You can imagine our exhaustion as we settled in aboard the Coast Guard cutter. Seamen found temporary quarters for the dozen or so women who had still been aboard the burning boat, while the rest of us were grateful for chairs. A seaman walked among us and asked for names and addresses so relatives could be notified. I handed him my passport and then fell asleep.
Sometime later an officer tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to come with him. At least I think that is what he wanted. I had no idea how long I had been asleep, but it hadn’t been long enough. I was too tired to argue, so I followed him up some stairs to the bridge of the ship. There I found Foster, Lebeck, and several other men in old uniforms browbeating the ships captain. He was out numbered five to one, and outweighed by half a ton, but he didn’t seem to mind. He stood his ground and simply repeated slowly and quietly, as if he were speaking to slow children, “This is an American ship, so it must return to an American port.” Lebeck was shouting in heavily accented English, and Foster was nearly as loud, and both of them kept repeating the same points – they had to be returned to Biloxi. For a minute I thought I might have been brought up to intercede in this argument, but it was immediately apparent to me the captain had everything under control. As much as the blue armband people might need to get back to their show in the morning, the captain was not taking a US war ship into a foreign port. This was not subject for debate, especially not with men who looked and smelled as badly as we all did.
No, the captain wanted me for something else. He noticed me come up on the bridge and nodded to the officer who had escorted me. The officer took me back into a small room filled with electronics gear, and offered me a chair and some coffee. I was grateful for both.
“You are Shawn Murphy, aren’t you?” He asked. He looked to be just out of college, not much younger than myself, but far cleaner and alert than I felt at the moment.
“Yes. Thanks for the coffee. By the way, can I have my passport back? I plan to return to Louisiana later today if that is possible.”
“Of course.” He pulled my passport from a pile of papers on the table, and handed it to me. “We have already notified your parents and your fiancée that you have been rescued.”
“Thank you.” I looked around for a clock and saw that it was after four. It would have been a scary call for my parents and for Elise, awoken in the middle of the night and told that I had been in a ship wreck. Then the coffee seemed to open one or two of my tired synapses and I had a realization. How did they know I had a fiancee? There was nothing on my passport about her. The officer seemed to be waiting for me to draw that conclusion. Then he continued.
“When we uploaded the guest list to our system, it only took a few minutes before we were alerted to the fact that you were not just a boatload of tourists. This is a significant event. We received several calls that indicated you might be helpful in explaining the situation to us.”
“Did you say you uploaded the passenger list from the boat?”
“Yes, we have satellite communications.”
“I have a digital camera with pictures of the accident. Do you have the bandwidth to handle images?”
“Our telecommunications capabilities are classified, but trust me, we can handle any images you have on a commercial camera. Let’s see what you have.” He held out his hand, and I reached into my pocket for my camera. I had an initial sinking feeling as I felt how wet the pocket of my coat was. We had been splashing water around pretty liberally. Had I ruined my camera? I took a good look at it before I gave it to him and to a technician who now rolled his chair over from one of the electronic consoles. Had the memory chip survived? I guess we would find out fast enough. The technician plugged in a firewire and had images up on a screen in seconds. The chip had survived. Thank God for American technology.
“Can you walk me through these images and explain what happened?” the officer asked, as we watched the images fly past.
“Yes, but I would like to use a special approach.” I thought of the pictures I had of Soisson – Napoleon abandoning his ship, leaving women behind. If I could get them uploaded to a public place soon, they would be out and about before Soisson made land and started lying about what he had done. “I have a web site for my students at the National University in Green Bay. If I upload the images to that site, they will be available to everyone. And, if you will give me a keypad, I can type up some descriptions of events. You will get what you want, and so will everyone else.” I could see from the expression on his face that I had just made a request that was – as they say in the military – beyond his pay grade. He thought for a moment and then left the room. He needed approvals.
I had finished my coffee and helped myself to a second cup before he returned with the captain. It was the captain who took over now.
“We have no authority to transmit data to a civilian site in a foreign country. But if you give us the URL and password, you have my word that once the images and text have been accepted by our communications people in Pensacola, they will forward everything to your personal site.” I wondered how many other places they would also forward the materials, but since that was exactly what I wanted, I could hardly object. I agreed, and spend the next two hours sitting with the technician, and keying in a caption for each image, and then a short summary of the evening. I was too tired for more than five or six hundred words, but I had enough energy left in me that I didn’t want to let this opportunity pass. Soisson might be able to blow up cathedrals, but I was in a position to blow up his reputation. This was payback time, pure and simple.
It was after six by the time we were done. The sun was coming up, and we were nearing Pensacola. I had one last cup of coffee, put my camera in my pocket, and went out on the deck to get some air. Foster was waiting for me. He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders but his purple silks still showed. He looked awful, just as I suspected we all did.
