Clear and Present Danger

The big marine diesels were of a new sort, perversely designed to be very easy to operate and maintain. To aid in this, small how-to manuals were provided for each engine-room crewman, and in each manual was a plastic-coated diagram that was far easier to use than the builder's plans. A blow-up of the manual schematic, also plastic-coated, had been provided by the drafting company, and was the laminated top of the worktable.

"Sir, this engine is a lot like the one on my dad's tractor, bigger, but-"

"I'll take your word for it, Obrecki."

"The turbocharger ain't installed right. It matches with these plans here, but the oil pump pushes the oil through the turbo-charger backwards. The plans are wrong, sir. Some draftsman screwed up. See here, sir? The oil line's supposed to come in here, but the draftsman put it on the wrong side of this fitting, and nobody caught it, and-"

Wegener just laughed. He looked at Chief Owens: "How long to fix?"

"Obrecki says he can have it up and running this time tomorrow, Cap'n."

"Sir." It was Lieutenant Michelson, the engineering officer. "This is all my fault. I should have-" The lieutenant was waiting for the sky to fall.

"The lesson from this, Mr. Michelson, is that you can't even trust the manual. Have you learned that lesson, Mister?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Fair enough. Obrecki, you're a seaman-first, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Wrong. You're a machinist-mate third."

"Sir, I have to pass a written exam..."

"You think Obrecki's passed that exam, Mr. Michelson?"

"You bet, sir."

"Well done, people. This time tomorrow I want to do twenty-three knots."

And it had all been downhill from there. The engines are the mechanical heart of any ship, and there is no seaman in the world who prefers a slow ship to a fast one. When Panache had made twenty-five knots and held that speed for three hours, the painters painted better, the cooks took a little more time with the meals, and the technicians tightened their bolts just a little more. Their ship was no longer a cripple, and pride broke out in the crew like a rainbow after a summer shower - all the more so because one of their own had figured it out. One day early, Panache came into the Curtis Bay Coast Guard Yard with a bone in her teeth. Wegener had the conn and pushed his own skill to the limit to make a fast "one-bell" approach to the dock.

"The Old Man," one line handler noted on the fo'c'sle, "really knows how to drive this fuckin' boat!"

The next day a poster appeared on the ship's bulletin board: PANACHE: DASHING ELEGANCE OF MANNER OR STYLE. Seven weeks later, the cutter was brought into commission and she sailed south to Mobile, Alabama, to go to work. Already she had a reputation that exactly matched her name.

It was foggy this morning, and that suited the captain, even though the mission didn't. The King of SAR was now a cop. The mission of the Coast Guard had changed more than halfway through his career, but it wasn't something that you noticed much on the Columbia River bar, where the enemy was still wind and wave. The same enemies lived in the Gulf of Mexico, but added to them was a new one. Drugs. Drugs were not something that Wegener thought a great deal about. For him drugs were something a doctor prescribed, that you took in accordance with the directions on the bottle until they were gone, and then you tossed the bottle. When Wegener wanted to alter his mental state, he did so in the traditional seaman's way - beer or hard liquor - though he found himself doing so less now that he was approaching fifty. He'd always been afraid of needles - every man has his private dread - and the idea that people would voluntarily stick needles into their arms had always amazed him. The idea of sniffing a white powder into one's nose - well, that was just too much to believe. His attitude wasn't so much naivete as a reflection of the age in which he'd grown up. He knew that the problem was real. Like everyone else in uniform, every few months he had to provide a urine sample to prove that he was not using "controlled substances." Something that the younger crewmen accepted as a matter of course, it was a source of annoyance and insult to people of his age group.

The people who ran the drugs were his more immediate concern, but the most immediate of all was a blip on his radar screen.

They were a hundred miles off the Mexican coast, far from home. And the Rhodes was overdue. The owner had called in several days earlier, saying that he was staying out a couple of days extra... but his business partner had found that odd, and called the local Coast Guard office. Further investigation had determined that the owner, a wealthy businessman, rarely went more than three hours offshore. The Rhodes cruised at fifteen knots.