The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  Teddy lifts the martini glass and smiles.

  Tammy nods.

  Boone looks back through the window at them as he walks to the car. Teddy stands behind the chair with his hands on Tammy’s shoulders. They look like worried parents in a hospital waiting room.

  Below the house, the ocean smashes against the bluffs in a fit of rage.

  123

  Dave hears the breakers from about two hundred yards away.

  He can’t see them in the dark, but the sound is unmistakable.

  Rhythmic, steady.

  Real bombs.

  “Esteban!” he yells. “Tell these kids to hold on!”

  What was it Boone always said, Dave thinks, that I could surf these waters blindfolded? Well, I hope he was right. You feel surfing more than you see it, but that’s on a board, not a glorified rubber raft overloaded with helpless kids.

  Doesn’t matter, he tells himself.

  That’s what you have to do.

  Surf this boat in.

  He guns the engine to get as much speed as he can and prays that it’s going to be enough. The last thing he wants to do is get into one of the mackers late, because he’d go over the top for sure and flip the boat. And he has to keep the boat straight, its bow perpendicular to the wave, because if he gets it even a little sideways, it will roll.

  So he has to get into the wave right, angle the boat into the left break, and keep it moving when it crashes on the bottom or it will get swamped in the white water.

  He feels the wave swelling under the boat, picking it up, and pushing it forward.

  It’s just another fucking wave, he tells himself. Nothing to it.

  “Esteban!”

  “Yes?”

  “Who’s that fucking saint you pray to?”

  “San Andrés!”

  “Well, hook us up!”

  The wave lifts and takes them over the top.

  The kids scream.

  He’s in time. Now he tilts the rudder to break left and move diagonally down the face of the wave. He can feel the water rising behind him, then curling over him, and then they’re out of the tube and the boat crashes heavily into the white water.

  It bounces hard, and for a second he’s afraid he’s going to lose it, let it slip out from under him and turn sideways and get rolled, but he manages to keep it straight and it settles into the wash and glides into the mouth of the lagoon.

  Dave says a quick prayer of thanks.

  To San George Freeth.

  “Esteban, take the rudder,” Dave says. When the kid, visibly shaken but grinning like a fool, takes over, Dave digs in his pocket for his cell phone.

  SOP.

  Let the guys know the delivery is on the way.

  124

  Boone drives up the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Through all the beach towns, past all the great breaks.

  Thinks about all the waves, the rides, the wipeouts. The long leisurely hours in the lineups, or hanging out on the beach, talking story. The cookouts, grilling fish for tacos, watching the sun go down. The bonfires at night, sitting close to the flame to get warm, watching the stars come out, listening to someone play the guitar or the uke.

  Doing things you love, in a place you love, with people you love … that’s what life is, what it should be anyway. If you spend your life that way—and I have, Boone thinks—then you should have no regrets when it’s over. Maybe just a little sorrow knowing that you’re riding your last wave.

  If you even know it’s your last.

  What I’ve seen.

  What I’ve seen, Boone thinks. I’ve seen the world from the inside of a wave, the universe in a single drop of water.

  There’s a world out there you know nothing about.

  The sun will come up soon, The Dawn Patrol will be out, shooting for the big waves, Sunny will be taking her shot. He’d like to be out there with them, would like to be out there forever. But there are some sunrises you have to see alone.

  Boone turns inland from the ocean and heads for the strawberry fields.

  He’s on The Dawn Patrol.

  125

  Johnny Banzai and Steve Harrington sit in their car and wait.

  Below them, an old van makes its way down the narrow dirt road to a clearing at the edge of Batiquitos Lagoon.

  “You think that’s them?” Harrington asks.

  Johnny shrugs.

  Since Dave’s call, Johnny doesn’t know what is what. He doesn’t know anything about anything anymore. The call was surreal. “It’s Dave. I’m coming into Batiquitos Lagoon with a load of wetbacks. Johnny, they’re kids.”

  But he bets it’s them. It’s four o’clock in the morning; there’s not a lot of reason to be driving a van down to the lagoon. Unless you’re picking up something you’re not supposed to be picking up.

  He lifts the night scope and scans the lagoon.

  A few minutes later, he sees the boat.

  “Jesus God,” he murmurs, handing the scope to Harrington.

  “They’re kids,” Harrington says. “Little girls.”

  Johnny takes the glasses back and counts seven little girls, a young male Hispanic, and Dave.

  “You want to take them here?” Harrington asks.

  “Fuck no.”

  “What if we lose them?”

  “Then I’ll commit ritual seppuku,” Johnny says.

  “What’s that?” Harrington asks. “Some sort of Jap thing?”

  “You should read a book every once in a while,” Johnny replies. He turns the glasses onto the van and can make out the license plate. He calls it and a description of the van into the Sex Crimes Unit waiting on the 5.

  Then he turns back to the boat, which is making a gentle, perfect landing onshore.

  126

  Dave hops out of the Zodiac.

  The ground feels funny under his feet.

  “I thought I was delivering herb,” he says to the guy who gets out of the van, a cute little shit named Marco.

  “You thought wrong,” Marco says. “You got a problem?”

