"Sir?"
Cal jerked his head in the general direction of the freighter. "How many more got through while we were picking people out of the water? Two? Five? A dozen? How many of these banana boats beached themselves on a Florida beach and their cargo walked ashore?"
"We can't stop them all," the XO said.
"We can't stop hardly any of them," Cal said. "We're spending billions, trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan to bomb the shit out of people who never had a pot to piss in, let alone enough money to buy a one-way ticket on one of these floating coffins. And here we sit, our finger stuck in a dike that is leaking like a sieve in a hundred other places. We can't stop them all. We can't contain them all. God knows we can't make their own countries more attractive so they'll want to stay home."
The XO considered this. "Today was a good day, sir," he said, a hint of a question in his words. "At least most of them are alive to make a run for the border another day."
"Agreed," Cal said. "I just worry about who else is coming into the country on all the boats we're missing. Be pretty damn easy for some bin Laden wannabe to bribe the right skipper, waltz off the ship somewhere north of Palm Beach, and hitch a ride north so he could light off his backpack nuke in the middle of Dupont Circle."
"I'd like to see bin Laden wading ashore at Palm Beach," the XO said meditatively. "All those little old ladies with blue hair and lime green polyester pantsuits would beat him to death with their Gucci bags before his feet were dry."
Cal laughed, as he had been meant to. "Point taken. Anything else?"
Taffy hesitated. "You up for a little crew confabulation?"
"I don't even know what the hell that means, but it's got to be better than people drowning on my watch." The words came out a little harder than he'd meant and he winced. "Sorry, Taff. Talk to me."
"OS2 Riley."
Cal groaned. "Not again."
"Afraid so. And this time it's someone on the ship."
Cal groaned again. "Who?"
"ET3 Reese. He says it was consensual, she says it wasn't."
Cal swore. "Where?"
" Miami. Last inport. Neither of them live there, don't have family there, are pretty much at loose ends when they go ashore. A bunch of the crew rented rooms in a motel. It started out men with men and women with women."
"And it didn't end up that way. Man, his wife is going to kill him this time."
They both considered that eventuality with pleasure. "What I don't get is how such an undernourished, snot-nosed little twerp gets all the girls," Taffy said.
"Does he still have money troubles?"
"Big ones. Too much house, too much car, too many toys. Not to mention the wife and the two kids, ages one and three."
"How did we hear about this?" Cal said.
"She came to see me."
"In Miami? And she's just getting around to tell us about it now?"
"She told her mother, and her mother told her not to tell. Yeah, I know, but I get the feeling Reese comes from a family that's just barely getting by. I think she's sending money home. She needs the job."
Cal rubbed both hands over his head. His hair was long enough again to be mussed. He wondered if he should call Papa Doc for an appointment for a haircut, and decided it was too close to returning to port. In port, hair was a good thing. Gave Kenai something to hold on to. "What made her come forward now?"
"She says he's coming on to her again."
"Now? Underway?" Cal felt a slow burn.
"I get the feeling"-the XO was notorious for starting sentences this way, and Cal had learned that more often than not Taffy's feelings were right on the money-"that liquor was involved in the onshore incident, although she says no. If that is the case, her judgment was impaired. When she sobered up and realized what she'd done, she was horrified." He wasn't.
"No, sir, he wasn't. The way she tells it, he's looking to continue the, er, relationship on patrol."
"What does he say?"
"Denies everything except the first incident. Which he says was consensual."
"I am tired of this punk screwing around on my ship," Cal said. "Get rid of him for me, XO."
"I'll break out the keelhaul, sir," Taffy said cheerfully. "Just say the word."
"I wish." Cal brooded. "Okay, call shore and have the investigators meet us at the dock. In the meantime, ask Reese if she can last another ten days on the same ship as that asshole."
"And him?"
Cal fixed Taffy with a fierce eye. "Tell him he might like to keep out of the captain's way until then. I don't suppose I could restrict him to quarters?"
"Alas, sir," Taffy said, getting to his feet, "he is by law innocent until proven guilty."
"You're the only guy I know who can use 'alas' in a sentence without sounding like a pansy."
Taffy grinned. "Why, thank you, Captain," he said, and fluttered his eyelashes.
Cal turned serious. "However it turns out, XO, I've had about enough of this selfish, self-involved little brat. Time for the Coast Guard to make his services available elsewhere."
"Understood, sir. He's a presenter at some kind of workshop somewhere when we get in. Always assuming the investigators are done with him by the time he's supposed to leave. So at least you won't have to suffer his presence in port, or not for the short term. Afterward, perhaps I can, uh, divert his return to the ship. We'll see."
The door closed behind the XO.
Cal, inexplicably, felt better. On a ship with 150 mixed-gender crew members, situations like this were inevitable, although on taking command of Munro he had worked tirelessly to ensure they wouldn't happen with any frequency, if at all. Well, he had failed, but dealing with the fallout from something like this was a lot easier on the psyche than fishing dead bodies out of the water.
He went down to the mess deck to make sure his boarding team members were eating right.
8
WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST 2007
"Damn it!"
Chisum rarely swore, and then only mildly, but it was enough to make his personal assistant raise her eyebrows. "Bad news?"
He looked up from the report and said with feeling, "Sometimes probable cause really gets in the way."
"Yes, it does, and I thought that was why the previous administration did away with it in these cases. Also habeas corpus and-"