It is a sunny spring day; the water is sparkling, dotted with the white sails of jauntily leaning yachts and the green islands that speckle the US-Canada border. Welcome to the front line of a vicious multibillion-dollar drug war.
A high-powered grey patrol boat with a three-man crew from the US Department of Homeland Security buzzes across this Pacific idyll like a frenetic killjoy, boarding sailboats, disrupting jolly outings on family motor launches and even accosting tiny sea kayaks.
In theory, the crew's primary task is to stop terrorists infiltrating the US. Ever since Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian militant, was caught a few kilometers from here in December 1999 with more than 45kg of explosives in the trunk of his car, border patrols have been braced for the next episode. One of the crew wears a radiation detector at all times.
Since then, however, the homeland security patrol has been finding mainly marijuana on the boats they search -- industrial quantities of a potent strain known as BC Bud, named in honor of the Canadian province where much of it is grown, British Columbia.
More than 900kg of BC Bud is thought to reach the US market every year. The whole industry is thought to be worth US$7 billion.
The product surges into the US like water flowing off a mountain, finding its way through every crack. It is dropped by small planes or helicopters into the raspberry fields and parks of Washington state.
It is walked across the mountain forests in backpacks, stashed among frozen berries and driven in articulated lorries or in the back of vans on country roads. Or it comes by sea, on a flotilla of unassuming watercraft.
"See those boats. That's what BC Bud boats look like," said Kevin Anderson, one of the patrol's marine enforcement officers, after boarding and searching a sailboat and a small motor cruiser, and finding nothing more menacing than an expired sailing licence.
The crew have been paying special attention to kayaks since last year, when a Canadian junior Olympic champion was caught putting his skills to lucrative use plying the sea border that runs through the Strait of Georgia. His boat was weighed down with his country's finest marijuana.
He was unlucky to get caught. On a fine summer's afternoon there can be 10,000 pleasure boats in the archipelago that forms the coastal borderline, and just one patrol.
BC Bud is so well thought of on the west coast it has been known to trade at the same price as cocaine, more than US$3,000 a pound. In fact, it is commonly bartered for cocaine and guns, which travel in the opposite direction, north into Canada, making it a less safe and predictable place -- and more like the US -- every day.
Drive-by killings are on the rise in the Vancouver area, as are house invasions, by which one gang seeks to take over another's marijuana crop without the bother of grow lights and hydroponic cultivation.
About a month ago four officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were shot dead when they stumbled on a BC Bud-growing operation -- the most Mounties lost in one day since the middle of the 19th century.
The killings shocked Canada, and have challenged the country's generally tolerant attitude toward drug offenses.
"It showed Canadians that the people who have grow-ops [growing operations] aren't all nice guys with mom-and-pop operations," said Inspector Paul Nadeau, the head of the force's coordinated marijuana enforcement team in British Columbia. "Nothing could be further from the truth. Every single criminal organization in the region is involved."
It is a big pie everyone seems to want a slice of. A lot of the smugglers caught on the border are from ethnic Indian and Pakistani gangs in Canada. Many of the 50,000 grow-ops thought to be hidden across British Columbia are run by Vietnamese clans.
But police on both sides of the border say some of the biggest organizations coordinating the trade are chapters of the Canadian Hell's Angels.
Joseph Giuliano, the deputy chief patrol agent at the Blaine border post, has been watching them evolve from gangs to corporations.
"They mostly farm out the dirty work," he said. "They have become administrators, bureaucrats, executives. The old days of them driving a Harley in a leather jacket are gone. Now they wear a three-piece suit and drive a Mercedes."
As the organizations behind BC Bud smuggling have grown larger, their operations have become more sophisticated, and the battle of wits at the border has become a technological race.
Giuliano's patrols put sensors down along the border which send signals to a central command post in Blaine, generating a computerized voice alert announcing where there is movement and in what direction. Agents can then train one of 32 cameras on the area to determine whether a smuggler is making a crossing or a cow has gone astray.
The smugglers have equipped themselves with night-vision goggles and metal detectors in an attempt to locate the sensors under the cover of darkness. They also conduct surveillance operations watching the border patrols and testing their reaction times to the sensors, and intercepting radio messages with computerized scanners.
"They even have their own scientific sorts working on the capabilities of our gamma ray machines at the border," Giuliano said. "They're testing what has similar density as BC Bud so that it's invisible. Apparently, frozen raspberries come pretty close."
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