Save the Manatee!
13: Night Chase
(June 14, 2015)
Tony Voillelli was over fifty and looked forty. Part of it was money—you can buy hair transplants and facelifts if you have millions—and part was his clean way of living. No cigarettes, no strong liquor, no drugs—for him. What happened to others was their business, and their business often made his business richer.
He had risen in the ranks of the extended family's organization by simple expedients: Ratting out relatives and friends, secretly informing to the police, a little judicious murder here and there. Now he owned an island of disputed nationality—Canada and the U.S.A. continually went back and forth on the question, without settling it—and Voillelli lived apparently retired.
However, a master puppeteer may be beyond the view of the audience, up at the meaningful end of the strings. Voillelli had been planning something big for years. He had accidentally (he would say providentially) learned the astounding truth that mermen and mermaids were real; that they held sway over the mammals of the sea; and that the prince of the merfolk was married—by arrangement—to the queen of the manatees.
A lesser man would have doubted his sanity. Voillelli took it in stride and saw ways to profit.
No Coast Guard vessel ever stopped a pod of dolphins. No DEA team ever interrogated a manatee. As couriers of illicit materials, they would be perfect smugglers, if only a man could organize.
And he'd found the way. Hold the queen, the king would fall in line. Just like a game of chess, but with bullets.
Very soon now he would hold the queen.
His yacht, the Cutwater, looked like a rich man's toy: ninety feet long, sleek, gleaming. A perfect vessel for the rich to lounge on.
It also bristled with concealed weaponry: high-powered machine guns, rocket launchers, even a well-hidden torpedo tube. Six small but lethal torpedoes waited to be loaded.
Hermit Island, they called the disputed territory, his home. Voillelli had built his hideaway, paid taxes to Canada and to the United States, and took no side in the territorial dispute except to have his lawyers doggedly find ways of forcing continuations of it. As a result, neither country policed the water right around it, and a seagoing weapon like the Cutwater could slip in and out without attracting official attention.
"What do you mean?" Voillelli asked Fusel, the captain of the vessel. "Why would we go inland?"
"This sea," Fusel explained. He stood in the owner's suite at midnight, sweating like a pig. Not that the cabins were hot, quite the contrary—but Voillelli had a way of putting you on the hot seat, anyway. "The Trident crew can lower the tank, but we're not stable enough to take it aboard. We have to make the exchange in a harbor, or at least in the lee of some shelter."
"Such as?" Voillelli asked. His eyes were flat as a doll's eyes, not hinting at warmth.
Fusel unrolled a black-and-white chart. "My preference," he said, "would be to shift the rendezvous to the west side of Graham Island."
Voillelli stared at the place where Fusel had stabbed the paper with his index finger. "No. Puts us five hundred miles from port. There'd be questions about the Trident straying so far off course."
"Then—this is a poor second choice." Fusel's fingertip sailed south and southeast, coming to rest on a spot. "Island Rock. South of Cape Blanco, west of Humbug Mountain State Park. It's small, it won't give much shelter—"
"It's right up against the mainland," Voillelli said.
"There's more than a mile of sea-room. Inglehorn knows how to be careful unloading cargo. It's enough room."
"It's within the twelve-mile limit."
"Yes. There's nowhere else, sir."
"Maybe the weather will improve."
Fusel took a deep breath. "I explained at first that this will be really tricky. With any kind of a swell, I can't guarantee success. We could lose the cargo, the vessels could collide—it's too risky."
Voillelli rolled up the chart and handed it back to Fusel. "Until I make up my mind, keep your course to to the original rendezvous. Let me think about what to do."
Fusel took the chart. "Yes, sir." Voillelli hated the "aye" word.
"Don't slip up. I want to meet them, not miss them."
"Understood."
