Beldon Gacayan was resting peacefully in his rack when a group of armed men burst through the hatch.

“Get on the ground! Get on the ground!”

With a gun inches away from the seaman’s head, they threw him to the floor and secured his wrists with plastic handcuffs. Then, grinning, they helped their shipmate up, dusted him off, and set him free.

This was just a practice for members of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Alert’s boarding team. But in a few days’ time the weapons could be real, and the suspect unwilling to give up so easily. Which is why the team was drilling take-down methods and reviewing boarding procedures last week in transit to Central American waters.

The Astoria-based Alert is on a six- to seven-week drug interdiction mission in the Eastern Pacific, putting the 75-person ship on the front lines of the nation’s war on drugs. The Alert is primarily looking for cocaine, a potent stimulant that can be snorted, smoked or injected. However, the Alert’s commanding officer, Capt. Mathew Bliven said sea routes may be used for “high-interest aliens,” such as members of al-Qaida, and economic migrants. Coast Guard ships are often diverted from counter-drug operations to migrant cases.

It has been 18 months since the Alert’s last tour off Central America. Then, the ship helped the Navy shuttle five to six tons of cocaine to shore, and rescued two Polynesian sailors whose boat was sinking 1,000 miles from land, but went home without a successful drug bust of its own. In fact, no one on board can remember a significant drug seizure by Alert crews, so the desire is palpable. The Alert did earn a Meritorious Unit commendation in 1999-2000 in Pacific Area, thanks in part to the seizure of 2.8 metric tons of cocaine from the Mexican fishing vessel Valeria, but a successful, large interdiction is usually 10 to 15 tons.

“Hopefully we’ll find something,” said Ensign Greg Higgins, a sentiment echoed by everyone onboard.

Vulnerable border The U.S. government believes the United States-Mexico land border is where most cocaine shipments are smuggled into the United States. Approximately 65 percent of the cocaine entering the United States crosses the Southwest border, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Kelly Hatfield, chief of law enforcement and intelligence for the Coast Guard’s 11th District, a former commanding officer of the Alert, said about 960 metric tons of cocaine travel to the U.S. every year, with 37 percent flowing through the Eastern Pacific.

The goal of the Coast Guard is to interrupt the flow of drugs at sea, before bales of cocaine ever reach the border.

Audio on the Web (Click Here) to hear Lt. Kerry McKeever talk about the Alert’s mission in the Eastern Pacific.To do this, the Coast Guard must cover an area approximately the size of the continental United States – a “Where’s Waldo” game of enormous proportions.

“Imagine you have to stop a VW van from Florida to Washington state, and you’re in Houston,” said Hatfield, illustrating the difficulty of hunting down a drug trafficker in the Eastern Pacific.

Because of the broad swath of sea the Coast Guard must search, a cutter working alone has a 7 percent chance of finding a drug boat. With a helicopter, like the H-65 Dolphin the Alert is picking up in Los Angeles, the odds move up to 20 percent. With shore-based air support, the same cutter has a 50 to 60 percent chance of tracking down a drug boat.

Intelligence information provided by the Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) South is also key to a successful search, Coast Guard officials said. JIATF South is a multi-agency, multi-country network that compiles information on illicit drug activity and is responsible for planning and directing the detection and monitoring phases of an operation. When a vessel suspected of drug smuggling is found, a hand-off occurs and law enforcement efforts are coordinated by a Coast Guard district.

“If the tactical commander doesn’t have good intelligence we might not find anything,” Bliven said. “Feels like you punched holes in the ocean for six weeks.”

The Coast Guard will be working closely with at least one other country during this trip, but exactly where the boat will be – and when – is information guarded like a Faberge egg.

“The drug organization in Colombia and other organizations are very well funded,” Bliven said. “They do have their own intelligence network, we know by looking at the electronics and communications gear we’ve seized. They’re trying to listen to what we say, track us on radar.”

The Coast Guard tries to have two to four cutters in the Eastern Pacific area at any time. The commitment has paid off in spades this year. Two recent busts off the Galapagos Islands netted 55,000 pounds, a $500 million street value. Just half of that haul would provide nine cocaine fixes to every American, according to the internal Coast Guard publication “Coast Guard.” The Coast Guard has seized 240,000 pounds of cocaine this year – a record.

Small and fastThe typical drug trafficking operation uses “go-fasts,” small, high-speed vessels outfitted with four engines.

“They’re like ‘Miami Vice’ cigarette boats built for the express purpose of hauling drugs up through sea lanes,” Bliven said.

