Devil's Harbor Read online

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  FOR KAREN,

  AND FOR OSKAR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, sincere thanks to my agents, Charlie Campbell at Kingsford Campbell in London and Farley Chase at Chase Literary in New York, for seeing this book all the way through.

  Next, a huge thank-you to Kristin Sevick, acquiring editor at Forge in New York, to her wonderful assistant, Bess Cozby, and to all the team at Forge who made this happen.

  Thank you to everyone at the Writers’ Studio in Sydney, most particularly Roland Fishman. For anyone who wants to develop a practice of writing, I know of no better place to do it than the Writers’ Studio.

  I’m deeply grateful to all those who read drafts and gave me feedback, particularly Marie-Hélène Gilly-Claudel as well as Laetitia Rutherford and Mark Milln.

  Thank you to Aurelie-Anne Gilly and Ashley Underwood for answering my legal questions, and to Dr. Georgina Clark for answering my medical ones.

  Thank you also to Dr. Victoire de Lastours, who at the final draft stage helped me distinguish the medically impossible from the merely improbable.

  Thank you to Keley Hill, director of marine operations, and Marine Interdiction Agent Tony Williams from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Air and Marine in San Diego, for taking the time to talk me through the realities of the difficult work they do. Thank you also to Jackie Wasiluk from the CBP Public Affairs department in San Diego, for facilitating the interviews.

  Finally and most important, thank you to my wife, Karen, without whom this novel never would have been finished. Karen, you told me to finish the book or you’d cancel the wedding. Well, now you’re married to an author and have only yourself to blame. Thank you for believing. I couldn’t be more blessed.

  Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  PROLOGUE

  Marine Interdiction Agent Nick Finn peered at the suspect boat, his night-vision goggles tinting her insect-green against the black sea. She was a sport fisher around fifty to fifty-five feet long, with a flybridge and two long spindles sweeping back from her superstructure like antennae from the head of a praying mantis. It was a half hour before sunrise on a cold Thursday in October. The moon was waning. The praying mantis was treading water; she had just enough way on her to keep her nose pointed into the breeze. And she had her navigation lights switched off, which was why Finn was interested in her.

  He was standing in the cockpit of a thirty-nine-foot Customs and Border Protection Interceptor about a mile northeast of the tiny hamlet of Two Harbors, on Catalina Island. He lowered the goggles. The air against his cheeks was cold; the sea looked colder. There was a light breeze out of the west. He looked up at the sky. A thin light the color of weak tea was creeping over the eastern horizon. Everywhere else, it was still dark.

  He turned to his patrol partner and brother-in-law, Marine Interdiction Agent Diego Jimenez, and said, “It’s officially night until the sun rises, right?” Finn saw Diego’s silhouette against the lightening eastern horizon: thick stocking cap pulled down to his brow, collar up against the cold. The silhouette nodded and said, “Definitely.”

  Finn snorted cold, salty air. “So let’s go tell this dope to turn his lights on,” he said.

  They arced around the unidentified boat and approached her from the west, where it was darkest. Then they swung in behind her and Finn scanned her again through the goggles. No one was visible aboard. The tinted-glass door leading from her stern deck to her cabin was shut, and he couldn’t see any interior lights spilling from its edges. He figured whoever was inside hadn’t yet noticed the Customs and Border Protection vessel approaching.

  When they were within hailing distance, he switched on the wailer and the blue lights, then shone the spotlight on the boat’s transom. The praying mantis had a name scrolled in gold letters: La Catrina. Finn swept the spotlight across her stern deck, and the beam reflected back at him from the glass door, an angry yellow eye dazzling his own. He pressed the spotlight’s signal button and the orb in the glass blinked at him three times, then stayed lit.

  La Catrina responded by taking off, her inboard roaring, her prop kicking up a rooster tail of white water. Finn caught a face full of exhaust, rubbed his stinging eyes with the back of his hand.

  “I think we spooked her,” said Diego, dry as sand.

  “Jesus, she stinks. Get us out of her fumes,” said Finn.

  The Interceptor darted forward, jumping over her quarry’s wake, and came up alongside her. Finn aimed the spotlight at La Catrina’s port-side window, but it, too, was tinted.

  He frowned. “Let’s give her the warning shot,” he said, shouting over the noise of the outboards and rushing air. Diego nodded and pushed the Interceptor about twenty feet ahead of La Catrina. Finn pulled the Remington 870 from its holder and racked the action. The shotgun was loaded with a flash bang shell—harmless but intimidating. He aimed at a spot about ten feet ahead of the sport fisher.

  “On target,” he said loudly enough for Diego to hear. Then he thumbed down the safety, drew breath, and pulled the trigger.

  A violent flash of white light tore up the darkness just ahead of La Catrina. The sound cracked through Finn’s skull; he felt it in his teeth.

  La Catrina responded by accelerating right through the cloud of smoke from the shotgun.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Finn, and he glanced in Diego’s direction.

