Chapter 28

The transponder on the Millers’ Corvalis was set to automatically ping 1200, telling air traffic controllers that it was adhering to visual flight rules (VFR). Under VFR, a pilot takes responsibility for not crashing into mountains, colliding with other planes, or running out of fuel and falling out of the sky. As Colt knew, by simply staying below eighteen thousand feet and avoiding controlled airspace around airports, military installations, or any FAA temporary flight restrictions, small-plane pilots enjoy the full freedom of the American skies. A VFR pilot doesn’t need to file a flight plan or even talk to anyone on the radio.

He had a fine plane and he had a plan that made sense, at least to him.

Instead of a short hop, this time Colt planned to leapfrog far ahead of his pursuers. Not that he had any reason to be unnecessarily concerned that they were catching up to him. After all, he had just spent an entire week at an airport within a half mile of where he dumped the last stolen car. This flight would be the big one, bigger headlines, bigger splash. He had a plane that could carry him out of the country to the first stop on a voyage to get to where the good life lives.

Once at his cruising altitude headed south, Colt leaned out the fuel mixture. On paper, the Corvalis could just make it to Cuba. In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt signed an extradition treaty with Cuba that covered fugitives wanted for larceny, which would include Colton’s crimes. Complicated relations between the two countries since la revolución, however, have made the treaty unworkable and Cuba a reasonable choice for certain fugitives. Flying direct from the United States to Cuba without a flight plan can be dangerous, though, and not just the risk of miscalculating fuel and dropping into the Florida Straits. In 1996, Cuban MiGs shot down two American-flagged Cessnas flown out of Florida by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Tensions were higher at the time, but still, attempting to arrive unannounced on Castro’s doorstep isn’t necessarily a good idea.

Instead, Colt veered east and flew out over the Gulf Stream. Fitting for a story that so far included UFO sites, ancient Indian burial grounds, and Bigfoot hunters, a little over four hours after he took off from Indiana, the Barefoot Bandit entered the Bermuda Triangle.

A half hour later, around 11:15 a.m., several Bahamians noticed the Cessna circling north of Sandy Point, a small village on a beach-fringed spur at the south end of Great Abaco.

The Cessna kept circling in the overcast skies, but no one paid much mind. Private planes often buzz the area, either to take aerial photos of the scenery or to scout for a likely stretch of coast to carve out a development.

Sandy Point’s airstrip serves this sparsely populated end of the island, but Colt didn’t dare use it. It was daylight, plus he figured there’d be Customs and Immigration officers there to greet planes. He’d have to execute another off-field landing. For the first time in his rough-landing career, finding “flat” wasn’t a problem. The southern tip of Great Abaco has miles and miles of pancaked land. Most of it, though, is covered in pine and scrub trees not conducive to safe set downs.

Finally, Colt settled on a section of sugary bog, the margin of a swamp covered in marsh grasses and mangrove sprouts. There’s nothing similar to the mangrove in the Pacific Northwest forest. These bushy tropical trees reach into warm, shallow seas, thriving in a saltwater environment that would kill other plants, and forming the basis of an entire ecosystem. The ground here may have appeared solid as Colt extended the flaps and made his approach, but in reality it was a sandy mix of tidal muck.

Normal landing speed on the Corvalis is 70 mph, and once it touches down on a runway, it uses about 1,200 feet to roll to a stop. As soon as Colt’s main gear hit the muck, though, it was as if he’d landed in peanut butter. The nose of the plane slammed down onto the front wheel, which burrowed into the soft sand, collapsed, and was torn from the fuselage. An instant later, the nose itself hit, with the propeller whipping into the ground, the blades bending backward like banana peels.

Instead of using four hundred yards, the plane went from flying to a full stop in an eye-bugging 150 feet.

The landing was rough enough to set off the plane’s distress beacon, which began signaling that N660BA had gone down hard at 11:44 a.m. The U.S. Coast Guard in Miami picked up the satellite signal and immediately went into search-and-rescue mode.

When Colt gathered himself and lifted the Corvalis’s gullwing door, he was 1,050 miles and a world away from where he’d taken off. He could officially check off another item from his prison collage/shopping list: the colorful Caribbean logo.

Even with the adrenaline of surviving another hairy landing, the kid from the misty cool Northwest couldn’t help but feel the saunalike assault of the July Bahamas heat, especially back in the mangroves where breath comes in moist bites. The other things that come in bites are the flying teeth, aka no-see-ums or nippers, along with the mosquitoes. In the still air of the marsh, they can be ferocious, especially on cloudy days like the fourth. As Colt climbed out and slid down the wing of the Corvalis, the local bloodsuckers must have rejoiced over the big helping of manna from heaven.

A Bahamian had watched in disbelief as the Corvalis came in lower and lower—apparently under control but far from any sensible landing spot—and then crashed into the swamp. Calls went out to the Royal Bahamian Police Force (RBPF) and Royal Bahamas Defence Force (RBDF), the country’s sole military branch.

BACK IN INDIANA, NO one suspected a thing. Even though it was a Sunday and a holiday, Spider Miller went to work. The Fourth of July weekend is a busy time for a beer distributor, especially in a college town like Bloomington. Late that morning, his cell rang, but he let it go to voice mail.

One minute after receiving the distress signal, the U.S. Coast Guard had called Spider’s brother, whose contact info was on the Cessna’s registration, to check whether it was a false alarm. Don told them he thought the plane was safe in Bloomington, but that Spider was the pilot they should check with.

When Spider retrieved his message, you could have knocked him over with an empty beer can. “It was from the coast guard’s Miami station, saying they were receiving an ELT ping that my plane had gone down in the Bahamas.” Miller figured there was no sense in calling them back until he could answer their questions, so he jumped into his car and raced to the airport. “I’m thinking, Oh hell, how can this be? I’d never heard of Abaco. I didn’t want to believe the plane might be gone, but the ELTs are accurate, they work, so I had myself prepared when I got there.”

Spider arrived at his hangar to find it filled with just an echo. He called the coast guard back shortly after noon. The second big surprise was to find out that his $650,000 airplane had been taken by a teenager who’d been on a tear across the country and who authorities suspected had been staking out the airport for a week. To top it off, he learned that his was the fifth aircraft stolen by Colton Harris-Moore, unlicensed pilot.

“Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that a kid like him was out there,” says Miller.

THE COAST GUARD ALERTED the Bahamians that the plane had been stolen. RBDF soldiers set out for the site by boat, but couldn’t get close because it was low tide. Once again a combination of luck and choosing the right spot gave Colt enough time to land and get away before the cops arrived. Part of his luck was the fact that the Bahamians didn’t send anyone overland to the site that day.

Colt and the plane sat 2.2 miles from the Great Abaco Highway, the one road that runs through the undeveloped south end of the island. If an officer had gotten within binocular range, he would have been able to see Colt moving, and possibly get men in position to intercept him. As it was, Colt almost stumbled into an RBDF trooper who got close enough to report seeing a white male “with lacerations” who ran off when he was spotted.

Whether he got cut up in the crash or picking his way through the mangroves, Colt was in good enough shape to make his way the eight or so miles to Sandy Point, a fishing village of about four hundred. The owner of a little gas station–convenience store says that sometime after dark, Colt stopped by to fill up. He broke in and left with a Gatorade and two bags of potato chips, though he’d gathered a lot more. The owner guessed that Colt may have been frightened off by someone passing by because he left a bunch of drinks and snacks on the counter. Colt then stole a brown Chevy Tahoe and aimed it north up the highway for the forty-nine-mile drive to Marsh Harbour, the island’s single-stoplight main town.

The Bahamians told the coast guard that they were planning a mission to the crash site for early the next morning and requested air support. At 6:11 a.m. on the fifth, a USCG Guardian jet detoured on its way to deliver spare parts to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and arrived on scene. The pilots had no trouble spotting the downed plane, and reported, “Does not seem to be in distress.” They stayed on-site for three minutes and didn’t see anyone in the area.

Later that morning after a four-hour slog, Bahamian police officers got to the plane. As expected, they found no one. Cushions had been taken out of the Cessna and laid on the ground in the shade of the wing. There was also a bucket beside the plane with used towelettes inside.

SPIDER MILLER WAS RELIEVED when he got ahold of the Bahamian police and they told him there was no one at the crash site. “I was happy to hear that he hadn’t been hurt and, especially, didn’t kill himself in the airplane.” Spider’s next priority was securing the aircraft. “The first cop I talked with said everything was inside the plane, my four thousand-dollar Bose noise-canceling headsets, oxygen equipment, all the valuables. So I asked him to hold on to that stuff and I’d find someone to go over and collect it from them. When I called the same cop later to say someone was on the way to get my valuables, he said, ‘We don’t have anything like that.’ ”

Spider hung up. “That was the second theft committed against me.” He says the third was dealing with the insurance company, which didn’t want to say the Cessna was totaled. Miller says he wouldn’t risk flying his kids in that plane again, so he had to pay the difference in value.

Spider, who has five kids of his own and supports the Boys & Girls Clubs and other youth organizations in the four counties where he does business, saw Colt as “misguided.” He and Don grew up as part of a huge family living in a house with only one full bathroom. There were struggles, he says, but it was always a loving and supportive home. “It sounds to me like Colt was dealt a bad hand right from the start.”

Even though he’d wind up about $100,000 out-of-pocket, Spider was philosophical about the theft. “I’ve had people steal from me before, and most of them didn’t use a gun. Hedge fund and investment managers, they steal without using guns, and so did this kid. He’s just one more in a line of thieves, but I don’t mind him because at least he never pretended to be anything but a thief.”

BACK IN WASHINGTON, OUR Fourth of July was spent on board a boat with friends, bobbing in Fisherman Bay, Lopez Island, along with what seemed like half the population of the San Juans. We ate and drank too much, laughed more than was reasonable, and whenever there was a lull in the action we fired a pirate cannon off the bow to wake the bay. The Fisherman’s Fourth always tops off with the islands’ best fireworks show, paid for, in part, by passing the hat—via dinghy—from boat to boat.