The go-fasts stop every 300 to 400 miles to refuel at boats loitering at strategic points. These stops may also be an opportunity for go-fasts to pass their load to another boat.

The go-fasts travel at night, without any lights, and cover up during the day. They’ll travel as far south as the Galapagos Islands to avoid Coast Guard detection.

LEANNE JOSEPHSON – The Daily Astorian

Michael Burgess, boatswains mate 2nd class, pipes the lunch call to the Alert officers and crew. Before modern communications equipment, ships’ crews used whistles so that even someone in the lookout could hear what was happening.”They have a good understanding of the range of our aircraft and our capabilities,” Bliven said.

Once a go-fast boat is spotted, stopping it and getting teams on board before evidence can be destroyed is another matter.

Because these boats can be successful at outrunning Coast Guard ships, the Coast Guard has outfitted cutters with faster small boats, which in some cases can overtake the drug runners.

The Coast Guard has also started using armed helicopters that can fire warning shots ahead of the go-fasts or disabling shots into the boats’ engines. But drug traffickers, who are paid upwards of $10,000 to safely transport a load of narcotics, don’t always give up. They’ll try and destroy the evidence with a Molotov cocktail (a bottle of gas with a rag in it) or some other method.

“They have standing orders, like the military, to destroy … evidence,” said Boatswains Mate 2nd Class Andy Daly, a boarding officer with five years of experience. “I’ve had go-fasts where surveillance aircraft spotted it. They slowed down and covered the whole thing in gasoline. When it started to sink, the coke fell out, half a ton of cocaine off Guatemala.”

Drug traffickers have other methods too, the most dangerous of which are found on drug boats disguised as fishing vessels. These boats are often outfitted with scuttling valves, a valve below the water level that can be opened to quickly sink a vessel and thus the evidence. The Coast Guard could potentially board a sinking ship, or have members of its boarding team searching below deck when someone pulls the plug. The first thing boarding teams do is secure the engine room, where such valves are often located.

“You have to be prepared for the unexpected at all times,” Daly said.

Drug traffickers know the Coast Guard’s first concern is life at sea, so when a boat is sinking or filled with flames, the Coast Guard immediately moves into a search-and-rescue operation. Potentially, the Coast Guard could save the lives of drug traffickers by pulling them from the water while the evidence sinks to the ocean floor. One way the Coast Guard has tried to combat this scenario is by filming boardings, so that attempts to destroy drugs are documented.

The Coast Guard doesn’t inspect all the boats it believes to be trafficking drugs. Much is dependent on where the vessel is stopped, whether the United States has a bilateral agreement with that country, and if so, to what extent the United States should intervene. The Coast Guard has also let millions of dollars sail by because the government has inside information about the boat and a seizure would jeopardize that operation.

How it worksWhen a boarding team does search a vessel, it does so methodically and thoroughly. Coast LEANNE JOSEPHSON – The Daily Astorian

Michael Burgess, boatswains mate 2nd class, pipes the lunch call to the Alert officers and crew. Before modern communications equipment, ships’ crews used whistles so that even someone in the lookout could hear what was happening.Guard teams have to account for every square foot of space because drugs are often hidden behind walls and in sealed spaces. They’ve been found in special compartments in a ship’s fuel tanks, and attached like barnacles to the bottom of a boat.

This counter-drug work has little in common with the fisheries boardings the Alert performs off the Oregon and Washington coasts.

While boarding team officers still outfit themselves with a 9 mm handguns, pepper spray and bullet-proof vests, fisheries boardings are generally safer to perform. Most of the time boarding team members check the safety gear on board, inspect bilge pumps and flare expiration dates, and measure net sizes and fish lengths.

The Coast Guard sometimes boards fishing vessels in teams of two; a drug interdiction operation is likely to use eight or even 12 boarding members.

If a boarding team is able to find illegal drugs, members will start gathering information and evidence for a prosecution team. Many suspects are brought to U.S. courts in Tampa, Fla., and San Diego, Calif., often the closest ports of entry.

“The more cases you make, the more cases you can make against the kingpins,” said Hatfield, the 11th District law enforcement and intelligence chief.

He defended the Coast Guard’s part in the nation’s war on drugs, and said that interdiction and prevention are needed to stem the tide of illicit drug use. However, he added that he didn’t know if the balance between those was what it should be.

Daly, too, said it’s better to put a small dent in a large problem than do nothing.

“I’ve had drugs sink right in front of me,” he said. “The satisfaction it’s not making it to the street is there.”