The nation’s defenders needed all the help they could get.

Coast Guard had been calling on sailors everywhere to keep an eye on any behavior that appeared the least bit suspicious. His first impulse was to keep a healthy distance between them and Sexy Streak to avoid having his beauty rammed by drunken revelers. He assumed its occupants were tourists who’d chartered the twenty-footer for the weekend without having any notion of water safety. A moment later Jimmy saw why: the little boat looked as jam-packed as a clown car at the circus. The small open vessel was steaming toward shore, its single engine straining as if overloaded. He was giving the factory-fresh showpiece named Sexy Streak a vigorous shakedown for its new owner, who was heading down from Kentucky for the rest of the holiday weekend.įully pumped with the raw wonders of speed - and the engines’ sharply tuned performance - Jimmy slowed long enough to notice a coastal cruiser on his starboard side. At that speed a single ding to the hull could mean death. The honey-haired twenty-two-year-old throttled up to 180, but kept his eyes peeled for debris. The scorching pace thrilled him but scarcely strained the twin turbine engines, which rocketed him past oil platforms that loomed ghostly in the Louisiana mist like prehistoric creatures marching toward land on mighty steel legs. Jimmy McMasters didn’t mind working the Labor Day weekend, not when it left him at the helm of a fifty-foot carbon-fiber speedboat racing at 170 mph across the Gulf.

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