Caribbean's Keeper (7 page)

Kevin thought for a moment and answered, “Dude, they might not dig the Coast Guard thing, but I’ll ask.”

The conversation ended as quickly as it had begun. Cole and Kevin relaxed in the shade until early afternoon when they prepped the
Yankee Freedom
for the return trip home and helped the same tourists, now sunburned and cranky with the onset of fatigue, back onto the giant cat for the trip home.

g

Days went by and nothing else came up from their conversation. Cole hadn’t stopped thinking about it, but didn’t want to push the issue. Two weeks passed and still nothing was mentioned between Cole and Kevin.

On a sleepy Monday night, the two of them were sitting on the porch outside Kevin’s apartment with a bottle of Captain Morgan and a liter of pineapple juice. Both half drunk and with the last traces of daylight disappearing to the west, Kevin spoke up. “What are you up to tomorrow night?”

Cole answered, “Hopefully a blond. I’m tired of brunettes.” He reached for the rum.

Kevin was looking right at his eyes. “Seriously, man. You got anything going on tomorrow night?”

Cole set the bottle back down. “No, I got nothing.” He felt the onset of butterflies, but kept it to himself.

“We’ll leave here around nine or so and it’ll be an all-nighter. You cool with that?”

Cole gritted his back teeth, swallowed for a brief second, and answered, “Hell, yeah man. I’m in.”

They poured another round and Kevin provided some details. They’d both call in to the
Yankee Freedom
and ask for a day off. Kevin knew from experience that the captain wouldn’t care one bit. After the day’s work, they’d head home and sleep until about eight in the evening. After that, they’d head down to Kevin’s boat and go from there. Cole didn’t need to bring anything, do anything, or say anything. Kevin made it clear that Cole was along for the ride. It went without saying that no one needed to know a damn thing about the whole affair.

“You cool with this?” Kevin was easing himself up from the chair while looking at Cole with as serious of a face as he could muster after a bottle of rum.

“Yeah, brother. Time to step it up a bit.”

The two walked back off the porch and into the apartment. Kevin, walking in front of Cole, reached down behind a table and flung a pair of women’s panties back at Cole’s head. Cole ducked and kicked Kevin in the back lightly as Kevin stumbled forward, laughing.

“Those are yours boss. Way too big for my taste.” Cole was smiling. The mood was light again and they both turned in for the evening. Cole knew it was a turning point in his life, but he felt no reason to dwell on the matter.

g

The next day, Cole was up early for his morning run. He showered and checked in at the
Yankee Freedom
like he did every day. Kevin was there a few minutes later, and the day pressed on like any other. Cole almost thought Kevin had forgotten about their conversation entirely. They spent the downtime chatting with the rest of the crew, but Cole found himself preoccupied with any sign from Kevin that their mission was still a go. Kevin didn’t give away anything. Had it been a late-night boarding in the Coast Guard, Cole would have spent considerable time studying the weather, the seas, and the mission, but Kevin gave no indication of any such research.

They tied back up to the pier in Key West in the afternoon and grabbed a quick dinner of fish tacos on the way home. After reaching the apartment, Kevin said he was hitting the sack and would wake up at eight. Cole wanted more details, but Kevin shut his door and Cole was left with his mind racing. He tried to sleep a bit on the couch, but to no avail. He laid there for two hours, watching the digital clock on the television, knowing that his chances of sleeping were nonexistent.

A bit before eight, Kevin emerged from his room with a grin on his face. He chugged two glasses of water from the faucet in the tiny kitchen, advised Cole to do the same, and went about grabbing a few odds and ends around the apartment. Cole drank three full glasses, remembering all too well the feeling of dehydration from his days as a Coast Guard boarding officer toiling under the tropical sun. He felt like a fish out of water as Kevin moved about the living room with purpose. Kevin had a cell phone, a small backpack Cole had never seen before, and a handheld GPS with a suction cup mount.

Kevin grinned and asked, “You ready, dude?”

Cole fired back, “Fucking A, man. Let’s go.”

As they walked out the door, Cole realized he was wearing one of his old blue
Delaney
t-shirts, faded even more so by the past few months in the sun. The crest of the cutter was still visible though and it made Cole smile at the thought of his former shipmates realizing what he was up to now.

