Wildfire (35 page)

Next, at the upper-left-hand corner of the screen, the computer displayed southern Florida from Lake Okeechobee down to the Florida Keys.

"Wow," Grynard whispered.

"Don't get too excited yet," Reggie Blackburn cautioned. "We're just starting to have fun here. Watch this."

A few more key strokes, and a number of small colored and numbered geometric shapes appeared on the oversized monitor.

"We're talking state-of-the-art transmitters hooked directly into the Defense Department's global positioning satellites, with no downgrade in accuracy, along with a CART—computer-aided recognition and tracking—capability that is absolutely unbelievable," the supervisory electronics specialist said proudly.

"You mean the computer can track a ship by remembering what it looks like?"

"That's right."

"Incredible." Grynard shook his head in amazement. "So what do all those symbols mean?"

"Well, first of all, the one you're interested in is that orange rectangle just about in the exact center of the screen. The one marked number one. See it?

"Yeah, sure."

"Okay, that's the
Sea Amber."

"Bloom's boat?"

"That's right. And at this very moment we're showing Mr. Bloom—or at least Mr. Bloom's boat—to be right smack dab in the middle of the Exuma Sound."

"Can you get a fax message to him out there?"

"Easiest thing in the world, assuming he's got his fax machine turned on. Either that, or we can just hand-deliver it on a silver platter if you
really
want to mess with the man," Blackburn chuckled.

"It's a tempting idea," Grynard said. "Why, you guys have him on that short a leash?"

"No, not really. But I did arrange to set up some resources for you on standby, like you asked me to —just in case our bird happens to go down, or you folks decide you want to do some of that genuine gung-ho agent stuff. Oh, and by the way, I can guarantee you right now, Owens ain't gonna be happy when he finds out, either."

"Who's Owens?"

"Hal Owens? He's the SAC for the Special Bahamas Task Force. You mean to tell me you two never met?"

Grynard shook his head. "Not that I can recall."

"Take my word for it, you'd remember the man," Blackburn said. "Real grouchy old bastard. Just like you, come to think of it."

"If he's just like me, then he'll get over it," Grynard said indifferently. "Now what kind of resources are we talking about?"

"Start with a sixty-foot sailer and a fifty-five-foot fishing boat for cover, and a thirty-six-foot cigarette for fast intercept. And as backup, a pair of Blackhawk assault/transport choppers, along with one of them little bitty surveillance jobs that look more like some kind of demented insect than a real, honest-to-God helicopter. The boats are designated as gold triangle one, gold triangle two, and gold triangle three, in that order, and the choppers are gold circle four through gold circle six."

"All that just for us?"

"No, not exactly. Seems like Owens and his DEA counterpart down there have a little narcotics deal cooking. But not much is happening just yet, so you can probably get access to just about any part of it, long as Owens doesn't have you shot first."

"Nice." Grynard nodded appreciatively. "What do we have for crews?"

"Genuine U.S. Coast Guard boarding-team types in the boats, FBI agent/pilots and FBI SWAT crews in the choppers. All of them are familiar with the area and the locals, so we shouldn't run into any confusion about who the good guys and the bad guys are."

"You're a good man, Charley Brown." Grynard smiled tiredly, patting the supervisory electronics specialist on the shoulder.

"Hey, I just used your name and credit card." Blackburn shrugged. "When it all hits the fan, I'm not going to be the one they come looking for."

"Yeah, thanks," Grynard said with cheerful sarcasm.

"Sit down a spell. Long as you're here, I might as well show you some of our new tricks."

"You mean there's more?"

"Oh, sure. Lots more. For example, one thing we can do is zoom in or out, depending on how much detail you want to see."

As Blackburn demonstrated the zoom capability of the computerized satellite monitoring system, Grynard noted that longitude and latitude coordinates immediately appeared next to each of the enlarged and numbered symbols.

"I'm impressed," Grynard admitted.

"Hell, you ain't seen nothing yet. You want to know where your buddy Bloom's been the last seventy-two hours"

"You can do that too?"

"'Course we can. What the hell kind of operation do you think we're runnin' down here?" the supervisory electronics specialist demanded indignantly.