Fusel left the suite, leaned against a bulkhead, and wiped his face with a handkerchief. He'd spent nineteen years in the Navy before getting caught as part of a conspiracy to—well, never mind. Lost his rating, got a DD, had to look for any work. He'd never risen to officer status, but he'd served a boatswain's mate, a petty officer grade E-6, pretty cushy salary. Lost his pension with the dishonorable discharge.
So . . . Voillelli found him boat-bumming in the Keys, offered him a spot, and for the past three years he'd had command of the Cutwater. His position was in many ways clandestine—his name really wasn't Fusel, that was a manufactured identity to keep the Coast Guard off his tail. The D.D. should have disqualified him from civilian command.
But he couldn't complain, not much. Life was smooth. Voillelli only occasionally took the yacht out. Most of the time, Fusel only had to superintend maintenance and keep the vessel in readiness. And most of the cruises were brief, taking some shady passengers out into the ocean for business conferences without risking anyone's eavesdropping. Sometimes the yacht took the occasional pleading passenger out for a trip to deep water.
A one-way trip.
But now Fusel worried. This—this crazy thing with the manatee—Fusel muttered, "I'll quit," and then pushed off the bulkhead, on his way to the bridge, knowing inside that you didn't quit Tony Voillelli. No one ever did. No one left his organization.
Unless it was feet first.
"Kids all asleep?" Stan asked as he came out of the deckhouse.
Ford, at the wheel, said quietly, "Yes. Wendy's in our bunk. Mabel and Mason are in the forward berths."
"Gettin' a bad feeling about this one, Sixer," Stan said quietly, coming around to stand beside his twin. "This guy of yours goin' to be able to send the cavalry to the rescue?"
"I hope so," Ford said. "I've transmitted the coordinates of our projected intercept."
"Three hours. Anything on the scope?"
"Radar shows only a few blips, none that could be the freighter. Some small craft toward the shore, ten miles off."
"Anything behind us?"
"Not yet," Ford said. "But I'm keeping an eye out."
"Where are we?"
Ford gave him latitude and longitude.
Patiently, Stan repeated, "Where are we?"
"Roughly about eighteen miles west of the California-Oregon border. A little north of that, actually."
"So, that would put us how far from this freighter?"
"Say sixty miles. Close enough."
"Hah! Poindexter, I never expected you to say somethin' so . . . approximate."
"Well," Ford said slowly, "I'm assuming that their course and speed remained constant during the night. If anything has changed, the calculation is obviously incorrect. However, if you took the Triton Trident as the center of a circle with a radius of ten miles—"
"Hang on, hang on, ya lost me. Why that?"
"Do you want the formula?" Ford asked.
"No, I want the reason."
Ford thought for a few seconds. "Let me put it simply. Our radar can 'see' for about twenty nautical miles, all right? A freighter is a big target. We could certainly detect it on the scope at twenty miles."
"Could we see it? With our eyes, I mean?"
Ford replied, "Um—barely, as a little dim nick on the horizon. If it were day. Radar's better. Anyway, if the Trident can be thought of as the center of a twenty-mile-diameter circle, we certainly can detect it when we come to within ten miles of the circumference. Understand?"
Stan stared at his brother, his face ghostly in the glow of the radar screen next to the wheel. "I'll take your word for it."
"You'd better try to get some sleep yourself," Ford said. It's just past midnight. I'll wake you in two and a half hours."
"Yeah, you better," Stanley said. "Look, assuming we can find this freighter, we can't attack it in the dark, ya know."
"No, but we can shadow it and I can call in help when dawn breaks."
"Couldn't the fish do that? The whales and the—I know they're not really fish, Ford! Don't look at me like I'm some kinda dummy! Couldn't the dolphins and porpoises do the shadowing?"
"They could," Stanford pointed out, "but they couldn't call in help. They don't have radio."
Not much happened while Stan grabbed a little sleep. The chop eased a little, the sky grew overcast, the wind dropped to a near-calm with fitful gusts now and then, but otherwise, Stanford steered on through an inky darkness, heading for that twenty-mile-diameter circle. He lashed the wheel briefly, woke Stanley, who had lain down in the main cabin on blankets piled on the deck. "It should be soon now," he said.
