Troubled Sea (6 page)

And here I am, all these years later, wanting my watch back
. So much for resolutions and good intentions. Even their plan to spend only three months in Cabo San Lucas, then sail back home to race the rat did not quite work out. Dismayed by the crass commercialization of that once beautiful little fishing village, they moved on to La Paz and the Sea of Cortez. And never returned. Until tonight, Hetta never had a regret.

Hetta’s reverie was brought up short by a noise outside. Her heart skipped several beats and her mouth went dry. Jumping from the captain’s chair, she peeked out the door, then sighed and giggled with delight. Hundreds of neon-like silver and green splashes erupted on the sea’s surface as dolphins, themselves glowing fluorescent in the dark water, cavorted in a feeding frenzy. She resisted going outside to watch, adhering to their nighttime cruising rule of not leaving the interior of the boat while the other slept. As she leaned out the door, fatigue hit her hard, and the dolphin’s light show suddenly reminded her of gunfire and explosions.

Tears welled, blurring her vision. How could their idyllic lives have gone to hell so fast? The boater’s credo, Shit Happens, had graduated to MegaShit Happens.

Chapter 12

And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky.  Thomas Campbell

Jerry Fisher lumbered into the darkened room he dubbed Star Wars Central as unobtrusively as his size allowed. Clumsily settling into an empty workstation, the head drug enforcement agent in San Diego acknowledged Nicole’s grin with an offhand wave.

Nicole Kristin, Jerry’s chief analyst, as well as his assistant and best friend, broke off her six a.m. briefing by pointing at Jerry.

“Bogie. Ten o’clock.”

A dozen trainees and analysts turned from their monitor screens in unison to confirm her sighting.

“Thanks, Agent Kristin. Carry on,” Jerry grumped.

Nicole’s even white teeth, long dark hair, and pale skin glowed in the light radiated by a wide screen blowup of the image duplicated on each workstation’s monitor. She turned, stepped in front of the screen, and a satellite image of the Baja California peninsula painted her shapely back. Vamping over her shoulder she wiggled her bottom and quipped, “Seismic disturbance, Cabo San Lucas.”

Laughter filled the room, lifting the slight tension induced by Jerry’s arrival.

"Now that I have your undivided attention," Nicole continued, "check the center of your screens." She clicked a remote control.

Jerry focused on his monitor as Nicole zoomed in on a map of a coastal area along central Baja. A blinking arrow pointed to a group of white dots a few miles offshore. A date, three days past, was superimposed on the bottom right-hand side.

“What you see...right...here,” Nicole said, freezing the arrow, then creating a circle around it, “is a fleet of squidding pangas off Santa Rosalia, in the Sea of Cortez. That’s the Gulf of California to you
Gringos
.”

The Mexican trainees smiled uncertainly at their American classmates’ laughter. Evidently these Americans did not realize, or care, that “
Gringo
”, loosely interpreted as “foreigner” by most, was less than a term of endearment. While the Mexicans had learned during training that
norteamericanos
had few qualms about referring to themselves as
Gringos
, they themselves used the word with caution until they knew a
Gringo
well enough to call him one.

Another zoom. The flotilla filled the screen.

“This image is a few days old. There’s a gale bollixing things up right now, so we’re using an old shot.”

Jerry smiled at Nicole’s habit of occasionally lacing Victorian terminology, like bollixing, into her vocabulary. It was a by-product of her passion for nineteenth century literature.
A modern lass with a Jane Austen wont. Not bad, Jerry,
he silently congratulated himself for such creative thoughts.

“Anyhow, most evenings, just before dark, hundreds of pangas leave the port of Santa Rosalia to fish for squid. And just for background, we’re not talking about those little calamari that look like fried onion rings at your local Greek deli. These behemoths of the cephalopod world run from ten to forty kilos. Over eighty pounds. We’re talking major calamari here. If any of you saw “The Beast” on television, you might be interested to know that Peter Benchley supposedly based his book on an American diver’s report that he was attacked by several giant squid in the central Sea of Cortez. He almost lost his, well, uh...tentacles.”

More laughter.

“At any rate,” Nicole continued, “the panga fleet returns to port around one or two a.m., loaded to the gunwales on a good night, with slimy critters. Trucks meet the boats, weigh and pay, then transport the squid to Ensenada on the Pacific coast of Baja for shipment around the world. Some squid is also processed right there at Santa Rosalia. Questions?”

One of the trainees timidly raised a hand and Nicole grinned. “John, do you need to go number one or number two?” The trainees roared. Above the raucous laughter and catcalls, Nicole rescued the hapless man. “Just a touch of waggery at your expense, John. It’s not necessary to raise your hand here. We’re a team. Feel free to speak your piece at any time. Don’t wait for an invitation. And for pity’s sake, ask what you will. Even the most innocent of inquiries might very well be important. Now John, what was your query?”

