“Easy, not too fast,” Calvin whispered. He stood and peered through a ventilation grid in the shed door towards the pilothouse. They were moving into Elm Tree Cove, but very slowly. He glanced at Jacob, who was now gulping down the hot, sugary coffee. How strong was he? Could he swim a couple of hundred yards in cold water? Heck, if he recalled correctly, the shoreline of the Cove pinched in as they moved deeper into it. If they could get into the water, he could pull Jacob to shore in just a few minutes.
“Jacob, can you stand? Can you swim?” he asked softly, pouring more coffee into the cup.
Jacob nodded. “I’m good,” he croaked, his teeth still chattering. “More coffee will help.”
“What I’m thinking is that once we’re close to shore, we might just go over the side and swim like hell. I can help you if you need it,” Calvin said. “Get to shore and get into the trees…”
Jacob’s shook his head, his face pale. “Won’t work! I’ve been listening to them – there are a bunch of drug guys on the beach with weapons. The Cove is narrow down there, they could shoot us clear from the other side.”
Calvin considered, then put his eye to a small ventilation grid.
Then he abruptly stepped away.
“Wha-” Jacob began, but Calvin put his finger to his lips to quiet him, then flattened himself against the shed wall behind the door. Jacob’s eyes widened and he thrust his hands together, then down between his legs, hopefully concealing the fact that the zip ties were gone.
The door swung open, hiding Calvin from immediate view. Tommy Burke, one of the two sternsmen, walked in, barely glancing at Jacob as he walked to the corner, picked up a coil of rope and walked out again. Calvin and Jacob both heard the “click” as Burke dropped the latch into place.
“Shit, we’re locked in,” Calvin said in a low voice, but Jacob shook his head.
“Not a strong latch,” Jacob whispered back. “If we can’t slip something under the latch and just lift it off, we can kick it open.”
Calvin was going to suggest that kicking the door open would be damn noisy when his eye caught something. There, sitting at Jacob’s feet, was the thermos of coffee Jacob had been drinking from, in plain view of Burke and the world. If Burke had noticed it, the entire escape would have been screwed.
“Jesus Christ, we were lucky,” he breathed.
Jacob looked down and saw the thermos. “Ah, fuck me,” he said, then he was laughing and crying all at the same time. Calvin knelt beside him, arms around his brother’s shoulders. “Hey, we’re doin’ good, doin’ good. You gotta eat now, Jacob, get your strength back. Eat and have more coffee. I’m going to keep my eye out and as soon as I think we’ve got a chance, we’re outta here.”
Jacob pulled back and wiped his nose. “I’ve been in here all day, Cal. Just thinkin’.” He tried to smile. “I heard them talking about drugs and delivering them tonight. I think they’re using me as a hostage to keep the cops from getting them. Dad, I guess. But, Cal, once they deliver whatever the hell this package is, I think they’re going to kill me and dump my body in the water. They got no choice – I know who they are. They can’t leave me alive, can’t risk it.”
Calvin leaned in, touching forehead to forehead. “Nobody’s going to kill you, I promise. I’ve got a gun, if it comes to that.”
Jacob shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. I-I don’t want you to die, too. I want you to sneak out and get to shore. With your black wetsuit, maybe they won’t see you. You can get help, but I don’t want you here when they come for me.” He hung his head. “Ah, Christ, I’ve been so fucking stupid. I think they used me to get stuff about Dad and what he’d been up to.” He rubbed his face with both hands, smearing snot and tears and dirt. “I couldn’t bear it if something happened to you.”
“You dumb shit,” Calvin grinned. “Mom would kill me if I left you here. I’m a lot more afraid of her than anybody on this boat. When I go, you go with me.”
______________
Bobby St. Clair navigated the Samantha back past the rocky ledge and further to Southeast Harbor. There, he cut the throttle and let the boat rock from the waves and the ebbing tide. If he turned right, to the east, he would head for open water and his home port. Of course, it hadn’t escaped him that his Uncle Jean-Philippe had maneuvered to be the second one to make the delivery. That left the Samantha the first one to go down the channel to open ocean, which meant it would be the first ship to run smack into the Coast Guard if they had a cutter parked there. If it were him, he’d put the cutter just east of Toothacher Ledge, where the channel was narrow and there was nowhere to hide.