"From what I've seen so far, a goddamned playground with lots of expensive toys and very little supervision," Grynard responded, looking around the cluttered electronics and computer shop.

"You got that right." Reggie Blackburn nodded cheerfully. "Now look here, watch this."

Blackburn hit a series of key strokes, and suddenly the orange rectangle reappeared, sporting a long dotted orange tail that started up at the top of the screen and then zigzagged back and forth, from north to south, in and around the island chain.

"Looks like he's been gradually working his way south, more or less, in a pretty casual manner, except right here, which was—oh, let's see—about six o'clock this morning, when he started straight down into Exuma Sound," the supervisory electronics specialist said.

"What's the update rate?"

"I've got it set on an every-half-hour basis right now. I could make it more frequent, but then I'd end up using a goodly portion of our computer processing resources on just one boat."

"Oh, yeah, why so?"

"We haven't been able to get a transmitter installed on the
Sea Amber
yet," the technical agent explained, "so we have to use the computer recognition system exclusively. And since she's a relatively small boat to begin with, that means we tie up a big chunk of our processing capability every time we try to fix her location. Figured every-half-hour would be enough for what you wanted."

"More than enough." Grynard nodded as he noted the surrounding locations of the golden triangles and circles. "And it looks like we've got everybody staying back out of the way too," he added approvingly. "Bloom ought to feel real comfortable right about now."

"Just like you said, if the man's gonna do something stupid, we want to give him plenty of room to do it in."

"So what are all those red and white and gray and green rectangles?" Grynard asked

"The red ones are DEA boats, the whites are regular Coast Guard patrol craft, the dark gray are U.S. Navy ships, and we use the green to designate the miscellaneous stuff. Since it's peacetime, they're all squawking their locations with their SSRS transmitters, which eliminates the need for CART processing," Blackburn said.

"SSRS? What does that mean?"

"Standard Ship Recognition System. A transmitting device built into every military ship's radio communications system. Which ones do you want to know about?"

"How about that one right there," Grynard said, pointing with a finger to a rectangle along the fishtail-like southern edge of Eleuthera Island.

"Man, we've got to start using a different color for them miscellaneous objects. Can't hardly see the damned things," Reggie Blackburn said, squinting at the screen. "Let's see what we've got there." Using the zoom capability of the computer program, the supervisory tech agent enlarged the area around New Providence, Eleuthera Island, and the northern end of the Exuma Sound to three times normal size.

"Okay," Blackburn mumbled to himself as he continued to enter commands into the keyboard, "that's green rectangle number three, which is . . . the
Lone Granger."

"The
Lone Granger
? What is that, a boat?"

"If it's a rectangle, it damn well better be a boat."

"And just what, may I ask, does a boat named the
Lone Granger
have to do with this operation?"

"I don't know, let's go take a look and find out." Leaving the large color screen in place, Blackburn shifted over to the second computer on the workbench, the one with the normal-sized color monitor, and began entering commands.

Moments later Reggie Blackburn had the relevant information up on the smaller monitor.

"Hmm, according to this, you ordered a full-press surveillance—tags, taps, the whole works—on some people named, uh, Lightstone, Paxton, Stoner, Takahara, and Woeshack working out of Boston? Fish and Wildlife Service agents, according to this. Does that sound right?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Well, according to this, they left ... uh, let me see, the Windbreaker Marina down in Fort Lauderdale at approximately oh-five-hundred hours this morning on the
Lone Granger.
That's why the boat shows up on our satellite scan."

"For Christ's sake!" Grynard exclaimed, his eyes widening as images of the eight dead bodies at the Warrenton safe house, and Whittman's comments about the restricted 10mm law enforcement pistol ammunition flashing through the back of his mind. "What the hell are those guys doing out there?"

"How should I ... hey, wait a minute. Takahara. I thought that name rang a bell. Isn't that the name of that tech agent you had me feed information to a couple of weeks ago?" Reggie Blackburn asked.

"Yeah, it sure was. So what did you tell him?"

