Caribbean's Keeper Read online

  Cole knew the Coast Guard was on high alert that evening, given the weather. There were almost certainly cutters, aircraft, and small boats all scouring their radars for a little green blip, indicating someone sneaking south. Satisfied each time that no one was in their immediate area, Kevin throttled the engines back up and pressed south. The stars were bright and Cole’s mind wandered back to nights on watch on Delaney. He’d forgotten how bright the stars were at sea. Moonlight reflected down on the water, and Cole’s nerves settled after an hour or so. He was back on the open water and could feel the ocean air on his skin. It was exhilarating and the Grady-White was a solid boat out on the water. Cole almost forgot entirely about what they were doing as he enjoyed the ride.

  After midnight, Kevin brought the boat to a stop. He squinted and looked forward, standing up on his toes. Cole looked too and could see faint lights to their left.

  Havana.

  “Holy shit, that’s Havana,” Cole said as the reality set in.

  Kevin never stopped looking forward. “Yup.”

  “We’re heading west of Havana, but here’s where we start to worry about the Cuban Border Guard. Do you see anything ahead of us that looks like a boat?”

  Cole scanned back and forth, his eyes well trained to pick up the faintest hint of a running light. He’d tracked boats at night, but with the help of radar. The Grady-White had one, but Cole knew it was short range and if anything came up as a blip, it would probably be too late, so they left it turned off.

  Cole pressed his lips together, taking one more slow and deliberate scan. “I don’t see anything.”

  He stepped to the back and took a leak off the stern as Kevin continued to scan forward for any signs of danger. To the north, all Cole saw was a dark sea. He walked back forward and looked again for trouble, but there was none.

  Kevin pressed the throttles ahead, keeping the speed back a bit. They worked slightly west of their original course and before long, Cole saw the rocky coast of Cuba in front of him. It started out as a dark jagged line rising from the horizon and took on a more defined shape as they crept closer. Kevin stopped a few more times, and they both scanned ahead and behind. The only sound was the motor at an idle purr and the water lapping against the hull.

  With the landscape emerging in front of them, Kevin spent more time looking down at the GPS. He played the throttle and slowed down gradually. Cole kept his eyes out and on the water in front of him. He could see the outline of trees now and the moonlight against palm fronds. There was a rocky coastline in front of them and some sort of small coral peninsula on the bow. A wave broke over a reef in the distance every few seconds, its whitewater seemingly floating on an invisible plain. Kevin drove straight at the peninsula then made a hard right turn and slowed the boat as they entered a large bay. A fire smoldered somewhere in the distance and its smell caught Cole’s attention. Unlike a wood fire in the States, a fire in the Caribbean burned mostly green brush—no doubt cut by hand and machete—and its odor was a sweeter and more complex scent. Whoever the farmer was who’d cleared brush that day was certainly asleep by now, and the smoldering remnants of his day’s labor drifted in the midnight land breeze out and over the water.

  Even in the middle of the night, Cole could see it was a beautiful bay with coral heads dotting the water. There were no lights and the bay was calm like glass. The moon cast slivers of light down as it climbed above them and over a low layer of scattered backlit clouds. Kevin sent Cole forward with a flashlight and told him to point it towards a small sandy area nestled behind the peninsula and to flash it three times quickly. Cole complied.

  From somewhere in the brush beyond the beach, three flashes came back towards them. Kevin was as serious as Cole had ever seen him. He pushed the bow right up to the beach and it nudged the sandy bottom a few feet shy of the dry shore. Bodies emerged from the brush and Cole counted eight of them. One more, a man, stayed halfway between the brush and the water. He whistled softly at Kevin and called out, “Ocho, si?”

  Kevin called back, “Bueno.” The man hurried back into the brush and disappeared.

