Bimini

Cael Seabrook took the morning flight from Miami to Bimini in the Bahamas, early summer 1983.

It was his first time flying, his first time leaving the USA, and his first time seeing an ocean from the sky. The world was fresh and new and extraordinary; he felt higher than the airplane he rode in. Like he’d hit the mother of all jackpots.

He was a twenty-eight-year-old ichthyologist flying into the best future he could imagine.

The view through the window didn’t seem quite real. He knew this region of the Atlantic from textbooks, classes, charts, and scientific papers, but seeing was believing. A mile beneath the wings of the plane, hazy blue radiance spanned from horizon to horizon. There was no land anywhere—just deep, boundless ocean, liquid brilliance shining back the sun, etched with tiny waves and ribbons of foam.

The Chalks seaplane banked slowly to the left. The propeller engines made a loud burring sound. Clouds wisped past the windows and bright sunlight suddenly filled the cabin. Small dots of land, edged with surf, gradually appeared in the east.

He gripped the armrest and angled his face close to the window, determined to get a glimpse of his new life. The small dots of land were the Bimini islands. Only from the sky could you truly appreciate how they sat in the midst of one of the earth’s greatest undersea rivers: the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream flowed like a gigantic artery, bigger than the Mississippi River, between Florida and the Bahamas. The current ran six thousand feet deep and stirred the ocean depths, transporting marine life, nutrients, and heat from the Gulf of Mexico to Bimini, up the southeast coast of the U.S., then thousands of miles east across the Atlantic Ocean, where it warmed the western coasts of Scotland and Norway.

The massive underwater river continuously bathed the Bimini islands with a steady supply of pelagic marine life.

It also brought large, deep-water predators right up to the shallows.

Only seven miles long and half a mile wide, North Bimini looked more like a spit of sand than a true island. It was less populated than most college campuses, with fewer than two thousand citizens. But what made Seabrook catch his breath were the incredible colors of the sea. Water so dazzling it hurt his eyes and made him squint. No picture, no postcard could capture what he saw in that moment.

It was as if God had scattered gemstones across the face of the ocean.

The deep water glittered lapis lazuli, the water near the coast radiated topaz, and the wading shallows shimmered blue diamonds. The lagoon and flats to the east and out to the Great Bahama Bank and Cat Cay were shades of turquoise. All of it glowed like a cosmic invitation, an underwater world to go down into and explore—full of extraordinary life.

The Caribbean Sea.

Seabrook had grown up in upstate New York and earned his undergrad and master’s degrees at Syracuse University. He didn’t look like a scientist or an intellectual, except perhaps in the brightness of his blue eyes. With red hair, white skin that burned easily, and an athletic rough-hewn six-foot-two-inch frame, he looked like a farmhand or maybe a Celtic rugby player. Like he was used to hard labor, dirt, and sweat.

He was, in fact, a rugby player. And his nose had been broken three times in as many years, but he’d never once left the field—not even when the cartilage in his nose felt like shards of broken glass scraping together, or his eyes watered like a squalling baby’s. He just wiped the dark blood on his jersey sleeve and played through the pain. Now his nose looked misshapen, like a boxer’s. When he ran his finger down the bridge, the cartilage traced left, then right, then a little more right. Permanently crooked. In the future his fiancée would say it was cute, that it gave him character. And she would kiss it.

* * *

The Chalks seaplane vibrated loudly as it began its final descent. The window gave another perfect view of the islands and how the windward shore declined dramatically into deep blue water, where the Gulf Stream flowed north through the deep ocean trench of the Florida Straits.

Because of Bimini’s geographical good fortune, big-game fish cruised very close to land: marlin, tuna, sailfish, wahoo, mako shark, and other species. The fish migrated north from the spawning waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea and followed the warm Gulf Stream up to the Atlantic. Many of the fish ran heavier than a thousand pounds.

All that traffic attracted apex predators.

And sharks were not the only things that hunted in Bimini.

The islands’ extraordinary empty beaches and world-class fishing put a glamorous mask over an ugly reality: a vicious underworld of drug trafficking.

The island served as a superhighway for illegal smuggling. During Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, smugglers sneaked rum into the U.S. from Bimini.

The smuggling had continued after Prohibition, but instead of rum it was now drugs. The Miami newspapers and nightly TV news reported that the Bahamas were a key transshipment point for the cocaine traffic coming from Colombia. And the Bimini islands were the very last stop before the United States. A mere forty-eight miles across the Florida Straits. Drug runners used speedboats to run cocaine into South Florida inlets and would return to Bimini with millions of dollars in cash. The round trip took only a few hours in good weather.

And like the giant marlin swimming near shore followed by sharks, the ability to make billions of dollars brought death in its wake: the Dores and Medellín Cartels fighting for territory and terrorizing South Florida and the Bahamas.

Reports of shootings and drug-related torture killings were a staple of the nightly news in Miami. There were so many homicides, the city had become known as the “murder capital of America,” and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration created a special task force to work with the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Also, the city morgue had to rent a refrigerated truck to store corpses, because the medical examiners couldn’t keep up with the number of bodies coming in from the drug war.

But across the Florida Straits, in the Bahamas, crime reports were virtually nonexistent. Bimini had no local news.

Besides, all evidence of criminal activity usually disappeared under the waves.

The Chalks seaplane abruptly landed in the harbor at Alice Town. The amphibian craft bounced, then wallowed down into the water with a dragging, quicksand-sinking feeling. Then the seaplane lowered its wheels and drove up the short ramp onto land like a massive sea beast crawling onto shore.

Once the propellers stopped spinning, the passengers began filing out. Seabrook crouched and ducked his head to fit through the doorway, then stood up straight and stretched to his full six feet two inches.

From the top of the stairs next to the plane, he gazed out over coconut palms and Australian pines at the magnificent clear water of the harbor. Everything looked so different from his life in New York—no crowds, no malls, no traffic, no skyscrapers—it felt like a different planet.

The air seemed to vibrate with damp heat and sunlight.

He paused and took his first sweet breath of the Bahamas.

This was a shark scientist’s paradise.

After going through the Customs Office, he was greeted by three scientists waiting to shuttle him to the research ship. One was an attractive young woman with black hair.

As he followed the scientists to the Zodiac boat tied nearby, he had no idea that he’d just met his future fiancée.

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