Uncle Jean-Philippe had been pretty slick. He’d made sure he wasn’t the last boat in, nor the last boat out. If things went tits up, he’d be in the best position to run deeper into the maze of coves and inlets and try to hide, or abandon his boat and go ashore somewhere. St. Clair grinned ruefully – maybe his uncle wasn’t going soft after all. Maybe he was sly as an old fox.
“Guys,” he called back to his crew. “We’re going to take a little detour. Instead of going home tonight, we’re going west. We’ll snug the boat up in some little cove and camouflage it as best we can, then see what’s what in the morning.”
One of his crew looked at him with concern. “Something wrong, Bobby? You know something?”
St. Clair spun the wheel and the Samantha turned west, slicing through the water towards Current Island and the Brays Narrows. “Nah, just being careful is all,” he replied. “Just being careful.” He whistled softly through his teeth. Uncle Jean-Philippe would be mad as hell when he found out what he’d done.
Tough shit, St. Clair thought.
______________
LeBlanc guided the Celeste down the channel into Elm Tree Cove. It was very dark, in that oppressive, squinting way it gets when the clouds are low and the air is full of oily rain. Normally he’d have the floodlights on, but not tonight. Eyes on the depth finder, he took his boat in slow and careful. The Celeste was four feet longer than the Samantha, and a foot broader in the beam, so slow and easy was the name of the game. Banderas stood beside him, nervously shifting from foot to foot. LeBlanc was a little surprised; Banderas was such a hard-ass that he rarely displayed nervousness.
“Glad to be getting onto dry land, Bruno?” he asked.
“Glad to be finished,” Bruno said shortly. “Most of my jobs are simple. Go to this place, do this thing, go home.” He suppressed a shudder. “This job, nothing but problems, problems, problems. And your ocean, I do not like your ocean. Too…too-” he groped for the right word.
“Cold?” LeBlanc suggested.
“Mean,” Banderas corrected him. “I think your ocean wants to kill me.”
LeBlanc laughed, a deep, authentic belly laugh. “You got that right! Fucking meanest ocean in the world. And it doesn’t just want to kill you, it wants to kill all of us. You can never take it for granted, that’s for damn sure.”
Bruno suppressed another shudder. “Dry land will be good.”
The short trip down the channel into the Cove was uneventful, if wet. The rain picked up, lashing at the windows and reducing visibility to no more than fifty yards. LeBlanc followed the channel as it curved left, then Banderas stepped out and called softly in Spanish. An answering voice called from the beach and briefly shone a light. Banderas replied in Spanish and came back to the pilothouse.
“He says if you go further to the left, the water stays deep enough so you can throw the package to them in about thirty feet,” he told LeBlanc.
LeBlanc checked his depth finder. He was right on the edge of running aground, but shrugged and nudged the boat forward at half a knot. Thirty feet later he felt the bow push gently into the rising bottom and he brought the throttle to idle. He stepped out of the pilothouse. Banderas handed him a thick envelope, then hefted the fifty-pound package to his shoulder.
LeBlanc was surprised to receive his payment before the third package was delivered, and said so.
&nbs
p; Banderas smiled coldly, pausing at the rail. “It is a matter of risk, no? And with you there is no risk. I know where your family lives, where your children go to school, where you go to drink with your friends. You will never cheat us because there is nowhere you could hide. You know this.”
LeBlanc did know it, but his blood ran cold and his bowels turned to water hearing Banderas say it. They dropped a small ladder off the starboard side and Banderas swung a leg over. “I’ll contact you in two months about another shipment,” he said, then he lowered himself into chest-high water and began wading ashore. Six men with rifles emerged from the trees and helped him out the water, two of them taking the package. One of the men waved to the Celeste and called out softly: “Send in the last boat!”
