“Don’t knock it, Matt. One of those jobs’s enough for a couple years of sea stories. I’ll take an easy one any day. I’m gettin’ a little old for that dramatic stuff.”
“How’s the food here?”
“Fair.”
“Buy you dinner?”
“Matt, I don’t even remember what I said to you.”
“I remember,” Stuart assured him. “God knows how I woulda turned out if you hadn’t turned me around. No shit, man. I owe you one. Come on.” He waved Riley over to a booth against the wall. They were quickly going through their third beer when Chief Quartermaster Oreza arrived.
“Hey, Portagee,” Riley called to his fellow master chief.
“I see the beer’s cold, Bob.”
Riley waved to his companion. “This here’s Matt Stevens. We were on the Mellon together. Did I ever tell you about the Arctic Star job?”
“Only about thirty times,” Oreza noted.
“You wanna tell the story, Matt?” Riley asked.
“Hey, I didn’t even see it all, you know -”
“Yeah, half the crew was puking their guts out. I’m talking a real gale blowing. No way the helo could take off, and this container boat – the after half of her, that is; the fo’ard part was already gone – look like she was gonna roll right there an’ then…”
Within an hour, two more rounds had been consumed, and the three men were chomping their way through a disk of knockwurst and sauerkraut, which went well with beer. Stuart stuck with stories about his new Admiral, the Chief Counsel of the Coast Guard, in which legal officers are also line officers, expected to know how to drive ships and command men.
“Hey, what’s with these stories I been hearing about you an’ those two drug pukes?” the attorney finally asked.
“What d’ya mean?” Oreza asked. Portagee still had some remaining shreds of sobriety.
“Hey, the FBI guys went in to see Hally, right? I had, to type up his reports on my Zenith, y’know?”
“What did them FBI guys say?”
“I’m not supposed – oh, fuck it! Look, you’re all in the clear. The Bureau isn’t doing a fuckin’ thing. They told your skipper ‘go forth and sin no more,’ okay? The shit you got outa those pukes – didn’t you hear? Operation TARPON. That whole sting operation came from you guys. Didn’t you know that?”
“What?” Riley hadn’t seen a paper or turned on a TV in days. Though he did know about the death of the FBI Director, he had no idea of the connection with his Hang-Ex, as he had taken to calling it in the goat locker.
Stuart explained what he knew, which was quite a lot.
“Half a billion dollars?” Oreza observed quietly. “That oughta build us a few new hulls.”
“Christ knows we need ’em,” Stuart agreed.
“You guys didn’t really – I mean, you didn’t really… hang one of the fuckers, did you?” Stuart extracted a Radio Shack mini-tape recorder from his pocket and thumbed the volume switch to the top.
“Actually it was Portagee’s idea,” Riley said.
“Couldn’t have done it without you, Bob,” Oreza said generously.
“Yeah, well, the trick was how to do the hangin’,” Riley explained. “You see, we had to make it look real if we was gonna scare the piss outa the little one. Wasn’t really all that hard once I thought it over. After we got him alone, the pharmacist mate gave him a shot of ether to knock him out for a few minutes, and I rigged a rope harness on his back. When we took him topside, the noose had a hook on the back, so when I looped the noose around his neck, all I hadda do was attach the hook to an eye I put on the harness, so we was hoistin’ him by the harness, not the neck. We didn’t really wanna kill the fucker – well, I did,” Riley said. “But Red didn’t think it was a real good idea.” The bosun grinned at the quartermaster.
“The other trick was baggin’ him,” Oreza said. “We put a black hood over his head. Well, there was a gauze pad inside soaked in ether. The bastard screamed bloody murder when he smelled it, but it had him knocked out as soon as we ran his ass up to the yardarm.”
“The little one believed the whole thing. Fucker wet his pants, it was beautiful! Sang like a canary when they got him back to the wardroom. Soon as he was outa sight, of course, we lowered the other one and got him woke back up. They were both half in the bag from smokin’ grass all day. I don’t think they ever figured out what we did to them.”
No, they didn’t. “Grass?”
“That was Red’s idea. They had their own pot stash – looked like real cigarettes. We just gave ’em back to ’em, and they got themselves looped. Throw in the ether and everything, and I bet they never figured out what really happened.”
Almost right, Stuart thought, hoping that his tape recorder was getting this.
“I wish we really could have hung ’em,” Riley said after a few seconds. “Matt, you ain’t never seen anything like what that yacht looked like. Four people, man – butchered ’em like cattle. Ever smell blood? I didn’t know you could. You can,” the bosun assured him. “They raped the wife and the little girl, then cut ’em up like they was – God! You know, I been having nightmares from that? Nightmares – me! Jesus, that’s one sea story I wish I could forget. I got a little girl that age. Those fuckers raped her an’ killed her, and cut her up an’ fed her to the fuckin’ sharks. Just a little girl, not even big enough to drive a car or go out on a date.
“We’re supposed to be professional cops, right? We’re supposed to be cool about it, don’t get personally involved. All that shit?” Riley asked.
“That’s what the book says,” Stuart agreed.
“The book wasn’t written for stuff like this,” Portagee said. “People who do this sort of thing – they ain’t really people. I don’t know what the hell they are, but people they ain’t. You can’t do that kinda shit and be people, Matt.”
“Hey, what d’you want me to say?” Stuart asked, suddenly defensive, and not acting a part this time. “We got laws to deal with people like that.”
“Laws ain’t doin’ much good, are they?” Riley asked.
The difference between the people he was obliged to defend and the people he had to impeach, Stuart told himself through the fog of alcohol, was that the bad ones were his clients and the good ones were not. And now, by impersonating a Coast Guard chief, he too had broken a law, just as these men had done, and like them, he was doing it for some greater good, some higher moral cause. So he asked himself who was right. Not that it mattered, of course. Whatever was “right” was lost somewhere, not to be found in lawbooks or canons of ethics. Yet if you couldn’t find it there, then where the hell was it? But Stuart was a lawyer, and his business was law, not right. Right was the province of judges and juries. Or something like that. Stuart told himself that he shouldn’t drink so much. Drink made confused things clear, and the clear things confused.
The ride in was far rougher this time. Westerly winds off the Pacific Ocean hit the slopes of the Andes and boiled upward, looking for passes to go through. The resulting turbulence could be felt at thirty thousand feet, and here, only three hundred feet AGL – above ground level – the ride was a hard one, all the more so with the helicopter on its terrain-following autopilot. Johns and Willis were strapped in tight to reduce the effects of the rough ride, and both knew that the people in back were having a bad time indeed as the big Sikorsky jolted up and down in twenty-foot bounds at least ten times per minute. PJ’s hand was on the stick, following the motions of the autopilot but ready to take instant command if the system showed the first sign of failure. This was real flying, as he liked to say. That generally meant the dangerous kind.
Skimming through this pass – it was more of a saddle, really – didn’t make it any easier. A ninety-six-hundred-foot peak was to the south, and one of seventy-eight hundred feet to the north, and a lot of Pacific air was being funneled through as the Pave Low roared at two hundred knots. They were heavy, having tanked only a few minutes earlier just off Colombia’s Pacific Coast.
“There’s Mistrato,” Colonel Johns said. The computer navigation system had already veered them north to pass well clear of the town and any roads. The two pilots were also alert for anything on the ground that hinted at a man or a car or a house. The route had been selected off satellite photographs, of course, both daylight and nighttime infrared shots, but there was always the chance of a surprise.