2.
 Lima Voyager, a nondescript cargo ship under Peruvian flag, approached San Diego harbor one cloudless, sunny morning. The ship came crawling over the sea and slunk toward land like a dark, furtive animal that hoped not to be noticed. The few who noticed her, particularly members of law enforcement agencies on duty around the clock to protect American shorelines, got the creepy feeling that something was wrong about her—something indefinable and deeply troubling.
She was a boxy looking antique—27,000 tons, small, strangely high in the water as if her cargo holds were empty, and a smell of decay about her like the fungus rot of the jungle. A cluster of strangely reticent crewmen stared down from the rails above her flaking black hull. They regarded the U.S. shore with hollow eyes and open mouths, as if speechless at some impending and unstoppable doom that, so far, only they knew about. In the lolling seas outside the harbor mouth between Point Cabrillo and North Island, Lima Voyager was challenged for a routine U.S. Coast Guard inspection.
The boxy freighter hove to with foul orange-colored water spouting from her bilges. She rocked on the splashing sea, showing rust streaming down from dirty black upper hull down to her flaking red Plimsoll line. A Coast Guard cutter sent a team of inspectors on board. A Coast Guard chopper circled above to provide cover. U.S. Navy SEALs and other crack police and military units were within a few minutes' call—after all, eight nuclear submarines were berthed just within the dark, brooding arms of Point Cabrillo with its centuries-old fortifications and Ft. Rosecrans cemetery. A harbor master's pilot approached Lima Voyager on a launch and boarded at about the same time. Lima Voyager's last port of call had been Peru, which was one of the Treasury Department's red flags for drug searches. The T-Men of the Coast Guard took a drug-sniffing dog on board. Unlike the military services like the Navy, the Coast Guard are a U.S. law enforcement agency with powers of search, seizure, and arrest like any other police jurisdiction, and naval patrols in offshore waters are usually accompanied by a Coast Guard officer to lead arrests.
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Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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