“How much do these fishermen make a night? I saw calamari in a store last week and they wanted eight bucks a pound. That means an eighty-pound squid would run almost six-hundred and fifty dollars.”

Nicole nodded. “That’s so. But not straight off the panga. The average catch runs thirteen hundred pounds, depending on weather, phases of the moon and the like. The fishermen get about two pesos a kilo, roughly ten cents a pound depending on the exchange rate, but only for the edible part. So they end up with somewhere around a hundred, hundred-fifty dollars a night. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? But gasoline is near three bucks a gallon and it takes at least two pangueros to operate each boat. Propane for the lanterns to attract the big buggers is cheap, but cheap is relative. The work is hard and dangerous. The panga fishermen are barely clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder.”

“Why dangerous?” another trainee asked.

Nicole's demeanor changed from light to serious. “Mexican scientists from the Sea of Cortez report these giants are hunting in packs of up to a thousand, and they've found forty footers weighing five-hundred pounds. Not long ago, a pack of these
diablos rojos
, as the Mexicans call them, attacked a panga and killed seven fishermen.”

The room grew very quiet.

“And if that isn't bad enough, these boats have leaky gasoline containers coupled with a propane lamp with a flame. A Coast Guard nightmare. Then there’s the weather. This time of the year, strapping great north winds raise havoc for days. Even on a calm night a person could fall overboard hauling one of these big suckers into the boat. And doing a half gainer into a feeding frenzy of giant squid is a sure-fire way to ruin your whole evening. Also, when the squid are hauled in they have the last laugh by spraying caustic ink all over their tormentors. And even the smaller ones bite. They have parrot-like beaks that can take a man’s, or woman’s,” Nicole twirled her finger, “pinkie off as cleanly as a pair of pruning shears. Oh, and where there are squid, there are sharks.”

Some of the trainees shifted uneasily in their chairs. Few could imagine livelihoods centered around large slimy creatures with beaks and tentacles, surrounded by Jaws.

“So,” a Mexican trainee said, “it is no surprise that some of our fishermen have switched from calamari to cocaine.”

“Correcto, Raul. You get the big gold star. One night out, pick up a few bundles dropped from a plane, hand the cargo over to a mother ship or a runner, and that fisherman has cleared several hundred dollars. Or half in money, half in dope.”

Another Mexican added, “And those drugs taken as payment have become a local problem, something new in my country. In my hometown of Mulege, only forty miles south of Santa Rosalia, drugs are being sold in the schools.” He looked a little unsure for a moment before adding, “We Mexicans thought for years that drug abuse was a
Gring
...uh, North American, problem, but now we have troubles like those of the United States.”

Nicole nodded. “I was only using Santa Rosalia as an example for this session. The problem is throughout Mexico.” She tapped her pointer on a new image. “This shot, taken a couple of hours after dark, shows a burst of activity emanating from the calamari fleet’s core. We suspect drug runners mingle with the fleet, then, under the cover of darkness, take off like bats out of Hell, headed north and northeast. We know they need fuel, but we don’t really know where the
drogistas
—I call the drug running boaters
pangistas
—are getting it. Probably not from the squidders.”

“How do you know that?” a trainee asked.

“If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” Nicole quipped. Jerry laughed loudly, prompting her to ask him, “Wanna tell ‘em, sir?”

“No thanks, Agent Kristin, you’re doing just fine.”

“Okay, but it stays within the confines of this room. We have ‘sources’ in Santa Rosalia, and all over the Baja, keeping tabs on fuel sales. They count the number of pangas leaving port, and we compare those numbers with our data. In some locations, but not Santa Rosalia, the numbers yell tilt.”

A Mexican asked, “What is tilt?” and Nicole took time to explain the pinball machine slang, speaking fluent Spanish learned from her Cuban grandfather.

“Anyone else have a question? Comment?”

John said, “So the bad guys mix with the squid fleet at some point. Why? If the squidders aren’t refueling them?”

“Good question. Sharp eyes keep vigilance on the one Pemex station fueling the squid fleet, and they say there has been no evidence of excess usage by the legitimate fishermen. We think they just use the pangueros for cover until they think it’s safe to head north. So the big question is, where’s the fueling station? Figure that out and you win a cigar. Not Cuban, of course.”

The Mexicans grinned. The United States government’s silly economic embargo against Fidel Castro’s island created a booming Mexican trade in Cuban cigars. American tourists loved the slightly naughty act of lighting up a forbidden stogie.

