"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.

The yacht was sixty-two-feet long, big enough that you'd want a few people to help you sail it... but small enough that real master's papers were not required by law. The big motor-yacht had accommodation for fifteen, plus two crewmen, and was worth a couple of million dollars. The owner, a real-estate developer with his own little empire outside Mobile, was new to the sea, and a cautious sailor. That made him smart, Wegener thought. Too smart to stray this far offshore. He knew his limitations, which was rare in the yachting community, especially the richer segment. He'd gone south two weeks earlier, tracing the coast and making a few stops, but he was late coming back, and he'd missed a business meeting. His partner said that he would not have missed it unnecessarily. A routine air patrol had spotted the yacht the day before, but not tried to contact it. The district commander had decided that something smelled about this one. Panache was the closest cutter and Wegener got the call.

"Sixteen thousand yards. Course zero-seven-one," Chief Oreza reported from the radar plot. "Speed twelve. He ain't heading for Mobile, Cap'n."

"Fog's going to burn off in another hour, maybe hour and a half," Wegener decided. "Let's close in now. Mr. O'Neil, all ahead full. Intercept course, Chief?"

"One- six-five, sir."

"That's your course. If the fog holds, we'll adjust when we get within two or three miles and come up dead astern."

Ensign O'Neil gave the proper rudder orders. Wegener went to the chart table.

"Where do you figure he's headed, Portagee?"

The chief quartermaster projected the course, which appeared to go nowhere in particular. "He's on his most economical speed setting... not any port on the Gulf, I'll bet." The captain picked up a pair of dividers and started walking them across the chart.

"That yacht has bunkerage for..." Wegener frowned. "Let's say he topped off at the last port. He can get to the Bahamas easily enough. Refill there, and then anyplace he wants to go on the East Coast."

"Cowboys," O'Neil opined. "First one in a long time."

"Why do you think that?"

"Sir, if I owned a boat that big, I sure wouldn't run it through fog with no radar. His isn't operating."

"I hope you're wrong, son," the captain said. "How long since the last one, Chief?"

"Five years? Maybe more. I thought that sort of thing was all behind us."

"We'll know in an hour." Wegener turned to look at the fog again. Visibility was under two hundred yards. Next he looked into the hooded radar display. The yacht was the closest target. He thought for a minute, then nipped the set from active to standby. Intelligence reports said that druggies now had ESM gear to detect radar transmissions.

"We'll flip it back on when we get within, oh, say, four miles or so."

"Aye, Cap'n," the youngster nodded.

Wegener settled in his leather chair and extracted the pipe from his shirt. He found himself filling it less and less now, but it was part of an image he'd built. A few minutes later the bridge watch had settled down to normal. In keeping with tradition, the captain came topside to handle two hours of the morning watch - the one with the youngest junior officer of the watch - but O'Neil was a bright young kid and didn't need all that much supervision, at least not with Oreza around. "Portagee" Oreza was the son of a Gloucester fisherman and had a reputation approaching his captain's. With three tours at the Coast Guard Academy, he'd helped educate a whole generation of officers, just as Wegener had once specialized in bringing enlisted men along.