CHAPTER ONE

The plaintive cry of a lone seagull gliding above was the only sound other than the belching chug of the diesel engine. The fifty-five foot lobster boat slowed down to only a few knots. The sky was still dark enough to be twinkling with crisply winking stars, the avatar of an excellent day to come. Even out on the ocean, it felt like spring.

One man was in the pilot’s loft, steering. The other two were down on deck, near the stern. One was seated on a fishbox with his hands tightly bound to the small of his back. The other stood beside a pile of lobster traps, cutting one away from the others. A little heavier than the rest, this trap was weighted down with old-fashioned, leaden window weights as well as the usual brick.

The man carried the trap over to the port side, leaving it on the edge. He then returned to the pile of traps, beside which lay a small pile of loose bricks. He grabbed a couple, went back to the trap and put them in. He repeated the act several times until he was satisfied with the weight. Then he picked up a hank of loose 3/8” rope from the deck and attached it, with a clove hitch, to the trap’s bridle.

Meanwhile, up front, the steersman was slowing the boat down as he consulted his fathometer and radar, the figures glowing on their dials. The depth of the water was more than adequate, he decided.

They had taken the Presidential Roads route from Boston Harbor, southeast of Deer Island, where the Black Rock Channel meets the Hypocrite Channel, at the lower periphery of Massachusetts Bay. His radar told him there was only one other moving object in the general vicinity and it was moving away from them. Satisfied he shut off the motor.

His partner, the man who had weighted the lobster trap, was climbing up the ladder in back of him and coming in. “How’re we doing?” he inquired, looking around at the instruments.

“Great! We’re right where we need to be.”

“You know we’re on a time crunch here.”

The pilot turned his head around and gave him a sly smile.

“Not as bad as Georgie’s time crunch,” he replied. They both snickered.

George McCarthy was thirty-one and a professional fisherman most of his adult life. As were most independent New England fishermen these days, he was in somewhat of a financial crunch. There was also the burden of his mother’s illness, exacerbated by the fact that, although she paid her insurance for years, her insurance company would not cover her current, serious illness. This made him especially susceptible to a lucrative, one-time-only financial overture. Along came the two men now operating his fishing boat, the “Carrie Anne”.

Against his better judgment, George had taken on a shipment of 1600 pounds of marijuana off the coast of North Carolina, about 100 miles east of Nag’s Head. Taking on his cargo from a mother ship sailing from Panama, he made his delivery at a Cape Cod inlet. When it came time to pick up his payment, he found himself a prisoner on his own vessel.

“Stand up!” yelled one of his captors, moving quickly towards him. As soon as George was standing straight, both captors were beside him. The man closest to him grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him so that one man was behind him, and one was in front. The end of the rope tied to the bridle of the loaded lobster trap was looped around the rope binding his hands to his body and was tightly secured. The pressure on his wrists was so tight that he felt the circulation in his hands fading away.

“I don’t get you guys,” George said. “You made $800,000 on that weed I picked up for you. I was only in for ten percent!”

“Yeah,” replied the man in front of him. But then you wouldn’t do it again.”

“It was a one-shot deal, remember?”

“It is now, George,” said the man in back of him as they grabbed him and threw him overboard.

The cold water was a massive shock to George’s system. His body started to twist and writhe as water filled his rubber boots, pulling him downward.

Back on deck the rope was almost out of slack. Before the trap could get pulled into the water, the man who tied the rope grabbed it, pulling back. George came to a sudden stop, but his weighted-down boots kept him from rising toward the surface. The struggle for oxygen became a mortal one. Repeating heel-to-toe motions with his feet, he managed to dislodge one boot, then the other. Moving his body like a dolphin as he kicked, he began to ascend.

As he broke the surface, he urgently sucked in great gulps of air, throwing his head back and lifting up his legs so that he floated on his back like a cork.

One of the men on the boat said to the other, “I told you he’d get back to the surface!”

The other man said, chuckling, “Yeah, he sure did. Watch this.”

He started jerking on the rope, flopping George back over on his stomach. George struggled to get back on his back in the water, so he could breathe. Every time George made it, the man with the rope jerked him back out of position as he and the other man laughed. Apparently, they were enjoying this immensely.

The horizon had already started to glow as they indulged in their sadistic comedy routine. Suddenly, the crown of the sun broke the horizon.

The man with the rope was totally lost in his enjoyment of George’s desperate, doomed suffering, but the other man said, “Hey, I hate to interrupt your amusement, but we have a breakfast meeting at Leopold’s in a couple of hours.”

The smile left the other man’s face. He glared at the horizon, saying to his friend, “I could’ve done this all day!” He let go of the rope and kicked the weighted trap into the water, which responded with a loud kersplash.

George realized, hopelessly, what the splash meant. He managed one more deep breath before he began to sink rapidly under the weight of the lobster trap. At that point he drew his legs up and curled his body into the fetal position as the rope pulled him deep into the Atlantic Ocean. Bit by bit, he managed to get his arms down to the back of his knees, then to the top of his calves. The exertion caused his body to devour what little air was left in his lungs, but he wouldn’t give up. Eventually he reached down to the bottoms of his feet, and miraculously his arms were out in front of him again. As he was being pulled headfirst down toward the bottom, he flexed his biceps and brought his teeth to the rope, hoping he could loosen the tightened knots. But time was running out. As the trap hit the ocean floor, George took his first involuntary breath of salt water. His blood and brain depleted of oxygen, he mercifully began to lose consciousness.