Nicole continued, highlighting suspected drug delivery sites near San Felipe. Dragging her pointer towards Mexicali she said, “This is called the Cocaine Corridor and is under the control of the Tijuana Cartel, or cartels, as may be the case. But lately,” she aimed her laser pointer at the other side of the Sea, “we’ve noted an increase in activity here...in the State of Sonora.”

Someone asked, “Does that mean the
drogistas
’ focus has shifted to the Arizona border?”

“Yep. And so has ours. Our's and the border patrol’s—” A beep drew Nicole’s attention to another monitor. “Okay, gang, let’s go live and in living color to the Sea of Cortez where, according to the weather boys, the wind has up and died.”

Jerry watched his attractive, efficient assistant captivate her new class of trainees. The leggy, mid-thirties Nicole, with her mane of shiny hair, reminded him of a colt—a thoroughbred colt. And she was as tough as she was sleek. Agent Kristin went after criminals with a vengeance born of just that: vengeance. She hated drugs and drug dealers with a passion not uncommon in those who have suffered a loss as a result of the drug trade. In Nicole’s case, it was the death of her kid brother from an overdose when he was barely thirteen. Nicole, still in college at the time, changed her major from English Lit to Law Enforcement.

Nicole and Jerry, although diametric opposites physically, were ideological twins. Jerry, a mid-fifties slogger compared to the kick-ass-and-take-names-later-Nicole, was nonetheless her intellectual and philosophical counterpart. Neither agent had a personal life to speak of. Jerry suspected Nikki held a romanticized view on the subject, and both were obsessed with halting the increasing drug trade in Baja California and the Sea of Cortez. They had identified those areas as narco hot spots and focused their attention there long before aired footage of a recent drug related massacre.

One morning the world woke to vivid images of nineteen bodies—men, women and children from the same family—sprawled in blackening pools of blood. The victims were dragged from their beds, lined up against a wall, and murdered, execution-style, with automatic weapons. Not in Beirut. Not in Iraq. In Mexico, outside of Ensenada, only eighty miles south of Jerry’s headquarters in San Diego. A rival cartel was strongly suspected. By noon on the day of the murders, Jerry had Washington’s support to do everything he could to avert another disaster so close to home. It would not be easy.

Chapter 13

Double, double toil and trouble...

—Shakespeare

Washington was officially awake for an hour when Jerry Fisher entered DEA headquarters in San Diego. He was not due in for another two hours but, an early riser, he liked to attend the night shift’s final briefing, check his messages, and drink a few cups of coffee before the daily bureaucratic crap hit at eight. Some might consider him a workaholic, but he preferred to think himself dedicated.

Grabbing a red folder marked URGENT from the pile in his in-basket, Jerry poured himself a cup of coffee and plopped down into a rump-sprung chair. He was reading what was deemed so urgent when he heard a tap on his office door.

“Come on in, Nikki,” he called.

Nicole entered, smiling. “How do you do that?” she asked, heading for the coffeepot.

“Clairvoyant. Besides, who else would it be at six o’clock in the morning?”

“Right. Other folks have lives.”

Even though Nikki was still facing the coffeepot, Jerry caught an unusual timbre in her voice and asked, “Everything all right?”

Nicole sighed and sat down across the desk from him. “Sure. I have a job I love, one really good friend, a great condo, and a paid-for car. What more could a girl want?”

“Wanna talk?”

“Not really. Well, just a question. Do you ever regret not marrying? Or at least having a warm body to come home to?”

“Nope. Nikki, get yourself a golden retriever.”

Nicole snickered. “Mayhaps I need another friend. A female one.” She eyed the red folder. “Anything good?”

“A little excitement in paradise. The Coast Guard received a report of an explosion off the central Baja coast, in the Sea of Cortez.”

“Yeah? What was it?”

“They don’t know. It was seen by an airliner crew en route to Los Angeles. Happened right at dusk and there was a dense fogbank nearby. We have a satellite shot not long after, so I’d like you to take a look, Miss Eagle Eye.”

“I will go and work my magic. A little computer enhancement can do wondrous things,” Nicole told him. She took the report and her coffee and left for Star Wars Central. An hour later, she was back.

“Not much there, Jerry. A little debris that I’d classify as scorched fiberglass from a crudely built vessel. Certainly not production model quality. Wish we had a piece of it for the lab. If pinned down, I’d venture a guess that a panga blew up. Happens, you know. Most pangas would never pass a U.S. Coast Guard safety inspection. One thing though, it looks like another vessel left the area. A wake pattern still existed when the satellite passed over. We’ll probably never know what happened unless we get a missing persons report.”

Jerry chuckled. “Fat froggin’ chance.”

“Language, kind sir, language."