09-Twelve Mile Limit (24 page)

On that cool December night, with a Midwestern breeze blowing through the screen window above my cot, I sat upright, sweating, trembling, my heart pounding.

The running shorts I wore were soaked. So were the sheets.

I threw the sheets back, then stood on shaky legs.

It was impossible to sleep after a dream so terribly vivid, so I went outside and took a cold shower, using a double ration of rainwater from my wooden cistern. I dressed, slipped into my sandals, then I went to work in the lab, writing up our report.

It was long before first light, just after 4 A.M. Fish and octopi in their tanks were watching me. Outside, there were stars in a black sky, and familiar, back bay sounds: the distant tapping of a halyard, the sump and whine of bilge pumps, the cornfield rustle of wind through the mangroves.

I wrote all morning. The only breaks I took were to walk to the marina for coffee, as I do almost every morning, then I returned there again around noon to pick up mail. On this particular day, I decided to have lunch at the marina. So I was sitting in the shade near the bait tanks, eating one of Joyce’s excellent fried-conch sandwiches, when Mack stepped out of the office door and called to me, “Hey, Doc! There’s some bloke here says he’s got a package for you. Won’t let me sign, won’t leave it at the desk. It must be important because he says he’s got to put it directly into your hands.”

Which is how I happened to receive the reinforced box from Bernie Yaeger that I now opened.

Inside was a Styrofoam cover, which I removed, then a layer of bubble wrap. Beneath, fitted into another cradle of Styrofoam, was a small, silver video camera not much bigger than my hand. There was a brand name and model designation on the side—Sony DCR-TR—and a typewritten note taped to the camera.

It read: “Doc, these directions are so simple even a lug like you can’t mess it up. Notice the wall bracket. Mount it no more than ten feet from the area you want videotaped. The camera has an infrared component, and it operates just fine at 0 lux, otherwise known to you hermit types as total darkness. The timer has already been programmed, and the memory stick has been inserted. Don’t touch anything! After you have mounted the camera, plug in the 12-volt converter. In the event you have a power outage down there in Hurricane Land, there is a info lithium battery backup. Try to install this beautiful little camera without crushing it in your big paws or dropping the damn thing!”

My attention intensified as I then read, “Also, I enclose several photographs that may be of interest. I’m sorry the series of images is not more complete, but these are the best data available. I wish your lost friend only good things, though I fear the worst. There is no doubt in my mind how you will react, and so I wish you safe travels as well. Ours is a dangerous world. It would be good to have you back working with us again. We need you. Shalom!”

He wished me “safe travels”? What the hell did that mean?

There was a final, short paragraph and no signature: “The container is vacuum-sealed. The proof sheet enclosed has been treated via a process with which you are familiar, and the images will vanish within one hour or less after the seal is broken. They are for your eyes only, and, of course, you must not divulge to anyone that these images exist. Viewing the images requires medium-power magnification capabilities.”

I glanced into the box and saw what appeared to be a heavy, ignition-walled Pyrex test tube that was capped with a black stopper. I held the tube up to the bulb of the goose-necked lamp and saw three, maybe four, tiny strips of paper therein. Each strip was a series of miniature photographs, and each image was no bigger than the head of a nail.

I walked to the middle of the room and pulled the wooden swivel chair into position, then removed the cover from my Wolfe zoom stereomicroscope. Finally, I hunted around for a notebook and pencil before checking my watch, removing my glasses, then sitting down at the microscope.

The Pyrex tube made a suctioning sound when I unscrewed the cap. I used dissecting forceps to mount a strip on the viewing stage—and noticed that my fingers demonstrated a slight tremor. I turned the scope’s revolving nosepiece until I found the most satisfactory objective, and first of several photographs came into sharp focus.

I looked at four different images before I whispered: Oh … my … God.

What Bernie Yeager had sent me were twelve photographs in three individual strips. Two of the strips contained four photos taken minutes apart. After some confusion, I realized that the third strip contained only one photo, but in various degrees of enlargement. The photo had been reproduced from the second contact sheet.

They were undoubtedly satellite images, although the source numbers and altitude information normally imprinted at the top of each image had been blacked out, as were the GPS coordinates. The date and time line at the bottom, though, had been left.

