“Maybe so. Let’s get the drums back on deck.”

Tashi descends and they quickly lift the metal drums out of the cabins. The cat is slower in the water with the drums aboard, but the effect is least when they’re clumped right behind the mast, so that’s where they put them.

Tashi takes the tiller and brings them in past the reefs of Reef Point, a beachless point on the continuous fifty-foot bluff that makes up the old “Irvine coast,” from Corona del Mar to Laguna. The top of the bluff in this area is occupied by a big industrial complex; just to its right are the condos of Muddy Canyon.

Tash motors them further in, out of view of the buildings on the bluff above them. “That’s where Jim’s dad works,” Tashi says as he luffs to a stop in waist-deep water, just outside the shorebreak. Happily it’s a day without surf. “That’s Laguna Space Research, right above us.” He tosses the boat’s little anchor over the side. “Hurry up, Sandy, those cutters were coming south pretty fast.”

He jumps overboard and Sandy picks up the drums and hands them down to him. Both of them handle the drums as if they were empty; adrenaline is about to replace their blood entirely. Tash takes the drums onto one shoulder and runs them up the mussel-and-seaweed-crusted boulders at the base of the sandstone bluff. He puts them into gaps between boulders, roots around like a mad dog to find small loose boulders to place over them. Sandy jumps in and rushes from boat to shore with the drums, huffing and puffing, splashing in the small shorebreak, skidding around on the slick rock bottom in search for better footing. They both are panting in great gasps as the sprint exertions catch up with them.

Then all the drums are hidden and they’re back on the boat and motoring offshore. No sight of other boats. Ten minutes, perhaps, for the whole operation, although it felt like an hour. Whew.

They motor west until they can circle around and approach Newport again, from out to sea. Sure enough, off Newport harbor they’re stopped by a Coast Guard cutter, and searched very closely indeed. It’s a first for both of them, although it resembles police searches of their cars on land. Sandy has thrown all the eyedroppers overboard, and he is polite and cooperative with the Guardsmen. Tash is grumpy and rude; they’re doing good detainee/bad detainee, just out of habit.

Search done, the Guardsmen let them go impassively. They motor on into the harbor, subdued until they get into the slip and are off the boat, onto the strangely steady, solid decking. Back to the parking lot and Sandy’s car, away from the scene of the crime, so to speak. Now, no matter what happens to the Rhinoceros, they are safe.

“Pretty nerve-racking,” Tash says mildly.