Tampa Burn (40 page)

Some of the details of my talk with Tomlinson kept banging around in my skull, interrupting the mechanics of the memorization process as I tried to imprint details from the chart onto my brain.

Finally, I said to hell with it. When things aren't going well in the classroom, it sometimes helps to get out into the field. So I went back up to the fifth floor, where I changed into fishing shorts, tank top, and boating Tevas.

As I was getting ready, my cell phone arrived, battery already charged. I checked out the little headphone set. It seemed comfortable enough. I could drop the phone in my pocket and chatter away.

I called my lab immediately, hoping to get Janet Mueller, but I got my recorder instead. Using the remote function on my home answering machine, I changed the outgoing message so that anyone who called would hear my voice recite my new cellular number. I did it for Dewey, no one else.

Maybe Tomlinson's right. Maybe it's inevitable that we will all end up slaves to the microchip.

Next, I tried to call Harris Lilly, an old friend of mine who is in naval intelligence. Tried him first at his home, and then on his cell phone.

I got lucky. He just happened to be deployed on some kind of duty for U.S. Central Command—he didn't say what, of course—and was working just across the bay from me at MacDill Air Force Base. MacDill is a massive military preserve that takes up much of Tampa's southern peninsular tip, and it is from there that the United States military ran the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I said to Harris, “I'm in town for a few days, so how'd you like to go boating?”

As if I'd just invited him on a Sunday picnic, he replied, “Ah, a
boat
ride. As if I don't spend enough time on the water. And what a pleasant day for it. Gray and windy, and it's almost certainly going to rain. Sounds
lovely.
”

“A perfect afternoon,” I said, playing along. “Maybe I'll pack a lunch. There's a lot I need to see. Just you and me banging around Tampa Bay.”

Suddenly serious, he said, “Screw lunch. Neither one of us is the recreational type, so you wouldn't be asking if you didn't have something interesting going on. I'm assuming there's a damn good reason you want me to go.”

“Exactly right, Commander. It's called local knowledge. You've got it. I need it. I trailered my skiff up. Do you have some time this afternoon?”

“I can manage. If it's that important.”

“It's that important. So do you want me to pick you up at MacDill? I think I can find my way to the docks at the south-east inlet. I
ought
to be able to.”

Laughing, Harris Lilly said, “Yeah, blindfolded, I think you could find those docks. But these days, our security teams get very nervous about civilian vessels approaching the base. They're prone to blow little boats out of the water with great big guns. Even someone like you. So why don't you pick me up somewhere around Ballast Point, just up from the base? At the Tampa Yacht Club or the fishing pier. I'll give you the tour from there.”

I said, “How about the Yacht Club. In an hour?”

Harris said, “An hour, yeah. That'll give me time to change out of my Superman suit into civvies. Which will allow me to pound down several of the excellent beers you'll be bringing in deepest gratitude for my help.”

HARRIS
Lilly is in his early forties, half Anglo, half Vietnamese, but entirely American. He looks more like someone well groomed and well satisfied in one of the solid professions—a physician, a judge—rather than the shit-hot reserve naval intelligence officer that he is. He's lean, with soccer-player legs, and gives the impression of boyishness, childlike enthusiasm, even naïveté—until you get a good look at his eyes.

Look into Harris's eyes and you will see that his enthusiasm is real, his energy level is unbelievable, but that the boy in him disappeared long, long ago.

Reserve officer does not mean that he is a “weekend warrior.” It means he does special assignments. He will sometimes drop off the radar screen, out of sight for weeks, sometimes months, at a time.

In his words, when he's not “playing Navy,” he is employed as a pilot for the Tampa Port Authority. When most people hear the word “pilot,” they think of airplanes. Around ports, though, the word “pilot” describes a highly trained, state and federally licensed maritime captain who boards and takes command of all incoming and outgoing freighters, tankers, and cruise ships, and makes sure they make safe passage through the tricky, narrow local channels.

