The two brothers who co-owned the lobster boat Robin Mary Joseph Warren Katy were out on Penobscot Bay just before sunrise, motoring at full throttle toward their lobster grounds, 400 pots to pull that day. Their view of the mast and partially submerged bow of the Hinckley drifting dead ahead of them was blocked by the rising sun. The lobster boat was almost on top of the hulk of the sailboat before they saw it. They cut their engine and slowly circled the sailboat, looking to see if anybody was on board.
Not seeing anybody, they radioed the Rockland Coast Guard station and reported what they’d found. The Coast Guard ordered them to stand by the vessel until assistance arrived. Lobstermen being lobstermen—no great fans of authority or the Coast Guard—they radioed the GPS coordinates of the boat and took off once again at full throttle.
The Coast Guard’s 110-foot Island-class coastal patrol boat Wrangell was returning to Rockland after a one-week VBST, vessel boarding and security team, patrol off the Maine coast, inspecting container ships bound for Portland and Boston. The radio operator at Coast Guard Station Rockland diverted the Wrangell to the coordinates given by the lobstermen.
It took the patrol boat, traveling through the flat water near its top speed of twenty-nine knots, less than an hour to reach the Hinckley. The captain ordered three men to lower a rigid-bottom inflatable boat and inspect the sailboat. Arriving alongside, two of the men hopped into the sailboat’s cockpit, which was full of water. The men were thankful they wore full immersion suits in the cold water. Clipped around their waists were utility belts with the full VBST pack of equipment they wore when boarding suspicious boats, including their sidearms.
Looking into the boat’s cabin, they observed one end of the life raft coming from the forward cabin.
There was three feet of air space beneath the ceiling in the main cabin. The two men climbed into the cabin, intending to inspect the boat for survivors, hoping they would not find any bodies. The main cabin and the forward cabin were both empty. One man forced open the door to the head compartment, where the toilet was located, and glanced inside. Nobody was there. He did not notice the open seacock beneath the water.
The men were puzzled but relieved that they’d found nothing especially gross, no decomposing bodies, to report. Looking around the cabin, one man noticed that the cushion on the starboard settee had floated free. The top of the settee looked as if it had been ripped open, exposing the water tank beneath. On closer inspection, he saw the top of the water tank had been smoothly cut out.
“What do you suppose caused that?” he asked his buddy, who shook his head and leaned forward to look into the opening. As he did so, a loud bleeping filled the cabin.
“What the hell was that?” the other man asked.
The first coastguardsman reached toward his belt and lifted a small, rectangular black device on which a red light was flashing and from which the bleep, bleep, bleep sound was coming. He unclipped the device from his waist and held it close to the opening in the settee. The sound increased and the red light flashed more rapidly.
“Holy fucking shit,” he muttered, holding his Polimaster personal radiation monitor, the device coastguardsmen used to check cargo containers for signs of hidden radioactive material. A red LED on top of the device was flashing rapidly and the device emitted a continuous bleep, bleep.
The man leaped from the cabin into the sailboat’s cockpit and screamed to the third coastguardsman waiting in the inflatable boat alongside.
“Call the captain. Now. Quick. We have a situation here.”
CHAPTER 27
Enclosed stadiums, fine as they were for sporting events, don’t work as detention centers. That lesson was learned in New Orleans. The Agganis Arena, to put it bluntly, stunk. There were no showers. The miasma of 4,000 people living together twenty-four hours a day, cooking food on hotplates when they tired of trying to eat what was trucked in to the concession stands, settled down from the domed ceiling like a fogbank over the surface of the ocean, gradually lowering until it hovered just over the heads of the people on the floor, engulfing those families who’d staked out higher sections of the seating area.
Something has to be done with these people, thought retired General Hutchings Paterson, director of the Department of Homeland Security. Gen. Paterson was responsible for housing the Israeli detainees. He knew he had a problem but was at a loss with what to do with the people he was holding. There was not enough prison space in the Northeast to house them, even if prison were the solution. After all, they had not been charged with any crime. From what he’d heard, they would be dealt with by the military, not the criminal system, not even by Immigration and Customs. That was fine with him. He just wished somebody would come up with a bright idea. Soon.
Harry Wade, the wonder-manager recruited from Honda Motors USA to revitalize the moribund Federal Emergency Management Agency, had won wide praise the past year for FEMA’s response to what was dubbed the Twin Hurricanes, which resulted from Hurricane Jack branching into two separate cells tracking side by side. This had never happened before. Because Hurricane Karla was already forming, claiming the K name, the twin cells were named Hurricane Jack and Hurricane Jill. The storms struck southern Florida from both the east and west simultaneously, causing record property losses and loss of life. Wade telephoned Gen. Paterson.
“General, I understand you have a few thousand people on your hands in Massachusetts and no place to put them,” Wade said. Problems, to Wade, were like daisies on the lawn—something to be dealt with, plucked and displayed.
“Nice to hear from you, Harry,” Gen. Paterson said into the telephone, signaling his first assistant director to pick up the extension next to the sofa in the director’s office. “Haven’t spoken with you since that reception at the British Embassy, when the prince introduced the new wife, that third one. Let’s hope he got it right this time, them being our one and only ally in Europe.”
“His problem isn’t in outliving his wives,” Wade joked. “His problem is that it looks like his mother is going to outlive him.”
Gen. Paterson laughed politely.
“I’m calling about your situation in Boston, General. You’ve got thousands of people trying to live in a basketball stadium, with more being arrested every day.”
“Yes, Harry, it was my people who stopped that Amtrak train heading to Montreal and checked Americards. We picked up a dozen Israelis trying to get out of Boston.”
“And what a good job that was. But where are those people, General? Cooped up in that basketball stadium at Boston University. That’s a problem.” Wade had a solution. “Here’s my suggestion. You can’t take all those Jews and hand them over to the Arabs, like the Arabs want us to do. Not after the TV coverage of those camps over there. Wouldn’t look good. Time for that is past. Agree with me so far?”
“The president tried getting those ships out of our hair and he failed,” Paterson said. “We’ve lost the option of returning these people to their homeland, like we did with all the other illegals in the past, since their homeland no longer exists—at least, as their home. So go on.”
“General, FEMA’s got access to a former military camp with housing for five thousand people in more comfort than any other federal detention facility,” Wade said happily. “It’s right in Massachusetts, a military place with loads of security, but a place with enough comforts so the liberals won’t scream too loud. We just removed the last of our Jack and Jill refugees from Camp Edwards at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. Great facility. We left it all spiffed up. Why don’t you ship ’em down there, General?”