The cold wind cleared the skies, and stars came out above the trees, which were being whipped into a frenzy. Every big gust broke more widow makers out of the tall firs, the branches cracking like gunshots and then crashing to the ground. It was not a good night to be camping or hiding in the woods.
It also wasn’t a good night to be sitting there. I got up and started to trip my way back down the path. Just as I reached the huge gnarly Doug fir that guards the entrance, a long, agonized screech came out of the black woods. A raccoon was decapitating a squirrel or something… I didn’t stop to find out. I drove home thinking that along with dealing with some crappy weather, if Colt was spending a lot of time in the woods he must be having some wild, spooky nights.
Back at the cabin, I settled in to transcribe notes. Then at midnight, the dog went off. Murphy rushed from door to door inside the tiny cabin. As soon as I opened the front door, he growled and lunged outside. I grabbed him by the scruff but he dragged me off the porch, determined to get at whatever was under the house. I wrestled him back inside. Sandi, who’d been pretty cavalier about things up to this point, was wide-eyed. Murphy had never done anything like that in his three years on Orcas.
While I was in town earlier that day after hearing Colt had returned, I’d gone by our storage unit. It took me over an hour of digging through boxes but I finally found something I hadn’t seen since packing it away in Orlando. Now I pushed a handful of shells into the twelve-gauge pistol-grip “street sweeper” shotgun. “Probably nothing,” I said, shrugging, then went outside, telling Sandi to lock the door behind me.
There was nothing under the house. I walked up to the parking pad and no one was there either. I checked the cars, I snuck up on the outhouse and peeked inside. Then I hiked up the long driveway that cuts through the woods. I felt like an idiot, but I called out to Colt several times.
THERE WAS NO SIGN of Colt that night or the next. Any hope that he might’ve hightailed it off the island again was dashed the following day, though, when word spread that Chuck Stewart’s hangar had been broken into again.
The Olympics happening just fifty miles north meant an already increased security presence in the region, and Orcas suddenly got the attention of a host of federal agencies along with additional state and local law enforcement. At the same time, a number of islanders decided that they’d had enough and suited up for some Colt wrangling. It was an entertaining mix. One father-and-son team patrolling the Eastsound streets dressed in full camo gear spotted movement in the bushes and rushed in to grab what turned out to be two FBI agents. A baker heading to work at 5 a.m. rounded a corner and saw two guys peering into his restaurant with night-vision goggles—more FBI agents. Anyone male near town in a car or on foot between dusk and dawn was a target. One acquaintance who drove to the gym early each morning in his rattling pickup got stopped again and again.
The FBI also set up a camera in Bea Von Tobel’s airport office and fed video to their Seattle field office of every plane arriving or departing Orcas. Officially, though, the FBI continued to say they were not interested in the case of what was merely a local miscreant.
At the north end of the island, U.S. Coast Guard cutters cruised back and forth just offshore with their chase boats lowered, ready to snatch up anything trying to bolt out of the Ditch. Along with the coasties, DHS Customs and Border Protection 900- and 1,200-horsepower Interceptor Class patrol boats circled Orcas, sweeping the island and surrounding waters with their FLIR (forward-looking infrared, aka thermal imaging) and radar. U.S. Navy warships stood by along the border focusing their surveillance equipment on anything that moved. There were so many electromagnetic waves sweeping the area that we figured everyone on the island was now sterile.
SMUGGLER’S RESORT, SITUATED RIGHT on the Ditch and adjacent to the airport, served as a convenient base for all kinds of agents now sent on stealthy missions to capture Colt. They all came to Orcas undercover and, this being a small island, kept their secrets sometimes as long as fifteen minutes.