I was blissfully disconnected from the news for two days. On the fifth, we did a slow cruise back to Orcas, not getting to the cabin until 9 p.m. Only then did I reluctantly sign on to the Internet. Cue the cartoon reaction, eyes bugging, jaw dropping. It wasn’t because Colt had taken a plane—I expected that to happen any day. And it wasn’t even that he’d flown a thousand miles and left the country—if at any time he’d turned south and vamoosed to Mexico, we’d have all gone “duh, obvious.” My shock came from where he’d chosen to go.

My first trip out of the country was to the Bahamas. It was a flight in an ancient DC-3 “Gooney Bird” with a door that fell open as we took off. In the ensuing thirty years, I’d been back scores of times, flying over on every kind of puddle jumper made, and even flying around the cays in an amphibious ultralight trying to spot mating sharks for a nature documentary. I’d also crossed the Gulf Stream from Florida to the Bahamas in boats as small as a nineteen-footer (at 2 a.m., in search of a bottle of rum) and as big as the cruise ship I worked on for all of a week. Wherever I moved around the world, the Bahamas always remained a second home, especially the Out Islands.

Most people know the Bahamas as just a cruise ship or casino destination because they’ve only gone to Nassau (New Providence) and Freeport (Grand Bahama). All the others are collectively called the Out Islands, or, as the locals say, the Family Islands. That’s where I’d spent almost all my time in the Bahamas, diving, fishing, drinking, and chasing Hemingway’s ghost.

Not only did Colt pick the Bahamas, he went to the Out Islands, specifically the Abacos—the place I’d spent more time than any other spot in the archipelago. My Abacos photos and magazine articles are scattered all over the Web. One of my favorite trips ever was a recent visit to Great Abaco for an article about male bonding called “Blood, Sweat and Beers,” when my dad, uncle, a cousin, and a friend joined me for a week of marlin fishing, shark diving, rum drinking, and conch fritter feasting.

Now, amazingly, Colt was there. It was already almost tomorrow Bahamas local time, but I picked up the phone. Who can you call at midnight in the Bahamas? A buddy who owns a bar.

The party was in full swing at Nipper’s on Great Guana Cay, one of the islands across the Sea of Abaco from Marsh Harbour. Johnny Roberts named his bar for the no-see-ums that bedeviled him and his crew as they hammered together a bare-bones drink shack atop a high bluff overlooking the dramatic blue and white of Guana’s Atlantic-side beach. Johnny’s joint has since grown into one of the most storied bars in the tropics, famous for its massive Sunday pig-roast parties attended by everyone who can beg, borrow, or steal a boat ride to the cay. Two of the biggest events each year at Nipper’s are the concerts put on by another piratical old buddy of mine from back in my days of living on Grand Cayman: the comic Calypsonian, singer of such songs as “Time Flies When You’re Having Rum” and “A Thong Gone Wrong,” who goes by the name of the Barefoot Man. Barefoot, aka George Nowak, was scheduled to give his Abaco summer concert at Nipper’s less than three weeks after Colt landed. When I talked to George, he was already penning the Barefoot Bandit song:

First he stole my golf cart, then my aeroplane,

but what really pissed me off, he went and stole my name.

JOHNNY HAD TO SHOUT above the music and laughter. It sounded like a pretty wild Monday, even for Nipper’s. He reminded me it was Regatta Time and asked why I wasn’t there. The annual Abacos regatta is a giant wind-powered party, with salty crews racing back and forth across the Sea of Abaco to a different beach bar blowout each day. I told him I was looking up flights as we spoke, but it wasn’t to get in on the sailing bacchanal.

Johnny had heard the first coconut telegraph beats about Colt, that Nassau had sent a team of detectives to Great Abaco that day, but he said no one was sure where the kid was. He told me to call his cousin Tim over in Marsh Harbour in the morning, and he’d have the latest word. Once we narrowed down which cousin—most of the Abaconians are cousins—I hung up.

The U.S. embassy in Nassau and the FBI had already posted a $10,000 reward for Colt’s capture. Apparently by taking his road show international, Colt had finally irked and embarrassed them enough to officially admit they were after him.

The universal reaction to the news that Colt had gone to the Bahamas was “Dumb move.” I wasn’t so sure. Everyone said he’d be spotted immediately—and not because of his height. They thought a white kid in the Bahamas would stick out like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee. Not so. After the Spanish wiped out the Lucayans who originally inhabited the Bahamas, the Abacos were next settled by British Loyalists who fled the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War. Even today, when countrywide 85 percent of the Bahamas is black, half the residents of the Abacos are white.

There’s also a population of expats in the Abacos, and about two thousand vacation homes that are mostly American owned. Parts of Great Abaco seem more like a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

Plus, it was peak tourist season. The Abacos aren’t like those Caribbean destinations that traditionally go nuts only in the winter. Many of its visitors are Floridians who can do easy weekends in the Bahamas all year. Families head over once school lets out for summer, and everyone who comes across is there to be on the water—boating, fishing, diving, and snorkeling, which are all at their peak in June and July.

To make it even easier for Colt to go unnoticed, it was regatta week. Abaco marinas and anchorages were filled with visiting yachties, the Top-Sider shoes and Jimmy Buffett–dreams crowd. They gather every evening for big parties where people start out strangers but become fast friends over their shared love of boats and the sea—and the rum doesn’t hurt.

If Colt played it cool and didn’t cause trouble, one more laid-back barefoot white guy would blend right into the beach party. He’d want to get a hat and some dark shades in case they put up his picture, but otherwise locals would assume he was just another tourist and stop to give him a ride if they saw him walking along the highway. If he chatted up some regatta folks at a marina or party, Colt would definitely end up invited aboard a boat for the next leg of the race.

When it came to sleeping outside in July, though, I’d much prefer Colt’s Turtleback Mountain camp on Orcas to sweating and swatting on an Abaco beach or in its pine forest. But Colt could not have chosen a better place in the Bahamas if he planned on more couch squatting. Great Abaco has hundreds of vacation homes, most concentrated around Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay, a big resort and real estate development twenty miles farther up the S.C. Bootle Highway.

As for the rest of Colt’s MO, there are three airports on Great Abaco. Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay always have small planes tied down out on the field. A Cessna with a full tank of gas could make it from Abaco to the Yucatán, Cuba, Turks and Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or as far south down the Caribbean chain as the Virgin Islands. For boat selection, there are hundreds of all sizes and styles in the Abacos, both in marinas as well as moored at private docks.

Arrayed against him at the moment, there was only a small contingent of RBPF officers in Marsh Harbour. Even though the Bahamian police announced that they were sure they would very quickly round up the young miscreant, it felt to me like Colt had done his homework. Either that or he was just very lucky in that he picked another welcoming, unsuspecting community.

I BOUGHT A TICKET to Marsh Harbour that night, but the more I thought about it the more I worried that I’d wind up on an open-ended stay in the Abacos while Colt went surfing from villa to villa, unseen for months. Or, worse, I’d arrive just as he island-hopped somewhere else. One thing about the Out Islands is that most of them are “you can’t get there from here” destinations. Unless you have your own plane or boat—or steal one—getting between Out Islands can take all day or even require an overnight in Nassau.

The next morning I called Tim Roberts at his Concept Boat Rentals office. There was definitely news, and Colt had decidedly not laid low and kept out of trouble. During the night, he’d basically done a Blood, Sweat and Beers tour, hitting Curly Tails Restaurant and Above & Below Abaco dive shop—both places I’d written about in my story. He’d even attempted to break into the hotel where we stayed. It felt like the Sports Illustrated cover curse.

At Curly Tails—named after one of the local types of lizard—owner Alistair McDonald said that Colt broke in at 4:20 a.m. and strolled around the restaurant “as if he owned the place.” He calmly probed the dark restaurant with a flashlight until he spotted the three security cameras, and then turned them to the wall. He pulled the network cables out of McDonald’s modem and plugged in his laptop to get online. Other than ether, though, he didn’t steal a thing.

Colt did a bit more damage at the dive shop. Curly-haired scuba queen Kay Politano said he broke in sometime in the early morning. He neatly sliced three sides of a screen to get to the window, which he jimmied open. He took $156 out of the cash drawer and then pulled four shark T-shirts off their hangers, but threw three of them back. “Only one was missing,” said Kay. “I assume he was looking for his size.” The shop was filled with expensive scuba gear, but none of that was gone. Her computer hard drive had been pulled out of its slot and the Internet cable disconnected and left unplugged, but nothing else was disturbed. Detectives flown in from Nassau found a handprint on the window. “It was very big, long fingers, and very distinct,” said Kay. “It looked like someone had intentionally smacked their hand against the window to leave a calling card.”

During the same night, the FedEx building, a bike shop, and the Abaco Cancer Society Thrift Shop were also broken into. A few pieces of clothing were taken from the thrift shop, and a first-aid kit went missing from another business.

“It’s a lot of excitement for this little island,” said Kay. “Many of the people are expressing frustration, irritation, and anger that he’s here doing this.” But, she said, there was also a little of that pirate side of the Bahamas showing. “No one is condoning it, but a little twinkle creeps into the eyes of some people as they talk about it.”

ONCE AGAIN, COLT ALSO induced a motherly response. The next call I made was to sixty-one-year-old Ruthie Key, who said that Colt had walked, barefoot, into her Bahamas Family Market on Monday, before the police started handing out flyers with his photo.

Along with the Robertses, the Keys settled in the Abacos 230 years ago. The Keys have been boatbuilders and farmers, and Ruthie’s brother represents South Abaco as a member of Parliament. Ruthie’s late husband, Frank, was from Pittsburgh, and together they ran the friendly store where I always provisioned when boating in the Abacos. After Frank’s passing two years ago, Ruthie’s kids convinced her to go high-tech, adding computers and offering free Internet at the market. That’s what drew Colt.

“He came in and very politely asked to use the Internet,” says Ruthie. “I told him I was sorry but the computers were down.” Colt noticed that Ruthie’s son had a laptop online and told her that if the Internet worked he could use his own computer. “He said he hadn’t been in touch with his mom for months, and he also wanted to call his girlfriend. He had a great smile and his eyes . . . very pretty, like to just swallow you up. I said sure, and we set him up at one of the tables.”