  His younger friend was waiting for him to call their next move. Finn was vessel commander, so it was his call. He looked at the eastern horizon. Sunrise wasn’t far off. He put the shotgun back in its holder, picked up the radio mic, and called the Air and Marine Operations Center. He gave their position, their course, their speed, and a description of the praying mantis. He said that she’d been running with her lights out and hadn’t responded to their signals to heave to or to their warning shot.

  Then he said, “I intend to board the vessel while under way. Over.”

  “While she’s moving?” said Diego.

  Finn heard the surprise in Diego’s voice. He signed off and hung up the mic.

  “Sure. We practiced it plenty in Saint Augustine,” he said, referring to the CBP’s National Marine Training Center in Saint Augustine, Florida.

  “Yeah. But that was t
raining. And we don’t know who’s in there,” said Diego, pointing at the sport fisher.

  Finn turned to look at their quarry.

  “So let’s go find out,” he said.

  * * *

  The two boats were running no more than six feet apart, a narrowing channel of water rushing between them. Dawn was unfurling quickly and Finn could now see La Catrina’s teak deck with his naked eye, though he still couldn’t see through the tinted windows into her cabin. He had the uncomfortable feeling of being watched.

  He put a foot up on the Interceptor’s gunwale and prepared to leap across.

  Just then La Catrina veered left, hard. Diego reacted quickly enough to avoid slamming the Interceptor into her, but not quickly enough to prevent the two boats’ sides grinding against each other. The impact threw Finn backward. He landed hard on the deck, right on his tailbone.

  Diego eased off the throttle and the Interceptor drifted to a stop. He yelled to see if Finn was all right. Finn ignored him and made a show of bending over the side of the boat to check for damage. Turned out that only his pride and maybe his coccyx were bruised.

  Making a supreme effort to ignore the pain in his backside, he walked stiffly back toward the console.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” he said, sounding sharper than he intended. “Go after him.”

  Diego closed the gap with La Catrina. Finn’s knees and spine shuddered each time the Interceptor slapped down on the face of the sea, sending up a spray of salt water.

  Soon they were running thirty feet or so behind the fleeing boat. Of the two boats, Finn knew, the Interceptor was the faster. He figured thirty knots was the sport fisher’s top speed, whereas the Interceptor still had at least twenty more in her. No way the suspect boat could outrun them.

  Trouble was, he and Diego were at the end of a six-hour shift. They had enough left in the tank to get back to the dock at Long Beach, but not enough to chase this bozo for miles across the sea. He had a choice: either figure out how to force La Catrina to stop now or call it in and let the guys in San Diego make the intercept.

  Finn’s pride was bruised enough as it was. He wasn’t going to let someone else catch his prey.

  He thought for a moment.

  Then he went forward and grabbed a mooring line and two fenders. He pulled out his knife, cut off a fifteen-foot length of mooring line, and tied a fender to each end. Then he went back to the console and told Diego his plan.

  Diego smiled. “That’s even dumber than your last idea,” he said. “I like it.”

  * * *

  It was a tricky maneuver at any speed, let alone at thirty knots. Both men knew that Finn was by far the better helmsman, and anyway it was his idea, so it was only natural that he should handle it. Diego had ceded his place at the helm and was now in the stern, holding the fenders that Finn had tied to the length of line. Finn was now at the controls. His eyes were fixed on the praying mantis; his grip tightened on the wheel.

  Both boats were running parallel on a southeast track. When he judged the distance to be right, Finn threw the Interceptor into a tight, torquey turn. The boat leaned toward the water. Now she was heading east-southeast, into the rising sun, with La Catrina on her left side about a hundred feet away and rapidly getting closer. The two boats were heading toward the same point, the Interceptor like a cowboy heading off a steer split from the herd. If neither vessel changed course or speed, they would slam into each other at a combined velocity of seventy knots. Finn’s heart beat in overdrive. Adrenaline surged through him. If he’d timed it right, he figured he’d cross the sport fisher’s bow with ten feet to spare. He felt 80 percent certain he’d timed it right.

  Seventy, maybe.

  “We gonna make it?” shouted Diego over the roar of the outboards.

  “A hundred percent!” shouted Finn.

  Just when collision seemed inevitable, Finn pushed the throttles all the way down, giving the Interceptor her last bit of thrust. She slingshotted ahead and launched clear off a wave. The blades of all four outboards cleared the air. For a moment, Finn felt weightless, his stomach rising. The praying mantis appeared so close, he could almost have reached out and grabbed the rail on her bow walk. Then the Interceptor slammed back down with a bone-shattering shudder.

  “Now!” he screamed back at Diego.

  Diego flung one of the fenders off the stern. It landed in the water a few feet ahead of La Catrina, on her starboard side. The line ran out after it. Diego made sure the fender attached to the other end cleared the outboards. It splashed down on La Catrina’s port side.