Tampa pilots have been operating out of Egmont Key since the early 1800s, yet few people even know their profession exists. What they also don't know is that, like all pilots worldwide, these pros play an essential role in maintaining the safety and security of the region.

For instance: Tampa is the largest fertilizer port in the world, so ships often bring in highly volatile anhydrous ammonia and sulphur. Tampa is also the import destination for all jet fuel, gasoline, and diesel used from Orlando south to Naples and north to Crystal River. Many millions of metric tons of petroleum products cross Tampa Bay annually.

Put a foreign skipper who is unfamiliar with the waters at the helm of an ammonia tanker or a jet fuel tanker in a raging squall, in a narrow channel, and suddenly, two hundred thousand unsuspecting people in downtown Tampa are at great risk.

To be a Maritime Harbor pilot, you must be a consummate professional, so I'd lucked out by getting my pal Harris to tour me around the bay.

Few men had more detailed knowledge of the area and local waters.

 

 

I bowed up to Tampa's classy yacht club at a little after one P.M., and Harris stepped aboard while I was already backing away. Because it made sense, I slid over into the starboard swivel seat and let him take the wheel.

In my own skiff, it is not something I often do.

I've got a 225-Mercury mounted on the transom, but it's quiet enough that he didn't have to raise his voice much to say to me, “Are we looking for people or places?”

I told him, “In a way, both. If you don't mind, I'd sort of like to get an overview first. A general look around. I want to get to know the area a whole lot better than I know it now.”

He nodded. “In that case, I'll start by showing you how Tampa works; how the port works. For a general overview, the first thing we'll do is make the loop through the city. The scenic route.” He looked at the silver Submariner on his left wrist. “It's still around lunch time, so all the beautiful women execs and secretaries will be out strolling the streets. After that, I suppose you have something more specific in mind?”

I shrugged, turned, and opened the live well, in which I'd stored block ice and drinks. I opened a bottle of Steinlager for him, took a bottle of water for myself, and said, “Let's do the loop. After that, yeah, we'll talk specifics.”

It is a pleasure to ride with a good small-boat handler. Riding with a poor boat handler is like taking a physical beating. Harris is one of the rare good ones. We had a southwest wind gusting between fifteen and eighteen, but he got the boat trimmed just right, tabs and engine angled precisely, bow down and hull listing ever so slightly to starboard, and we cut our way smoothly toward the skyline of downtown Tampa.

As we neared Davis Islands, he began a steady commentary, pointing out landmarks with a tactical brevity that bore no resemblance to anything typically offered by a sightseeing guide.

“See that point straight ahead, all the masts sticking up in front of that row of beautiful houses? That's the Davis Islands Yacht Club. They take it seriously, just like the Tampa folks. Real sailors, not phonies. Just beyond is the seaplane basin . . . and the municipal airport. If you ever get in a real tight situation and need a fast egress—the civilian variety, I'm talking about—I'd make the right phone calls, then make a beeline for this area. Chopper, seaplane, a fast car. If someone's on your tail, it'd be tough for them to be certain how you spooked out.”

That's the way it went. Him talking, me listening, making mental notes. Much, much better than hanging around the pool at the Vinoy trying to memorize the chart.

Off to our right was Hookers Point. There were ocean-going freighters, barges, and tugs moored alongside avenues of commercial dockage, cranes and semis working. On shore were acres of storage tanks, some for liquids, some built as elevators for fertilizer. Many of the containers were painted with seascape murals: dolphins, breaching whales, sharks. Others were industrial gray or green.

Looking as the shoreline swept past, I listened to Harris say, “Tampa is part of a long peninsula that hangs down into Tampa Bay. The Port of Tampa is made up mostly of a second, smaller peninsula to the east, closer to the mainland. Kind of like a miniature Tampa hanging down”—he had a chart out now, folded into a square, showing me—“so it's an ideal location. The port's a couple thousand acres, so it's isolated from downtown and all the residential stuff, but it still has almost instant access to the city and the Interstates.”