"Not much, far as I recall," Blackburn said, his fingers flashing across the computer keyboard as he called up another program on the smaller monitor. "Okay, here we go," the supervisory electronics specialist whispered. "Yeah, now I remember. When I went looking for him, on the sly—you know, electronically—I found him digging at that Abercombie broad, rummaging around the billings for her credit cards for the past two years. So what I did is I got out ahead of him and had Ms. Lisa Abercombie pay for some diesel fuel with one of her gas cards at a little marina on North Bimini. Then I had Bloom pay for a couple of bottles of expensive wine with a Mastercard at the same place about two minutes later."

"That's
all
you gave him?" Grynard blinked in surprise.

"That's it." The supervisory electronics specialist shrugged.

"Jeese, that's not much."

"Looks like it was more than enough, as far as I can see," Blackburn countered. "Look where they're at now."

"How are you identifying them?" Grynard asked, staring at the big screen with increased interest now. "With that CART-computer recognition stuff?"

"Don't have to with this baby," Blackburn chuckled. "Nowdays just about all the big private boats—and by 'big,' I mean the expensive ones— get rigged with a civilian version of the SSRS transmitters too, either when they're built or when they're refitted."

"So what does that mean? That the
Lone Granger
has her own identifying transmitter?"

"That's right." The FBI tech agent nodded. "And it looks like she's squawking real pretty out here."

"Yeah, but what are they doing over there by—what is it? —Eleuthera Island, instead of picking up the trail around Bimini?"

"Damned if I know. Let's see if we can figure out how they went about getting there," Blackburn said as he went back to the larger computer screen and started to key up the history of green rectangle number three. "Okay, if they started out from Fort Lauderdale at five this morning, which we know they did, then we only have to calculate back about what—oh, say ten hours, which won't take long at all because we've got squawk data, so . . ."

"Christ, look at that!" Grynard exclaimed as a thinly dotted and nearly straight green line suddenly appeared on the screen, connecting the city of Fort Lauderdale and the green rectangle in a long sweeping curve that dropped right down into the northern end of the Exuma Sound. "They never even went near Bimini."

"And from the looks of things, if they stay on the same course, it's gonna take them right along the western shore of Cat Island. Which means they're going to end up right on top of your surveillance target," Blackburn noted.

A1 Grynard cursed, and then asked: "About how far away from Bloom are they right now?"

"Hmm, I'd say they're maybe about fifteen miles northwest of the
Sea Amber
at the outside. Doesn't look like they're moving all that fast right now, but based on the distance between those half-hour location points on the first part of their run, it looks to me like they could close in on the
Sea Amber
pretty damn fast if they had a mind to. Man, whatever that
Lone Granger
is, she can really scoot!"

"Do you have any information on her from the tag?"

"I don't know, let me check."

Blackburn switched back to the second computer monitor.

"Ah, no wonder," the electronics specialist muttered. "She's described here by your surveillance team as a brand-new eighty-two-foot sports cruiser slash luxury yacht, multimillion dollar value, which means she probably has a pretty fast hull and one hell of an engine package."

"What?" A1 Grynard exclaimed, not sure he'd heard Blackburn right.

"Hey, I'm just telling you what the agents reported in," Reggie Blackburn reminded, "but if they're right—and based on those early tracks, they probably are—those wildlife guys aren't going to have any trouble
at all
catching up with that little forty-five-foot sailboat. Fact is, if they're not careful and they keep cruising around when it's dark, they're liable to run right over her."

"What I want to know," Grynard said with forced restraint, "is how a bunch of wildlife agents got their hands on a boat like that. And I also want to know how they managed to get a line on Bloom that fast."

A1 Grynard was frustrated by the realization the twenty-four agents he'd just wheedled out of special operations were now useless because it was too late to set them into position. That and the fact that he was now forced to play catch-up behind Henry Lightstone and his wildlife agent buddies again, just like the last time up in Anchorage.

And there was something else in the back of his mind that he really didn't want to think about—the presence of all those restricted issue 10mm law enforcement ammunition casings, and the possibility that Henry Lightstone and his buddies really were intent on avenging the deaths of their fellow agents.