  The passengers wore ragged clothes and each carried a bag about the size of a teenager’s backpack. Kevin and Cole helped them up one at a time and sent them down into the crowded cuddy cabin. They were all thin and their skin dirty, likely from the daylong trip to this much-anticipated rendezvous in the middle of nowhere. They talked to each other softly, some holding hands, and seemed to reassure each other that things were going well. There were two men, but the rest were women and two appeared to be teenage girls. After the last one was onboard and down below, Kevin jumped back to the wheel and reversed out. The motors churned up an immense cloud of sand and the water was clear enough that Cole could see it under the moonlight. Not good for an engine, Cole thought.

  “Drive it like you stole it, huh?” Cole was looking at Kevin as he said it.

  Kevin grinned.

  They backtracked out of the bay the same way they’d entered. Kevin was cautious around the coral heads as a hole in the hull this far from home could spell disaster, and both knew Cuban prison was no fun. After clearing the bay and pointing due north, Kevin opened up the throttles again and the Grady-White surged up and into a rhythmic plane as they screamed back to the north. Cole looked at his watch and saw it was after one in the morning. With the added weight below, they were making 25 knots over the ground. Kevin explained that they wouldn’t stop on the way back like they had heading south, because if they were stopped now, they’d be screwed. This was simply a mad dash. On the trip south, they could have always claimed stupidity or error as their reason for heading into the Florida Straits in the middle of the night. But with eight illegal migrants in the cabin, there was no bullshitting their way out of this one.

  Cole knew that many smugglers would find themselves the subject of hot pursuit as they neared the Florida coast. Customs, Coast Guard, local police, even Florida Wildlife Conservation officers often joined the chase to catch smugglers and defend the integrity of the U.S. border. Cole had been on more than a few chases himself and knew that more than half of the migrants made it to dry land, meeting the “Wet Foot/Dry Foot” policy of the United States. If a Cuban touched dry land, he or she was welcome to stay. That was the goal, and it didn’t matter if they were in handcuffs ten seconds after setting foot on solid ground. They just needed to touch sacred American soil.

  Cole also knew that many made it to the coast without ever being detected. Planes, helicopters, ships, and boats patrolled the waters every day and night, but it was a vast expanse to cover and smugglers knew their routes well. Their chance of success was quite good, or else they wouldn’t bother with the risks. The Cubans who built homemade rafts and attempted to paddle their way north with a trash bag full of their worldly possessions were the unfortunate ones who often died of dehydration or found themselves caught in the Gulf Stream, unwillingly pushed east, then north and into the Atlantic. Cole had seen every stage of death as a boarding officer. He’d carried men and women reduced to skin and bones, many too weak to even stand. In some ways, he knew more than he realized about the eight souls in the cabin below.

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  In all likelihood these migrants onboard the Grady-White were well connected in Florida. Someone, maybe a dad or an uncle, had found their fortune in America and paid a hefty sum to give their family the best shot at reaching Florida. The Cubans who took to rafts and paddled the 90 miles were the most desperate. The eight below were fortunate, and they knew it. Cole looked down at them from time to time and saw the fear of uncertainty on their faces as they were jolted back and forth by the boat as she screamed north.

  He smiled at one lady who kept staring at him and gave her a thumbs up. “Bueno.”

  She relaxed a bit, but kept an eye on Cole, looking for the first signs of trouble as they edged closer to Florida. Two hours went by at full speed. Cole scanned the horizon and then the fuel meter on Kevin’s console. They had
a quarter tank left. Kevin exchanged a look with Cole and then back down at his GPS.

  “Thirty minutes, bro.”

  It was now four in the morning. Key West was a faint beacon on the horizon. Kevin kept it on their right side and once again scanned the horizon, comparing what he could see with what his GPS showed on its tiny display. They rounded the uninhabited islands to the west of Key West then turned sharply to the east. Kevin wove the boat at speed around shoal after shoal and brought her to idle after nearly 20 minutes, showing a near-photographic memory of the shallows surrounding Key West. He picked up the phone again and made a call.

  “Normal dropoff?” Kevin nodded as he listened.