“They had multiple layers of undercover people here,” says Smuggler’s Mike Stolmeier. “I got different groups of from one to four guys staying in the condos and being real vague about their visits. But they’d always request the unit closest to the airport and then they’d casually try to pay with government credit cards. ‘Oh, we’re on leave from Iraq for a month.’ Yeah, right you guys… this is what you would do if you’re on a one-month leave, come to Orcas off-season when there’s nobody here and nothing to do. My favorite was a couple of guys, outdoorsy types, who’d been looking around and then came in acting real nonchalant and started asking questions about the marina and the airport and ‘Gee, does anything unusual ever happen around here?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, occasionally we get guys acting kind of suspicious.’ They didn’t get it, and one asked, ‘So you’ve actually seen people acting suspicious?’ I handed him a slip of paper with their license plate written on it, and said, ‘Yes, the two guys in this car.’
“The biggest batch were four guys who stayed a full week. Definitely tactical types, go-get-’em thirty- somethings, in and out of the condo all day and all night. They were dressed Eddie Bauer–style—trying to fit in on the island. Only thing was that they weren’t fishing.”
Some of the sightings were FBI tactical units, but there were other acronyms involved as well. The Department of Defense won’t confirm anything other than to say they “kept in touch with other agencies” about Colton Harris-Moore’s adventures on Orcas, but a couple of sources claim the DOD had their guys out here at least checking out the situation if not actively searching. One thing Colt probably didn’t know was that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has a vacation home on the island. Secretary Gates declined to comment on whether he pulled a few strings to be neighborly and try to end the crime spree, but when things started escalating, some residents were pulling for him to send in Delta Force.
It was also an election year, and sixty-two-year-old Bill Cumming was widely expected to run for sheriff again. The longer the hunt dragged on, though, the more disgruntled his electorate. With federal help, San Juan County deputies baited a trap for Colt, leaving the keys in a white Chevy pickup rigged with tracking devices and hidden cameras. They even parked it outside a hangar. The day after they secretly set it up, an islander driving members of the high school golf team passed the airport. The kids all pointed to the pickup: “There’s the decoy the cops put out!”
Five days after the Homegrown break-in, Sheriff Cumming put out a notice telling all San Juan County residents to consider getting alarm systems, and asking us to “wipe down all your surfaces,” like windows and doorknobs to make it easier for the cops to get fingerprints, and smooth our gravel driveways so they’d be able to find footprints and tire tracks when we got hit.
For the few island residents not already feeling paranoid, that did it. Good night and good luck.
THE FEDERAL FRENZY ON Orcas died down after about two weeks of the “undercover” agents coming up empty. FBI and DHS assets remained on call, though. Orcas went back to not even having twenty-four-hour police coverage. From 5 to 6 a.m. every morning, the island had no deputies on duty, a fact obvious to anyone who kept watch on the cop shop.
On Sunday morning, February 28, the sole young deputy manning the graveyard shift left the station and drove his police cruiser home to Deer Harbor. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive, one way; forty minutes during the summer when chances are you’ll be behind an “I brake for trees” tourist; or twenty minutes if you ignore the speed limits and risk offing yourself via a deer through the windshield or a skid off the cliff into Massacre Bay.
As soon as Colt knew the town was left unguarded, he came out of the shadows and approached Orcas Island Hardware. After the previous summer’s burglary, owner Scott Lancaster had called Colt a “cockroach” during a TV interview. That gave the Barefoot Bandit three possible reasons for coming back: replenishing his tool collection, collecting more cash, and revenge. Or maybe he was just stopping by to do a return: he brought along the bolt cutters he’d stolen in the first burglary.
Scott had moved the piles of bagged mulch that Colt climbed the last time. He’d pulled the pallets far enough away from the sloping roof that he didn’t think even Spider-Man could jump across to the building.
Colt once again scaled the tower of bags and then leaped, barefoot, across the void and onto the dew- slicked metal roof. His footprints led to each corner of the building, where they show he squatted like a gargoyle gazing out over the sleeping town. Satisfied the coast was clear, he went to the same warehouse window he’d found open last time. Scott, though, had jammed 2 ? 4s into every frame, making them impossible to lift. Colt padded around the roof looking for another way in. He pried up a piece of metal siding, but realized it would take too long to make an opening large enough for him to squeeze through. He went back to the window, busted a small hole in the corner, then used a screwdriver to poke away the 2 ? 4. The window slid open and he ducked
