‘Last man coming down now.’ It was the pilot’s voice over our loudspeaker. ‘I’ll be leaving you then, Skip. I’m at call if they want me. I’m to pick them up at Namu, or else they’ll send an amphibian up for them. Okay — you got that? You’re to collect the bods when they’ve finished the job and deliver them to Namu. The motor yacht, incidentally, is Colombian-registered. She’s hove-to with a Mounty and two customs boys on board. Over.’
Cornish already had the mike to his mouth. ‘That’s presuming tug, yacht and barge are cleared by the rummage party. What happens if they’re not cleared?’
‘Then I guess all three vessels will be under arrest,’ came the answer. ‘Customs will stay on board, so will the police officer. They’ll make for Port Hardy most like. Wherever it is, you and I won’t have to worry about them. They’ll have borrowed their own transport. Okay?’
‘Yes, okay.’
‘Then I’ll get going. See if I can find my way back in this dirty crud. Ta-ta — let’s both of us hope they locate whatever it is they’re looking for. Out.’ And the big chopper lifted away, swinging its blunt nose westward, its landing lights suddenly cut off. Almost immediately it vanished from sight behind the grey, silvery wall that marked the iridescent limit of our own and the tug’s lights.
Cornish hung up the VHP mike and turned to the Mate. ‘Curly, have the deckies stand by to go alongside. We’ll hitch onto the tug and give the engines a rest. The sea’s calm enough.’
Not only was the Angeles-Georgia tug called the Gabriello, but she was manned by an ethnic mixture of Greek, Mexican and Italian Americans. The captain was of Welsh-Cretan extraction, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, truculent little man, who strutted around the deck of his flat-iron of a ship shouting at us, ‘Yu guys are wasting your time. Yu won’t find no contraband on my ship. Nothing. D’yu hear? Yu won’t find nothing illegal. Yu look on the barge. That bumboat’s none of my responsibility. Yu look there if yu think anybody got liquor or drugs. I bring it up empty, yu understand. Empty as a dead man’s arse, but what those timber cowboys put in her besides logs, Christ only knows. Not me. It’s nuthin’ to do with me wot yu find there.’
We were tied up to that tug for almost six hours, right through the night until dawn came and the sun began burning up the fog, our whole world turning from sepia to silver and aglow with the warmth of a hidden furnace. I slept a little. Not much. Tom I don’t believe slept at all; by morning his face was haggard, his eyes puffed and slightly inflamed. Once, sitting beside me with a cup of coffee, he had talked about drugs, comparing the operation that was being carried out now with the attitude of US authorities to liquor back in the 1920s. ‘Prohibition put liquor underground. It was hoodlums and mobsters that handled it then. Now it’s respectable and people accept that there’ll be deaths on the road and mayhem on the football terraces as the result of over-indulgence.’ He was drawing a comparison between drink and drugs and, though he was clearly trying to justify his own use of cocaine, I knew far too little about it to argue with him.
His point was that it was the outlawing of drugs, the prohibition of them — and he emphasized that he was only talking about cocaine and the coca leaf — that had made the traffic lucrative and driven it underground into the hands of the criminal element. At one time coke had been respectable, the liquors derived from the coca leaf regarded as beneficial as well as stimulating. An Italian had distilled a liquor from it that was like an elixir, sending it to all the crowned heads of Europe, to the President, even the Pope — all had praised it. And there was that great American drink, based on it and still imprinted with the name. ‘No coke in it now. Suddenly the medical boys turned against it and the world became teetotal on drugs, coke in particular. Pity!’ His hands were trembling, the coffee cup rattling, a nerve twitching the muscles of his jaw. ‘If there wasn’t so much money in it, then bastards like that — ‘ he nodded towards the ship’s hull plates creaking against the big plastic fenders that separated us from the tug — ‘wouldn’t have muscled in on the towing contract I had.’ He shook his head, his shoulders sagging. ‘I never should have sold that timber. So much money… Jesus Christ! It seemed such waste — the money I needed just standing there.’ Tears of self-pity stood in his eyes. ‘Temptation… The Devil, if you like — God! You lawyers, you sit there on your bums, smug as the last trump, never stepping out of line, conforming and keeping to precedent, turning your nose up at lesser mortals and passing judgment on them for their indiscretions… And now there’s Miriam. What the hell happens to her when they’ve found the drugs and Wolchak hears I was on this bloody Coastguard cutter? He’ll think it’s my fault. He’ll blame me.’
‘They haven’t found anything,’ I said, trying to comfort him. ‘They’ve been over three hours at it — ‘
‘No, but they will. They will.’ He was quite certain this was the drugs route to Chicago. ‘They virtually told me so. Anyway, it all adds up.’
But the fact was they didn’t find any drugs. One member of the tug’s crew, a Mexican, had a small amount of cannabis tucked away amongst some socks at the bottom of his suitcase. And on the big motor-cruising yacht, which was carrying a package group of hunters from California up to Prince Rupert, they had found one of the party in possession of narcotic cigarettes. But they hadn’t charged either the American or the Mexican, merely confiscating the cigarettes and the cannabis. They had also found three hand guns. But none of this was what they had been looking for.
Almost six hours they had spent rummaging the three vessels and that was all in the way of contraband they had found. It was the two officers on the barge that finished first. ‘Guess there’s not so very many nooks and crannies on a barge you can hide things.’ The man had smiled ruefully, adding that they hadn’t been looking for the odd little bag of the stuff.
‘The tip-off was that the yacht would be carrying big bags or containers of raw cocaine.’ But when the yacht was finally cleared to proceed, and the officers ferried across to the cutter in the inflatable workboat, they admitted that, not only was there no coke on the vessel, but the passengers were all genuine Californian businessmen taking a hunting holiday.
As one of them put it with what I thought was a touch of envy: ‘Get away from the wife, get as drunk as a coot, talk smut and do what you dam’ well like with nobody around to tell you don’t. Reck’n the company running them hunting cruises got it made. They were all as rich as hell and enough booze on board to give any ordinary fella the shakes in a week.’ All they had managed to achieve in the three and a half hours they had been on board was to collect the bugging device that had enabled the yacht to be tracked by satellite.
Dawn broke and the last of the customs men came aboard just before seven. They were dead tired and all of them below, drinking coffee and eating into the cook’s supplies of sausages and bacon, as Cornish gave the order to throw off the warps, the engines picking up as we got under way and turned our bows to the north, followed by the complaints and curses of the tug’s dark-haired skipper. He was out on the sidedeck, shaking his fist. Then, just before disappearing into the fog, he grinned at us and made a rude gesture.
As well as the customs men, and the RCMP officer neat in his uniform of blue blouse and trousers with yellow stripe, there was an American, a short, explosive little man with a crumpled, weatherbeaten face. When I went down for coffee shortly after we had got under way he was holding forth to the others along the lines that the bastards had got away with it this time, but next time they played yachts and barges in Canadian waters they’d be escorted into harbour ‘and I’ll bloody see that all three vessels are taken to pieces bit by bit.’