PROLOGUE
WITH the swell and the way the wind was gusting, Marine Interdiction Agent Vernon Gomez was struggling to keep the spotlight locked on the panga. One second the little open boat was inside the circle of light, the next it had slid back into the surrounding murk. Agent Nick Finn stood under the Interceptor’s canopy, glancing from the panga to the rain clutter on the radar screen, thinking, a night like this, it was a miracle they’d found it at all.
The panga, as usual, was packed to the gunwales. Gomez’s spotlight clung to it long enough for Finn to glimpse a woman clutching a child and two men bailing water. He also had time to see that some genius had hacksawed away the forward flotation compartment to make room for more passengers. He took one look at how low the boat was in the water and picked up the radio mic.
“Long Beach, this is Interceptor One, over.”
A voice crackled back. Finn spoke up against the rain pelting the hardtop. He said, “I’m looking at a suspected illegal entry vessel, twenty-foot-long open boat, taking on water. Looks like her engine’s out. I need a chopper and a utility out here to take everybody off.”
“Interceptor One, what’s your position?” said the voice.
Finn gave their position, some ten miles southwest of Newport Beach. Finn was vessel commander, so this was his operation. He turned to tell the newbie, Marine Interdiction Agent Antonio Figueroa, to do a head count of the people aboard the panga. But Figueroa was bent over the rail, throwing up. So Finn turned instead to Marine Interdiction Agent Amanda Chinchilla. “Ask them how many people they’ve got aboard,” he said.
Chinchilla’s voice boomed through the bullhorn. The squall lulled, and Finn heard a man at the rear of the sinking boat shout back, “Veintidós!”
Even Finn, no linguist, could understand that. He relayed the information back to Long Beach before Chinchilla had a chance to translate. He asked how long till his backup got there. “Stand by,” said the voice on the radio. Finn looked at Chinchilla and Gomez. By their solemn faces, he figured they were thinking the same thing he was. What he was thinking was, the panga was going to sink long before the chopper arrived. Finn decided on a course of action, then let five seconds pass, counting them off in his head.
No better idea presented itself.
He hung up the mic.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ll bring us round their weather side. Gomez, you keep them lit up. Chinchilla, you tell them we want the children first, then the women. Let’s go.”
Gomez and Chinchilla nodded and moved to their posts. No one paid any attention to Figueroa, still throwing up. Finn maneuvered the Interceptor between the panga and the swell. The squall picked up again and blasted rain across his face. Cold water had somehow slunk under his jacket and now found new courses to follow each time he moved. He felt it trickling toward his socks.
Sheltered behind the much larger vessel, the panga righted a little. But it was still dangerously low in the water—by the glare of Gomez’s spotlight, Finn could see maybe a foot and a half of freeboard above the waterline.
Another thing that worried him: the confusion on the radar screen. They were in the middle of the southern fairway into Long Beach, one of the busiest shipping channels in the world, and he couldn’t see a thing. A couple of years back, a three-hundred-foot cargo ship had crushed a twenty-five-foot fishing boat right here in the channel, and the cargo crew hadn’t even noticed. Finn fiddled with the clutter control. Nothing. He’d switched on every light the Interceptor had, figuring if he couldn’t see, at least he could make himself as visible as possible. If he’d had a Christmas tree in the bow, he’d have lit that, too.
His socks squished when he stepped over to Figueroa, still bent over the leeward rail. He grabbed the newbie by the back of the collar, hauled him over to the windward side, and pointed out at the wet darkness.
“I don’t care if you puke all over yourself. You’re on lookout duty, you hear? You see anything at all out there, you shout it out. Anything at all, even if you’re not sure it’s an actual thing, you yell out. Got it?”
Figueroa groaned and moved his head in a way that might’ve been a nod, but which might not have been.
Finn shook him, hard.
“Show me you understand what you gotta do.”
“Look out. Got it,” came the weak reply.
Finn let go of the young man’s collar and went back to supervise the rescue operation.
* * *
Chinchilla stepped over to him. “They say they got four children!” she said, shouting against the sound of the rain.
“Bring them up!” he said at the same volume.
She went back to the rail and started shouting in Spanish at the guy standing by the dead outboard at the panga’s stern, the guy whom Finn surmised was in charge of the whole catastrophe. Finn remained at his station with one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle, ready to respond if Gomez, who had a clearer view of the sinking boat, hand-signaled to him to back off. The Interceptor was forty feet long, twice the size of the panga. A gust in the wind or freak wave could easily thrust them over the top of it.
He glanced over to the other rail. Figueroa was still upright, throwing up into the wind. He turned back to see Chinchilla bend over the side, haul up a small child, and set her down on the forward deck. Within two minutes, she’d hauled three children aboard. Then something went wrong; Finn heard yelling before a grown man appeared over the side. Finn recognized him as the guy from the back of the boat.
He waved the guy over to him. The man stumbled across the shifting deck and through the rain and wind toward the cockpit. Finn grabbed him by the collar.
“I said women and children first,” he said, calling the guy one of the Mexican cusswords that his wife, Mona, had taught him. He resisted the urge to throw the fellow over the side, but not the one to fling him down on the deck. He looked up. Chinchilla was shouting. Something was going on in the panga. Finn stepped over the pendejo and went to the rail. A young woman wearing an oversized white T-shirt and spandex leggings was trying to push a child up the ladder. The child had clasped her tiny hands to the ladder’s lowest rungs and wasn’t letting go. The other people in the panga were crowding around the ladder, yelling at her, unbalancing the open boat. Chinchilla was shouting at them to step back, but they weren’t listening. Their refusal to heed orders was the first sign of a panic that Finn knew could prove fatal. He jammed his knees under the Interceptor’s rail, leaned down as far as he could, got a hold on the girl’s forearms, and said, “I got you, sweetheart. You can let go,” in English. Two terrified eyes met his. Her tiny hands remained clenched around the rungs. Then the young woman below said something to the kid in Spanish, her voice firm and reassuring, not panicky. The child said something that sounded like a prayer—Finn heard the word Dios—shut her eyes and let go of the ladder. Finn hauled her up over the side. He settled her against the rail with the other children, then bent over the side again, extending his arms to the young woman this time. Her long black hair was plastered to her face. She reached up and took hold of Finn’s forearms.
A wave shouldered its way between the two boats, separating them. Finn felt the woman’s arms yank out of his hands. She splashed into the strip of roiling water.