The two made their way down to Garrison Bight and onto the
Aquaholic
. Kevin fired up the old diesel and Cole untied her from the cleats on the dock, giving her a good push away from the splintered wooden pilings. As Kevin started a slow motor out of the bight, he called someone on the cell phone and talked for almost a minute. Kevin jotted something down on a piece of paper then hung up. The old Mako blended in with the dozens of other pleasure boats out for a balmy evening in the Florida Keys. They waved at boats crossing their paths, made their way out past the Coast Guard base, and turned sharply to the north. Kevin opened up the throttles and played with the GPS. He wove a meandering course back and forth until finally the GPS gave him something to work with.

Kevin drove for almost half an hour before ducking the
Aquaholic
behind a small uninhabited key well north of Key West. The sun was down and twilight was fast losing its daily battle to the darkness. The air had cooled just a bit and the nighttime sky felt good. Cole was seated on the bow when he spotted something in the darkness ahead. Almost out of nowhere, a pristine Grady-White cuddy cabin emerged, anchored and bobbing in the moonlit flats. Kevin chucked an anchor over the side and threw a line over to the Grady-White. He then hopped onto the cuddy cabin and tied the
Aquaholic
off to the shiny factory-new cleats of the Grady-White.

Kevin put on some latex gloves from the bag and went directly to the wheel, offset slightly to the right of the console. He turned the keys—strangely enough already in the ignition—and her two 250-horsepower outboards came roaring to life, shaking violently at first against their mounts on the transom and then finding their rhythm in idle. Cole smelled the gas exhaust mixed with salt air and remembered the same smell from the rigid hull inflatable boats he’d worked from on
Delaney
for the past two years. Even with those mixed memories, Cole took a deep breath and basked in his surroundings. If the summer had taught him anything, it was that boats were fun again. Kevin tossed him some gloves and Cole hopped over.

“Cut her loose,” said Kevin, already mounting the GPS to the console. Cole tossed the line back to the
Aquaholic
, and she disappeared into the darkness as Kevin idled forward through the flats. Cole took a seat to Kevin’s left. The sleek hull was immaculate and the engines looked like they had just arrived from the factory. There was hardly any sign that the boat had ever been used.

“All right, man. Fill me in. Where did this come from?” Cole was now standing next to Kevin, his hands braced against the console.

“This one, I don’t really know. My guy just gave me the coordinates. Somewhere in southern Florida for sure, but where I don’t really know.” Kevin scanned the horizon, his left hand on the wheel and his right on the throttles.

He continued talking while his eyes were busy going back and forth from the GPS to the horizon in front of them. “Sometimes I borrow a boat myself, but it gets a bit sketchy, so I prefer to just pick them up like this. It’s almost always new, some doctor’s new toy or something that we spot tied up in a channel behind a mansion.”

Cole put the pieces together as they motored along. The boat had its own GPS, but the handheld was a telltale sign of smugglers, since they could easily chuck it over the side if caught, thus preventing the cops or Coast Guard from knowing where they’d been. Cole could see Kevin knew what he was doing—smugglers almost always went for new boats with more horsepower than they needed. For centuries, speed had been a smuggler’s friend. Almost every migrant or drug operation Cole had ever seen used a center console or a cuddy cabin. Once a run was complete, the smugglers would beach the boat somewhere or set it adrift in the backwaters, leaving it for eventual discovery. Most owners got their boats back, albeit with a few more hard-earned hours on the engines.

The two of them passed under a bridge of the famous highway A1A, which ran east and north to the mainland of Florida, and then they continued past Stock Island, on the eastern side of Key West. Once in the channel, Kevin opened her up and the engines surged to life. The boat lifted out of the water before she settled on a plane and the air felt cool against Cole’s face. The GPS showed almost 28 knots over the ground. At that rate, they’d hit Cuba in just over three hours.

The seas were calm with a small groundswell that the Grady-White danced over as she screamed southward. Kevin would occasionally yell something to Cole if he saw a light ahead, and twice Kevin brought the boat to a full stop and stepped out from underneath the bimini cover, scanning the sky above them. Cole did the same, knowing they were looking for Coast Guard or U.S. Customs aircraft that patrolled the straits every night. At the same time, Cole knew it was like finding a needle in a haystack. Nights like this were prime smuggling weather, and in all likelihood, Cole and Kevin were not the only game in town.