Colt pulled a laptop and headphones out of his backpack and spent an hour making Internet phone calls. One of Ruthie’s granddaughters, a five-year-old, was running around the store. “I said to him, ‘I hope she’s not disturbing you.’ And he said, ‘Oh no, she’s not bothering me at all, just let her play.’ He was kind, and very nice, very nice . . . I never would have suspected him of doing anything wrong. Never. If he told me he was hungry I would have cooked him a meal.”

Colt took his time and finished his calls, then bought a deli sandwich, said good-bye, and left. “Then the police came in with a poster and told me to call if I saw this guy,” said Ruth. “I looked at the picture and said, ‘What?’ ”

Investigators swarmed in. “I told them I don’t really have anything to say, I don’t want to get involved.” When they left, Ruthie says her main feeling was fear—for Colt. “They’re out there with guns, and Lord, if they find him and he tries to protest . . . I’m afraid they’re going to shoot him.”

BACK IN THE UNITED STATES, Pam the quote machine did not disappoint. She said she was glad Colt was out of the country, “the further the better. I’m glad he’s able to enjoy beautiful islands, but they extradite. It doesn’t help matters at all.” She also wanted a message relayed to Colt, reprimanding him, not for stealing a plane, but for stealing the wrong kind: “Only take twin-engine planes, and carry a parachute. That’s the rules.”

BY TUESDAY, THE EAST Coast media had descended on Marsh Harbour—“they on our ass,” as one Bahamian told me. Another Bahamian friend said he could tell something big was going on because for the first time in recent memory, “the police have actually left their station.” With Colt this active, the government decided to reinforce the RBPF with the RBDF. Tommy Turnquest, Bahamas national security minister, who announced, “If he is there to be caught, our police will catch him.”

Assistant Commissioner Hulan Hanna of the RBPF said he was locking down Great Abaco. “We have taken steps to neutralize the areas he may try to use to leave the island.” Bahamian cops and soldiers flooded in to keep watch on the airports and marinas. Leaflets with Colt’s photo papered the island. The game was on.

ON ORCAS, IT FELT like it was going to be all over before I even made it to Seattle to catch a plane east. I was packing when Sandi came home early from work, sick. My selfish first thought was that the last thing I needed was to catch her cold before a long trip. But then her fever soared. I’d never seen her this ill. I changed all my tickets, pushing the trip to Marsh Harbour back a day. I called Tim Roberts again. He said nothing new had happened, but more police were running around. There was also, he said, some local vigilante action, “soon come” style. “A bunch of guys at the bar were talking about getting together to go look for him, maybe snag the reward,” he said. “But they were disappointed the FBI was only offering ten thousand dollars,” so they ordered another round.

I warned Tim to keep an eye on his boat and said I’d see him on Thursday.

That evening, a bartender said Colt—barefoot and with a cap pulled down on his head—walked into a Marsh Harbour sports bar, ordered a Kalik beer, drank it, and left after five minutes. Another sighting had him stopping by to use a bar’s restroom, and one young woman later claimed she had talked with Colt and that he’d told her who he was. None of the sightings was confirmed.

First thing Wednesday morning, my phone rang. It was Tim, but something was wrong. “Bob . . . ,” he said in a hoarse whisper, then paused. I immediately thought he was going to tell me that Colt was dead.

After an agonizing few moments of silence, Tim said, “I can’t talk louder because there’s a TV crew in here sniffing around for information.”

My heart started beating again. He said he’d just heard that a boat had disappeared from the marina. Boat theft is not unknown in the Abacos, so that didn’t necessarily mean it was Colt. I asked him what kind.

“Forty-five Sea Ray,” he whispered.

New and tricked out, a forty-five-foot Sea Ray Sundancer is a $750,000 sex bomb of a boat.

“That’s him,” I said. “Any idea where it went?” I could hear Tim shuffling the phone around before he said one word into cupped hands: “Preacher’s.”

I thanked him for the tip and hung up, laughing. Colt was writing his own story and here was some more heavy-handed symbolism. Preacher’s wasn’t in the Abacos. It was the name of a cave at the north end of Eleuthera, the next island heading southeast down the Bahamas chain. The Lucayans named it Cigatoo, but again the Spanish wiped them out and the island was uninhabited in 1648 when a group of English came journeying south from Bermuda in search of a new homeland that would offer freedom from the Crown’s religious mandates. As they sailed toward Cigatoo, they were blown into a treacherous stretch of stony corals, a reef called the Devil’s Backbone. They shipwrecked, but were able to make it to the beach.

As the soggy pilgrims waded inland through the seagrapes, they found that Providence had brought them ashore near a large limestone cavern, which provided shelter. It became their holy place. They used Preacher’s Cave for religious services and, as the Lucayans before them, as a burial ground.

The pilgrims rechristened Cigatoo “Eleuthera,” a derivation of the Greek word for “freedom.”

That Colt would choose as part of his great escape to run to an island named “freedom,” and then land at the very same spot and in the same manner as the Bahamas’ first liberty seekers was storybook imagery.

It was also a very ballsy trip. He had to start a boat and sneak out of a crowded marina that was supposed to be under surveillance. Then he had to navigate the shallows around Marsh Harbour’s Eastern Shores before running about twenty miles south through the Sea of Abaco. At Little Harbour, he was forced to leave the protection of the fringing islands, flushed out into the deep blue. As Colt steered the Sea Ray into the open Atlantic, he motored directly past the luxury resort where the dreaded paparazzi—in the form of American network TV crews—were staying.

I spoke with friends who were sailing to Eleuthera that day, and they reported that sea conditions were very rough. Colt had a lot of boat under him, one capable of doing more than thirty knots, but he still had to pound his way across fifty-six miles of open ocean over thirteen thousand feet deep, with big swells rolling in on his port beam the entire trip. It must have been one hell of a ride.

AS SOON AS I got off the phone with Tim, I changed my tickets again, now Orcas/Seattle/Houston/Fort Lauderdale/North Eleuthera, with an overnight in Seattle. Sandi, though, was even sicker. She went to the local doc, and I pushed my trip back another day in case I had to take her to a mainland hospital.

Fortunately, other than the Abacos, the place I’d been to most often in the Bahamas was Eleuthera. I started making calls to local friends, but no one had heard anything about a stolen boat or the Barefoot Bandit. Even police officers I spoke with didn’t know anything about it yet. Then reports started coming in of Colt sightings—but these were back in the Abacos. He was seen in the woods, he was seen on the street, he was back hanging in the Marsh Harbour bars.

More media poured into the Abacos and the government sent even more reinforcements. The police patrolled Marsh Harbour with shotguns and German shepherds while the RBDF strode the streets with M4 assault rifles. The assistant police commissioner, Glenn Miller, announced, “We are intensifying our search and we are going to be relentless until we catch him.” Each new rumor sent armed troops up and down Great Abaco.

I checked Eleuthera again—still dead quiet. Then even more unconfirmed Colt sightings came in from the Abacos. Picking the wrong island would be very expensive, both time- and money-wise. I reserved a second set of plane tickets, and now held them for Marsh Harbour and Eleuthera.

Sandi started a course of mega-strength antibiotics, but continued to get worse. Neither of us slept that night, and at 3 a.m., I rebooked both sets of tickets, moving them back one more time. Now I was set to leave Orcas Friday afternoon and get to the Bahamas on Saturday evening, July 10.

By late Thursday evening, Sandi’s fever finally broke. It felt safe for me to go. But where? All of the media and law enforcement remained on Great Abaco. My gut, though, said Eleuthera.

I TOOK A KENMORE seaplane to Seattle on Friday, and sat in a hotel room until 3:30 a.m., when I went to Sea-Tac for my next flight. As a major handicap for someone who’s spent a career traveling, I can’t sleep on airplanes. I was bleary-eyed by the time we landed in Fort Lauderdale. I went online at the airport and read the newswires that declared the trail of the Barefoot Bandit had gone “cold.” Glenn Miller was now backpedaling on whether Colt was even in his country, saying the only reason his police force suspected he was in the Bahamas was because the U.S. authorities had told them so.

Although I did take a twin-engine plane for my flight over the water to the Bahamas, Colt’s had more advanced avionics and much more leg room—plus he got to skip dealing with the TSA. He also had a much better view out his windshield. Minutes after takeoff, we left the French-manicured Florida coast and flew across the soft blue line marking the edge of the fabled Gulf Stream. The Stream churns north, forming a fast-moving moat between Florida and the Bahamas, though it’s never been an obstacle to pirates, bootleggers, or drug runners, and certainly wasn’t a barrier to a boy with a plane.

Ever since Christopher Columbus first got New World sand in his stockings on an Out Island beach, the Bahamas have played host to a long line of outsize characters. For a short eighteenth-century stretch, the Bahamas capital, Nassau, was even declared the pirate republic and run by the likes of Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and Anne Bonny. During the silliness of Prohibition, Captain Bill “the Real” McCoy ran Irish and Canadian whiskey from the Bahamas to the States to slake thirsts and stock the speakeasies. Hemingway pounded typewriter keys, rum, and marlin in Bimini during the 1930s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the pirate republic rose once again, this time fueled by Carlos Lehder’s Colombian blow and Medellin millions. Out Island airstrips transshipped an estimated 80 percent of all the cocaine inhaled by the United States during those years later caricatured in Miami Vice. Aviator and recluse Howard Hughes spent his last years holed up in a Grand Bahama hotel. Gary Hart’s Bahamian shenanigans aboard the aptly named yacht Monkey Business blew his presidential chances. And so on.

There’s something about the Bahamas. Now a nineteen-year-old who’d become the world’s most famous airplane pirate and, for the moment, its most famous living outlaw, was having his moment in the sun.

TOWERING THUNDERHEADS FORCED US to fly a serpentine course toward Eleuthera. The blooming cumulonimbus clouds rose like slow-motion nuclear explosions in the subtropical summer heat. They have a severe beauty from a distance, but fliers respect them for the thermal turbulence and deadly downdrafts. Whenever our pilot couldn’t totally avoid the outer edges of the clouds, the little plane rocked and shuddered.

