Plundering Paradise by Michael D'Orso

Author:Michael D'Orso
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061749568
Publisher: HarperCollins

NINE

Tranquilo

JANUARY 14, 2000

A party of eight checked in late yesterday—five men and three women. Jack was expecting the men: Ricardo Nuñez, with one of his surf groups from the mainland. Nuñez runs the only surf tours around the archipelago—or at least he’s trying to get started. He’s got a Web site, “Galápagosurf.com,” although updating it is sometimes a problem, what with his day job and all. And then there’s the small matter that most of the spots to which Nuñez takes his clients are National Park waters, closed to the public, illegal to surf. Only a few designated sites in the islands are open to surfers. But what the hell, the Park Service can’t patrol all this water, and the way Nuñez sees it, or his argument, at least, is that he and his customers are doing no harm.

When Surfer magazine brought those pros down to do its big story, it was Nuñez who served as their guide. He’s been riding waves all his life, starting out on the Ecuadorian coast where he was born and grew up thirty-some years ago. The surf isn’t bad there, Nuñez says, but the first time he saw the Galápagos, at the turn of the 1980s, he thought he’d found heaven. He’d never seen tubes like these, and in a setting like this. He worked on a traditional tour boat around the islands for a couple of years, then went back home to Guayaquil to join his family’s beer distributorship because he simply had to make money. The beer still pays Nuñez’s bills today, but two or three times a year he charters a boat and brings out a group of a half dozen or so surfers, who pay and pay well for him to show them some waves like the ones they have seen on those magazine pages.

That’s what the four young men in their twenties with him this Friday morning have come for. Except this group has clearly got more money than most surfers Jack sees, with their hand-tooled leather travel bags, Perry Ellis slacks, Ralph Lauren shirts, and Docksiders shoes—not to mention that chartered pearl-white, seventy-five-foot catamaran anchored out in the harbor on which the group will be living for the next week or so as they circle the islands looking for waves.

The group’s apparent leader, the short stocky one with the salon-styled hair, the tight T-shirt, the abs, the biceps—and the shapely redhead in jeans and a bikini top parked on his lap—Jack’s never seen him before, but he knows who he is: the son of one of the most influential members of the Ecuadorian Congress. The kid’s father is at the moment in Quito, looking out his office window at mobs of Indians facing off in the streets with some of the several thousand soldiers and police deployed just this morning by President Mahuad to keep the protesters from fulfilling their vow to seize Congress when Mahuad delivers his State of the Union address one week from today.

The kid seems less than concerned about the coup his father is facing back home.

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