For instance: Tampa is the largest fertilizer port in the world, so ships often bring in highly volatile anhydrous ammonia and sulphur. Tampa is also the import destination for all jet fuel, gasoline, and diesel used from Orlando south to Naples and north to Crystal River. Many millions of metric tons of petroleum products cross Tampa Bay annually.
Put a foreign skipper who is unfamiliar with the waters at the helm of an ammonia tanker or a jet fuel tanker in a raging squall, in a narrow channel, and suddenly, two hundred thousand unsuspecting people in downtown Tampa are at great risk.
To be a Maritime Harbor pilot, you must be a consummate professional, so I’d lucked out by getting my pal Harris to tour me around the bay.
Few men had more detailed knowledge of the area and local waters.
I bowed up to Tampa’s classy yacht club at a little after one P.M., and Harris stepped aboard while I was already backing away. Because it made sense, I slid over into the starboard swivel seat and let him take the wheel.
In my own skiff, it is not something I often do.
I’ve got a 225-Mercury mounted on the transom, but it’s quiet enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice much to say to me, “Are we looking for people or places?”
I told him, “In a way, both. If you don’t mind, I’d sort of like to get an overview first. A general look around. I want to get to know the area a whole lot better than I know it now.”
He nodded. “In that case, I’ll start by showing you how Tampa works; how the port works. For a general overview, the first thing we’ll do is make the loop through the city. The scenic route.” He looked at the silver Submariner on his left wrist. “It’s still around lunch time, so all the beautiful women execs and secretaries will be out strolling the streets. After that, I suppose you have something more specific in mind?”
I shrugged, turned, and opened the live well, in which I’d stored block ice and drinks. I opened a bottle of Steinlager for him, took a bottle of water for myself, and said, “Let’s do the loop. After that, yeah, we’ll talk specifics.”
It is a pleasure to ride with a good small-boat handler. Riding with a poor boat handler is like taking a physical beating. Harris is one of the rare good ones. We had a southwest wind gusting between fifteen and eighteen, but he got the boat trimmed just right, tabs and engine angled precisely, bow down and hull listing ever so slightly to starboard, and we cut our way smoothly toward the skyline of downtown Tampa.
As we neared Davis Islands, he began a steady commentary, pointing out landmarks with a tactical brevity that bore no resemblance to anything typically offered by a sightseeing guide.
“See that point straight ahead, all the masts sticking up in front of that row of beautiful houses? That’s the Davis Islands Yacht Club. They take it seriously, just like the Tampa folks. Real sailors, not phonies. Just beyond is the seaplane basin… and the municipal airport. If you ever get in a real tight situation and need a fast egress-the civilian variety, I’m talking about-I’d make the right phone calls, then make a beeline for this area. Chopper, seaplane, a fast car. If someone’s on your tail, it’d be tough for them to be certain how you spooked out.”
That’s the way it went. Him talking, me listening, making mental notes. Much, much better than hanging around the pool at the Vinoy trying to memorize the chart.
Off to our right was Hookers Point. There were ocean-going freighters, barges, and tugs moored alongside avenues of commercial dockage, cranes and semis working. On shore were acres of storage tanks, some for liquids, some built as elevators for fertilizer. Many of the containers were painted with seascape murals: dolphins, breaching whales, sharks. Others were industrial gray or green.
Looking as the shoreline swept past, I listened to Harris say, “Tampa is part of a long peninsula that hangs down into Tampa Bay. The Port of Tampa is made up mostly of a second, smaller peninsula to the east, closer to the mainland. Kind of like a miniature Tampa hanging down”-he had a chart out now, folded into a square, showing me-“so it’s an ideal location. The port’s a couple thousand acres, so it’s isolated from downtown and all the residential stuff, but it still has almost instant access to the city and the Interstates.”
He told me about some of the freighters he’d transited in and out recently as a pilot, and the many cruise ships, adding, “The big cruise lines love the city. They’re investing more and more-Holland America and Carnival-because here’s what a lot of people don’t realize: Tampa’s closer to the Panama Canal than Miami. It’s faster access to Havana, too. When Cuba opens up? Our cruise business is going to boom off the scale.”
He ran us up Sedon Channel, the pretty houses of Davis Islands off to our left, and directly into the skyscraper-heart of the city: Convention Center, high-rise hotels with marinas and patio bars, WFLA television station, cars streaming over bridges with plasmic rhythm, condo-sized cruise ships moored off to our right, canyons of steel and glass towering over us now in a narrowing waterway that seemed built for gondolas.
Harris was right about the women. Lots of beautiful executive types in business dresses and stockings.
He continued to name key landmarks. Tall buildings, mostly, that could be seen from far offshore.
At one point, he indicated an eight-story, salmon-colored complex next to the Davis Islands Bridge, and said, “That’s Tampa General Hospital. Did you hear about what happened there last night?”
A woman surgeon, he said, had been abducted as she’d walked from the hospital to her home on the south tip of Davis Islands.
“Her name’s Valerie Santos,” he said. “I’ve seen her on some of the local talk shows. This drop-dead gorgeous plastic surgeon who works in the burn unit, and some asshole snatches her.”
Harris told me that a while back, he and another pilot happened to be first on the scene at a local marina fire that had injured a friend of theirs. The hospital staff, he said, had done a hell of a job saving the guy.
Harris added, “I visited him a couple of times in the unit-half-hoping I’d get to see the beautiful doctor lady in person. Never did. But there were some good-looking nurses that made up for it. Shit, now some freak’s got her.”
Harris mentioning Tampa General-particularly the burn unit-reminded me of another freak, Prax Lourdes, which, in turn, reminded me of the esoteric list of drugs he’d demanded.
Thanks to a good and dear thoracic surgeon friend of mine, I’d stopped on my way out of Fort Myers and picked up the boxes of cyclosporine and prednisone that he’d assembled, plus Neurontin capsules in the highest dosage.
The Neurontin was not so easy for him to get. “It’s an antiepilepsy medication,” he said. “We don’t use it in my field.”
Giving away prescription drugs to someone who’s not a patient wasn’t something he did lightly, and I took it as a testament to his confidence in me that he’d made an exception.
When he asked why I needed the meds, I’d told him the truth as I’d been told it: The medicines were for casualties of the war in Masagua and were desperately needed. The request for antiepilepsy med, though, I didn’t understand.
Tomlinson had worked his sources, too. He’d already gotten the immunosuppressant drugs Thymoglobulin and OKT3, all in intravenous infusion forms, and given them to me for safe-keeping.
When I’d told him I was impressed he’d secured them so quickly, he said, “With the medical people I know, all the business I’ve done with them? No worries, man. Don’t be vexed at me, compadre, but my doctor pals also threw in a cylinder of nitrous oxide gas. When I get to St. Pete, you should give it a try. Really, Doc. To me, sevoflurane gas is kinda like eating an anchovy pizza, but without the calories. But nitrous, man, is just good, clean fun. Take a couple whiffs, drink a beer. Then just sit back and watch the world get goofy. Next thing you know, you’re crawling around in the bilge, laughing your ass off.”