Stanley came on deck right behind him, and behind Stanley, Wendy came out, still bundled up, still wearing a lifejacket. "We there yet?" she asked.
"Almost," Stanford said.
"Whoa! Dudes, what's that over there?" she asked. "Off to the right?"
Stanford barely glanced that way. "It's a cruise ship," he said. "An Alaska cruise. It's headed up to Seattle, and then it coasts up past Canada and around the shore of Alaska. I've had it on the radar for a while."
"That's one ship?" Wendy asked. "Man, I thought it was a city or some deal. Now I can tell it's moving, though. How far away is it?"
"About four miles," Stanford said, consulting the radar.
"Cool," Wendy murmured.
After a few minutes, she volunteered to go into the galley and make a pot of coffee. "Java would be great!" Stanley told her. When she had gone, he confided to Stanford, "Dipper will be a fool if he lets her get away."
"I concur," Stanford agreed. "Wendy is a remarkable young woman."
Wendy came up, expertly carrying three mugs without spilling a drop. "Dr. P., two sugars, splash of cream. Stan, black and plain. And the one with just a tablespoon of cream is mine."
"This hits the spot," Stanley said. "Wendy, get some gloves on."
"Don't have any."
"Eh, look in the cubby next to the john. Little half-closet. It's got fishin' gear in it, there's a couple pairs of cotton gloves, five fingers each glove. Ford here hasta have special ones made for him."
"I'm wearing a pair," Ford pointed out.
"Yeah, and I got a pair in my pocket, my hands get cold enough," Stanley said. "Fishin' gloves ain't much, but they'll help some."
Wendy found the cubby, figured out how to unlatch it, and found the gloves, amid a jumble of fishing line on spools, plastic boxes of hooks and sinkers, and other gear. Including a strange-looking gun—a flare gun, she realized when she inspected it. In case of emergency. The gloves were stretchy, but even so, large on her hands.
She came back on deck to hear Ford saying, "The freighter must have changed course." He tapped the radar screen. "I'm guessing, but I'd say that's her—the strong return there. If it is, it's heading north-northwest, and it already passed us."
"What's the trouble?" Wendy asked.
"Aw, the ship with the manatee slipped east and now we gotta pull a U-turn," Stanley said.
"If that is the Trident," Ford added. "Let's see—we're a little south of due west from Klamath. They're closer inshore and up around Crescent City. We have to check it out—but a stern chase is a long chase."
"And a bird in the hand'll poop all over you," Stanley said. "What? What's that even mean?"
"It means," Stanford said, "that now the Trident's sailing away from us at maybe ten knots. We can do better than that, but not much—twelve without risking running completely out of fuel. So, each hour we'll only gain two nautical miles on her. Right now, she's roughly fourteen miles ahead of us. Seven more hours to catch her, and we'll be running on fumes, even with the extra gas we stowed."
"Could we—" Wendy began, and then she cocked her head. "What was that? A bird?"
"You hear something?" Stan asked.
"Shh."
They stood in the dark, the only light coming from the radar screen. Then it came again, from out to sea, faint but plain: "Mabel!"
"Oh my gosh, it must be Mermando!" Wendy said. "I'll get Mabes!"
She ran below, and Stan said, "It kinda does sound like someone hollerin' for Mabel. Throttle back, Ford."
"If I do, we may lose—"
"Trust me on this one, Brainiac. Throttle back. It's Mabel we're talking about."
Hesitating only a moment, Stanford slowed their progress to a crawl.
From Captain Inglehorn on down, nobody aboard the Trident liked the orders that had come in by radio: They were to head for a small offshore island, barren and unpopulated, and wait there to rendezvous with Voillelli's boat in the early morning.
That meant they'd be inside the twelve-mile limit.
That meant they were potential Coast Guard prey.
That meant that every hand aboard, from cabin boy to captain, grew increasingly jumpy.