  “No problem,” Dave says, because the guy is holding a wicked-looking little machine gun under one arm. “Just tell Eddie I’m out.”

  “You tell him,” Marco says. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a fat envelope, and hands it Dave. “Help me get the merchandise into the van.”

  “Do it yourself,” Dave says, stuffing the envelope into his jacket. “I’m done.”

  “Whatever, bro.”

  Another guy gets out of the van and starts herding the girls into it. They go obediently, passively, like they’re used to being moved around.

  “Jesus, they stink!” Marco says. “What’d you do with them?”

  “Seasick,” Dave says. “It was a little rough out there, bro. And you might have let me know I was driving people. I would have been better prepared. You know, life jackets, shit like that?”

  “If I had told you,” Marco says, “would you have gone?”

  “No.”

  “So?”

  “What do they do now?” Dave asks. “They’re like maids or something like that?”

  “Yeah,” Marco says. “Okay, something like that. Look, much as I’d like to stand around and shoot the shit …”

  “Yeah,” Dave says.

  He goes back to the Zodiac, praying that Johnny got his call. He casually opens his cell phone and sees the text message: “Back-paddle.” Dave starts the engine, then takes the boat to the other side of the lagoon, where he left his truck. When he lands the boat, he says to Esteban, “Disappear, dude.”

  “What?”

  “Va te,” Dave says. “Pinta le. Get the fuck out of here.”

  Esteban looks at him for a second, then gets off the boat and disappears into the reeds.

  Dave kneels, bends over the edge of the boat, and throws up.

  127

  They follow the van out to the 5, then north to the 78, and east to the town of Vista, where the van pulls up to a nondescri
pt house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood.

  Nothing special, just your basic suburban cul-de-sac.

  A garage door opens and the van pulls in.

  Johnny gets on the radio.

  The Sex Crimes Unit is there in five minutes, with a SWAT team. The SCU lieutenant is a woman named Terry Gilman, who used to work homicide and then jumped from the frying pan into the shit fire. She walks up to Johnny’s car.

  “Where’d you get this, Johnny?” she asks.

  “You’re looking good, Terry.”

  She straps a vest on, checks the load in her .9mm, and says, “If we don’t find evidence, will your source testify?”

  “Let’s find the evidence,” Johnny says as he gets out of the car.

  “Sounds good to me.” Terry Gilman is pissed. She hates snakeheads in general and snakeheads who run children in particular. She’s almost hoping this thing goes south so she can use the nine on one of them.

  They hit the front door like Normandy.

  A SWAT guy swings the heavy ram and the door cracks open. Johnny is the first guy through. He ignores the adults scrambling to get away—SWAT will wrap them up. He just keeps pushing through until he comes to a door that opens to a basement stairway.

  Pistol in front of him, he goes down the stairs.

  It’s a dormitory, a barracks of sorts.

  Dirty mattresses are set side by side on the concrete slab. A rough open shower in one corner, an open toilet in the other. Blankets everywhere. A few dirty, stained pillows. An old TV set hooked up to a video player.

  Kids’ movies.

  A few children’s books in Spanish.

  The girls from the boat have jammed themselves into one corner. They stand there holding one another, staring at him in sheer terror.

  “It’s all right,” Johnny says to them, lowering his pistol. “It’s all going to be all right now.”

  Maybe it is, he thinks.

  I have these kids.

  But where are the children who were living here?

  128

  Boone drives past the reed bed and keeps going until he finds a place where he can turn off and see the fields and the road.

  Now he sits and looks at the fields, silver and dewy as the sun starts to rise behind the hills to the east. On the far side of the fields, where they dip to meet the river, the reed bed stands like a wall, sealing the fields off from the rest of the world, blending into a line of trees that old man Sakagawa planted as a windbreak so many years ago.

  On the other side of the fields, on a small rise near its eastern edge, old Sakagawa’s house sits in a small grove of lemon and walnut trees. The old man will be getting up soon, Boone thinks, if he isn’t already, sitting at his table with his tea and his rice with pickled vegetables.

  The workers are already coming out, filing onto the fields with their tools over their shoulders, like the rifles of soldiers moving out on a early-morning mission. An army of phantoms, they come from nowhere. They hide at night in the creases and folds of the San Diego landscape, emerge in the soft light of the early dawn, coming into the open to work, and then disappear again at dusk into the wrinkles and seams, the last unwanted places.

  They’re the invisible, the people we don’t see or choose not to see, even in the bright light of day. They’re the unspoken truth, the unseen reality behind the California dream. There before we wake up, gone before we fall asleep again.

  Boone settles back and watches them start to work. They fan out in well-organized lines, practiced, almost ritualistic, silent. They work with their backs bent and their heads down. They work slowly, in a methodic rhythm. There’s no hurry to get done. The field will be here all day, was here yesterday, will be here tomorrow.

  But not for many tomorrows, Boone thinks. He wonders if these men know that someday soon they will not be out here. It will be the bulldozers and road graders that will come out at dawn, machines, not men who work like a collective machine. Exhaust fumes instead of sweat.