“So what did you tell them?” he asked.
“I assume I told them the same thing you did – what happened, when it happened, who did what -- your basic incident report for their log.”
“Two hours is a long interview.”
“I had lots to say.” We stared at each other for a while. He was still huge and powerful, but he looked so bedraggled at that moment I felt more companionable than intimidated. “Tilden,” I said, letting his first name hang in the air a bit to warn him I was going to be personal. “You need to think about your connection to these people. People stupid enough to forget to bolt down a stove are stupid enough to forget other things. Later today I think you are going to find they are too stupid to train their mules and mule drivers in advance. Assuming the wagon train ever leaves at all, I suggest you have ambulances standing by. These are nasty people, and they are dumb people, and whatever you want, they are not in a position to help you get it.”
“We could use your help.” He sounded tired, even pathetic at the moment. Was he playing a role, or did he understand how much trouble he was in? I didn’t care.
“No.” Neither of us spoke after that. We stood looking out at the port, watching the cutter angle in to its assigned dock. Our long night was at its end.
Our next few hours consisted of bureaucratic and personal basics. The cutter landed and we were escorted onto busses and taken to a holding area. It wasn’t quite a jail, but it was also clear we weren’t to be wandering around. There were identifies to check, forms to sign, arrangement to be made for our transfer back to Biloxi. Eventually we were put back on busses and allowed to do some shopping at the base exchange. This made everyone happy. All of us looked pretty bad – smoky, wet, ripped, sweaty – and worst yet, since most people were wearing silks and such, we appeared to be royalty from a past century who had climbed out of our graves. You should have seen the stares we got. Wherever we passed, people stopped dead in their tracks. I wouldn’t be surprised if we caused a traffic accident or two. All the counts and count
esses were happy to find blue jeans and white shirts. All the silks went into the store trash bin, including some gowns that must have cost thousands. I couldn’t help noticing two store clerks edging their way toward the trash. With typically Yankee business sense they were going to retrieve all that silk and go home much wealthier than they had arrived.
Back at the reception area, we were shown large bathrooms and given time to clean ourselves up. Nothing was going to get all the smoke smell off our skin and out of our hair, but this at least cleaned us up some and made us feel more presentable. By noon we were back on busses and headed west, spurred on by the friendly waves of the good folks of Pensacola.
Somewhere in this process Foster disappeared. He is not the kind of guy you can just lose, so I assume he headed back to New York or had a more grand means of getting to Biloxi. The rest of us took the bus, grateful to sit down. The guards on both sides of the border stopped us and took names again, but they obviously had been called about us and knew there would be no passports. They passed us by and we all began to grow more interested in our final destination.
What would be waiting for us in Biloxi? It was about a hundred miles from the border to Biloxi, and if there had been an anxiety meter on the bus, it would have risen exponentially with each mile. These folks were the cream of the blue armband crop, and they had expected their Sunday to go a very different way. After a beautiful – and exclusive – night aboard the very scenic sailing ship, they would return to port to adoring crowds, massive news crews, and prominent positions on the stage. This was to be their day to show one and all that they had arrived. Instead, here it was mid-afternoon, and they were sneaking in to town in a pair of very plebian buses. As much as they wanted to be on camera, this wasn’t what they had had in mind.
As it turned out, things were even worse than they had feared. The party had gone on without us. The buses drove all the way down to the port only to find remnants of the crowd, a stage being taken down, and banners already being rolled up. We had missed the big send off. Take your pick – people were relieved (given the way we all looked, who could blame them), confused (how could the party happen without them?), or angry (how could Soisson dare to hold the event without their august presence). By the time we had all left the busses and found ourselves standing in a largely-empty street, it was anger that was taking command of their emotions. Soisson had jumped ship with the women, gotten to shore more directly on a shrimp boat, and taken all the limelight for himself. Somehow this surprised all of them. Lebeck quickly huddled with his leading henchmen, mayhem clearly on his mind, while the rest of us drifted away.
I headed back to my car. Wherever the parade was, and whatever trouble Lebeck would cause, I was too tired to care. I have never wanted to see a bed so badly. The walk back to my car woke me up enough that I wasn’t too dangerous on the road, but I mostly made it back to my hotel from luck and habit. I’m not even sure if it was six o’clock when I went to bed. I didn’t care. I called Elise and explained in under fifty words that I was safe and back in my hotel, asked her to call my family, and was never so grateful to anyone as I was to her when it became apparent she could hear the fatigue in my voice and was willing to hold all questions until the next morning. I disconnected all phones and slept for fourteen hours. It had been a long, wet, scary day.
Chapter 19
My final week with Morons