Rocky Island (11 page)

Allison was back in about five minutes with a couple of lengths of nylon quarter-inch rope. While Toby held the gun on them, she stood to one side of the men lying on the ground, and tied up their hands. The fifth man was still yelling in pain. Toby walked forward and stood over him.

“Shut up—now—or I’ll make it so you can’t yell.”

That worked.

“Toby honey, I was so scared when I heard that gunshot. The RCMP will be here any minute. An hour ago, Corporal Brock told me they’d be here in about an hour.”

Even as she spoke, the sound of a helicopter could be heard. In a couple of minutes a big Air Force chopper landed on the pad and a dozen Mounties, armed with rifles, jumped from it. The two crewmen wrestled a Zodiac from the side door of the aircraft after the police had exited, and four of them carried it to the water’s edge beside the lifeboat.

Toby quickly briefed Kellerman, in command of the police raiding party, on what had happened. The Staff Sergeant asked Allison if she would phone the Transport Canada office in Yarmouth and ask them to send their helicopter with a doctor and a policeman to take the five men still on the ground back to Yarmouth. She hurried off to the house. Brock replaced the ropes with handcuffs and asked Toby where they could be locked up until the second helicopter arrived. Toby suggested the storage room in the lighthouse, since he had to go there and turn off the light. He volunteered to stand guard.

“Great.” Brock ordered the Filipinos to carry the wounded Mate to the lighthouse, and removed their cuffs while they carried out the operation. When they were safely handcuffed again and locked up, Toby stood guard outside the room while the RCMP went about their business.

“The sub has left to pick up the fishing boats.” Kellerman explained the messages Allison had heard and passed on. “So we’ll be doing the boarding. Can we borrow your Zodiac because ours won’t hold everybody?”

“Be my guest,” replied Toby. “It’s government property. The tide is in and you ought not to have any trouble getting right up to the ship.”

The police were on the water in fifteen minutes, heading back around the island toward the
Helen of Troy
, Kellerman in charge of the lead boat, Brock in charge of the second.

CHAPTER NINE

In his New York office, Nicolai Antonelli was angrily talking on the telephone to Manfred Koch. “Where the Hell is that damned vessel?”

“I don’t know, Nicolai. In Canadian waters somewhere, due to be at the rendezvous point today or tomorrow as far as I know. Why? Hasn’t he been reporting in?”

“We haven’t heard from him for three days or more. No word. Nothing. What’s the matter with that German you hired for Captain? Is he competent?”

“Very competent. Something must have happened to his radio system.”

“As long as nothing happened to the boat. He’s got a two hundred and fifty million worth of cargo on there. Georgio lost two hundred and fifty million on the last trip. How much can I afford to lose? And there’s another thing.”

“What’s that?”

“How come you didn’t know that Georgio was ripping us off by selling one container on each trip to some creep named Gonzalez operating out of New Brunswick with fake fishing boats from Nova Scotia? How come you didn’t know that? Do I have to find out everything for you? That’s your job. Or are you working with Gonzalez too and getting paid from both of us?”

Antonelli was very angry and without yelling, his tone of voice made his mood very clear to Manfred.

“Gonzalez? Never heard of him. He must be a small time player.”

“A third of fifty million is more than sixteen million, and that isn’t what I would call small time. How come you didn’t realize the full cargo wasn’t getting to Newfoundland? Good thing I have accountants working for me who can keep track of things.”

“Nobody at the Newfoundland end told me they were getting short changed. They probably thought that what they got was all that was available.”

“Well I want to know who this Gonzalez is and I want him taken out of the picture. Understand?”

“You want me to do it.”

“Whaddya think I’m talking about it? That kind of job is what I pay you to do and I’m not satisfied with the return on my money. Now get busy. Keep me informed about what’s going on.”

Antonelli slammed down the phone and continued to sit and fume. For his part, Manfred Koch poured himself a stiff drink from the bottle in his desk at the warehouse office of NA
T
ransport and began to make some plans for travel.

