Devil's Harbor (2 page)

Both boats were running parallel on a southeast track. When he judged the distance to be right, Finn threw the Interceptor into a tight, torquey turn. The boat leaned toward the water. Now she was heading east-southeast, into the rising sun, with
La Catrina
on her left side about a hundred feet away and rapidly getting closer. The two boats were heading toward the same point, the Interceptor like a cowboy heading off a steer split from the herd. If neither vessel changed course or speed, they would slam into each other at a combined velocity of seventy knots. Finn's heart beat in overdrive. Adrenaline surged through him. If he'd timed it right, he figured he'd cross the sport fisher's bow with ten feet to spare. He felt 80 percent certain he'd timed it right.

Seventy, maybe.

“We gonna make it?” shouted Diego over the roar of the outboards.

“A hundred percent!” shouted Finn.

Just when collision seemed inevitable, Finn pushed the throttles all the way down, giving the Interceptor her last bit of thrust. She slingshotted ahead and launched clear off a wave. The blades of all four outboards cleared the air. For a moment, Finn felt weightless, his stomach rising. The praying mantis appeared so close, he could almost have reached out and grabbed the rail on her bow walk. Then the Interceptor slammed back down with a bone-shattering shudder.

“Now!” he screamed back at Diego.

Diego flung one of the fenders off the stern. It landed in the water a few feet ahead of
La Catrina,
on her starboard side. The line ran out after it. Diego made sure the fender attached to the other end cleared the outboards. It splashed down on
La Catrina
's port side.

They'd managed to string fifteen feet of thick rope across the surface of the water right in front of
La Catrina
's track, like a seaborne tripwire. And Finn had timed it so that there was no way she could avoid running over the line.

He carved the Interceptor around in a big turn, came up behind the praying mantis, and watched what happened.

La Catrina
made it another fifty feet or so. Then she lost all her momentum, abruptly came off the plane, and drifted to a halt.

Finn smiled. He couldn't see it, but he could imagine how tightly the rope had wound around the sport fisher's propeller shaft. He could imagine gears grinding, shear pins snapping, oil leaking, rubber hoses melting as the engine overheated.

Just then, he saw a whiff of black smoke rise from what he figured was
La Catrina
's engine room beneath her stern deck.

Still no one appeared from the cabin. That disturbed him. Almost all the traffickers he intercepted, when they realized there was no way out, turned meek—especially if their boats were about to sink or catch fire. Usually what they did was show themselves, put their hands in the air, make it clear that they were unarmed and surrendering. Most of them knew they were just going to get shipped home anyway.

Finn sensed that this guy was different. There was something all-or-nothing about this guy.

It was an attribute Finn shared.

He went to the gun locker and pulled out an M4 carbine. He clipped it into its mount on the starboard rail. Then he put a bead on the glass door and waited.

A minute passed.
La Catrina
bobbed serenely up and down, a thin stream of smoke rising from her stern. After all the commotion, the silence was eerie. Plus, Finn sensed that the M4 had changed the atmosphere, darkened the mood. Unlike the shotgun, the M4 was a battlefield weapon, and he knew Diego wasn't comfortable with it. Neither man spoke. Finn kept the rifle sighted on the glass door. He saw the Interceptor's blue lights flashing in the sport fisher's darkened windows.

“He coming out or what?” said Diego finally. He sounded nervous.

Finn thought he saw movement through the glass—with the tint, he couldn't be 100 percent sure. His finger tightened slightly on the trigger.

The door slid open.

A man stepped out.

One guy, dressed all in black.

“Manos arribas!”
shouted Diego.

The guy gave him a blank look. He had black hair, a black mustache. The black smoke rising from the engine bay was thickening.

“You see a weapon?” asked Finn, his finger tightening a little more. He had a bead on the guy's chest. He was deliberate with his breathing.

“No. No weapon,” said Diego, still sounding nervous. He shouted at the guy some more in Spanish.

The guy kept staring at them. His arms hung at his side.

“Put your hands up!” Finn shouted in English.

The guy's hands didn't move.