And that meant they misinterpreted the visitor from the sky.
Contrary to popular belief, the helicopter was not black, but a becoming shade of extremely dark green, with a fashionable matte finish. Pilot Leon Jefferson had worked with the Agency for five years and a bit, long enough for him to learn to do what he was told and never speak about it. He took the coordinates, checked his location, and said, "ETA 0311" before banking the machine to the left and heading out over the dark sea.
From time to time people have seen such helicopters flying over, often when unusual occurrences have been reported in the area—animal mutilations, bigfoot, UFOs, even ghosts—and almost always witnesses have reported the aircraft as being black, suspicious, possibly involved in the paranormal activity, and lacking ID numbers and any insignia.
The witnesses are wrong on every single count. As mentioned, the choppers are painted a deep, dark, nonreflective green, which admittedly does look black, or at least black-ish, at any distance. Then, too, the helicopters are carrying out important surveillance and research work for an Agency committed to protecting the happy, unaware population from threats of demonic intrusions on our reality, an invasion of paranormal creatures, rains of frogs, mass hysteria, panic in the streets, or Mrs. Cake.
Don't ask about Mrs. Cake. There is no Mrs. Cake.
Finally, while it is true that the helicopters are not marked in any bright colors, or even in a contrasting white, there is one decal on the fuselage of each and every one, on the pilot's boarding door. In letters that are red and about a quarter of an inch long, it reminds the pilot "YOU BREAK IT, YOU PAY FOR IT." It is a motivational message.
However, assuming you are not a member of the Agency, your odds of ever seeing such a helicopter are vanishingly low. That's fortunate, because sometimes strange things happen to those who report "black" helicopters, so don't fuss yourself. You'll never see one.
In fact, there are no black helicopters. They don't exist. And don't ask about the dog park. Or Mrs. Cake. None of these exist.
Except the chopper presently vectoring in on the Triton Trident, a vessel apparently off its charted course and barely out of American waters. Jefferson, a seasoned pilot, doesn't fool around and within a few minutes he reports, "I have the target visually located. Repeat, I have the target in sight."
"Paint it," comes the response. In the jargon of the Agency, this does not mean "Oh, good, run along to the hardware store and buy, oh, thirty thousand gallons of Marsala (a reddish-brown, the official color of the year for 2015, as named by whoever the hell names colors of the year, don't look at me!) and a couple of paintbrushes and get to work."
No, "Paint it" means "Photograph it in infra-red, HD radar, and that secret electromagnetic spectrum that, as you know, does not exist."
The chopper had been tricked out. It made far less noise than the average helicopter, it was almost but not quite invisible to radar but did send back a return that looked so much like a flock of migrating waterfowl on a radar screen that it practically quacked, and, running without lights, it was not readily visible on a dark night.
Still, as Jefferson made the photographic run, the lights—even the running lights—on the vessel below went out, nearly simultaneously, because the captain and crew were keyed up and jumpy and noticed more than they ordinarily might have. Grunting in annoyance, the pilot flipped down his visor and switched to IR, and there the ship was, plain as day, if the sun were a weird shade of fluorescent green.
At 300 feet altitude, he overflew the vessel stern to stem, circled, dropped almost to wave-height, and took a second run back, getting the profile. He transmitted all this, pulled back on the stick, and got the hell out of there.
"What!" Voillelli yelled, thumbing the button of the intercom next to his bed.
"Sir," the officer of the deck's voice said, "we received an emergency report from Inglehorn on the Trident. A Coast Guard helicopter just buzzed them."
Voillelli cursed. "Where are they?"
The OOD read back longitude and latitude. "I asked you, where the hell are they!" Voillelli yelled.
"Uh—just a second—fifteen miles off the coast of southern Oregon, making a north-northeasterly course for—"
"Tell 'em to put to sea again. How quick can we get to them?"