He told me about some of the freighters he'd transited in and out recently as a pilot, and the many cruise ships, adding, “The big cruise lines love the city. They're investing more and more—Holland America and Carnival—because here's what a lot of people don't realize: Tampa's closer to the Panama Canal than Miami. It's faster access to Havana, too. When Cuba opens up? Our cruise business is going to boom off the scale.”

He ran us up Sedon Channel, the pretty houses of Davis Islands off to our left, and directly into the skyscraper-heart of the city: Convention Center, high-rise hotels with marinas and patio bars, WFLA television station, cars streaming over bridges with plasmic rhythm, condo-sized cruise ships moored off to our right, canyons of steel and glass towering over us now in a narrowing waterway that seemed built for gondolas.

Harris was right about the women. Lots of beautiful executive types in business dresses and stockings.

He continued to name key landmarks. Tall buildings, mostly, that could be seen from far offshore.

At one point, he indicated an eight-story, salmon-colored complex next to the Davis Islands Bridge, and said, “That's Tampa General Hospital. Did you hear about what happened there last night?”

A woman surgeon, he said, had been abducted as she'd walked from the hospital to her home on the south tip of Davis Islands.

“Her name's Valerie Santos,” he said. “I've seen her on some of the local talk shows. This drop-dead gorgeous plastic surgeon who works in the burn unit, and some asshole snatches her.”

Harris told me that a while back, he and another pilot happened to be first on the scene at a local marina fire that had injured a friend of theirs. The hospital staff, he said, had done a hell of a job saving the guy.

Harris added, “I visited him a couple of times in the unit—half-hoping I'd get to see the beautiful doctor lady in person. Never did. But there were some good-looking nurses that made up for it. Shit, now some freak's got her.”

Harris mentioning Tampa General—particularly the burn unit—reminded me of another freak, Prax Lourdes, which, in turn, reminded me of the esoteric list of drugs he'd demanded.

Thanks to a good and dear thoracic surgeon friend of mine, I'd stopped on my way out of Fort Myers and picked up the boxes of cyclosporine and prednisone that he'd assembled, plus Neurontin capsules in the highest dosage.

The Neurontin was not so easy for him to get. “It's an antiepilepsy medication,” he said. “We don't use it in my field.”

Giving away prescription drugs to someone who's not a patient wasn't something he did lightly, and I took it as a testament to his confidence in me that he'd made an exception.

When he asked why I needed the meds, I'd told him the truth as I'd been told it: The medicines were for casualties of the war in Masagua and were desperately needed. The request for antiepilepsy med, though, I didn't understand.

Tomlinson had worked his sources, too. He'd already gotten the immunosuppressant drugs Thymoglobulin and OKT3, all in intravenous infusion forms, and given them to me for safe-keeping.

When I'd told him I was impressed he'd secured them so quickly, he said, “With the medical people I know, all the business I've done with them? No worries, man. Don't be vexed at me,
compadre,
but my doctor pals also threw in a cylinder of nitrous oxide gas. When I get to St. Pete, you should give it a try.
Really,
Doc. To me, sevoflurane gas is kinda like eating an anchovy pizza, but without the calories. But nitrous, man, is just good, clean fun. Take a couple whiffs, drink a beer. Then just sit back and watch the world get goofy. Next thing you know, you're crawling around in the bilge, laughing your ass off.”

More seriously, he added, “After what I told you this morning, maybe it'll help us be friends again.”

 

 

STILL in my skiff, we headed away from the city, out toward the shipping channels of Tampa Bay. Without mentioning the e-mail from Lake, I'd told Harris that I was looking for an area of land and water in which I might find a specific combination of wildlife.

I'd written the list on a sheet of hotel stationery and handed it to him: reddish egret; monk parrot; monk parrot nest; mature bull gator; a place where toads or frogs might lay eggs.

He read it, squinted, then read it again. The sidelong look he gave me would have been hilarious if the situation wasn't so serious.

“Please don't tell me we're out here because you're on a freaking snipe hunt or something, Doc. What the hell is this all about?”