The Last Best Place by John Demont Page B

discovered Nova Scotia once Washington choked off the drug traffic into the United States. A few locals, needing the cash, hold their noses and play along, acting as mules moving the dope from the mother ship anchored far offshore to land under cloak of darkness. Even they know it is different. There is no pride in it. No panache. Just dirty money. It’s not just illegal, it’s wrong.
    “They dump it anywhere: on a hidden beach, in the woods where a couple of guys are waiting in all-terrain vehicles. They’ll find a couple of small wharfs that anyone else would think are no use whatsoever,” Gallup says, pointing to a pair of decapitated piers. “Sometimes they’re quite brazen about it. It’s frustrating. But we have so little manpower there’s not a lot we can do. Some people say we get 20 per cent of the dope that comes in, others would say only 2 per cent. It’s like squeezing a balloon. Squeeze one part and it just pops out somewhere else.”
    Yet, despite the immense odds in the dealer’s favour, their ships hit ice, they get drunk and talk too much, they draw attention to themselves with their funny accents, flashy yachts or by paying for their clams and chips with a hundred-dollar bill. Or sometimes they panic, like the faint-hearted group who dropped $525-million worth of hash on a secluded beach near the hamlet of East Berlin because they thought a couple of locals rowing by in a dory had spotted them.
    Yet they were Pablo Escobars compared with the ones who tried to land 500 pounds of Moroccan hash around here a few years back. Imagine, such lousy sailors that they had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and still couldn’t get close enough to shore for the dropoff. Eventually, one of them set out in rubber dinghy; a fisherman found him stranded on the rocks near Port Mouton with a broken toe and, for some unexplainable reason, a guitar strung over his back. By now the Winnebago he was supposed to rendezvous with was gone. He checked into a motel in the area—owned by a retiredRCMP officer—then skipped town, conveniently leaving behind his passport and drawings of the boat, clearly showing where the dope was stowed. It gets even more pathetic: a month later he resurfaced with a partner in an old camper van with a dilapidated boat slung across the roof. The Mounties tailed them to a small cove, watched as they dropped their boat in the water, then shrunk back in disbelief as their engine exploded and went up in a fireball. The pair swam back to shore, hopped dripping-wet into their van, drove a few miles and walked into the thick woods. When they staggered into the clearing, lugging their waterproof bags full of hash, the Mounties were standing there with their cuffs out.
    Gallup had cut the engine to tell me these stories. As we sat there bobbing in the waves, another Zodiac, full of Mounties and Revenue Canada agents, pulled alongside. Someone had noticed something strange behind an island on the furthermost end of the Bay.
    “Hold on,” warned Gallup. “I’m just going to ease this out a bit.”
    Then, a Miami Vice moment as he pulled out the clutch and we joined them in a tight little formation thundering in tandem eastwards. Ten minutes later we rip between some medium-sized islands, then slow way down. Steering with one hand as he raises his binoculars with the other, Gallup keeps a running monologue as we near an anchored black scow. “Look at that hook on the forward spar, what does he use it for? Does he use it for offloading while at sea? What kind of radar is that at the front? Jesus, is that a seal? No, it’s a dog.” He pauses. “What’s he doing sitting in a cove in the middle of the bay by himself?”
    The other Zodiac goes in first, pulling up alongside the boat, the boarding party scrambling aboard. “We can’t get you too close in case shit happens,” Gallup warns. He picks up his radio and asks for a check on the ship’s identification. A crew member, or maybe the owner,