Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,83
“Looks like.”
He nevertheless continued a back-street route down to the Intracoastal, where they parked a couple of hundred feet from Cattaneo’s chunky white sailboat. Virgil carried the tanks and Regio and Lange carried the two gear bags down to the boat.
“Right on time,” Cattaneo said. He checked Virgil: “You ready, Willy?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Virgil said. “We got things to talk about. I need GPS numbers, coordinates, I need to know what tricky thing I’ve got to do to find the cans.”
“We got time to talk,” Cattaneo said. “Get everything down below and out of sight. I want to be the only one visible as we’re going out through the cut.”
“Got two hours before it gets dark,” Virgil said.
“Going to take a while to get there at four knots,” Cattaneo said. “We’ve got this nailed down. Don’t worry about it.”
Rae to Virgil: “You know when I said I was getting puckered up? I’ll tell you what, cracker: right now, I couldn’t poop poppy seeds.”
* * *
From across the Intracoastal, Lucas, Devlin, and the FBI team watched the boat from a condo parking lot. “They’re doing it,” Devlin said. “It’s all going down.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Lange stayed in the cockpit with Cattaneo as they cast off, then eased the boat into the Intracoastal and motored north toward the Port Everglades cut into the Atlantic. The boat rode slowly and smoothly with a southerly breeze not strong enough to create even a light chop on the waterway.
Virgil could talk to Cattaneo through the open hatchway and as they passed under a bridge, asked, “When do we get there?”
“Around six-thirty,” he said. “We’ve got to go through one drawbridge and then I’ll give the wheel to Matt and we’ll talk.”
“We’re going to motor the whole way?”
“Yes.”
Rae was poking around the interior of the cabin and said, “This is really neat. I’ve never been on, like, a yacht. It’s like an RV, but way better.”
“Until you get in rough water,” Regio said. “It’s quiet today, so that’s not a problem. But if you start getting queasy . . . If you have to hurl, do it in the sink, or over the side.”
* * *
They had to wait a few minutes at a drawbridge, then Cattaneo steered it through, gave the wheel to Lange, and dropped down into the cabin. The cabin was fifteen feet long, with two parallel benches, each six feet long, facing each other and covered with beige Naugahyde cushions. The deck was wood strip, the walls were white fiberglass.
“Everybody sit down,” Cattaneo said. “Now, Willy. The cans will be in a straight line on the bottom, the line’s only about a half mile long. They were dropped out of a chute over the side of a moving reefer ship that had stopped at Port Everglades and was heading north to Norfolk.”
Virgil: “They stopped? Wasn’t that a big risk?”
“No. The ship was carrying bananas inside containers in a temperature-controlled hold. Our stuff was in a little access hatch under the floor of the hold, between the floor and the hull. There was a stack of Jersey-bound containers sitting on top of it. Too much for the inspectors to move without it being a major pain in the ass. Once the Florida containers were pulled out, and the ship was underway again, the containers were moved and our stuff pulled out from below and loaded into the chute.”
Virgil: “Cool.”
“We have an exact GPS location for both the beginning and end of the string. Our first diver had no problem finding the cans, but then, we were able to drop her right on top of them. You’re going to have to get there yourself.”
“I can do that. I’m surprised the Coast Guard didn’t find them, though.”
“The Coast Guard was mostly looking in the wrong place. The string is right on the edge of where they were searching and they are very hard to see, unless you have one of these.” He held up what looked like an oversized remote control for a television, except that it had no visible buttons and did have three rubber arm straps and a parachute-cord hand-loop.
“You turn this on by slamming the wand forward.” He snapped the wand forward in his hand and a red LED light blinked at the top; the blinks continued for ten seconds or so, then turned off. “It’s transmitting a low-frequency sound—most people can’t hear it—that will be picked up by the cans. That will turn on bright white LEDs on the outside of the cans.