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in. But three mouthfuls later, he found his attention drawn away from the stack of jacks and glued onto a large ship that was just entering the harbor.
    "What the hell is this?" he thought to himself through a gulp of coffee.
    It was a luxury liner. Big, sleek and all white, it appeared to be flying a hundred different flags. For the next ten minutes he watched in suspicious fascination as the ship was nudged into a nearby pier by a squad of tugboats.
    Once it was close enough, he noted the ship's decks were lined with a couple hundred passengers. They all seemed animated enough, as if they had actually just returned from a pleasure cruise. He wouldn't have been surprised if he'd seen them all start throwing confetti and streamers.
    His waitress returned to fill his coffee cup and he took the opportunity to point out the newly-arrived ship.
    "What's with 'The Love Boat?'" he asked her.
    She took a quick look at the white ship, now almost completely settled into a berth close by and laughed.
    "Why that's the Big Easy Princess" she said, matter-of-factly. "Coming back from another 'Cruise to Nowhere,' I suspect."
    "It docks here regularly?" Hunter asked.
    "Sure does," she said. "Been doing so for about the past six months. It goes out for about two weeks at a time. Comes in, stays a few days, then heads back out again."
    Hunter reached inside his shirt and came up with two bags of real silver.
    "Where's it go?" he asked her, pressing the money into her hand. The savvy waitress immediately knew that he had just paid about ten times too much for the meal.
    "From what I hear, it travels all over," she said, still clutching the bags of silver. "Sometimes Barbados, or Saint
    Thomas or Saint Croix. Sometimes all the way down to Colombia."
    A bell went off in Hunter's head.
    "Any place special in Colombia?" he asked.
    Now she eyed him suspiciously. "Are you a cop?" she asked.
    "No," he said, deftly producing another bag of silver. "Are you?"
    She shook her head and smiled. "Can I sit for a minute?" she asked.
    He reached over and pulled out the small table's other chair. "Be my guest,"
    he said.
    A half hour later, Hunter was pushing a baggage cart down the pier where the luxury liner had docked.
    He was dressed in a nondescript pair of denim coveralls and a woolen cap -
    both articles of clothing courtesy of the diner waitress. He took his place in amongst the small army of baggage handlers loitering around the ship's gangway and pretended to smoke a cigar. All the while he was taking in every detail possible about the Big Easy Princess.
    This was no ordinary cruise liner. True, while its decks were lined with what looked to be fairly ordinary passengers and some soldiers, its fore and aft sections boasted at least a dozen gun mounts. Also its mast was bristling with a forest of sophisticated radar hardware and, easily spotted by his well-trained eye, a number of missile guidance and tracking systems. He even noted unmistakable scrape marks along the port side of the ship which indicated that small boat launches - probably attack craft - were lowered and raised regularly.
    He was sure there could be much more evidence found inside the hull of the boat, but Hunter had no plans to steal aboard to find it. He didn't have to.
    He knew a drug-running ship when he saw one . . .
    Drugs were a nasty fact of life in New Order America.
    Just because the United American Army had defeated The Circle didn't mean that criminality had suddenly come to a screeching halt across the continent. The skies were just as dangerous to fly in and the roads just as treacherous to move on as before the final defeat of The Circle. And the fractured nation's seemingly endless cycle of drugs and money kept spinning along.
    When Jones and the United Americans set up their Reconstruction Government in Washington following the war, not one of the top command men was laboring under any illusions. The continent was still a scattering of ever-changing independent