Cole knew the Coast Guard was on high alert that evening, given the weather. There were almost certainly cutters, aircraft, and small boats all scouring their radars for a little green blip, indicating someone sneaking south. Satisfied each time that no one was in their immediate area, Kevin throttled the engines back up and pressed south. The stars were bright and Cole’s mind wandered back to nights on watch on
Delaney
. He’d forgotten how bright the stars were at sea. Moonlight reflected down on the water, and Cole’s nerves settled after an hour or so. He was back on the open water and could feel the ocean air on his skin. It was exhilarating and the Grady-White was a solid boat out on the water. Cole almost forgot entirely about what they were doing as he enjoyed the ride.

After midnight, Kevin brought the boat to a stop. He squinted and looked forward, standing up on his toes. Cole looked too and could see faint lights to their left.

Havana
.

“Holy shit, that’s Havana,” Cole said as the reality set in.

Kevin never stopped looking forward. “Yup.”

“We’re heading west of Havana, but here’s where we start to worry about the Cuban Border Guard. Do you see anything ahead of us that looks like a boat?”

Cole scanned back and forth, his eyes well trained to pick up the faintest hint of a running light. He’d tracked boats at night, but with the help of radar. The Grady-White had one, but Cole knew it was short range and if anything came up as a blip, it would probably be too late, so they left it turned off.

Cole pressed his lips together, taking one more slow and deliberate scan. “I don’t see anything.”

He stepped to the back and took a leak off the stern as Kevin continued to scan forward for any signs of danger. To the north, all Cole saw was a dark sea. He walked back forward and looked again for trouble, but there was none.

Kevin pressed the throttles ahead, keeping the speed back a bit. They worked slightly west of their original course and before long, Cole saw the rocky coast of Cuba in front of him. It started out as a dark jagged line rising from the horizon and took on a more defined shape as they crept closer. Kevin stopped a few more times, and they both scanned ahead and behind. The only sound was the motor at an idle purr and the water lapping against the hull.

With the landscape emerging in front of them, Kevin spent more time looking down at the GPS. He played the throttle and slowed down gradually. Cole kept his eyes out and on the water in front of him. He could see the outline of trees now and the moonlight against palm fronds. There was a rocky coastline in front of them and some sort of small coral peninsula on the bow. A wave broke over a reef in the distance every few seconds, its whitewater seemingly floating on an invisible plain. Kevin drove straight at the peninsula then made a hard right turn and slowed the boat as they entered a large bay. A fire smoldered somewhere in the distance and its smell caught Cole’s attention. Unlike a wood fire in the States, a fire in the Caribbean burned mostly green brush—no doubt cut by hand and machete—and its odor was a sweeter and more complex scent. Whoever the farmer was who’d cleared brush that day was certainly asleep by now, and the smoldering remnants of his day’s labor drifted in the midnight land breeze out and over the water.

Even in the middle of the night, Cole could see it was a beautiful bay with coral heads dotting the water. There were no lights and the bay was calm like glass. The moon cast slivers of light down as it climbed above them and over a low layer of scattered backlit clouds. Kevin sent Cole forward with a flashlight and told him to point it towards a small sandy area nestled behind the peninsula and to flash it three times quickly. Cole complied.

From somewhere in the brush beyond the beach, three flashes came back towards them. Kevin was as serious as Cole had ever seen him. He pushed the bow right up to the beach and it nudged the sandy bottom a few feet shy of the dry shore. Bodies emerged from the brush and Cole counted eight of them. One more, a man, stayed halfway between the brush and the water. He whistled softly at Kevin and called out, “Ocho, si?”

Kevin called back, “Bueno.” The man hurried back into the brush and disappeared.

The passengers wore ragged clothes and each carried a bag about the size of a teenager’s backpack. Kevin and Cole helped them up one at a time and sent them down into the crowded cuddy cabin. They were all thin and their skin dirty, likely from the daylong trip to this much-anticipated rendezvous in the middle of nowhere. They talked to each other softly, some holding hands, and seemed to reassure each other that things were going well. There were two men, but the rest were women and two appeared to be teenage girls. After the last one was onboard and down below, Kevin jumped back to the wheel and reversed out. The motors churned up an immense cloud of sand and the water was clear enough that Cole could see it under the moonlight.
Not good for an engine
, Cole thought.