Coming around one great anvil cloud, a shallow bank topped by the Berry Islands came into view. And there it was, the vision that has blown away so many when they first see it: the watercolors of the Bahamas. What was Colt’s reaction, an evergreen kid suddenly engulfed by these shocking blues? Presumably the same as mine and everyone else’s: awestruck. The sea is so clear that sunlight bounces off the white sand bottom, soaks up a particular tint of turquoise depending on water depth, and then beams it back into the sky to coat the bottoms of clouds as they float across the flats.

Channels and cuts and currents flowing between the small cays sweep and swirl the seafloor into fantastical designs, with each change in depth reflecting a singular blue so that from the air the islands appear set amid elaborate sand paintings.

Old Bahama boat hands navigate by color, reading the dozens of blues and greens that reveal sandbars, grass beds, and coral reefs. A subtle change in shade can mean the difference between safe passage and shipwreck. Past the Berrys, the water dropped precipitously from Tiffany to ultramarine as we flew out over the fourteen-thousand-foot-deep Great Bahama Canyon, the abyssal valley Colt crossed in the Sea Ray. Then Eleuthera appeared.

Colt joked about having been to the Bahamas when he came back to school tanned from a stretch in juvie. Something put these islands in his mind. For me, it was Hemingway. For Colt, it might have been his James Bond fixation. Thunderball and five other Bond films were at least partly filmed in the Bahamas.

Along with a desire to visit tropical islands, both Colt and I grew up wanting adventure. Neither of us was congenitally rich, and apparently neither had the patience to work fifty weeks a year in exchange for two weeks of thrills. My solution was to become a travel writer and photographer. What options did Colt have once he dropped out of school? Pilot? Becoming a private pilot doesn’t earn money, it costs money. You need a job to support your flying habit.

Becoming a commercial pilot would have given him both the adventure of flying and a job. A neighbor here on Orcas, Grant, is a great model for someone like Colt. Grant grew up obsessed with planes and flying. So he worked at a gas station every day after school. Every time he got enough cash together, he’d pay for another hour of flight instruction. He slowly earned his way through his ratings and now he’s a top pilot for Alaska Airlines. Of course he also had to make his way through college: commercial pilots without bachelor’s degrees are almost nonexistent, another big hurdle for Colt.

“This kid could have been Top Gun if he’d gone the right way,” says Grant. “Out of the people like me, those totally into flying all their lives and who actually became airline pilots, probably 90 percent would have killed ourselves attempting to do what he did—flying without instruction and landing off-field three times. It’s a huge waste of talent.”

A WONDERFUL SIDE BENEFIT of what I do is that over the years I’ve been able to bring family members on some of my travels, particularly my father. Together, we’ve snorkeled with humpback whales, rappelled into caves filled with the skeletons of human sacrifices, hiked among grizzly bears, and had many other adventures—including several in the Bahamas. Seeing the blue-on-blue water again prompted memories of those trips and even much earlier times, like my dad teaching me to fish and squeezing us into a tiny, inflatable Kmart raft—basically a pool toy because that’s all the boat he could afford at the time—for a trip down the Delaware, our first great adventure.

Somewhere down there was a teenage boy who never had that. A kid with a lot of the same interests but no steady male role model to share the fun and teach him the life lessons that go along with learning how to handle boats as well as bullies. What would I have done if I didn’t have that man who came home from work every night to do what good fathers do, however imperfectly? My parents didn’t have a dime to spare for a lot of years, but they were always there, unconditionally. To grow up without them modeling responsible behavior and the rewards of hard work, I can’t imagine how I would have ended up. My own strong tendency toward risk taking got me into enough trouble coming from a good, stable home.

I felt a sudden pang of . . . embarrassment, maybe guilt. My blog that Colt had been reading linked to collections of my stories, including at least a couple of those father-son Bahamas-bonding trips. I wondered if Colt read them and, if so, how they made him feel.

THE PILOT REDUCING POWER to start our descent brought me back to the present. Another threatening cloud dominated the view out my window, dropping a curtain of rain across the north end of Eleuthera and its satellite islands: Spanish Wells, Royal, Russell, and Harbour Island. Suddenly a rainbow arced out of the thunderhead. I took a picture just to prove it wasn’t a sleep-deprived hallucination. It had to be a good omen for somebody.

By the time we touched down, the shower had scrubbed the air fresh and moved on, but it was still hot enough—about 90 degrees—that wisps of steam rose saunalike from the tarmac. It was 6:30, p.m., July 10, Bahamas Independence Day.

There’s a tiny police substation at the North Eleuthera Airport. Inside the dim room semi-cooled by a rattling air conditioner, a female officer sat behind a desk while a male cop sat opposite, fussing over an imaginary spot on the shiniest shoes I’d ever seen. A wanted poster with Colt’s picture hung on the wall. I pointed to it and asked if they had any evidence that he was on the island. I got a couple of noncommittal grunts until I pressed the question. Officer Shiny Shoes looked me up and down, then shared a nod with the other cop. “All inquiries as to current investigations should be made through the public affairs office in Nassau.” I asked about the boat at Preacher’s. “All inquiries as to . . . ”

I walked back outside. Mine had been the last flight in and all the other passengers were gone. Two taxi drivers who hadn’t snagged fares sat on a bench solving the world’s problems. I went over to get the skinny.

While I was talking to the taxi guys, Kenny Strachan was speaking to God.

“I PRAYED THAT DAY, talkin’ to the Lord, and He told me that the Barefoot Bandit was coming here to me,” says fifty-three-year-old Strachan. Born in Nassau, Kenny lived in New York for fifteen years, where he learned to install kitchen equipment. He came back to the Bahamas in the late eighties and worked at the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, but eventually decided to try the slower pace of the Out Islands. In 2005, he moved to Harbour Island, the toniest of the Bahamas, famed for its pink sand beach and the fashion models and celebrities who pose and repose on it.

Harbour Island (shortened to “Briland” by locals) lies just a five-minute taxi-boat ride across a shallow bay from Eleuthera (likewise shortened to “ ’Lutra”). Kenny worked as head of security for Romora Bay, a marina resort on Briland’s harbor side.

Over the previous couple of days, the police had been handing out flyers about Colt all over North Eleuthera. There’d been no recent sightings and there hadn’t been any at all on Harbour Island, but on Saturday, a power even higher than the Royal Bahamian Police Force sent a definitive heads-up to Kenny that today was the day.

“When He told me the Bandit was comin’, I was axin’ the Lord what should I do when he gets here?” God wasn’t too specific with His answer, so just to cover his bases, Kenny also texted a message to RBPF detective Sergeant Hart at the Briland station: “When the Barefoot Bandit come, what should I do?”

Hart didn’t answer right away, but as Kenny pulled on his black SECURITY T-shirt to start his twelve-hour night shift, he made a fateful decision. “I have three licensed guns and I usually carry a shotgun when I’m on duty.”

Kenny packs a gun for its deterrent effect against what he calls the “little lootin’ ” that goes on. “This island is so calm and so lovely, people leave their doors open . . . and the looters look for that.”

There wouldn’t be any looting on Briland, Kenny says, if only the Bahamians would stop using the “old England–style, the old Angelo-Saxon–style” of policing where they don’t offer rewards. “It’s a very small community,” he says. “People know who is the culprits, but they just hush hush. If there was a little reward, oh my God, the police start nabbing, back after back.”

Kenny says the looters “look to see if you don’t have a camera or manpower security. And manpower is best to keep them away.”

Strachan’s manpower strategy is ninja. “I wear a black hooded jacket and stay in the dark bush, low, like a cat, and you don’t see me.” The potential thieves never know where Kenny is, and he’s also let word spread around that he brings along his little friend when he patrols. “Like hogs in a pen, looters know where it’s safe to rub they skins. So when they hear you have guns, they stay away.”

There hasn’t been a theft at Romora Bay since Kenny took on the job.

Saturday evening, though, Kenny decided to leave the shotgun in his room. “After the Lord showed me His plan that this boy was comin’ to me, I said, ‘I ain’t gonna have no gun when he come.’ ”

The Bahamian police and FBI were warning everyone that Colt was armed and dangerous, but that didn’t worry Kenny. “I wasn’t scared,” he says with a big gap-toothed smile. He had faith that the Barefoot Bandit was coming, and his plan was still to stop him, but he didn’t want to hurt him.

An unmarried father of three (“That’s the way it is here in the Bahamas, with a lot of no-wedlock children”), Kenny keeps himself in great shape. Broad-shouldered, six-one, 212 pounds, he cuts an imposing figure in his tight black shirt. “I’m really strong, and if he didn’t stop when I asked him to, then my plan was I would toss him and wrassle him.”

At 7:38 p.m., Kenny’s phone buzzed with an answer from Sergeant Hart: “Bust his ass and hold him until I come.”

AT THE AIRPORT, I’D gotten the expected stew of rumors and wild speculation from the taxi drivers. The only concrete info was that the big party tonight was at the Bluff, a small North Eleutheran settlement that hosts a yearly homecoming that draws Bahamian diaspora living in Nassau, Miami, and even farther afield for a major fish fry and bashment. This was one of the years when it fell on Independence Day, which made it even bigger and better.

A black SUV pulled up and out jumped a petite powerhouse, Petagay Hollinsed-Hartman. Born in Jamaica, Petagay came to the Bahamas via Key West when she and her former husband, Mike Hartman, created a ground-breaking eco resort named Tiamo on Andros Island. Petagay now lived on Eleuthera, raising her daughter, Bella, and running a small guesthouse, BellaMango, along with the Laughing Lizard Café. The Lizard (motto: “No Haters”) lies in Gregory Town, where Petagay serves fruit smoothies to surfers, pumpkin soup to locals like rocker Lenny Kravitz, and jerk chicken wraps to blow-ins such as Robert De Niro.

The Lizard offers wireless Internet, and I’d warned Petagay (who shares a heaping helping of that islanders’ antiauthoritarian streak) that Colt might stop by to get online. “If he does, I’ll make him a panini,” she said.

ELEUTHERA IS A GANGLY, 110-mile-long island shaped like a marlin’s skeleton picked clean by sharks. Its bill, severed at Current Cut, points toward Nassau, thirty miles away. The island is so narrow that you can stand on its limestone spine in many spots and see both the indigo Atlantic and the aquamarine waters of the shallow Great Bahama Bank.

