nearly fifty percent since the Border Security Force was activated only six months ago. And since over half of the cocaine that comes into this country comes through the southeast, I’d say we are making a real impact.”

  “You see that reported price increase as a victory?”

  “I do. A fifty-percent increase begins to make cocaine too expensive for a lot of users. Someone who six months ago may have been able to find a hundred-dollar vial of coke easily now finds his or her supply drying up, or finds he can’t afford it anymore—”

  “So he robs another liquor store or snatches another purse or embezzles more money from the till to get the extra money—”

  “Or, sir, he does without. Or he finds a treatment program because use is too expensive. Or he does something stupid, something he’s not accustomed to, and gets caught. Or he does drugs less often, or shares less of it, or dilutes it more. The fact that our new operation here is chasing a lot of the rats out of their holes and into the open where we can better get at them is in itself an accomplishment. We are making a difference. And we’ve only just begun to fight ...”

  Valdivia, Colombia

  Gonzales Gachez
picked a slice of lime from a cup on the bar and hurled it at the wide-screen television set.

  He had been sitting at his bar in his oak-paneled office at his ranch in central Colombia watching the interview program via a hacked satellite descrambler—any announcement of an interview with any American official involved with drug interdiction or drug policy got his close attention these days. With him were officers and foremen in charge of various aspects of his drug trade.

  The TV program cut to a commercial, but because Gachez was receiving the satellite broadcast live as it was being transmitted from the Hammerhead One platform they still saw Geffar standing in front of the camera, taking a message on a walkie-talkie.

  “Does she really believe she can have such an effect on our operation?” Gachez said aloud. “We ship a thousand kilos a day right under their nose, all their fancy helicopters and drones can’t stop—”

  “She’s gotta say that on TV,” Luis Cerredo, Gachez’s chief of staff, said.

  Instead of calming Gachez, as they should have if believed, Cer- redo’s words had the opposite effect. “Just for TV, Luis? Then why are we not getting paid? Why are our buyers saying we are not delivering as promised? We distribute drugs all over the Bahamas, all over Mexico, and we get only half our money and no product in return. Why?”

  “The cowards on the receiving end see helicopters coming and they run. They say that the Cuchillos’ planes attract too much attention, that they draw the federates to the drop point and they cannot pick up the product—”

  “And are they attracting attention?” Gachez asked. “Are the Cuchillos becoming sloppy?”

  “Not in my opinion, sir,” Cerredo told him. “They take precautions. They have analyzed the weaknesses of this Border Security Force and have managed to take advantage of their deficiencies—” “How have they done that? Making drops in the middle of the mountains in Mexico? Making fifty-kilo shipments? That is their idea of taking advantage of weaknesses?”