LeBlanc threw the engine into reverse and backed away, but at the first opportunity, he counted the money in the envelope. It was all there, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Hard to know what he would have done, or could have done, if Banderas had cheated him at the last minute.
After all, they knew where his children went to school.
______________
“That’s two. One more to go,” said Finley. “Get ready, everyone. As soon as the next boat drops its package, we’ll take them.” He crawled over to Honeycutt. “Where are the State Police?” he whispered. “We need more men if we’re going to send a team across the bridge to block their escape.”
“If they don’t come in time,” Honeycutt answered, “I’ll send you and the two Coast Guard guys across, then announce our presence from this side. You’ll want to disable their cars first, then find a good shooting position.”
Finley was appalled. “Christ, Howard, you call that a plan?”
Honeycutt grimaced. “If you’ve got something better, I’m all ears.”
“What about the helicopter?”
Honeycutt looked grim. “I checked with Commander Mello a few minutes ago. The helicopter took off, then had to return to base because the winds were still too high. Weather might ease up in an hour or so, but that’s probably too late to help us.”
“Crap!” Finley muttered.
“The two Coast Guard guys are pretty damn good, Frank, you’ll be fine,” Honeycutt assured him, with the same blasé confidence of military leaders throughout history.
Finley was reminded of the old doctor joke, when the patient asks if the surgery is going to hurt and the doctor replies, “I won’t feel a thing.” It really wasn’t very funny.
Back in his shooting position, he watched as the boat slowly backed up in the narrow channel, then turned around and picked up speed. His heart felt leaden and cold in his chest.
Was that the boat Jacob was on? Was his son really mixed up in this?
______________
LeBlanc waved to the Rosie’s Pride as he passed it.
“Any problems?” called the captain, Marc LeBlanc. He was a short, squat man with a bushy beard and a chronically annoyed expression, a man who woke up every morning knowing that somehow the world was going to piss him off that day. He was rarely wrong.
“Channel’s tight, but you can do it,” Jean-Philippe LeBlanc called back. “When the depth finder hits four feet, turn to the left and you’ll get another thirty or forty feet. You’ll ground, so go slow. Mud bottom, no rocks. And don’t be startled when the drug guys come out of the woods armed to the teeth.”
Marc LeBlanc scowled. “Don’t like the sound of that.”
LeBlanc grinned. “For the money we’re making tonight, I can put up with some guys with guns.”
His cousin grunted sourly and pushed the throttle forward. “See you after, Jean-Philippe. You’re buying the beer tonight!”
LeBlanc laughed. “No beer for us, cousin. Tonight, we drink Champagne!”
His cousin made a rude gesture and LeBlanc laughed again. Then he got on the radio and called Bobby St. Clair on the Samantha. “How’s it going where you are?” he asked jovially, but he listened intently.
The Samantha was halfway through the Brays Narrows, heading northwest, away from the ocean. They were almost to Sawyers Island and Long Cove. There was a little inlet less than a mile away, a secluded spot surrounded by tall trees. A great place to hide for a few hours. In high school, St. Clair used to take willowy French girls there and go skinny dipping, and sometimes got lucky afterwards when they were drying each other with soft cotton towels. And sometimes not. He planned on holing up there for the night, then to return back through the maze and into open waters early in the morning. And then…just go lobstering. It wouldn’t be the first time the Samantha had spent a night on the water.
St. Clair picked up his radio mic. “No problems. All clear where we are,” he said truthfully.
______________
On the Coast Guard Cutter Vigilant, Captain O’Brien sat in the Combat Center, scanning the inlet to the northwest through a pair of low-light binoculars. Rain hammered at the windows and the cutter rolled queasily under her feet. Her bad shoulder throbbed.
“Anything on radar?” she asked the XO.
“No, Ma’am, but you could hide a goddamned armada behind these islands and headlands,” Lt. Commander Hillson replied disgustedly.
