and shower sump.
Already the water was a couple of inches above the floor boards, the bilge pumps unable to keep up. Bahmad opened several portholes so that the boat would sink easier without trapped air, then went up to the open deck, closing and latching the door. Aft on the sundeck, he pulled up the two large teak floorboards exposing the slowly idling engines nestled in their spotless, silver insulated compartments. They were huge ten-cylinder supercharged diesels and needed a lot of water for cooling. Two hoses, each of them five inches in diameter, sucked raw water from the sea through strainers and directed the flow to the massive heat exchangers. Bahmad reloaded and shot both hoses completely apart. Instantly two streams of seawater with the strength of firehoses began rushing into the engine compartment, flooding the air intakes. Within seconds the diesels sputtered and died.
Bahmad calmly climbed back up onto the foredeck and made his way to the bow. The boat was already down six inches on her lines. He jumped across to the Margo’s boarding ladder, then took out his stiletto and cut the tether holding the powerboat.
The Aphrodite slowly began to drift away, her bow much higher now than her sinking stern. She would be completely gone in minutes.
Topsides Bahmad found the control for the boarding ladder and brought it up, secured it in its cradle and closed the rail gate.
The last he saw of the Aphrodite before he went inside, she was fifty yards away, her aft deck awash, her bow rising up at a sixty-degree angle.
“Coast Guard Station San Diego, Petty Officer Wickum.” the young man answered. It was 2:00 a.m. and he’d just started on his fifth cup of coffee this shift to keep awake. Absolutely nothing worth a shit was on television tonight.
“This is Special Agent Susan Ziegler with the Drug Enforcement Agency, let me talk to your OD,” she said urgently.
“Yes, ma’am, stand by.” Wickum slid over to the duty officer’s door. The young ensign, his feet propped up was reading a copy of Playboy. “Got a woman from the DBA on one for you, sir. Sounds stressed.”
The OD put the magazine down and picked up the phone. “Ensign Rowley, may I help you, ma’am?”
“I’m Special Agent Susan Ziegler, DBA. I’m about a hundred miles south of you, just outside Ensenada. Is your MECODIR program up and running?”
“Ma’am—”
“I’m on your list, Ensign, look me up. Star-seventeen bright Do it quick because you might have a problem coming your way.”
“Stand by,” Ensign Rowley said, he put her on hold. “We’ve got a possible MECODIR request,” he told Wickum. “Pull it up while I make sure she’s who she says she is.” MECODIR was a Message Content and Direction program that was new to the Coast Guard. Receivers scanning millions of frequencies automatically monitored radio transmissions from seaward around the clock, recording their content and the direction they came from for review by the Coast Guard itself along with a host of other law enforcement and intelligence-gathering agencies. It was a NASA-designed program that had gone operational six months ago. Messages were stored digitally for up to one month. If they were not retrieved by then they were automatically erased. Maydays, or other standard distress calls, kicked off alarms so that human operators could intervene.
Susan Ziegler’s name and the proper identifier code were listed in the authorized users manual and he reconnected with her.
“Yes, ma’am, we’re up and running.”
“We received a partial message that we think came from one of our deep cover agents about twenty minutes ago. Since then there’s been” nothing. We think that he’s aboard a fifty-foot speedboat called Aphrodite somewhere off shore. We’re not sure how far out he was, but we picked him up on fourteen three-ten at oh-one- forty hours on a relative bearing of two-five-four degrees. Puts him a little south of west from us.”
Wickum slid back to his console and brought the MECODIR program up on his monitor.
Ensign Rowley could see him on the other side of the glass partition. A couple of the other night-duty operators drifted over to see what was going on. “Okay, ma’am, we’re pulling that up now. Be just a couple of secs.”
“I want a cross bearing so we can tell exactly where he is, and a filter wash on the message. It was broken up. Sounded like heavy interference of some kind.”
Wickum raised his hand. He’d found it.
“I’m transfering to a headset,” Ensign Rowley said. He put the call on hold, grabbed a headset, went out to Wickum’s console and plugged in. “Ma’am?”
“I’m here.” She sounded strung out.
The message came up on Wickum’s screen. “We have it,” Ensign Rowley said. “It’s weak. Relative bearing two one-five. Stand by.” Wickum entered the bearing Susan Ziegler had given them and the computer instantly crossed the two and came up with a map position. “That’s ninety seven nautical miles southwest of your position, ma’am. We’re bringing up the audio now.”
Wickum played the very garbled message through once. It lasted only five seconds and was extremely broken up,
as if the antenna were bad or blocked. He put the message on a loop so that it would repeat itself over an dover again, and began dialing in circuits that would filter out some of the interference and allow the computer to help reconstruct some of the words. It was like fine-tuning a radio to get the best reception. The machine could do it on its own, but human operators still did a better job. Very slowly a few recognizable words began to emerge from the mush. “… home plate… we’ve… trouble.” There were three seconds of nothing useable. “… going down, but… Stand by! Stand by!” The message ended after that.
They played the message several more times, but nothing else became recognizable.
“Okay, that’s our agent and it sounds like he’s in trouble.”
“We’ll start the precoms and excoms tonight, but we can’t send a chopper up until morning. If you’re declaring an emergency we can get a cutter headed that way within the hour though.” Precoms, short for preliminary communications, was a quick search by radio for any and all ships in the vicinity of the last known position of the vessel in distress. Excoms, or extended communications, expanded the search pattern to a much broader area including marinas, lighthouses and other facilities on shore. A lot of the time vessels calling Mayday were found hours later safe in some harbor, not bothering to call anybody to say they were safe.
“I’m declaring a Mayday, Ensign. But if he’s aboard the Aphrodite and he’s in trouble you can expect armed resistance. Pass that along to your people.”
“We’re on it, ma’am,” Ensign Rowley said. “If you come up with anything new shoot it up to us, would you?”
“Right,” Susan Ziegler said, and she rang off. Ensign Rowley went back into his office to start calling in people. It was going to be an interesting night after all.
The wind whipped around the corner and Bahmad had to brace himself against a piece of angled steel in order to accomplish his task without making a mistake.
They were heading directly west at their best speed of nineteen knots in order to put the most distance between them and where Aphrodite sunk before dawn. Something about Morales and the setup aboard the drug boat had continued to bother him until they had gotten underway, and it finally came to him.
The SSB radio in the Aphrodite’s main saloon was set to the Margo’s frequency. The one Bahmad had used to make contact. But he finally remembered that before they had left Rosario the captain had switched the set to a different frequency. Morales had been up on deck at the time and had not seen it.
It was a small discrepancy. But paying attention to such seemingly minor details had saved Bahmad’s life before. It was possible that Morales had radioed somebody and when he heard Bahmad coming back aboard he had switched frequencies.
When it got light they would turn north again, on a parallel course to their previous one, but more than seventy nautical miles to the west of the Aphrodite.
The last of the inner latches clicked up, and Bahmad raised the lid of the bogus life raft canister to expose