Gregory Town served as the pineapple capital back when Eleuthera exported boatloads of the sweet fruit. The village is now the island’s laid-back surf city during the winter swell season when board riders fill up the guesthouses, spend long days on the break at Surfer’s Beach, and then gather at Elvina’s for twice-weekly music sessions where anyone can walk in and just jam. South of Gregory, Eleuthera is all about quaint towns like Tarpum Bay and Governor’s Harbour, weekly fish fries and sociable bars, world-class bonefishing, and beach after beach of precious pink and white sand. There was a lot of Eleuthera for Colt to roam, but the highest concentration of boats was up in the north and it made sense he’d still be near the top of the island.

I climbed into Petagay’s truck and we drove straight out to Preacher’s Cave, a nine-mile run from the airport. It seemed too obvious that Colt might be sheltering in the cave where he came ashore, but there’d been a lot of obvious going on lately. It fit the Eleutheran Adventurers’ deliverance story and the Huck Finn archetype, and using the cave wouldn’t be a bad idea as long as he’d already gathered a cache of food and water. There’d be the chance of a tourist stopping by during daylight, but Colt could hide in the surrounding woods and move back in at night. The way Preacher’s entrance faces the open ocean, he’d even be able to build a fire inside to cook and keep bugs away without worrying someone might see the glow.

After leaving the paved highway, we bounced down a sandy, rutted track carved through dense coppice. There wasn’t another soul on the road. The last quarter mile was a narrow, winding path leading into what Bahamians call the backabush. Rainwater filled every pothole and gully. Tropical rule of thumb says that rain one day brings a bloom of biters in three. According to Petagay, they’d had occasional drenching showers all week, which meant the mozzies and nippers would be insatiable. I wondered if Colt had picked up bug juice somewhere along the way.

We parked in a deserted little clearing just as the sun was setting. As we started walking up the sand trail toward the cave, I suddenly thought of something. “Do you have your keys?” I asked Petagay. She looked at me like I was a little crazy, but I convinced her to lock the truck and bring the key while I grabbed my backpack, which held all my gear and notes. It was too easy—and fitting to the story—to imagine us coming out of the cave and finding the truck gone.

Petagay got her Nancy Drew on, checking out footprints. One set leading to the cave was especially large. I noticed a hum that grew louder as we walked. At first I thought it was the sound of waves, but that didn’t make any sense since we were heading away from the shore. By the time we could feel the cave’s cool exhale, the noise had swelled to the buzz of an electrical power station. I stopped and looked at Petagay.

“Bees,” she said.

A huge hive grew on the upper lip of the cave’s mouth. Hundreds of bees swarmed about twenty feet above us, their drone magnified and emanating from the entrance as a single ominous note. The twilight penetrated only a few feet past the cave opening, where two rocks poked like fangs from the ground. Beyond that, a patch of luminous sand pooled beneath a natural skylight. Beyond that was black.

Petagay pulled a small flashlight out of her shorts and clicked it on. We stood together at the edge of the darkness, our eyes intently following her light’s sickly yellow glow as it seeped across the rock walls. The weak beam reached only a short distance, so I slowly moved ahead while Petagay held the light above my shoulder to show the way.

Bats that cling upside down inside pockmarks in the cave ceiling were just beginning to stir. We’d gone about sixty feet, past several ancient Lucayan graves, when Petagay’s flashlight died. Ruh-roh.

“Colt?” I called out into the blackness. “Don’t shoot . . . ” No answer.

Bees, bats, Lucayan and Puritan spirits, yes, but there was none of that Coltish energy inside Preacher’s Cave.

I dug out a headlamp and its cold-blue LEDs blasted any remaining chills out of the cave. Petagay went back to the entrance looking for signs anyone had built a fire. I took the light and searched all the way to the back of the cave, where I found a small opening that looked like it might be a passageway. I got down on all fours and crawled inside. It didn’t go far before it turned vertical like a chimney. I shined my light up. The cave had saved one last tingle: a giant spider sprawled across its web a foot above my head. I thought of young Colton befriending the spider in his Camano backyard. He could have put a leash on this one and walked it.

Petagay found some wood burned to charcoal, but it looked more than a couple days old. We left the cave and walked through the lush seagrapes that enveloped a dune. Over the rise, the trail led to one of the island’s most beautiful reveals: a long coral-sand beach bordering baby blanket–blue water. We slipped out of our shoes and the sand felt silky cool underfoot. The light was failing rapidly as it does in the tropics once the sun sets, but I could still make out the color change that marked the Devil’s Backbone where Colt had grounded the Sea Ray. He’d misjudged the tide. There hadn’t been enough water atop the coral to get the boat across without wrecking its running gear so badly that it would eventually have to be towed all the way to Fort Lauderdale for repairs.

Like the Eluetheran Adventurers, though, Colt had managed to wade ashore. Of course the colonists didn’t have to worry about keeping their laptops and iPods out of the salt water.

We walked back inland, losing the hint of cool ocean breeze and wading back into the humidity. Mosquitoes found us and the sudden screaming trills of cicadas tore through the still air. We had the SUV as a refuge, but Colt left Preacher’s on foot. He’d presumably Google Earthed the island and knew he could follow the roads to the North Eleuthera Airport and the pockets of civilization where he could forage for food. His only other options were to stick to the coast and slog along the edge of a mangrove swamp or to try to pick his way through the backabush.

The forest here is a labyrinth of ram’s horn, thatch palm, wild dilly, granny bush, and gumbo limbo—nicknamed the “tourist tree” because its peeling bark mimics sunburned skin. Within this confusion of green, brown, and gray sprout shrubs valued by bush medicine practitioners, local alchemists who muddle and mash the leaves of explicitly named plants like “strong back” and “stiff cock” to make therapeutic potions. Radiant tiger lily blooms perch amid the dusty scrub like exotic birds, providing the only splashes of color. If Colt wanted to scout the area by climbing a tree, the tallest were leafy evergreens of the genus Metopium. Petagay’s husband, Mike, shimmied up one of these to survey their Andros property when he, too, was a Bahamas tenderfoot. They had to airlift him to a Nassau hospital. The tree’s common name—which is helpful, but not until you know how to identify it—is poisonwood, and its toxic sap can leave the unwary covered in agonizingly itchy blisters.

We climbed back in the truck. On the road, a car coming the opposite way suddenly zigzagged and then stopped in our lane, its driver hanging out the window shining a flashlight along the shoulder.

“Land crab season,” said Petagay. During the summer, these beefy crustaceans climb out of their deep burrows in the sandy forest floor and scuttle en masse to meet and mate in the sea. The next person we saw was a successful hunter pedaling his bike home with a huge crab on the handlebars. With its arms spread wide and claws held high, the crab looked like a roller-coaster rider enjoying a downhill rush. Its amusement would end with a couple days in a pen being fed coconut to purge its system and sweeten its meat before a short visit to a hot kettle.

Petagay suggested we check the area’s Haitian settlement, so we bumped along a sad excuse for a dirt road that wound through the bush. A large number of refugees have settled illegally in the Bahamas, many squatting in tin shacks or simple concrete-block homes.

A stereo balanced on the sill of a screenless window poured music into a brown grass yard where five children danced in the dusky light. They waved. Everyone we saw waved. We passed six guys carrying a refrigerator along the road, laughing and joking in Creole. We stopped to ask if they’d seen Colt, but they spoke very little English. We whittled our question down to “Tall white boy?” which got the point across, but they said no.

Next we drove to Jean’s Bay dock, where taxi boats connect North Eleuthera with the island of Spanish Wells, a white-Bahamian enclave that’s home to the best commercial lobster fishermen in the country. They don’t allow alcohol sales on Spanish Wells, so the spot where its residents step ashore on Eleuthera is dominated by a large liquor store painted like a giant Kalik label that’s visible from a mile at sea. Wooden garages line the road leading from the dock, most housing vehicles used by Spanish Wells residents during their visits to “mainland” Eleuthera. It’d be the perfect place to commandeer a car, as it might take a week or more before anyone noticed it was missing. All of the padlocks looked intact, though.

We tried calling around the island to see if anyone had heard anything new. Petagay got momentary cell service, then lost it. The islands were having more than their usual hefty share of phone and electrical issues. A pleasure boat off Briland had snagged an underwater cable with its anchor and unplugged almost all the islands’ communications for three days. Additional power grid problems also kept cutting electrical as well as cell phone service. Colt, once again, was catching some lucky breaks.

Petagay and I then drove to Three Island Dock—or as most tourists hear the Bahamian pronunciation, “Tree Island Dock.” Here, a small limestone peninsula forms a protected lagoon that’s home port for a fleet of small taxi boats that connect North Eleuthera to Harbour Island via a $5 two-mile ride. As usual, a couple of boat drivers sat on the cement seawall talking sip-sip (gossip) with the van drivers who link the dock to the rest of Eleuthera.

“Yeah, he messed with my boat Wednesday night,” said a burly driver with the sitcom name of Ricky Ricardo. “The tools he used is still in there.” Ricky said three boats had been messed with over the course of two nights. “He really tear up that Bertram there, cut up the wires, fool with the ignition, do something to the engine and the gas . . . The guy couldn’t run it for the whole day, had to call out a mechanic.”

The Bertram, a twenty-eight-foot classic sportfisher, had a complicated ignition that required both a key and a safety switch, which Colt wasn’t able to figure out. Ricky’s boat was a twenty-four-foot cuddy cabin set up to ferry a dozen people back and forth to Briland. None of the boats was Colt’s preferred style.

“He took one of the key switches and he try to take my batteries. I had the terminals on real tight and he couldn’t get them off so he tried to cut the wires. Why he try to take my battery?” Ricardo asked.

I shook my head. Unlike the Abacos, where there are as many boats as cars, Eleuthera has only a couple of marinas and they both lay south, miles away. There were boats around the north end that fit Colt’s predilection for speed and style, but they were across the bay at Harbour Island. He’d need a boat just to get over to the better selection. That explained the attempts on the taxi boats. Why, though, try to take a battery?

Ricky Ricardo said he’d actually seen Colton on Wednesday night. “He was walking to the dock, tall guy, short brown hair, no shoes—and that’s what I noticed because I only ever know two white guys who walk on the road barefoot.”

