"Good to know." Cal 's phone rang. It was the EO. He listened and hung up. "It was a dust bunny," he announced.
There was a brief silence, unusual in the middle of launching the helo. "I beg your pardon, Captain?" the XO finally said.
"A dust bunny," Cal said. "That's what jammed the steering linkage at five degrees port."
No one believed him, but he was the captain so no one said so, until the EO reappeared on the bridge with the dust bunny in question, a tiny scrap of fabric, oil-soaked and well-chewed, on display in the palm of his hand. "We figure someone was mopping oil out of the steering linkage with a rag and left this behind."
"Of course at the most inopportune possible time," the XO said tartly.
From the expression on the EO's face, a normally very unflappable man, Cal rather thought the XO was right.
They spent the rest of the day chasing the go fast.
"He would not stop for anything," he said to Kenai.
"I thought you could shoot out the engines."
"We could," Cal said, "if, a, the.50-caliber on the helo hadn't jammed, and b, we didn't have a problem fueling the helo when she came back to gas up."
"Yeah, gas is kinda important," Kenai, the veteran pilot, said. "What happened?"
"We thought at first something was wrong with the fueling system, but it turned out during the last refit the helo manufacturer had installed a new fuel coupling without telling anyone and without updating the specs. You know at a gas station when your car is full the handle clicks off?"
"Yeah?"
"That was what was happening when we tried to fuel the helo. It took us a week to figure out what the hell was going on."
"So you didn't fly for a week?"
"Oh no, we flew, the engineers figured out a way around it."
"Must have been frustrating."
"Yeah, well. Been nice to have caught ourselves a live one." He sighed. "We aren't seeing a lot of action this side of the isthmus since we got the smugglers here pretty much bottled up."
"Bottled up where?"
"There are three natural chokepoints in the Caribbean. Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba, and the Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico. If they're coming north, they are most likely coming through one of those. We know it, they know we know it, and they've gotten a lot cagier because of it."
"So what can you do?"
"Chase them," Cal said. "Chase them until they run out of gas. Chase them until they break down. Chase them until we catch up with them. Box them in with another cutter."
"What did you do this time?"
"Well, we caught up with him. We fired a stitch of warning shots from the machine gun across the bow to make them slow down. They never do, but we try. Then the goddamn.50-caliber jams, so they can't take out the engines."
"So they got away?"
"The aviators told me they flew so low over the go fast that the go-fast guys stood a pole up in the middle of the boat so they couldn't get close enough to drop a net, which they know we do sometimes so we can snarl their prop."
"Clever," Kenai said.
"Yeah, they've had a lot of experience running from us," Cal said. "Anyway, we chase him all day. Eventually, we've got two Coast Guard cutters, our helo, two Customs jets, and a Jamaican Navy patrol boat all engaged in pursuit of this yo-yo, and guess what?"
"What?"
"He got away."
"You're kidding."
"I wish."
"I didn't know Jamaica even had a navy," she said. "How much did that cost the nation?"
"It's better you should not know. The only upside is when last sighted he was headed south, which means he didn't get his drugs to market."
"They will eventually, though."
"They will," Cal said. "Or somebody else will. We're intercepting more drugs here and in EPAC every year, and you know what that means?"
"What?"
"It means we are responsible for driving up the price of drugs in the U.S. Supply and demand."
"You'd rather be in the Bering?" she said. "Twelve-foot swells, forty-knot winds, and ice forming on the bow?"
"In the Bering we'd be doing a boarding every other day, if not every day. Plus in the Bering there is always the possibility of a search and rescue. Out here…" His voice trailed off.
"You don't feel that the Coast Guard's efforts are being utilized to their fullest potential?" she said, a smile in her voice.
"I think we're pissing away any relevancy we had as a service," he said.
"Ah. I was trying to be diplomatic about it."
"I noticed."
"I like the dust bunny part of the story best," she said.
"You like a three-hundred-seventy-eight-foot cutter being put on hold in the middle of an operation?" he said a little dryly.
"Well," she said apologetically, "yeah. It has such a ring of…" She thought for a moment. "Inevitability, I guess. It's the little things that will screw you, every time. A tile falling off the shuttle. A morning temperature low enough to freeze an O-ring."
He so didn't want to go there. At least his cutter still floated when it got into trouble. Space shuttles exploded. "Munro's almost forty years old, with a bunch of systems some of which are older than that, none of which were necessarily designed to work together. And let's face it, it's not like the Coast Guard ever gets first pick of the tech. A lot of our systems fall off the backs of trucks headed for the Navy. Sometimes I think it's a miracle we get off the dock."
"There's a story," she said, "so far as I know actually true. Gus Grissom was being interviewed on the radio one night, and when the host asked him how he felt waiting for launch on top of a Mercury rocket, he said, 'How would you feel sitting on top of a million different parts, all of which were manufactured by the lowest bidder?' " Cal laughed. "Yikes."
"Yeah, and that was back when all astronauts were de facto heroes and NASA could do no wrong." She stretched.
"Grissom was one of the guys who died in the capsule fire, right?"
"Yeah. Grissom, White, and Chaffee."
"You ever wonder if…" He hesitated.
"Every day," she said. "Every time I strap myself in. I'd still kill anyone who tried to take the job away from me." She smiled. "Just like you."
He thought of the go fast getting away, in spite of the massive amount of American manpower and assets arrayed against it. "Yeah," he said, a little wearily. "Just like me."
"Part of your problem is you're tired."
"And you aren't?"
"Time for me to be tired when we're wheels down."
"So long as you aren't arrested for homicide before you lift off."
She laughed. After a moment, she said, "Not loving the drug war, are you, Cal?"
"Not so much, no. If I had my druthers, I'd treat all drugs like alcohol, legalize them and tax the hell out of them and earmark the proceeds to underwrite the cost of marching every sixth grader in the nation through a detox center. 'There, you little twit, right there, see that guy sweating and shaking and screaming that the big snake's gonna get him? That's what'll happen to you if you use drugs.' After that, it's up to them and their parents."
He closed his eyes against the bright sun. "And I could get to work on stuff that matters. Like making sure your sweet ass gets itself safely in the air.
She raised her head from her arms again to smile at him. "You think my ass is sweet, do you?"
"Roll over here and I'll show you how sweet. Oh, never mind." He drained his beer, picked her up, and carried her into the bungalow.