Chapter 6. San Diego, Current Time
13.
 On a typical clear, sunny day with a playful breeze ruffling the water, Lima Voyager passed her Coast Guard inspection. With a harbor master's pilot on board to guide her, she clanked slowly past Point Cabrillo, past the nuclear submarine pens and other Federal installations on the north side of the harbor entrance, and North Island Naval Air Station and the aircraft carrier berths on the south lip. Lima Voyager was one of a constant stream of ships making the journey in or out of one of the best salt water ports on the West Coast, and, aside from a few Harbor Police, nobody took much notice. And why should they? Looking on the bright side, her paint was reasonably fresh, if a little rusty around the seams, and her engines throbbed with quiet strength, and thin streams of water spouted from two or three bilge ports to signal that all was working well in her guts. She to be simply heading to port for a refurbishing.
Two other persons watched her arrival with considerable interest. Standing stock still on the docks on Harbor Drive that had once been home to the greatest tuna fishing fleet on the North Pacific, a man and a woman stood like statues. He was an elderly, white-haired man with a dented round hat and baggy, dark clothing, while she was a slender, still youthful woman wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt along with a simple red baseball cap. Both had strongly delineated, pure Indian features. They stared at the passing freighter, which clanked like the forges of hell, and in their eyes was written bleak prophecy of a great evil entombed within those rusting black steel plates. Rusty bilge water spewed out as if gargoyles were taunting the two on the dock. But the two had disappeared—melted away into the heights of the city above India Street toward Cortez Hill and the vast urban groves of Balboa Park.
Lima Voyager bypassed the Coast Guard station and former tuna fleet docks, on one side, the aircraft carrier berths at North Island Naval Air Station on the other side. She clanked past the tourist attractions around the B Street Pier—like the Star of India iron-hulled sailing ship dating to 1863— and under the Coronado Bay Bridge. Slowly, she angled left, portside, and disappeared into the mass of mostly gray Navy vessels laid up around the 32nd Street Naval Yards. Somewhere in there, at a small civilian cargo dock surrounded by high wire fences topped with barbed wire, she had a civilian harbor tug nudge her to rest. Engines off, she coasted silently as crew members readied for tying up.
After the harbor master's pilot went ashore, nobody else left the ship. Mariachi and song could be heard echoing across the steel decks from someone's large radio—a Tijuana station—and several sailors could be seen cleaning and securing the decks after their ocean voyage from deep in the Amazon. For Lima Voyager had not just steamed north from Peru. She had also been halfway up the Amazon River on the other side of the South American continent—a river that at times seemed like an ocean in itself, in that one could sit on its currents in an ocean-going steamship and not see land in any direction. She had left the Amazon Basin by its great estuary near Belem, had crossed through the Panama Canal, and briefly journeyed south to Lima before turning north toward the U.S.
That night—as related to Lt. Linsey Simon and other investigators by a U.S. Navy Shore Patrol petty officer who happened by on routine duties—the heavily fortified wire gate opened briefly. Almost furtively, the captain and his two dozen complement left in civilian clothing, carrying sea bags, and locking the facility behind them. They left the ship totally unmanned, with lights on and radios playing as if men were living on board. Only one other figure saw them do this, and he would never testify.
|
  Thank you for reading. If you love it, tell your friends. Please post a favorable review at Amazon, Good Reads, and other online resources. If you want to thank the author, you may also buy a copy for the low price of a cup of coffee. It's called Read-a-Latte: similar (or lower) price as a latte at your favorite coffeeshop, but the book lasts forever while the beverage is quickly gone. Thank you (JTC).
|
TOP
|
MAIN
Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