*

Captain Braun had heard the shotgun blast but not the screaming of his First Mate. He mistook the gunshot for that of the rifle shot, never realizing that somebody on the island might have been lying in wait for his men. He grinned to himself with satisfaction. He didn’t hear the grumbling of his crew, either. Smuggling was one thing. Murder was another. They were not happy.

Within a few minutes, the Captain’s mood changed abruptly when he heard and then saw the Air Force helicopter. He couldn’t believe his ears and his eyes.

“Sie wußten! They knew! They knew all along! Get the drugs out of the hold and throw them overboard,” he yelled. The crew was slow to react. They were as dumbfounded as he was by the chopper’s arrival. Their slowness caused the distraught captain to scream all the louder in a mixture of excited German and English, and the louder and more excited he got, the slower they were to understand and move. They were just beginning to remove the forward hatch cover when the helicopter suddenly flew over the ship and hovered about a hundred and fifty feet above the deck.

“Ahoy
Helen of Troy,
” came a voice on a loud hailer. “Your ship is under arrest. Prepare for a boarding party. Do not—I say again—do not attempt to jettison cargo.”

The message was repeated and the crew abruptly ceased work on the forward hatch cover. Captain Braun screamed at them in German and English to follow his orders. The crew ignored him. In a few minutes the two Zodiacs came into view and Kellerman was calling for a ladder to be lowered over the side. The helicopter had moved off to the starboard side so the wash from the rotors would not hamper the boarding party.

After the second time Kellerman gave his order for a ladder, a rope ladder came over the side of the ship and the police began climbing up to the deck after making the Zodiacs fast to the ladder. Finding the captain, Staff Sergeant Kellerman placed Braun under arrest, telling him that he was charged with smuggling illegal drugs into Canada, with endangering his ship without reporting the trouble and conspiring to commit murder of a Canadian citizen. The Captain was handcuffed to a section of the rail near the rope boarding ladder where an armed policeman stood guard. Braun continued to protest in his excited mixture of German and English until he finally got the message that nobody was listening to him. Dejectedly, he watched what was happening and simply waited for the inevitable.

The rest of the crew were rounded up and also placed under armed guard. Brock and several officers removed the forward hatch cover and descended into the hold where it took them only a few minutes to discover the containers they wanted.

“Who’s in charge of the loading winch?” asked Kellerman. Nobody answered for a couple of minutes, then one of the Chinese engineers stepped forward. “Okay. Get those three containers on deck. Pick the men you want to help, and no funny business. Understand? The men nodded and in a little more than a half hour had the containers on deck.

The hovering helicopter lowered a large basket and the police broke open the first container and loaded the plastic-wrapped bags of powder into the basket, which was pulled up into the aircraft. After six basket loads, the chopper flew off to the island where it unloaded its cargo and returned for more. By that time the DOT chopper had arrived and left again with its five passengers. The doctor had given the wounded Mate morphine for his pain and declared that his legs would heal and that he would need only some hospital time after all the buckshot had been removed.

“You put it in,” he joked with Toby. “You ought to have to take it out.”

“I’d be glad to, so long as you don’t give the SOB an anesthetic while I do it.”

The doctor laughed.

The big helicopter had to quit after the second load and head off for Yarmouth for refuelling. While they were gone, Kellerman was on the phone to Inspector McLaughlin.

“Get the DEA on the move to raid Antonelli Importers. We got proof of their ownership of the
Helen of Troy
and we got three containers of cocaine, part of it to be unloaded when the chopper gets back and the rest on the ground on Rocky Island. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the stuff. Biggest haul we’ve ever made.”

Within two hours, two squads of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency investigators burst into two offices in New York. Uptown, they hit the thirty-second floor of the building where Antonelli Imports and Exports had their office. In the Bronx, they invaded the warehouse and office of NA Transport. They missed Manfred Koch by ten minutes as he had just driven away, headed for Canada, New Brunswick in particular. But they found cocaine in locked storage rooms and in panel trucks being readied to go out on deliveries. With the cooperation of the NYPD, they arrested fifteen people and seized a truck load of records, both on paper and in computers. The expectation was that more arrests would be made.