He started shuffling toward the stairs leading to the flybridge.

Then he started climbing the stairs.

“Where the fuck does he think he's going?” said Finn.

Diego kept yelling in Spanish. Finn didn't understand what Diego was saying, but whatever it was clearly wasn't working. The guy ignored them both and kept going up the stairs. When he got to the flybridge, he disappeared from view.

Finn realized the guy now had the height advantage. If he came out with a weapon, he'd be shooting downward. Letting him get up there had been a tactical mistake.

The guy reappeared.

He had something in his hands. Finn thought it looked like an AK-47, but before he could be sure, the breeze pushed the plume of smoke in front of the guy, obscuring him.

Then he heard what sounded like machine-gun fire.

The smoke cleared.

He saw the guy firing at them. Shells spat from the gun, going over the flybridge rail.

Finn had the M4 set on semiautomatic. He fired a single three-round burst.

Two of the rounds blew holes through the fiberglass canopy above the guy. The third caught him in the chest. His arms flew up and he lost hold of his weapon. He stumbled back, flipped over the rail, and fell into the sea.

 

CHAPTER ONE

Twelve days after Finn had shot and killed Rafael Aparici
ó
n Perez, he was back on patrol, looking out over the Interceptor's stern. It was the end of a cool autumn day, with the Santa Anas blowing exhaust fumes inboard and shreds of cloud off the San Gabriel Mountains, across Los Angeles and out over the dirty, wind-chopped sea. Night was falling, and in the two minutes since they'd left the dock, the water's color had changed from police-uniform blue to slate.

Diego was slouched in the helmsman's seat, one leg dangling, as he helmed the Interceptor at no-wake speed toward the gap in the breakwater that protected the vast Terminal Island port complex from the Pacific's swells. He was wearing a pair of blue Customs and Border Protection overalls, a low-profile life jacket over that. The black grip of a Heckler & Koch P2000 stuck out from the holster on his utility belt. He was arguing that Finn shouldn't have shot Perez, enumerating the reasons it had been a bad idea.

Finn, wearing the same CBP uniform and carrying the same service-issue handgun on his hip, was only half listening to his young patrol partner. He felt the low-rev shudder of the four 300-horsepower Mercury outboards passing through the floor and up through his legs. After more than a week of mandatory leave, it felt good to be back on the water.

“You shouldn't have shot him,” Diego said again.

“He was shooting at us.”

“I'm telling you, it's gonna be a giant headache for the both of us,” said Diego, not hearing Finn.

“It'll blow over,” said Finn.

Diego didn't look convinced. They were nearing the breakwater.

“What did Mona say about it?” said Diego.

Finn turned to face him and said, “She's glad I wasn't the one who got killed.”

“She say it like that?”

“Her words exactly.”

“What about me? She say she was glad I wasn't killed, either?”

“She didn't say.”

Among other things, Finn had missed the shipboard banter during his furlough. Moping around the house hadn't been good for him. It had darkened his mood.

“If one of us was killed, who do you think she'd be more upset about, you or me?” said Diego.

“I'm her husband.”

“Yeah, but she's my sister. What's worse, a dead husband or a dead brother?”

“A dead husband, no question.”

Diego shook his head. “Your husband gets killed, you can always get another. But you only get one brother.”

“Maybe. But when I asked, she said she'd choose me over you.”

They were passing the breakwater now. The gulls on the rocks squawked.

“You actually asked that?” said Diego.

“Yup,” lied Finn.

“Really? And that's what she said?”

“Her words exactly.”

Diego shook his head. “Dude. That's fucked up.”

Finn turned back toward the stern to hide his grin. The sun was setting and he watched the fading light gild the playing fields and gardens of the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, its garden plots a glade amid the mesas of container stacks and forests of giant cranes in the port behind it. The stacks and prison buildings protected the water in the channels at either side of the island from the wind, and the low-slung light now gave it a lacquered look, like the surface of a newly waxed car. The sheen made the water look clean, but Finn knew better. He'd seen what dregs the city flushed out through its sewers and overflow outlets.

He knew what drifted in the depths.

