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LAKEFRONT AIRPORT Philip Marshall Copyright © 2013 by Phillip Marshall All rights reserved. Th is book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America Second Printing, 2013 ISBN 978-1481859653 Veritas vos liberabit 5 PROLOGUE Never Amounted to Shit Between radar sweeps and perilous night swells of the Gulf of Mexico, the leading importer of recreational goods from South America kept the twin- engine Piper Seneca on course with sharp eyes and steady hands. Th rough a windscreen streaked with moisture, Brophy Wales raced to beat the approaching cold front against a forty knot headwind that was kicking up whitecaps just twenty feet below. Instant death would be the fi rst hint of narcolepsy. Aft of the cockpit bulkhead, fi fteen wrapped bales moved slightly with each bump around a makeshift fi fty-fi ve gallon auxiliary fuel tank in the space normally occupied by passenger seats. A locator antenna was attached to each two-kilo bale. For the past fi ve hours, Wales had fl own the second leg of his journey by the seat of his pants with all lights out to keep his night vision perfect. Finally, dawn cracked against fl orescent orange of high cirrus to the east above drilling rig derricks that glistened like Christmas trees on the horizon. Th ough he fl ew with hollow bones of a bird, time was gaining on the former airline pilot. He sat forty pounds heavier than optimum weight for a six-foot man of forty-three. Th e black hair he combed over the thin spot on his crown was going gray. Crow’s feet framed intense bloodshot brown eyes that began to burn with the energy-sapping sunrise. His belly growled with hunger. He could pee for thirty minutes. Wales was blessed and cursed with a photographic memory. A slideshow had perpetually clicked in his head during the marathon cruise from Colombia. Again, he visualized his drop plan with worries about those damn intangibles that could fl uke him into a federal penitentiary. Click. He ran through a plan 6 LAKEFRONT AIRPORT for contingencies that he could imagine and trusted his cunning for the ones he could not. Click. His tanks held ninety minutes of fuel. Click. In an hour and a half, he would either be on his way home or on his way to the big house. Th e air traffi c radar he was currently eluding was a remote antenna for Houston Center, located just south of beautiful downtown Leesville, Louisiana. It had swept all night, but nary a blip refl ected from the Seneca. Th e radar had begun to pick up Petroleum Helicopter’s fl eet of Bell 212s as they lifted from drilling rigs of the massive oil patch with crews of exhausted roughnecks and roustabouts heading home from seven-day hitches. Leesville bounced their blips to Houston Center, where they painted on the screens of ten air traffi c controllers. Th e targets all squawked the code for Visual Flight Rules on electronic transponders, solely an advisory to the controllers, who had no real need to identify or talk with the pilots. Th e controllers simply ignored the dozen PHI targets off shore on the lower portion of the round green screen. Th eir main concerns were the business planes on instrument fl ight plans they worked in and out of Houma, Lafayette and Morgan City. Th ere certainly was no alarm when another target appeared seventy-fi ve miles south of Grand Isle within a dozen targets, all squawking 1200. Wales turned to the right seat. “Damn son...ya gonna sleep all day, too?” Wales yanked the yoke aft, jolting Camille Mouton from a Jamaican beach to the harsh morning light of the sky-fi lled windscreen. Gravity paralyzed him to the seatback and he nearly wet his Levis. “Goddamn...You bastard.” Mouton pulled himself up groggily and looked out of his side window to see the turbulent Gulf water below as the plane climbed. “On course?” “Course this...We’re gonna fi nd out right now.” Wales leveled off at 1,400 feet, high enough to ping the radar and to pick up navigation signals from the station at Grand Isle. He pulled the throttles back to eighty knots and dialed 1200 into the transponder. To the controllers at Houston Center, it was obviously another PHI chopper. He centered Grand Isle with his navigation needle as the Distance Measuring Equipment lit up seventy-two miles. Wales lifted his eyebrows to his lethargic co-pilot. “Easy money.” Posing as a Petroleum Helicopter, he fl ew directly over the PHI heliport just south of