Saltwater Cowboy by Tim McBride

Author:Tim McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466882386
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In 1986, two years after the Feds tried to take down the Saltwater Cowboys, the jobs were still coming, fast as ever. We handled them all with ease—all, that is, except for one job in particular. At the time, though, the mission seemed to be by the book. Carlito and Leo had their ship bring the pot up from Colombia. All we had to do was meet it offshore, unload it, and deliver the haul to them somewhere in Miami. No problem.

The method of delivery was the same as always. The shore crew utilized all manner of transportation to deliver the bales to a strip mall, where our respective drivers would do their respective dances. You know the drill by now. The Cubans were cautious that way, and that was fine by me. But what they didn’t comprehend was the loyalty among my crew members and how that trust was a big reason why we were all getting rich. In those days, if one of our guys got busted with a truck- or carload of pot, he was only going to get fourteen to eighteen months in a Club Fed. That’s what we called a federal prison located on an air force base or any other type of military installation. The surroundings and daily routine of a Club Fed could be compared to those of summer camp. The rest of us would take care of the guy’s family until he came home. Then he went right back to work again. So back to the story.

This was a dangerous two-night job. Dangerous because none of us really wanted to press our luck by approaching the same vessel twice. But in this case we had no choice. Sixty-two thousand pounds of weed were on board. I asked Jorge to bring to me a schematic of the ship so I could tell the guys how to load it. I took the drawings and examined the ship’s holds and other watertight compartments below deck. Looking closely I noticed a maintenance bilge in the bow section beneath a dry storage area known as the folks hold. This bilge area was accessible through a watertight hatch in a maintenance compartment just aft to (or behind) the hold. I explained to Jorge that he needed to compress his bales no larger than the size of that hatch’s opening because this was where we would store half of the load, 31,000 pounds. Those bales would be hidden in the bilge until the second night of work. If any problems arose or any delays occurred while the first half was on its way to Miami, the second half would be well concealed until we could reapproach the ship or send it to an alternate drop point. When closed, the top of the bilge hatch rose only four inches above the floor in the nine-foot-by-nine-foot enclosed maintenance compartment. Because all of the compartments on this type of vessel were fitted with watertight doors, the threshold through the doorway to this room rose twelve inches above the floor.

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