  They’d managed to string fifteen feet of thick rope across the surface of the water right in front of La Catrina’s track, like a seaborne tripwire. And Finn had timed it so that there was no way she could avoid running over the line.

  He carved the Interceptor around in a big turn, came up behind the praying mantis, and watched what happened.

  La Catrina made it another fifty feet or so. Then she lost all her momentum, abruptly came off the plane, and drifted to a halt.

  Finn smiled. He couldn’t see it, but he could imagine how tightly the rope had wound around the sport fisher’s propeller shaft. He could imagine gears grinding, shear pins snapping, oil leaking, rubber hoses melting as the engine overheated.

  Just then, he saw a whiff of black smoke rise from what he figured was La Catrina’s engine room beneath her stern deck.

  Still no one appeared from the cabin. That disturbed him. Almost all the traffickers he intercepted, when they realized there was no way out, turned meek—especially if their boats were about to sink or catch fire. Usually what they did was show themselves, put their hands in the air, make it clear that they were unarmed and surrendering. Most of them knew they were just going to get shipped home anyway.

  Finn sensed that this guy was different. There was something all-or-nothing about this guy.

  It was an attribute Finn shared.

  He went to the gun locker and pulled out an M4 carbine. He clipped it into its mount on the starboard rail. Then he put a bead on the glass door and waited.

  A minute passed. La Catrina bobbed serenely up and down, a thin stream of smoke rising from her stern. After all the commotion, the silence was eerie. Plus, Finn sensed that the M4 had changed the atmosphere, darkened the mood. Unlike the shotgun, the M4 was a battlefield weapon, and he knew Diego wasn’t comfortable with it. Neither man spoke. Finn kept the rifle sighted on the glass door. He saw the Interceptor’s blue lights flashing in the sport fisher’s darkened windows.

  “He coming out or what?” said Diego finally. He sounded nervous.

  Finn thought he saw movement through the glass—with the tint, he couldn’t be 100 percent sure. His finger tightened slightly on the trigger.

  The door slid open.

  A man stepped out.

  One guy, dressed all in black.

  “Manos arribas!” shouted Diego.

  The guy gave him a blank look. He had black hair, a black mustache. The black smoke rising from the engine bay was thickening.

  “You see a weapon?” asked Finn, his finger tightening a little more. He had a bead on the guy’s chest. He was deliberate with his breathing.

  “No. No weapon,” said Diego, still sounding nervous. He shouted at the guy some more in Spanish.

  The guy kept staring at them. His arms hung at his side.

  “Put your hands up!” Finn shouted in English.

  The guy’s hands didn’t move.

  He started shuffling toward the stairs leading to the flybridge.

  Then he started climbing the stairs.

  “Where the fuck does he think he’s going?” said Finn.

  Diego kept yelling in Spanish. Finn didn’t understand what Diego was saying, but whatever it was clearly wasn’t working. The guy ignored them both and kept going up the stairs. When he got to the flybridge, he disappeared from view.

  Finn realized the guy now had the height advantage. If he came out with a
weapon, he’d be shooting downward. Letting him get up there had been a tactical mistake.

  The guy reappeared.

  He had something in his hands. Finn thought it looked like an AK-47, but before he could be sure, the breeze pushed the plume of smoke in front of the guy, obscuring him.

  Then he heard what sounded like machine-gun fire.

  The smoke cleared.

  He saw the guy firing at them. Shells spat from the gun, going over the flybridge rail.

  Finn had the M4 set on semiautomatic. He fired a single three-round burst.

  Two of the rounds blew holes through the fiberglass canopy above the guy. The third caught him in the chest. His arms flew up and he lost hold of his weapon. He stumbled back, flipped over the rail, and fell into the sea.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Twelve days after Finn had shot and killed Rafael Aparición Perez, he was back on patrol, looking out over the Interceptor’s stern. It was the end of a cool autumn day, with the Santa Anas blowing exhaust fumes inboard and shreds of cloud off the San Gabriel Mountains, across Los Angeles and out over the dirty, wind-chopped sea. Night was falling, and in the two minutes since they’d left the dock, the water’s color had changed from police-uniform blue to slate.

  Diego was slouched in the helmsman’s seat, one leg dangling, as he helmed the Interceptor at no-wake speed toward the gap in the breakwater that protected the vast Terminal Island port complex from the Pacific’s swells. He was wearing a pair of blue Customs and Border Protection overalls, a low-profile life jacket over that. The black grip of a Heckler & Koch P2000 stuck out from the holster on his utility belt. He was arguing that Finn shouldn’t have shot Perez, enumerating the reasons it had been a bad idea.

  Finn, wearing the same CBP uniform and carrying the same service-issue handgun on his hip, was only half listening to his young patrol partner. He felt the low-rev shudder of the four 300-horsepower Mercury outboards passing through the floor and up through his legs. After more than a week of mandatory leave, it felt good to be back on the water.