“I thought we were going in through the port at Charleston,” Ireland said.
“We thought about it,” John said. “This is safer. The only traffic here is shrimpers early in the morning. We come in at night, nobody around.”
“Yeah, but that makes us even more obvious,” I said.
“Dave’s had people out on the creek every night we’ve been gone, Ali. Nobody’s there. Just shrimpers leaving at dawn. This is the perfect spot,” John said.
Fine. What did I know? If we got to the creek, I guessed we’d have made it. I nodded.
“Okay. Now we start getting rid of anything that’d prove we’ve been to Colombia. Any leftover cans of food, the fuel bottles, all our charts. Everything goes.”
We topped off the Namaste’s tank with fuel from the glass bottles, threw the empties overboard, and tossed the remaining full bottles of diesel fuel after them. Ireland and I gathered all the leftover Spanish-labeled cans of food the Indians had given us and threw them overboard while John got reams of nautical charts and universal plotting sheets and tossed them into the sea, where they lay like a trail of pale lily pads going to the horizon. In a few hours, there was nothing on the boat that could be used as evidence we’d been to Colombia—unless of course, you happened to notice the five-foot-deep cargo of marijuana in bales labeled product of Colombia.
We had plans if we were spotted. “If it looks like they want to stop us,” John said, “we dump the bales.”
“The three of us wrestle up seventy-some bales of pot and dump them before a cutter gets to us?” I said.
John was used to this. He’d had forty days of criticism from me. He shook his head sadly. I bet I’d never get another job offer to smuggle pot. “We try, Ali. Besides, we ain’t gonna get caught.”
This part of the mission required dumb luck and blind faith.
On the evening of the fifteenth, our ETA, we hit fog. We’d all been up for thirty hours straight because we figured we’d be sighting land any damn second. We were nervous with anticipation, squinting out over the gray sea for hours, looking for land and the law, and now we were blind. We were on a course John plotted using the azimuths from radio stations we’d gotten from his radio. The azimuths were crude. When you rotated the antenna to get the direction to a radio station, determining the point of maximum signal strength was an art, subject to errors of five to ten degrees. Our plots, made every half hour, often differed by twenty or thirty miles. Now was when we needed the loran. I turned it on and watched the lights blink very nicely and then show us a position of: blank. The loran thought we were nowhere on earth. I wanted to set the chairman of Texas Instruments adrift in a boat equipped with this loran.
When we figured we must be within ten miles of the coast, we still couldn’t see a thing. This was bad. We were depending on sighting lights from which we could make an accurate plot. It’s pretty easy to hit somewhere on the entire East Coast of the United States when you’re sailing west, but that wasn’t good enough. Navigating to the rocky and shallow entrance to Five-Fathom Creek would be difficult under ideal conditions.
John tried using the depth finder to plot our position. He had very accurate depth charts for the region. He’d kept the local charts, even had one marked with course lines and notes that showed we’d sailed down from Maine. If we could match up our depth finder readings with those printed on the charts, we’d have some idea where we were. Unfortunately, the bottom in this area was fairly flat. We could only guess that we were somewhere in a circle about twenty miles in diameter, probably near the United States.
At eight o’clock Ireland called us on deck. He’d spotted some lights. John and I went up. There they were, lights. Good old USA lights. The joy of sighting home was tempered by the fact that we were, at the moment, not welcome.
The lights were confusing. As the fog lifted, we could see shore lights for miles north and south. Where were we? John estimated our position by guessing what the lights were, and sailed to where we should be going from where he thought we were. This is hard to do, even flying.
I got lost one night in a helicopter during flight school in Alabama. I flew from one group of town lights to another, all over southern Alabama, running low on fuel, and never could figure which was which until I happened to bump into Fort Rucker, which was where I was going. If I hadn’t lucked out, though, people at the heliport could’ve found me on radar and told me where I was. I, like most of my fellow students, would’ve found violent death preferable to the humiliation of admitting I was lost—but help was available.
Help was not available now. At ten o’clock, after identifying a couple of unmistakable television towers and using them to plot our position, we discovered our guesses were wrong. We were way off course: twenty miles too far north. John turned back out to sea and then paralleled the coast, heading south. He called Dave and told them we’d be late.
“How late?”
“I figure we’ll see you by two or three.”
“Two or three!” Dave said. I was standing next to the stove, shivering, listening to Dave’s dismay.
“Yeah, best I can figure,” John said. “Two or three. Had some problems. Ran into some fog out here.”
“Maybe we should reschedule the… shipment,” Dave said. “We’re getting real close to seeing daylight, and you know how the unions are.”
John put down the mike. “Shit! He wants us to come in tomorrow night. He doesn’t want to be unloading the boat in daylight.”
“I think he’s making sense, John,” I said.
“Bullshit. We’re here. We made it past the Coast Guard. You want to go back out and cruise around for a day and give those guys another chance?”
I shook my head. “You want to know what I’d do?”
“Do I have a choice?” John said. He was looking very nervous, very agitated. He was out of booze and there was nothing worse than trying to sneak a million dollars worth of pot past the Coast Guard and put up with Mason when what you really needed was a goddamn stiff drink and no advice. But no, Mason had yet another two cents worth. Shit (I read John’s mind), Mason is a goddamn gold mine of ideas. I have the fucking mother lode of opinions about anything on earth, right here in front of me. He shook his head and nodded. “Okay. What would you do?”
“I’d wait until morning. I’d go back out into the fog, just make a lazy trip south toward Charleston. Then in full daylight, I’d just balls-it-out, sail right into the main harbor there. Blend in with the other fools out sailing in this fucking weather. There’ve got to be some. We sail in, hang out on deck, and wave at our fellow yachtsmen. Our waterline looks normal; we look empty. We’re just another sailboat. They’d have no reason to be suspicious; there’s no sign we’ve got this shitload of pot on board.”
John said, “Then what?”
“Well, then I’d anchor out wherever the other yachts do and wait until night. Then we motor up the Intracoastal Waterway to the same place Dave’s picked out—just come in from the opposite direction.” I looked at John. He was considering it. “What d’you think?”
He nodded his head slightly, distracted, working on it. I could tell it violated his notion of smuggling, which was to stay invisible. I agreed; I just figured invisibility could be achieved more realistically by camouflage. “Nope,” John said finally. “I have a bad feeling about that. I trust my guts, Bob. We go. We go in now.”