In the Antonelli office, there was a great deal of shouting and confusion. Most of the shouting came from Nicolai. His secretary burst into his office calling, “Mr. Antonelli, the DEA is here.” Before he could reply, three armed men wearing DEA jackets and caps crowded into the room behind her.

“What the Hell’s going on? Who are you and what are you doing in my office?”

“John Thurston, Drug Enforcement Agency. You and your entire staff are under arrest and this warrant says we can search everywhere and everything for proof of drug trafficking.”

“Get out of my office. I don’t care about your warrant. I’ll call Senator Bonelli and get that quashed in five minutes. Auralie, call Corelli.”

Corelli and Associates was the law firm that handled legal matters for Antonelli Imports and Exports as well as NA Transport. They were about to be a very busy law firm.

“Sorry. No phone calls. Just stand up and put your hands behind your back.”

One of the agents moved behind the desk and unceremoniously dragged Nicolai to his feet, pulled his arms behind his back and handcuffed him. Then with a none too gentle push, headed him for the door. The entire office staff was being put through the same procedure, but only Antonelli was making any protest. He was cursing in both Italian and English and threatening lawsuits, mass firings of the agents and anything else he could think of—and he was thinking at the same time of what might lie ahead for him. Some of the women were in tears, others, like most of the men, were stoic as they were herded into the elevators and taken down to paddy wagons and driven off to jail. On the street a crowd of people watched the parade of handcuffed office workers loaded into the vans. Reporters and TV crews arrived in time to catch the last of the stream of people, but they got no answers to their shouted questions from any of the DEA officers or assisting members of the NYPD. The official word was “No comment.”

The material, again both on paper and on computer hard drives and disks, which the DEA agents confiscated, was immense in volume. When it was all assembled in a large room in DEA headquarters for New York, the chief of the bureau whistled as he looked at the sheer mass.

“This is going to take months to wade through,” was his only observation. Nobody disagreed with him. Even bail hearings and appeals of bail denials were going to be a lengthy process.

*

Back on Rocky Island, the last of the three containers of cocaine was piled on the shore of the island, waiting to be transported to the RCMP Nova Scotia office in Halifax. A second helicopter had been assigned so there could be a shuttle run. The first run was to take the crew of the
Helen of Troy
to jail in Halifax. When Captain Braun attempted to call Antonelli in New York from the jail, he was connected to the DEA officer in charge at the office. He then tried the Corelli law office and was told that they could not represent him in Canada. He was on his own.

It took all day to haul away the load of illegal drugs. In the meantime, the Navy had used Allison’s information and their radar to round up all three fishing boats. A Canadian Coast Guard vessel with a couple of RCMP officers aboard was on the way to take the boats in tow and place the nine men of the crews under arrest. Inspector McLaughlin who couldn’t stop smiling all that day or the next coordinated the entire operation. His wife claimed that he even smiled in his sleep.

The Department of Transport dispatched a deep-sea tugboat to see what could be done about getting the
Helen of Troy
off the reef. When it arrived, likely the next day, an investigation team would be flown to the island to assist.

Toby went to bed and slept the afternoon through until Allison waked him to turn on the light for the night. Then she made supper and following that, they both collapsed in bed and slept the night through until the alarm clock woke Toby to shut off the light in the morning. He felt better, no longer sleepy, but certainly stiff and tired from his long vigil on the rocky shore. Allison slept the clock around.

Corporal Brock phoned in the middle of the afternoon to tell Toby that there would be no investigation of his having shot the First Mate of the vessel.
It
was pretty clear to him what had happened, but he would like to come down next day and take an official statement. Toby agreed.

When Brock arrived next morning, he was in a good mood. “How does it feel to be heroes? We are recommending both of you for medals of bravery, and official commendations for your help in the biggest drug bust ever in both Canada and the USA.”