Captain O’Brien studied the radar screen, then glanced once more at the charts of the area. The XO was right, there were islands, coves, inlets, peninsulas and all sorts of crap that conspired to make searching for a lobster boat much harder than it should have been. Night like this, a lobster boat could anchor right beside a finger of land or an island, power down and just sit there. For all practical purposes, they’d be invisible.
“What do you think, Mr. Hillson?” she asked mildly. “Should we put the small boat out to poke around and see what they scare up?” They had a twenty-foot inflatable with twin Yamaha 90 HP outboard engines and, more importantly, a mounted machine gun. It would be like a hunter sending out dogs to flush out pheasants. Or perhaps a bear.
Lt. Commander Hillson rubbed his chin in thought. “The small boat doesn’t have any armor.”
O’Brien nodded in agreement. “You’re right, but it’s got speed, a .30 caliber machine gun, a siren and a radio. I don’t want them fighting a pitched battle, but they can poke around all the bolt holes a boat can hide behind or in. Meanwhile, we block the channel.”
Hillson looked at her. They had served together a long time and she knew the look. She sighed. “I know, it’s my decision. There’s some danger we can’t eliminate, but this is what we do, John. This is why we’re here.” Her shoulder throbbed again, making her yearn for a strong drink, a pain pill and a warm bed. She made up her mind. “Three-man crew. Make sure they wear full ballistic vests and helmets, and I want them to carry a ballistic shield with them so they can have some cover if it gets hot. Oh, and a transponder so we can track them in real time. Launch them as soon as they’re ready.”
“Yes, Captain,” her XO said. She couldn’t tell whether he agreed with her order or not, but it didn’t matter now. There was another fight coming, she could feel it.
“Master Chief!” she called.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Master Chief Petty Officer Ramirez responded.
“Get on the Bushmaster, Master Chief, things may get hot soon.”
“Yes, Ma’am!”
Captain O’Brien had been appalled at the carnage they’d wracked on the drug smugglers go-fast boat, appalled and pleased. If she was going to be in a shooting engagement with a drug cartel, it was good to know that her weaponry was up to the task. If the crews on the lobster boats were stupid enough to fight, she intended to win.
As far as she was concerned, happiness was a Bushmaster autocannon.
Chapter 59
Choices
Calvin and Jacob watched through the ventilation grid as the men with rifles dragged the package ashore and carted it off into the woods.
“Who are they?” Calvin whispered.
“Not who, but what,” Jacob said. “Drug smugglers, doesn’t matter which ones.” He turned his back to the
grid and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. “We’ll go north to Southeast Harbor, then turn east for the ocean. And when we get to the ocean, they’re going to throw me in.”
Calvin moved to the side ventilation grid. “We’re coming up on Rosie’s Pride.”
“He’s such a prick,” Jacob said sourly. “I had to work on that damn boat one day, only one day, and I couldn’t wait to get off.”
“Who?” Calvin asked.
“Jean-Philippe’s cousin. All he does is bitch about everything. Worst boss ever.”
“Well, he’s the last delivery tonight.” Calvin wondered if his father was nearby, watching the deliveries and getting ready to pounce. He hoped so. “Anyway, you say Jean-Philippe is getting ready to kill you, so he can’t be worse than that.” Calvin moved to the front ventilation grid. “Jacob, once we reach Southeast Harbor and we start the turn east, you and I are busting out of here and swimming ashore.”
Jacob stared at him. “How?”
Calvin held up the knife he had been carrying all night. “Slip this under the latch, then run to the side and jump. It’s only three or four steps.”
Jacob looked at him, white-faced and pinched. If they got caught, LeBlanc would kill them right away. If they made it, they’d be in the freezing water getting shot at. Hell, LeBlanc could just turn around and run over them. There were so many things that could go wrong he couldn’t even count them.
“Okay,” he said. “Sure.”
______________
Jena-Philippe LeBlanc increased speed when the depth finder showed twenty-one feet, marking the channel that would take him through Southeast Harbor and into the long finger of water that would take them to the ocean. He chuckled to himself – he hadn’t thought it was going to be this easy.
North Harbor Page 36