  “Cool man, give me ten minutes.” He put the phone down and pushed the throttles forward. Cole could see on the GPS that a marker was sitting where they’d dropped off the Aquaholic. Kevin spotted the bay after some time and slowed the boat. Next to Aquaholic was yet another center console. The eight passengers below were whispering and each of them were trying to look out of the tiny portholes of the cramped cabin. Cole looked down and said, “Bueno,” once again. The older lady smiled back at him this time. Cole could see, and smell, that someone had vomited on the trip, yet none of the other migrants complained.

  Kevin pulled up next to his boat and shut the engines down. They’d run hard for more than six hours and the fuel tanks were all but drained. On the third boat were two men who waved at Kevin. As the migrants stepped up and out of the cabin, they scanned around them, unsure of exactly where they were. Some stretched their arms out and yawned. One of the teenage girls let out a loud screech and ran across Kevin’s boat and into the arms of one of the men on the third boat. He hugged her and motioned with his pointer finger for the rest of them to be quiet. He couldn’t hide a contagious smile as the other seven climbed across Kevin’s boat before exchanging hugs. Cole thought it was surely a long-awaited family reunion, but he watched with indifference. There was no right or wrong in what he’d just been a part of—there were valid and well-intentioned arguments on both sides of the debate over illegal immigration. All Cole knew was that he’d just tasted adrenaline once again and he liked it.

  The driver of the third boat tossed an envelope onto the deck of Kevin’s boat, threw off his mooring line, and idled off into the darkness. Kevin went back to his boat for a plastic two-gallon jug of gas. Cole, already back on the Aquaholic, watched as Kevin poured gas all over the console, deck, and rails of the Grady-White. Thinking for a moment he might burn it, Cole sat on the far rail and looked to Kevin, who just smiled and laughed. “Relax dude, it’s just to make sure we didn’t leave any prints.”

  Kevin hopped over to the Aquaholic and parted lines with the Grady-White, now sitting quietly again at anchor. He tossed the GPS over the side in the depths of the main channel and took both his and Cole’s gloves and stashed them in his pack.

  Kevin looked back once and then said to Cole, “Well, we broke it in for some doctor.”

  The two laughed and relaxed as they motored back to the Garrison Bight docks. Cole tied the Aquaholic to a cleat at their usual place, and both of them walked back to the apartment. Hues of blue were beginning to form in the sky as they walked into the living room. Kevin tossed the gloves into the trash and went straight to the refrigerator. Tossing Cole a beer, he grabbed one himself, and the two took their usual seats on the front porch. Daylight was breaking. A rooster came alive somewhere in the distance and, with that, it was just another day in Key West.

  Cole took a giant sip of his Dos Equis and focused his energies on remembering the smell of that smoldering fire somewhere on the wilds of the Cuban coast. On an empty stomach, the beer worked quick on Cole’s mind. He fancied himself as a modern-day pirate, now sharing in an ancient profession of arms, wit, and bravado. As they sat there with their feet on the railing and their chairs kicked back on hind legs, Cole thought about the family that was reunited. He’d now seen the entire spectrum of southern Florida’s illegal migrant epidemic. It had plagued the country since its inception and Cole took a second deep sip of his beer as he tried to figure out where he stood on the issue.

  “What’s your take on all of this?” He was looking at Kevin.

  Kevin pulled the envelope from his pocket, opened it, and counted out bills with one hand. He put ten one-hundred dollar bills on the table and pushed them over to Cole. “That’s how I feel about that.”

  Cole counted them himself then folded and stashed the money in his pocket. “All right, then. Good enough for me.”

  Kevin looked back out at the quiet street in front of them and finished off his beer. “You’re in, bro?” His tone indicated more of a question than a statement.

  Cole laughed for a second and nodded. His mind was clouded, partly by fatigue and partly from the beer. It was a dangerous decision. He thought back to the feeling of being on the water, the rush of breaking someone else’s rules, and the roll of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. He thought too of the Coast Guard, the years he’d spent pursuing a dream, and how it had all fallen apart in front of him.

  “Sign me up,” was all Cole said.

  Chapter 4 – Indian Summer

  TWO WEEKS PASSED before Cole brought the subject up again with Kevin. They were under a palm tree on Fort Jefferson sitting idly under the noon sun when Cole spoke up.