Ricardo said other boat drivers had also seen the Bandit. “He was sea bathing in the evening, floating in the cove around the corner . . . just seem like a young man, just a tourist.” They took notice because the cove is lined with ironshore—limestone bank eroded into chisel-sharp points easily capable of slicing through skin. Only the toughest leather-bottomed bare feet could make it across even a short patch of ironshore without being shredded.

The police eventually showed up with a flyer featuring Colt’s picture, and the boat drivers ID’d him.

ACROSS THE PIER FROM the taxi boats lies the tropically painted and grandly named Coakley’s International Sporting Lounge. Coakley’s consists of a small rum shop with a large covered patio and a pool table that provides the sport. Petagay and I pulled out two of the half dozen bar stools and ordered Kaliks. The name of the local beer comes from the sound of a cowbell, one of the most important instruments, along with whistles and goatskin drums, that create the Bahamas’ frenetically loud Junkanoo music.

Denaldo Bain pulled a couple of cold ones from a glass-front fridge that provided the brightest light in the nice, dark bar. Behind Denaldo, shelves held maybe a hundred liquor bottles, mainly rums. A TV suspended in the corner played a Schwarzenegger movie. Jamaican reggae pumping out of the stereo mercifully drowned the one-liners.

I asked Denaldo, who lays down rap songs when he’s not tending bar at Coakley’s, whether anything strange had happened on his side of the dock in the last few days. He said there’d been a break-in Wednesday night.

“What was taken?”

“Water, Gatorade, snacks . . . ”

“Any rum?”

“Nope.”

Colt.

“I know he was watching TV, too,” said Denaldo. “I came in the morning and the remotes and my chair were moved.”

Maybe Colt sat down to check to see if he was still making news. Denaldo pointed out the section of screened wall cut out so the Bandit could climb into the patio. After that, he said, Colt jimmied a deadbolt to get into the rum shop. He said that the same night, someone had also hit the administrative building at the center of the dock.

Denaldo, who lives across the water on Briland, said he’d also spotted Colt. “I saw him when I was closing up Wednesday night about ten o’clock. He was just about to go into the water. He stood up a little when we saw him—tall guy, slim, just shorts, bareback. The water taxi man was saying that the night before, someone trifle with the boats. So we look at this guy and no, no, not him, he wouldn’t trifle with the boats, didn’t look that way. This is just a tourist, just a tourist having fun. You know: love yourself. When we drove off, he went into the water.”

When the police came out to investigate the break-in at Coakley’s, they never mentioned the Barefoot Bandit and suspected the burglar was just a local troublemaker.

I ordered another Kalik and asked Denaldo what exactly had been taken. He pointed to cartons of bar snacks on top of the drink fridge. “He got Honey Buns and some of the Planters Go Packs, but his favorite was the Snickers.”

Ah, Snickers, the candy bar that fueled fifty burglaries. If he lived through this, I could see Colt’s first endorsement deal: “It’s tough staking out airports and marinas all night, so when I need an energy boost, I pull out a Snickers.”

“How about the drinks?” I asked.

“He took a few bottles of water and a couple Gatorades,” said Denaldo. “Oh,” he suddenly added, “and a few Heinekens and Kaliks.”

Regardless of whether Colt actually took the beers (which I kinda doubt), it was very interesting that he hadn’t emptied the place out. Why not fill his entire backpack with Snickers and water? If he’d been willing to carry a boat battery he could certainly handle a dozen bottles of Fierce Grape Gatorade to keep himself hydrated, and more Snickers to keep himself topped up on nougaty goodness. To me, that meant either he already had a campsite or an empty home stocked with food and water . . . or else he was supremely confident in his ability to forage what he needed whenever he needed it.

I looked up at all the candy bars and pastries Colt had left behind. “He’s going to come back here,” I told Denaldo.

He didn’t seem concerned. They’d put up some plywood over the one torn screen, but that left another forty feet of patio screen for Colt to slip through. And he’d already proved that the door lock was no contest. From Colt’s experience over the last few days, he must have thought things shut down early on the dock, leaving him plenty of dark hours to come back and raid Coakley’s and maybe take another shot at a taxi boat if he hadn’t found one elsewhere.

Tonight would be different, though, because of all the parties happening and people moving back and forth among islands. I wondered if Colt knew that.

I finished my beer and looked at the rum display. This would be a fine place to wait for Colt. I’ve spent many amiable afternoons that stretched into pleasantly lost evenings inside Bahamian rum shops. You order a bottle for your table and the bartender keeps you supplied with Cokes or fruit juice mixers. It’s one of the best ways to meet people because, like pubs in Ireland, Caribbean rum shops serve as the social centers of every small village.

Petagay broke my reverie, saying she was starving. I bought her a Honey Bun.

“No thanks,” she said. Cell service had popped up momentarily and her phone buzzed in a couple of messages. Two stories were floating around the island. “Some people are saying a boat was stolen today down in Governor’s Harbour. Others say a boat is missing from Harbour Island.” Denaldo added that he, too, had heard about a boat theft in Governor’s.

It was close to 10 p.m. Governor’s Harbour was a forty-mile drive south. Harbour Island was a ferry ride across the bay. Both rumors, though, said only that boats were missing. That could mean Colt had found his long-range craft and was already on his way farther down the chain to Cat Island or the Exumas. Both were a day’s travel by scheduled flights even though they were only twenty and thirty miles, respectively, from the southern tip of Eleuthera. And there was no way for me to even start a trip tonight. These were also just island rumors. I suddenly felt the sleeplessness of the last few days catching up with me. Even more, I realized I was hungry, too, and yeah, you’d have to be desperate to be in the Bahamas on Independence Day and settle for Honey Buns and Snickers bars. I turned to Petagay. “Let’s go to the Bluff.”

As I paid our tab, Denaldo remembered one more detail about the burglary.

“Oh yeah . . . he also took the emergency light.” He pointed to a spot on the wall where the battery still hung, part of a system designed to pop on whenever the power went out, which was frequently. The lights had been unplugged and taken. The grid had intermittingly blinked off Wednesday night, so Colt could have just been ensuring he wasn’t suddenly lit up inside Coakley’s. But why take the lights?

Another explanation for Colt’s machinations aboard the taxi boats suddenly made sense. By MacGyvering together Ricky Ricardo’s boat battery and Coakley’s fixture, Colt could create a powerful spotlight to illuminate a campsite or cave, or even to use on the front of a boat to help him navigate unfamiliar waters. His portable GPS worked well for charting general courses, but depending on the exact model—as well as meteorological conditions—it might be accurate only to within ten or fifteen yards. Like many, many boaters before him, Colt had already learned a tough lesson on the Devil’s Backbone: if you couldn’t see the myriad rocks, reefs, and sandbars in the Bahamas’ shallows with your own eyes, being off course by just a few feet could mean the difference between smooth sailing and coming to grief hard aground. If he was going to be boating after dark, a light would help him read the water in those shallow areas where just a couple hours of tidal rise separated a safe passage from bellying up to a sandbar.

THE TAXI DRIVERS HAD been right: the Bluff was definitely the place to be that night. We heard the music and smelled the barbecues a block away. People swarmed the waterfront, piling in front of the food and drink stands that lined the settlement’s large concrete dock. High-energy calypso pumped from the walls of speakers you find at even the smallest Bahamian public parties. At the booze booth I ordered a rum and Coke in an attempt to maintain the island vibe and stay awake at the same time. Petagay and I then sat on the seawall digging into huge plates of grilled lobster and cracked conch with mounds of peas ’n’ rice on the side.

We’d just finished eating when the the Falcons, one of the Bahamas’ best party bands, came onstage and kicked into a cover of “Harbour Island Song,” which celebrates pink sand on your feet and dancing in the street.

The crowd pressing toward the stage parted for small groups of Bahamian women in impossibly tight jeans who wanted to get their booties bouncing. Then everything suddenly went silent . . . except for the drummer, who kept thumping the bass. Power to the sound system had gone out, cutting all the mics and guitars. I took the opportunity to sidle up to an RBPF chief inspector who stood out from the crowd in his bright tunic, red-sashed cap, and swagger stick. I started to say hello but double-taked because hidden behind the six-foot-three well-fed inspector was a scrawny patrolman about a foot shorter whose cartoonishly large round motorcycle helmet made him look like Marvin the Martian.

I nodded to Marvin, who stood stiffly at attention, ignoring me. I looked up at the chief inspector, wished him a happy Independence Day, then said, “I hear the Barefoot Bandit may be in the area.”

He looked me up and down, then finally said, “We have that information,” and he made it clear that was all I was going to get.

“EVERYTHING FOR US AT that point was just information, information, information,” says another chief inspector, Roston Moss. “There was only suspicion, no proof that this individual had landed on Eleuthera.”

At forty-two, Moss is already a twenty-five-year veteran of the Royal Bahamian Police Force. He’s spent most of his career in Nassau, home to the Bahamas’ meanest streets. At the end of February 2010, however, he was reassigned to Harbour Island. Normally, Briland, like Orcas, has a sergeant as its top cop, but there’d been a recent surge in crime, primarily what Kenny Strachan calls “looting.” In just the week before Moss arrived, the tiny island suffered eight burglaries. The night after he got there, robbers broke into an American tourist’s hotel room and hit him with a cutlass (the pirate-era name still used in the Bahamas for a machete). Since Harbour Island is the Bahamas’ prime destination for the rich and famous, it was extremely important to the country’s overall tourist industry to quell the crime wave and ensure it maintained its pastel-colored, celebri-quaint reputation. So Nassau sent the big man—Chief Inspector Moss stands six feet two inches, 295 pounds—to take over the station.

To assist him, Moss had eight regular officers and five reserve officers. They provided twenty-four-hour policing for the 1.3-square-mile island (compared to forty-square-mile Camano and fifty-seven-square-mile Orcas, both of which have fewer cops). As soon as he took charge, Moss also created a citizens advisory board to enhance the local crime watch.

Moss followed the events on Great Abaco after the stolen plane landed and knew about the boat found off Preacher’s. It wasn’t until Thursday, though, after the incidents and sightings at Three Island Dock, that he felt there was enough evidence the Barefoot Bandit was in his area to plan a search.

