‘‘Could you lose your license?’’
‘‘Hell yes.’’
‘‘Is it safe?’’
The helicopter dove so quickly that Stevie reached out for a grip.
‘‘Depends,’’ the pilot answered, talking loudly into the headset.
‘‘On what?’ she asked nervously.
‘‘On what they do,’’ he answered, indicating the neighboring helicopter as they passed below it.
‘‘Stand by,’’ the technician said, ‘‘I think they’re going to broadcast.’’
‘‘Get between them!’’ Stevie instructed. She could not have Seven revealing the ship and spoiling Boldt’s efforts. Melissa! she thought. ‘‘Oh my God!’’ she hollered. ‘‘Hurry!’’
The screen in her lap showed the water as a dark green, the ship’s outline boldly as black, its wake, a flaming orange roil, its onboard lights pale yellow and tiny.
She asked her technician, ‘‘What’s that red blob at the stern?’’
‘‘I’m thinking engine room,’’ he answered. ‘‘Those engines will be cooking. The bright yellow dots are probably some of the crew out on deck. Same with the darker yellow just forward of that—most likely the pilothouse.’’
‘‘And this?’’ she asked, indicating another much larger mass of pale yellow slightly forward of midship.
‘‘That’s coming from a container,’’ he confirmed.
‘‘As in people inside a container?’’ she asked.
‘‘Warmth,’’ he answered. ‘‘The source? We don’t know.’’ He touched his headset. ‘‘Hang on! They’ve gone live. Listen up!’’ He threw a switch and Stevie’s headphones filled with a reporter’s introduction. On the screen, the ship appeared against the blackness of the water, a large rectangular shape of unexplained color. Sparkles filled the screen.
‘‘That interference is us,’’ the technician said proudly.
‘‘Blind them!’’ Stevie ordered the pilot. The helicopter slowly turned to the right and aimed up toward the flashing strobe lights just below the layer of clouds. Both helicopters remained to the stern of the SS Hana, less likely to be heard or spotted by the crew.
The reporter said on-air, ‘‘Without infrared, you can barely see the stacked containers aboard this ship . . . but in a moment we’ll show you what the eye cannot see! It is this reporter’s contention that the heat inside a forward container represents body heat from illegal immigrants. What you will see next is an infrared image of this same ship, with yellow and red representing heat sources. It is Live-7’s intention over the next hour to follow this ship to port.’’
The video screen switched to the infrared color images.
‘‘Now!’’ Stevie shouted.
The pilot brought the chopper’s nose up. He tripped a bright spotlight that flooded the other helicopter white. On the screen, this appeared as a blinding bolt of fire-engine red that interrupted the view of the ship.
‘‘Direct hit!’’ shouted the technician.
‘‘You’re brilliant,’’ Stevie said. ‘‘Pun intended.’’
The image on the screen appeared to burn and melt from the edges until completely white.
The fraught and anxious voice of the news reporter complained like some old lady with her garden torn up by a neighbor’s dog. Channel Seven had caught a few seconds of the infrared image and it reappeared on their live broadcast. The reporter delivered a voice-over narrating the events below.
Stevie asked the pilot if it was possible to contact the other helicopter by radio. He warned her it would have to be quick, threw a switch on the console and indicated for her to depress a button when she wished to speak, and to release to listen.
‘‘Now?’’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘‘Julia?’’ Stevie spoke, naming the Channel Seven reporter. ‘‘It’s Stevie McNeal. Do you realize what you’ve just done? What you’re doing? There are human lives involved here. An active police investigation! Do you understand the consequences of these images?’’
‘‘Was that you who just fried our gear? You competitive bitch!’’
‘‘You can’t stay on the radio,’’ the pilot warned as air-traffic control began to call out to the aircraft.
The reporter screamed into the radio, ‘‘We’ll sue you!’’
The pilot mumbled, ‘‘They’ll ground me.’’
Stevie moved her hand away from the talk button rather reluctantly.
‘‘Check it out!’’ the technician shouted, handing a set of night-vision binoculars forward to Stevie.
‘‘I think they’ve made us!’’
Through the binoculars, Stevie watched in the eerie green-and-black environment of night vision as the crew ran forward toward the stacked containers.
‘‘They’re working the chains!’’
Below, a half dozen deckhands looked like ants as they hurried to free that top container.
The technician announced, ‘‘They’re going to dump it overboard!’’
The winch jammed with only forty feet of cable deployed as crewmen worked furiously to fix it. Nothing on Hana worked anymore; it was amazing that she even floated.
A crew of four sprang into action, carrying a fifteen-foot, twelve-inch-thick plank atop their shoulders as they climbed the adjacent stack of containers and then shoved the plank beneath the topmost container and hung their weight from it in an attempt to leverage the container up and over the side.
At the first considerable tilt of the container, the ship rocked and the loosened boxcar swiveled, cantilevered over the dark water below. One of the planks snapped and men fell forty feet to the steel deck. The ship rocked to port and the container miraculously pivoted most of the way back.
One lone figure scrambled up the stack and went at the huge door with a bolt cutter as the rain fell harder.
‘‘He’s letting ’em out!’’ the technician exclaimed.
‘‘We’ve got to
do
something,’’ Stevie cried helplessly.
‘‘What’s done is done,’’ the pilot said.
Far below, the huge container doors swung open. Massive bundles of fabric sealed in plastic cascaded down to the ship’s deck. Dark figures fled from that container, the first two falling forty feet to the deck below. A woman jumped into the dark water.
‘‘Follow her!’’ Stevie said. ‘‘Call the Coast Guard! Goddamn it, if only they hadn’t . . .’’ She caught herself about to chastise the press as she and her team had so often been chastised. That mirror was not one she wanted to look into. Several more illegals scurried down the walls of the containers, wild with their escape. Frightened. Terrified. The outnumbered crew was helpless to stop them.
The Live-7 chopper dove toward the black water and hovered over the ship. Stevie and her crew remained behind, staying with the woman who had gone overboard. The radio came alive with requests for the Coast Guard. The Hana would never make port, would never lead the police anywhere. Not to the sweatshop, not to Melissa. The press had ruined everything.
CHAPTER 67
eports from the covert surveillance teams established at both construction sites identified by LaMoia’s visit to City Hall had already suggested that Delancy Avenue Wharf was the container delivery’s backup location. For the last hour, three cars of Asian males had been observed driving the area, circling like hungry buzzards. Fifteen minutes earlier, two of those men had jumped the fence at the site and had hot-wired and fired up the crane, breaking any number of laws in the process. Boldt allowed himself the faint hope that his team still had a chance.