  “So when are we going again?”

  Kevin laughed to himself, his arms up and crossed behind his head as he lay prostrate on the sandy grass. His eyes were closed when he answered. “It’s all you, bro. I like to go alone, plus the money is best when you go by yourself.”

  “So I just call your guy?” asked Cole, who was sitting forward with his arms draped over his knees and his heels dug into the sand. He yawned as he spoke.

  “Pretty much, man. I’ll give you his number. Don’t save it in your phone, just keep it written down somewhere. He’s a bit funny about his phones.”

  Cole nodded, looking down between his feet and spent some time thinking about what he was asking for. Criminal networks—and that was what this was—were a slippery slope. That much Cole knew. Where it ended he had no idea. He thought about finding his own limits and he thought about jail, then he pondered the look on Potts’ face if he ever found out his errant junior officer was rotting in some Cuban prison. He also thought about extending his middle finger to Potts as he sped past on a midnight run and the satisfaction of doing something well. That thought took hold. Cole was his own captain, master of his own destiny. He took a deep breath and solidified a plan in his mind.

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  Nearly a month after their first run, Kevin handed Cole a piece of paper one evening and told him to call the number written on it. Cole took the note, stuffed it in his pocket, and played the part as if nothing had happened. They were in the midst of another raucous night and Kevin had been gone for about ten minutes when he returned with the note. Cole figured Kevin had been off talking to Miguel, “the guy,” and Cole’s chance rested on the other end of that phone number.

  Cole nursed his drinks for the rest of the night, slowly sobering up to the thought of his first run as a captain. A young woman, pretty and barely in her twenties, had latched onto him earlier in the day. They’d been out on the Aquaholic and Kevin acted as a good wingman with her friends while Cole played the requisite games he’d become so good at. He was a bit burned by the sun and felt the dried salt on his skin from a swim he’d taken with her earlier. With smuggling on his mind, he’d slipped though and the night was slowing down. Worse yet, he’d forgotten her name, a major transgression in the game of drunken lust. She’d caught his mood change as well.

  With her fingers clutching the pockets of his shorts and her body pressed against his, she momentarily had his attention.

  “What’s got you so down?” she asked playfully and bit lightly on her lower lip, her head tilted to one side as she pulled herself even closer against Cole. Her fingers were now locked through his belt loops.r />
  “Just a long day, I suppose.” Cole feigned interest, but couldn’t shake his mind away from the thoughts in his head.

  “Something’s got you down.” She pulled his waist harder against her hips.

  “How do you know that?” Cole looked into her pretty eyes.

  “I can just tell, and I want to have fun.” She smiled shyly.

  Cole, recognizing the cues at hand, went into recovery mode. “You’re a sweet girl, Crystal,” he said, thinking she looked like a Crystal. It was too late when he remembered that Crystal was the week before. Damn this rum, he thought.

  “It’s Brittany.”

  She released her grips, pushed herself away from Cole and slapped him on the left cheek. Clearly insulted and regaining her senses, she separated from the intimacy moments before.

  Growing increasingly mad, she yelled, “You’re drunk.”

  “So are you.” Cole laughed just a bit and pulled back thinking for a second she might swing again.

  By this point, her friends had parted ways with Kevin and were on their way to her defense. The fat one looked like she could do some damage and Cole knew he’d been beat. Kevin was still casually leaning against the railing at the bar, looking at Cole, and laughing his ass off. The girls departed back onto Duval Street and Cole made his way over to Kevin, watching the girls as they disappeared down the street.

  “That was awesome,” Kevin said as he finished up the rest of his drink and looked at his watch. It was just after midnight and Duval Street was at full speed.

  “I’m done.” Cole tossed his plastic cup in the trash and the two departed. Kevin was still laughing as they rounded a corner and walked back on the side streets.

  “Fucking Duval Street.” Cole was laughing now too, looking down and shaking his head.

  “You gonna file charges?” Kevin punched Cole in the shoulder.