Each photo was dated November 5, and the time span was 6:15 to 6:39 A.M.

Amelia hadn’t been imagining things. There was a boat, and it was just as she had described it: a steel-hulled shrimper, maybe sixty feet long, booms folded high, rust streaks fouling the vessel’s name, which was painted on its stern. One of the images was an enlargement of the name:

Nan-Shan Port of Cortez Florida The most striking thing about the vessel, though, was that it carried a human cargo. The deck and the wheelhouse were jammed with bodies. The resolution was so fine and sharp that I could distinguish individual faces. There had to be a hundred people aboard. It reminded me of various refugee boats I’ve seen around the world: Vietnam, Cambodia, Mariel Harbor, Cuba. When people are sufficiently desperate, they will risk any means to escape to what they hope is a more tolerable existence. It makes them easy prey for flesh traders and profiteers.

The Nan-Shan was in the flesh trade. U.S. citizens do not ride willingly atop the wheelhouse of a trawl boat in twenty-knot winds. These were illegal immigrants, of that there was no doubt.

I remembered Amelia commenting on the stench that blew from off that vessel. Now I understood. I understood because I know that stench. I’ve suffered it in many of the world’s dark places. It is the stink of fear and of sickness. It is the stink of animal despair.

The photo keyed a vague memory awareness. It took me a few moments to isolate the reason. Finally, I remembered a newspaper story I’d read several days after Janet disappeared. The story said that immigration police had arrested a couple dozen illegal aliens of various nationalities who’d been jettisoned off the uninhabited Ten Thousand Islands and left to wade ashore.

Thirty of them? Forty? I couldn’t recall the figure. They’d been carried by flesh merchants who’d smuggled them into U.S. waters from Colombia. The people they’d arrested were in bad shape: dehydrated and starving. Several had died.

Suddenly, Bernie’s words—Safe travels. Ours is a dangerous world—assumed meaning.

He had already assembled information that I, presumably, would gather, which was not surprising. And I thought to myself: not South America. Not again.

The obligation to return there, though, was now an uncomfortable prospect. Between 6:23 and 6:31 A.M. on November 5, my friend Janet Mueller was still alive. In a series of four photographs, I could see a shrimp boat closing on three small dots, people adrift.

In the first shot, the three of them were alone in an expanse of gray. The second shot was from the same aspect, but the shrimp boat had intruded into the upper corner of the frame, its bow pointed in the direction of the swimmers.

They’d been spotted, apparently, and the boat was returning to pick them up.

In the fourth frame, the boat sat abeam the three dots.

It was this photo that had been reproduced on the third contact strip in various degrees of enlargement. The resolution was not as good as in the other photographs, so each photo was grainy and indistinct.

The first image was a tight close-up of the three swimmers. I could distinguish Janet’s pale, farm-girl face. Grace Walker and Michael Sanford were close beside her in a tight cluster, faces turned upward, their BCDs still inflated.

There was now no doubt that they were all still alive at the end of that first long night adrift.

Janet’s expression was heartbreaking. She had both hands out of the water, waving, her mouth open wide—perhaps shouting something to the boat but maybe grinning, too.

The next three shots included the vessel.

Aboard the shrimper, among the mass of people, standing at the door of the wheelhouse, was a man wearing a baggy dark cap. Or maybe he had long hair. I played around with the magnification and still couldn’t be certain.

Hair. Long hair. That’s what it seemed to be.

The man was holding something in his hands. He appeared to be reaching out with it to the three swimmers. It was an elongated shape, dark—a boarding hook, perhaps, but thicker. But that didn’t seem right, either, because of the way he held it.

I stopped, turned away from the binocular tubes, rubbed my eyes, then looked again.

Could it be a rifle?

That made no sense. Why would he have a rifle?

My brain scanned for possible explanations. Okay, so put yourself in the place of longhair. He owns the boat. He’s smuggling in refugees. Once they’ve made contact, the three swimmers become witnesses. So he shoots three defenseless and desperate people?

I have witnessed terrible acts of inhumanity in my life, have even participated in a few, but nothing ever as callous as that.