Morgan City at 1,400 feet, pulled both throttles to idle until he reset power fi fty feet above the swamp a mile west of Louisiana Highway 1. Calmly, he waited for the pre-arranged site to appear. After twenty seconds, he spotted the narrow, cypress-lined bayou and rolled the Seneca into a smooth forty-degree bank below the treetops. As the plane roared up the deserted waterway, egrets and redfi sh dove for cover. Wales scanned the surface for the PHILIP MARSHALL 7 pirogue anchored at the mouth of a small lake, the signal that the coast was clear. Mouton crawled back over the cargo and fuel tank, popped open the lower entry door and pulled the fi rst bale into position. Th ree men below manned their own fl at-bottomed skiff s. Each was equipped with a fi shing pole, handheld radios, a receiver to locate the transmitter on every bale, a Mac 10 semi-automatic machine gun and enough ammunition to hold off the Lafourche Parish Sheriff Department for days. God help any Cajun boy who might innocently wander upon the men, who had been there since three a.m. Wales pulled his handheld radio. “Twenty?” He let go of the mike key and instantly got his answer. “Twenty-one clear,” said the man in the boat on the bayou side of the pirogue. “Th irty?” “Th irty-two clear,” said the man in the boat on the west shore of the lake. “Forty?” Wales banked left along the shore of the four-mile wide lake. “Forty-three clear.” Wales signaled Mouton to kick the fi rst package into moist, warm air. He continued circling the lake as his co-pilot kicked another fourteen times on cue. Th ey circled back once more to count the bales aloud and confi rm that all packs were within easy recovery range. As the boats converged for pickup, Wales pushed the throttles to the fi rewall and the Seneca shot west, fl ying a hundred feet above the swamp for ten miles before spiraling to 1,000 feet to check for tails. A leisurely cruise north around the west of Baton Rouge preceded a smooth landing at the uncontrolled 3,000-foot strip at New Roads, Louisiana. As the plane rolled to a stop, a Chevy van appeared with a young brunette at the wheel. After Wales enjoyed a divine bladder release in the gravel parking lot, she drove the smuggler south to Baton Rouge. Firing up his new Toyota Corolla, Camille Mouton lit a Camel, inhaled deeply, and headed north to St. Francisville for several well-earned days of solitude and ganja. Back on Highway 1, an unmarked panel truck approached the small Cajun town of Golden Meadow. In the rear were the booty, the boats, the guns and all the damning evidence a prosecutor could dream up. Th ree men in the cab reminded each other that the speed limit change from fi fty-fi ve to thirty was well hidden behind the Welcome to Golden Meadow sign. All looked straight ahead as they passed directly by the local heat’s radar gun and slid through town. Strictly obeying all traffi c laws, they made their way to Baton Rouge. Following thirty sleepless hours, a three-hour nap in his own bed was enough to revive Wales. Ever cognizant of police tails, he drove his Mercedes 8 LAKEFRONT AIRPORT out to his warehouse near Ryan Airport with one eye constantly fi xed in the rearview while the other scanned aggressively for local, state and federal heat. His meanders spent little time upon main roads and would usually include a U-turn or two. Th e panel truck showed up on schedule at high noon and Wales waited inside the aluminum prefab warehouse to crank the chain rope that opened the cargo door and the truck and his three men slowly nosed in. At noon plus fi ve, a yellow Ryder truck with two men arrived. Wales directed them to back up to the panel truck for the transfer. Wales’ men slung out the fi fteen packages from behind three pirogues while Wales held a Mac 10 in the ready-for-any-surprise position. A stocky man from the Ryder received and threw the booty behind a leather living room set and a king-size bed. Wales ordered them all back into their respective cabs. He walked around to the driver of the Ryder to receive a duff el bag and disappeared between the trucks. Wales would not miss this opportunity. Of all the sound eff ects he had perfected, nothing unnerved more in this line of work than the po-lice siren. And so he began, ever so faintly, on the whoo-whoo-whoo warning that puts the fear of God in people engaged in off enses that bring major slammer time.

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