"At full speed, on a closing course—uh, by 0420." A pause, and then, apologetically the man added, "That's, uh, twenty after four AM."
"Lay in the course. Get started. And—"
Voillelli paused, cursing mentally. Damn it. But he couldn't risk the freighter's being caught with evidence. Or caught at all.
"—and ready all weapons."
He threw back the covers and, still cursing, got up and began to dress.
"Mermando!" Mabel called through the bullhorn. "I'm right here!"
Wendy, hugging herself in the cold morning gusts, said to Dipper, "A real merman, dude?"
"Yeah," Dipper said. "You saw him, that summer when you were the lifeguard at the municipal pool. Remember the long-haired guy with the sorta mustache who never came out of the water? Brown hair, missing a front tooth?"
"Oh, yeah," Wendy said. "That guy. I thought there was something strange about him. I mean, none of the other swimmers ever took an acoustic guitar in with them."
From right under the bow, very near Mabel, a male voice said, "Querida! How are you, dear Mabel?"
"Mermando!" Mabel dropped to her knees and reached under the rail. A hand grasped hers. "Good to see you again. You're looking grown-up!"
"Yes. Mermen become adults at the age of thirteen years, one month, and eleven days. It is complicated. The ship with my wife is not far now."
"Uh—there's kinda a problem," Stan said from behind Dipper.
A splash echoed. "Grunkle Stan!" Mabel yelled. "You scared Mermando! His kind must not be seen!"
Ignoring her, Stan called, "Hey, Mermando! I see stranger things than you every day!"
"You do not!" Mabel said hotly.
Gruffly, Stan shot back: "Oh yeah? I watch Soos eat! Mermando! Heads up. We're gonna help you if we can, but we're runnin' low on fuel. We can't catch the ship that has your old lady on it."
"What?" Mermando surfaced and even grasped the rail and pulled himself up out of the water far enough so that, in the dim green glow from the starboard-bow running lights, they could see him. His mustache had improved to a pencil-line, like Clark Gable in the old movies. "Then all is lost?"
"Maybe not," Dipper said.
Mermando shaded his eyes, as if the faint light blinded him. "Is that your brother, who kissed me?" he asked Mabel.
"It was not a kiss!" Dipper insisted. "It was resuscitation!" He had never lost the impression that Mermando, though his feelings for Mabel might be strong, was bad for her. "I was just doing my job, man!"
"Whatever," Mabel said. "What's your idea, Dipper?"
He quickly told them, Mermando said, "Yes! It can be done! You prepare, and I will talk to them!"
It took only a few minutes. Then Stanford cut the engines entirely and the Stan O' War II leaped forward in the water. "We won't have lights for very long. In fact, I ought to cut everything but the radar," Ford said to the gang as they helped haul Mermando into the boat and into the folding bathtub full of water they had prepared on the deck.
He sat up in the tub, occasionally ducking down to wet his gills. "Is no matter. My friends know where the ship with my poor wife is. They will take us there with the speed of a sailfish!" He held Mabel's hand. In his romantic, Spanish-accented voice, he said, "Hello again, my first love. Thank you for doing this."
"Yeah, we're just the audience," Stanley complained.
"Shut up, Stan!" Wendy said, surprising Dipper. "This is, like, a tender moment!"
"Sheesh! I give, I give!"
Mermando said, "If I may interrupt—hang on, everyone!"
And three humpback whales, each one hauling on a tether attached to the boat's bow, broke into full speed. The crew of the Stan O' War II staggered back as water sloshed from Mermando's improvised tank and the deck tilted—Dipper grabbed Wendy to keep her from falling and by accident took hold of, well, some place soft, and she stage-whispered "Not in public, Dip!" and his face almost red-lit the night.
The Pines family boat sped over the water, leaving a phosphorescent wake. The whales changed course. On the black face of the night water, two imaginary lines, one the course of the Trident, one of the Stan O' War II, began to converge.
No one on either vessel yet suspected that a third line was angling in from the north, fast and deadly.