It couldn’t be a rifle.

Or could it?

No … almost had to be some kind of pole or boarding hook. What almost certainly happened was, the boat stopped, the crew fished Janet and the others out of the water, then continued on to the remote backwaters of the Ten Thousand Islands where their human cargo was offloaded.

Then what?

Obviously, the three were not released there. Not alive, anyway—we’d have heard from them. If the vessel had returned to its home port of Cortez, same thing. They’d all be home by now.

Conclusion: Janet, Grace, and Michael had either been killed, or they were being held prisoner, or they’d been abandoned on some remote island where they could not make contact with friends and family.

The indirect linkage came into my mind again, and the word sucked some of the light out of the room: Colombia.

The fourth and final frame gave no clue: water and just the stern quarter of the shrimp boat, with the name in white—Nan-Shan, Port of Cortez. No people. No faces.

I was still studying the third frame twenty minutes later when the images suddenly darkened, faded, then disappeared as the strip of paper turned black.

Speaking on his cell phone, Cmdr. Dalton Dorsey said, “What I don’t understand is, why this sudden interest in a shrimp boat named the Nan-Shan? I’ll help you any way I can, Doc, but you need to be upfront with me.”

An unavoidable consequence of involvement with the intelligence agencies is the obligation not only to lie, but to lie convincingly and plausibly.

I was never good at it, not even when I was duty-bound to lie. I’m still not good at it, so I loathe any social or professional situation that requires it. However, back in the days when lying was a necessary part of my day-to-day life, I came up with a technique that, at least, made duplicity manageable. The method is simple: Speak factually, but omit the larger truth.

It had taken me nearly an hour to reach Dorsey. Now I was outside by the big fish tank on the lower deck of my stilt house, pacing nervously. I said to him, “The reason I’m interested in that particular boat has to do with a newspaper story I read a few weeks back. I don’t know why it took me so long to make the connection. Do you remember reading about those illegal aliens the immigration people found down in the’Glades?”

“Sure, our people worked the cleanup search. There were forty-seven out there lost, mucking around in the sawgrass. Three ended up corpses, and the vultures didn’t leave much. One of them was a child, only three or four years old. Two more adults died later. So what’s the connection?”

“The time window. I’m not certain of the exact date, but the feds—maybe your people—found the refugees a week or so after the Seminole Wind sank.”

“A private plane spotted them, and Naples air traffic control forwarded the information to Immigration. Yeah. Okay, I see where you’re headed with this. The coyote boat that dumped them in the Ten Thousand Islands was in the area at the same time the three victims were adrift.”

I said, “Coyote boat?”

“The boat that brought the illegals. The question is,” he said, “what gives you the idea the coyote boat was a shrimper named the Nan-Shan?”

A perceptive man, my Coastie friend.

“I can’t tell you, Dalt. I would if I could. But it’s good information. You’ve got to trust me on this one.”

A familiar professional restraint had crept into his voice. In the uniformed services, duty always comes before friendship. “I trust you or we wouldn’t be talking. So what are you asking me to do?”

“I’d like to get some information about the boat. A boat that size, it’s a registered vessel. Who owns her, who runs her? And those refugees—where are they? What do I have to do to interview them?”

Dorsey seemed to relax a little—that’s all I was asking? “As far as the boat goes, you could call the federal documentation office in Miami, but I don’t think they’d help you much. Or I can run what we call an EPIC search. That stands for El Paso Intelligence Center—which I suspect you already knew.”

I did, but said nothing. In fact, I’d once had reason to visit that high-security facility out in the New Mexican desert. I remembered soundproof rooms and a forest of satellite antennas.

“The EPIC maintains a database system,” Dorsey said, “that all the federal agencies use. Particularly the agencies that deal with drugs, refugees, that sort of thing.

“Let’s say the shrimp boat you’re interested in was stopped and searched for drugs, five or ten years back. All the information goes into the EPIC database, whether drugs were found or not. Vessels that we know the bad guys own, or vessels we suspect are dirty, all go into the computer, too. Nothing has to be proven. There’s a lot of interesting reading in that file. Can you confirm the spelling of the vessel’s name?”