“On Friday, the ninth, at eight a.m., myself and seven officers started the manhunt in North Eleuthera,” says Moss. He split his men into two teams. Four drove around the top of the main island while Moss and three others searched by sea in a “go-fast boat,” scouting the beaches and rocky shorelines of Spanish Wells, Russell Island, Current Island, and Harbour Island.

“We were looking for footprints, a tent, a boat out of place . . . ,” says Moss. “But there was no sign of him.” Moss called off the search at 7 p.m. Friday, and resumed it Saturday morning, Independence Day. At five that afternoon, after again finding nothing suspicious, Moss stopped by the homecoming party at the Bluff to grab something to eat before heading back across to Briland.

AFTER NEARLY TEN MINUTES of solo boom, boom, booming, the Falcons’ drummer was drenched with sweat and looked about to pass out. I felt the same way. The cell towers were dead again. The only rumor we could scare up from anyone at the Bluff was another sketchy report about “the Bandit.” In the Bahamas, where so many people are often barefoot, almost everyone dropped that part of his nickname. The Bandit had maybe been spotted and maybe jumped off a boat and swam away. Didn’t sound likely.

A sudden screech of feedback and an electrician jumping three feet into the air after sticking something somewhere it shouldn’t have gone told me that the music wasn’t coming back for a while. Worse, the line at the drink booth was now twenty minutes deep.

Decision time. Whereas I’d made pretty good gut calls up to this point, I now made one of the worst.

I could take a chance and go over to Briland, maybe wind up having to spend the night on the beach if I couldn’t scare up a hotel room. We could go back to Coakley’s and wait until it closed and hope Colt showed up. I was going on thirty hours with no sleep, though, and if he did show, either my snoring would scare him away or I’d wake up with a bare foot drawn on my forehead. Option three won: go crash on Petagay’s couch.

We had people all over Eleuthera and the surrounding islands keyed up to call us if anything broke. Besides, what were the chances something big would happen in the next few hours? My gut told me he was still around and wasn’t planning on going anywhere tonight.

I hate being half right.

WE SWUNG BY THE airport on the way home. The police substation was empty, closed down. There was no security at all besides a chest-high chain-link fence along the runway. Commuter planes sat close to the tiny, dark terminal. Private planes—at least a dozen, including seven that Colt could fly—were farther down the tarmac. No lights, no police, no guards, and the world’s most successful plane thief somewhere within a few miles.

One of the planes on the field was a Cessna 400 that looked ready to leap into the air if you just tickled its tail. Suddenly I felt a strange urge to hop the fence, jump in, and take off.

At Petagay’s, I lay sweating beneath a ceiling fan with Bella’s dog, Jazzy, beating her tail against the couch as I fell asleep petting her.

BACK AT THE BLUFF, they finally fixed the sound system and Homecoming cranked up again. Ferry boats carried so many Brilanders over to Three Island Dock to go to the party that the couple of taxi vans still working couldn’t keep up with the flow. A crowd gathered near Coakley’s waiting their turn. One of the dock staff from Romora Bay Resort, nineteen-year-old Mauris Jonassaint, stood at the end of the dock talking to a friend while they waited for a ride. Suddenly they heard a boat engine coming toward them. The water was pitch-black except for the reflection of lights from Harbour Island, two miles away. Mauris says he figured it was a boat coming to pick someone up, but he could tell it was moving way too fast through the shallows.

A small white hull appeared out of the darkness headed right for the dock. Everyone started waving it off, shouting, “Whoa! Slow down!” When the driver got close enough to see that there was a crowd of people there, he immediately spun the boat around and started back for open water. “But he didn’t slow down,” says Mauris. “Just went back out at full speed. Mauris and the others watched, dumbfounded, as the tall white guy, in a light T-shirt and camouflage shorts, drove the little boat aground on a submerged rock within sight of the pier.

Colt had busted into a vacation home at Whale Point, a finger of North Eleuthera that points at Harbour Island from across an 850-foot-wide inlet. He broke in looking for one thing: a key to the shiny new thirteen-foot Boston Whaler Super Sport sitting on a trailer outside. He found it inside the garage, then muscled the half ton of boat and motor into the water and started its forty-horsepower Mercury outboard. The unsinkable $10,000 Whaler, designed for use as a yacht tender or as an all-purpose sport boat, wasn’t big enough to get Colt farther down the Bahamas chain, but it was plenty of boat for buzzing between the islands at the top of Eleuthera.

After running aground, Colt was able to rock the Whaler free and then drove off a ways. Then he did something that set the course for his foreseeable future: he decided to turn around and come back.

Colt motored up and stopped the boat about twenty feet away from the pier, then shut off his engine. Mauris says Colt was laughing. “I asked him what he was doing.”

Colt looked up at Mauris and said, “Did you hear about the plane I crashed?”

“That was you do that?”

“Yeah,” admitted Colt.

“What’s your name?” asked Mauris.

“Colton Harris.”

Mauris says Colt was very friendly, and as they started talking, he sat back and put his bare feet up on the gunwale. Mauris asked why he’d come to the Bahamas. Colt told him that he couldn’t get any farther. “He said he didn’t have enough fuel to go to Cuba.”

Colt answered every question Mauris and his friend asked. He told them he was from Camano Island and still planned on getting to Cuba. “I asked him how he’s getting there and he said, ‘Plane.’ My buddy was playing with him and said he wanted to go. But Bandit said, ‘No, I fly alone.’ ”

Mauris told Colt that there were plenty of planes at the airport for him to choose from, but apparently the Bandit had already checked out the flying stock. He shook his head, saying, “I don’t drive old planes.”

While they were chatting, the current carried the little boat toward the dock. Mauris and his friend knew about the $10,000 FBI reward and watched as the boat came closer and closer. When he was just about within jumping range, though, Colt calmly reached over and started the engine. “He moved out to about twenty feet away and shut it back down . . . and he was laughing.”

Mauris asked Colt if he was hungry. “He said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ And we asked him if he wanted some liquor, and he said, ‘I don’t drink and drive.’ ”

The Bahamian then mimed a toke and asked if Colt was interested in a little weed, but Colt just laughed and said no. As the Whaler again drifted in close to the dock, Mauris asked, “Why don’t you come up here and talk?” Colt nodded to the large group of men standing off a little ways. “You see all those guys? You think I’m crazy?” Then he slowly motored the boat back out of reach and stopped again.

“He was just chillin’,” says Mauris, who nonetheless remembered the “armed and dangerous” part of the police warning.

“Do you have a weapon?” he asked.

Colt smiled. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

“I was like, yeah, he’s packin’. So there’s this big steel pole I was standing next to and I moved a little behind it.”

Mauris says the conversation had gone on for more than half an hour when Colt started to get agitated. “I ask him if he miss his mom, and he’s like, ‘Yeah,’ so I said, ‘Then why don’t you go back home?’ ”

“Too many cops,” said Colt, who then asked, “So where are your cops?”

“We don’t have that much cops,” answered Mauris.

“Well, call them,” said Colt. “I’m bored . . . I want to get chased.”

Naturally, Mauris first thought Colt must be joking. “But then he started to get mad, saying, ‘Call the cops, call the cops! I want to get chased! For real, call them! Call them!’ ”

Mauris tried to calm Colt down. “I’m like, ‘There ain’t no cops, man.’ ”

AND THERE WEREN’T. NO one had called them despite everyone on the dock figuring out that it was the famous Barefoot Bandit bobbing in front of them. Some of the other men tried to engage Colt in conversation, but he would talk only to Mauris and his pal.

After Colt got mad, Mauris slid a bit farther behind the steel pole and signaled to his buddy, who pulled out a cell phone. He didn’t dial the RBPF, though, he called friends who had a boat, whispering to them to hurry up and get there, that they had the Bandit “right here at the dock.”

Colt spotted the guy making the call. “Why is that guy on the phone?”

Mauris told him not to worry about it. Colt gave him a big smile and said, “I’m gone!”

He started up the outboard and began to pull away, turning back to yell to Mauris, “Read about me on the Internet!”

MAURIS SAYS THE WHALER blasted away in the direction of Harbour Island, aiming for the lights of a resort a third of a mile north of Romora Bay. “He went toward Valentines, so I told our friends in the boat to head that way and listen for the motor because he was running really hard and was the only boat moving out there.”

A taxi boat with a 115 Yamaha got within sight of Colt, but his little forty-horse Whaler could run over 30 mph and turn on a dime. A second boat joined the pursuit, but neither could corner the nimble Whaler out in open water as Colt ran circles around them in the darkness.

On the other side of the bay, Kenny Strachan was manning the shadows of Romora Bay Resort, lurking for looters. About twenty boats resided in the marina that night—big live-aboard yachts along with smaller speed-boats in the twenty-five- to thirty-two-foot range that the yacht owners used for fishing and diving excursions. A few people were on board, asleep, but most guests were down in Dunmore Town celebrating the holiday at Gusty’s, Vic-Hum, and Daddy D’s, leaving Romora and its docks deserted.

Shortly after 11:30, Kenny heard a commotion out on the black bay. “Engines were roaring and I could hear guys yelling, ‘See him? See him?’ ”

At 11:43, Kenny was heading toward the marina just as Colt came flying in. “He drive that boat under the dock, right under the marina office and jumped off,” says Kenny.

The docks at Romora stand high off the water, designed for big boats. Only one spot, a floating dinghy dock just below the office, sits low enough to disembark from a small tender. Colt drove directly there, climbed out, and tied the Whaler to a cleat, leaving the engine idling. He strapped on his backpack, grabbed his Walther PPK, and ran up the ramp to the main dock.

At the top of the ramp, Colt bolted through the office breezeway and turned left, running full speed down one hundred yards of dock before coming to dead wet end with nothing ahead of him but bay. He realized his mistake, spun around, and raced back, finally hurrying off the dock and onto the hotel grounds, where Kenny Strachan had positioned himself at the bottom of a stairway.

As Colt, who was obviously in some kind of distress, ran toward him, Kenny shouted, “What happened?”

“They’re trying to kill me!” Colt yelled.

That’s when Kenny saw a flash of silver in Colt’s hand, the pistol, and realized that God had kept His word and brought the Barefoot Bandit to him.