The outboards roared to life and sent him lurching toward the stern. They had passed into open water, and Diego had opened the throttles.

He'd neglected to warn Finn.

*   *   *

An hour later, Finn took the helm from Diego. He leaned against the chair and pulled back the throttles, leaving just enough thrust to give the Interceptor way. The Santa Anas and the chop had died down. Now the sea was dark and quiet. They were five miles off Santa Catalina Island, about midway between Two Harbors and the resort town of Avalon.

Not far from where he'd shot Perez.

Finn rested his hands on the wheel, the boat drifting ahead, his fingers reading her slightest movements, his whole body in its element. He sensed the effect that the current streaming alongside Catalina was having on the boat, how the waves refracting off the island were nudging her bow eastward, toward Newport. Instinctively he held the wheel a quarter inch off-center so that she tracked true. He gazed out at the starlight reflecting off the sea and, though he couldn't see it, he knew the flow was slackening, that the tide was reaching its peak, and that, when it started ebbing, it would travel at least two knots.

He let go of the wheel and scanned the darkness through the night-vision binoculars. The thirty-nine-foot Midnight Express Interceptor was a state-of-the-art boat fitted with state-of-the-art navigation electronics, and Finn loved it dearly. But he'd served in the Gulf, aboard inshore boats patrolling the waters around the Al-Basrah Oil Terminal, keeping it, the contractors rebuilding it, and the supertankers docking at it safe from insurgents, and he'd seen the damage that blind faith in marine electronics could cause. He took advice from the machines, but he trusted only his own eyes.

And then, there was the phantom. Over the last four months, Finn and Diego had picked up a signal off Catalina three times on the radar, had gone looking for it three times, and three times had come up empty-handed. The last time it had happened was the night he'd shot Perez.

He let the binoculars hang around his neck and killed the engines. He planned to drift awhile, wait for the tide to turn, and enjoy being out on the dark, quiet sea. He heard Diego snap shut his Zippo lighter and saw the orange glow of the cigarette's ember brighten. Finn stared into the darkness and retreated into his thoughts.

When Perez had opened fire, maybe what he should've done was drop back to a safe distance and called for backup. Instead of returning fire, maybe he should've ensured the safety of himself and his crew first. There'd been no reason to get into a firefight. “You're not in a war zone anymore,” Mona had said. Her words had been looping in his head ever since, and he hadn't been sleeping right. For the first time in a year and a half, he'd felt like a drink—another reason to get back on the water.

On the other hand, the guy had been shooting at him; all he'd done was return fire and hit his target. It seemed simple enough, and part of him resented Mona for not seeing it like that. He thought he'd just been unlucky, that when his shot had hit his target, Perez and his weapon had splashed into the sea. They'd recovered Perez's body, but his gun had gone straight to the bottom.

Out in the patch of night into which he was staring, he saw something shift. He raised the binoculars to his eyes.

“What?” said Diego.

“Thought I saw something.”

He stared through the glasses for a full minute before looking down at the radar. Dozens of green dots to the east of their position revealed all the vessels plying the channel into the Port of Los Angeles. Most were tracking north or south, heading into or leaving Long Beach. He checked his watch. The glow-in-the-dark face told him that it was close to midnight. He pointed at a dot tracking eastward from the island.

“There,” he said, looking up from the screen in time to see Diego flick his cigarette butt into the sea.

Finn got behind the wheel and pushed down the throttles. The nose tilted up and the boat gathered speed, lifting until it was on the plane. Wind blasted through the cockpit. Diego held fast to the handles on the console, the instruments' green glow lighting his face so that he looked like a creepy magician Finn had once seen on a fun-park poster as a boy.

“Moving slow like that, might be just a fishing boat,” said Diego, shouting against the roar of the engines.

“No. She's the phantom,” said Finn.

At the intercept point, he pulled her back into neutral. The roar died, the way fell off her, and her knifelike bow dropped. He looked down at the display. Half a mile of water separated the two vessels, according to the radar. Diego stepped onto the aft deck and scanned the darkness through the night-vision binoculars.