GUARD WALKS BAHAMAS 'BEAT'

NASSAU, BAHAMAS - The largest air station in the Coast Guard is key to
America's defense against drug smuggling.

The Bahamas are known for beautiful beaches and outstanding fishing, but for
the Coast Guard crews assigned to work here, their time is spent hindering
the flow of cocaine into the United States.

"It's kind of like being the cop on the beat," said Lt. Cmdr. James Manning
at Air Station Clearwater, which provides the crews foro the Bahamas. "With
all those deserted islands, there's a lot of activity."

So much activity that the Coast Guard usually makes two drug seizures a
week. Between the Coast Guard's H-60 helicopters and C-130 planes, Air
Station Clearwater accounted for 18,436 pounds of seized cocaine in 1998
with a street value of $125.7 million. It seized more than 6,500 pounds of
marijuana the same year along with much smaller amounts of hashish and
heroin coming in from Central and South America.

Where a drug bust of a kilo of cocaine would make a street cop happy, the
hauls the Coasties get are much more substantial.

"We're getting busts of 360 kilos, 500 kilos, 2,000 kilos," said Coast Guard
spokesman Lt. Shawn Tripp. "Those are monstrous maritime busts. Out there is
where we make a big difference in the U.S. Once it hits the States it gets
so spread out."

The choppers and planes patrol vast stretches of the Caribbean, often
spotting smugglers holding tight to the coast of Cuba. If the boats head
toward Cuba, the Coast Guard must wait for them to venture back into the
open sea.

When the smugglers see the white-and-orange aircraft, the fun begins.

"Most of them tend to run," said Lt. Cmdr. David McBride, a 37-year-old
Tampa resident who pilots one of the Guard's Jayhawk helicopters.

"For the most part, it's a gentlemen's game down here," he said. "There's
not a lot of shooting involved. Occasionally it happens, but there's not a
lot of big OK Corral shootouts like you used to have in Miami."

Small planes drop cocaine shipments to waiting boats, whose crews load it
and then try to run to the chain of islands. Eventually they'll try to make
it to a drop-off point in South Florida.

When Guardsmen see cocaine dropped off a fleeing boat, they drop a marking
beacon so the drugs can be picked up by a cutter. The vast majority of the
smugglers caught by the Coast Guard are prosecuted in Bahamian courts.

"It's a lot quicker and stricter," McBride said.

The Jayhawks are the Coast Guard version of the Army's Blackhawk helicopter,
which is heavily armored to protect it from gunfire and equipped with
redundant operating systems in case of damage from weapons fire.

Only recently have some of the choppers been equipped with weapons so the
crews can defend themselves if fired upon by smugglers.

"Our policy now is if they shoot at us, we fly away," Tripp said.

The weapons are seen as another tool to stop smugglers. The .50-caliber
sniper rifles some helicopter crews use fire a monstrous slug designed by
firearms developer da Vinci John Browning. The targets aren't the smugglers,
but instead the massive outboard motors typically used on the "go fasts,"
the cigarette boats capable of outrunning most anything else on the sea.

Air Station Clearwater, which sends crews to Nassau and Great Inagua, is the
largest air station in the Coast Guard. Five hundred people are stationed at
Clearwater, and of about 1,000 pilots in the Coast Guard, 85 fly out of
there. The station has a fleet of 13 H-60s and seven C-130 planes.

They form the forward military operating base in the Caribbean, complemented
by three Army Blackhawk helicopters based in Great Exuma. Coast Guard
boarding parties also are stationed on Navy ships in the region, so they can
inspect suspicious vessels.

The military presence began in the mid-1980s when the Coast Guard started
working with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bahamian
Defense Force Drug Enforcement Unit, and the Turks and Caicos Islands
police. With law enforcement jurisdiction on the high seas, the Coast Guard
can board and search a ship, which could be considered an act of war if done
by the Navy.

"Primarily we're down there doing drug interdiction, but we end up doing a
lot of search-and-rescue because we're the only emergency response unit in
the Bahamas," Tripp said.

When not hunting drug runners, the crews search for refugees from the
Dominican Republic, Cuba and Haiti and rescue boaters in distress. Joe Kean,
a 29-year-old rescue swimmer with the force, initially considered becoming a
Navy SEAL, but chose the Coast Guard instead.

"They are trained to kill and we save lives," Kean said. "It's a totally
different mission."

Lt. Russ Hellstern and Petty Officer Joy Hall were aboard one of the
Jayhawks earlier this month searching for four divers who had been stranded
off Nassau. Another diver from the party had been rescued, but thes four had
been missing for 19 hours when Hall spotted something through her night
vision goggles.

"They were nine miles away from their original spot," she said.

"They had no type of signaling device. If we didn't have the night vision,
we wouldn't have seen them."

The divers were hoisted aboard the chopper, scuba tanks and all. They seemed
oblivious to the danger they were in, Hall and Hellstern said.

"The sharks are freaking huge here," Hellstern said. "They were lucky."