  In place of the fields, there will be luxury homes and condominiums. A shopping plaza or a mall. In place of the workers, there will be residents and shoppers and diners. And these men will have disappeared to some other netherworld.

  Boone feels a bit of welcome warmth come through the car window.

  The sun has crested the mountains.

  129

  Johnny goes back upstairs.

  Lieutenant Gilman is standing beside the prisoners, who are sitting on the floor, their arms cuffed behind them. Three men, two women.

  “Whoever they had here,” Johnny whispers to her, “they’re gone.”

  She looks to him and Harrington. “Do what you need to do.”

  Harrington steps over to one of the skells, who made the mistake of making eye contact. He lifts him to his feet. “What’s your name?”

  “Marco.”

  “Let’s you and I go have a little chat, Marco,” Harrington says. He walks him down the hall, toward the bedrooms. “You don’t have to come, Johnny.”

  “No, I’m in,” Johnny says.

  He follows Harrington down the hallway, into one of the bedrooms, and closes the door behind him. Harrington bounces Marco off the wall, catches him on the rebound, and knees him in the balls. He lifts his head and says, “I am not fucking with you, asswipe. You’re going to tell me where those kids are, or you’re going to pull a gun on me and I’m going to have to paint the wall with your brains. And that’s my second shot. My first goes into your gut. ¿Comprende, amigo?”

  “I speak English,” Marco says.

  “Well you’d better start speaking it,” Harrington says. He pulls his pistol and jams it into Marco’s stomach.

  “They just left,” Marco says.

  “Left for where?”

  “The fields.”

  “What fields?”

  “The strawberry fields.”

  Johnny feels his skin go cold. “What? What did you say?”

  “The strawberry fields,” Marco says. “The old Sakagawa strawberry fields.”

  Johnny feels dizzy, like the room is spinning. Shame flows through his blood. He lurches to the door and shoves it open. Staggers down the hall, through the living room, and out the door. He leans on the car and bends over to catch his breath.

  It’s coming on dawn.

  130

  The first faint rays of sunlight hit Pacific Beach, warming, if only psychologically, the crowd of photographers, magazine people, surf company execs, lookie-loos, and hard-core surfers who stand shivering on Pacific Beach Point in the cold morning, waiting for the light.

  The bluff they’re standing on is historic ground. Surfers have been riding that reef break almost since George Freeth, and it was way back in the 1930s, when this was still a Japanese strawberry field, that Baker and Paskowitz and some of the other San Diego legends built a shack on this bluff and stored their boards here and proudly adopted the name that the farmers gave them—“the Vandals.”

  Just off to the north, the big swell is pounding the reef. Sunny stands at the edge of the crowd, her board beside her like a crusader’s shield, and watches the sunlight turn the indistinct gray shapes into definitive waves.

  Big waves.

  The biggest she’s ever seen.

  Mackers.

  Thunder crushers.

  Dreams.

  She glances around her. Half the big-wave riders in the world are here, most of them professionals with fat sponsorships and double-digit mag covers behind them. Worse, most of them have Jet Skis with them. Jet Skis with trained partners who will pull them into the waves. Sunny doesn’t have the cash for that. She’s one of the few paddle-in surfers out here.

  And the only woman.

  “Thank you, Kuan Yin,” she says softly. She isn’t going to bitch about what she lacks; she’s going to be grateful about what makes her unique. The only woman, and a woman who’s going to paddle into the big waves.

  She picks up her board and heads down toward the water.
r />   131

  Dave’s out there already.

  He sits out behind the massive break on a Jet Ski, ready to pull people out if they need it. It’s his sacrifice, his penance, not riding the big waves. He hasn’t slept—he’s exhausted—but somehow he felt that he had to be here, but not surf.

  There was just something that felt wrong about it, going out there and having the time of his life when he’s seriously questioning what his life has even become. He can’t shake the image of the girls huddled in the hold of the boat—who they were, where they were headed, whether or not Johnny managed to intercept them.

  And then there’s all that. Johnny’s going to want some questions answered, and the answers are going to blow up life as they know it.

  Which maybe isn’t such a bad thing, Dave thinks as he checks his equipment—mask, snorkel, fins—things he might need if he has to get off the ski and dive into the soup.

  Maybe this life needs a little blowing up.

  A change.

  Even if Johnny doesn’t ask the questions, Boone will.

  But where the fuck is Boone? He should be out here with me and Tide and Sunny, should at least be here for Sunny, backing her up, helping her deal with the big-name Jet Ski crews that will try to block her out.

  Boone should be here for her.

  132

  The girls look like ghosts.

  Boone spots them coming out of the trees. The last of the morning mist hugs their legs and mutes their footsteps. They don’t talk to one another, walk side by side, or chat and laugh like girls going to school. Instead, they walk single file, almost in lockstep, and they look straight ahead or down at the ground.

  They look like prisoners.

  They are. Now Boone sees two men walking behind them. They’re not carrying guns—at least Boone doesn’t see any—but they’re clearly herding the girls along. It doesn’t take much effort, as the girls seem to know where they’re going. And the men are behind the girls, not in front of them.