“ ‘Oh, that’s Bandit!’ I said to myself.” Kenny had purposely left his guns at home, but the $150-a-week security guard hadn’t received a divine strategy for how to handle the situation in case the Bandit brought his. “I was excited, but I didn’t want to get shot,” he says.

Colt kept running and Kenny kept pace alongside. “I didn’t want to show him my fear and give myself away. I wanted him to think I was on his side.” So Kenny played along, telling Colt, “I ain’t gonna let nobody kill you.”

Colt wasn’t buying it. “He looking at me tensified and kept exactly the same distance between us, eight feet, and wouldn’t let me get closer,” says Kenny. “I kept running beside him, asking, ‘Who tryin’ kill you?’ and saying, ‘Let me help you!’ When I moved a little closer, though, he put his finger on the trigger . . . He didn’t want to shoot me, he wasn’t evil, but I know he was thinking it was going to get physical and I was bigger than him.”

Kenny quickly weighed his options and his chances and made the wise decision. “Can’t run down a man with a gun, gotta let him go,” he says.

Colt ran off the Romora grounds heading east. Kenny grabbed his phone and dialed Sergeant Hart to tell him the Bandit was loose on Briland. “Hart told me to go get my shotgun.”

Kenny also had the presence of mind to do something that severely limited Colt’s chances of escape. He ran back down to the dinghy dock, turned off the Whaler’s engine, and pocketed the key.

LANDLINES WERE STILL DOWN throughout the island, and cell service was spotty, so Sergeant Hart sent a runner to wake Chief Inspector Moss. Hart then grabbed his weapon and rushed down to Romora. Kenny met him at the edge of the resort and was just pointing out which way Colt had fled when they heard a scream. The men ran east and found a woman standing in the street crying. She’d come outside because of the shouting, and suddenly Colt appeared, gun in hand. He looked at her, she screamed, and Colt dashed off into the bushes next to her property. As Hart and Strachan ran up, the woman was trembling. She pointed to the trees. “I just saw him! Right through there!”

Kenny says they clearly saw the path where Colt parted the scrub. “If the police had a good canine or good experience, they would have got him right there in the bush . . . But they didn’t go in.”

Instead of rushing into the black woods, Hart began to gather as much manpower as possible. “He called up some other neighborhood crime fighters,” says Kenny. “They all have licensed guns, and he directed us to spread out and try to keep Bandit trapped in the woods.”

Hiding in the bushes, Colt was in his element, but also in his nightmare. He’d told his mom that a doctor said he had PTSD. “And Colt thinks it’s from the cops chasing him in the dark,” says Pam. “He said, ‘Every time I see a little light in the dark, I go insane.’ ”

Now Colt was crouched amid strange scrubby trees on an unfamiliar island three thousand miles from home with a rapidly growing group of armed men probing the woods with flashlights. He was also already bleeding. Instead of the soft moss and cedar branchlets of the Northwest, the ground here was sharp limestone rock, and the forest was filled with tearing thorns and scaly, tripping roots.

Colt had gotten his chase. Now he could see the lights and hear the voices and crackle of walkie-talkies as the men tried to pen him in. But he wasn’t ready to give up by a long shot.

The two-hundred-square-yard section of Briland backabush where Colt hid was connected to other patches of woods he could sneak through to reach any of nearly one hundred nearby homes. He could also stay under cover all the way across the island, which is only five hundred yards from bay to beach in this area. Or he could pull a Colt and try something no one would ever expect.

CHIEF INSPECTOR MOSS WOKE to the banging on his door and got the news about Colt. He knew he’d need more manpower to have any chance of corralling the outlaw who’d escaped so many police operations over the last two years. Neither his landline nor cell phone was working, so Moss pulled on a pair of jean shorts, threw his bulletproof vest over a muscle tee, grabbed his 9mm, and ran out of the house in his slippers.

Like everyone else on Briland, the police generally drive around in golf carts. Moss, though, had brought in an actual patrol car after taking over. He raced to Pink Sands, the island’s most famous resort, which had an Internet connection that didn’t rely on the phone lines. Moss booted up Vonage and called Nassau headquarters and Governor’s Harbour. The same VoIP technology Colt had been using to communicate during his time on the lam was now used to call in reinforcements to catch him.

Calls were relayed via radio to officers spread across Eleuthera, still out policing the late-night festivities. Eight of them hightailed it to Three Island Dock and commandeered a boat to carry them over to Briland.

By 1 a.m., Moss had sixteen men. He broke them into two teams. With no night-vision equipment and no dogs, his strategy was simply to contain Colt until sunrise, when he’d be easy to spot in the low scrub. Moss led Team One, which included unarmed members of the local Crime Watch. Their job was to seal off the island so Colt couldn’t escape. Team Two—all cops packing Uzi submachine guns, shotguns, and their 9mm sidearms—was ordered to continue patrolling the edges of the woods near Romora to keep Colt bottled up.

Dawn would break in five hours.

Moss and his team drove to the island’s other marinas, telling them “to remain on red alert” so Colt couldn’t grab another boat. They handed out more wanted flyers and gathered drinking water and bug juice for everyone involved in the operation.

“It seemed like half the island was up and around by now,” says Moss. Many came up to the chief inspector asking to be deputized. He told them to just keep their eyes open but not to put themselves in danger since this was an armed fugitive.

Word had gotten downtown, and all the guests had returned to Romora Bay. One of the boats in the marina, a ninety-two-footer named Picasso, lay berthed adjacent to the dock office. The captain of the $4 million aluminum yacht checked the footage from its surveillance cameras and found images of Colt running back and forth.

Kenny Strachan went back to his post, patrolling the resort, now with his shotgun strapped across his back. Time dragged on, with no sightings and no action for more than two and a half hours. It was the dead of a dark, moonless night. Everyone was tired and bleary-eyed. Talk among the cops dropped to occasional whispers, then to nothing. Kenny walked out onto the dock and sat down.

At 2:45 a.m., Chief Inspector Moss got a report of a possible escape boat on Pink Sand Beach. He and his team drove across the island to check it out. As soon as they left, Colt made his move.

Kenny and another guy were on the dock near the marina office, discussing whether Colt might be able to sneak back and take one of Romora’s boats . . . 

“Just then a white guy come up and say he heard a boat startin’,” says Kenny. “We listen and suddenly hear boat engines bog down and go WHOOOOO like when you go full throttle. We start yellin’, ‘Dat’s him! Dat’s him!’ ”

COLT HAD MANAGED TO creep from the woods east of Romora Bay and through the cordon of Team Two cops. He crossed the resort grounds and then made it out onto the dock. At the farthest corner of the marina lay the Lady BJ. The owners of this seventy-six-foot yacht—a Miami real estate investor and his family—were fast asleep belowdecks with the generator thrumming and air conditioners blowing. They never heard Colt climb down off the dock onto the thirty-two-foot Intrepid they’d towed over from Key Largo as their sport boat. The keys were on board, and Colt fired up the pair of 275-horsepower Mercury outboards.

Colt pulled out of the slip and pushed the throttles forward. With a full tank of gas aboard what the Bahamians would definitely call a “go-fast boat,” Colt had the range to get to Nassau or Cat Island or Rum Cay or Long Island, or to lose himself amid the hundreds of Exuma Cays—all before daylight. If he could just get out of the bay.

Colt opened her up and headed south toward the deep cut between Harbour Island and Whale Point that led to open water.

SERGEANT HART AND THE cops of Team Two ran down to the dock with guns at the ready, but Colt’s boat had already disappeared into the darkness. The only chance to catch him was to find a boat of their own. Hart asked the Picasso’s owners if the RBPF could borrow their sport boat and their captain, New Orleans native Ron Billiot. The owners said yes. The Picasso’s go-fast was the owners’ son Jordan’s Dr. J, a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler Outrage powered by twin 250s. With one or two people aboard, this boat could top 50 mph, just like Colt’s Intrepid. However, Sergeant Hart, three RBPF officers heavy with body armor and weapons, Jordan, and another visiting boater also got aboard. Billiot fired up the engines, tossed off the lines, and headed out into the dark bay. They were already about four minutes behind Colt, and all the extra weight meant there’d be no way the Whaler would ever catch the Intrepid in a chase. All they could hope for was a lucky break.

A FEW MINUTES AFTER the Dr. J took off, Moss arrived at the dock and commandeered another civilian boat. This one, though, wouldn’t crank, so they tried another. That started, and with Moss, five cops, and the captain aboard, it too roared off into the pitch-black night.

It was the first time the chief inspector had been out on a boat after dark in this area. Fortunately, he wasn’t driving, because the deceptively calm bay hides a nasty surprise for anyone who is unfamiliar with the local waters or is in too much of a rush to check the charts.

COLT, NEVER ONE TO be afraid of going full speed at night when the adrenaline surfing comes in even bigger waves, blasted south along Harbour Island. The few lights burning on shore and the slightly blacker black of the land were all he could see. However, all he had to do was make it to the end of the island, just 1.1 miles from Romora, and he’d be able to pick out the smudge on the horizon that marked the inlet leading to open water and continued freedom.

Colt had not only gotten his chase, he’d toyed with the locals, dodged the cops, and then ninja’d himself right under their noses for yet another spectacular escape. He had an excellent boat and plenty of good-life islands within reach. Colt had broken through to unlock whole new levels of the game.

Then, suddenly, everything went to shit. Three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, the Intrepid abruptly slowed as if the seawater had turned to Jell-O. The engines growled and the propellers churned. Colt pulled back the throttles. He’d hit a sandbar.

TWO THINGS CONSPIRED TO finally end the Barefoot Bandit’s long run. First was the sandy shoal that stretches more than halfway across the bay between Briland and North Eleuthera. To get to the Whale Point cut, boaters have to first steer toward the Eleutheran shoreline to skirt the bar. It’s marked on charts and obvious on satellite photos. It’s also easy to spot during the day when the shallows glow a brilliant aquamarine compared to the deeper blue surrounding waters. At night, though, it’s invisible.

The other thing that got him was also invisible that night. One of Colt’s first fascinations and one of his very first words—the moon—betrayed him. Hitting its darkest phase that morning, the new moon brought dramatic tides. It’d sucked water off the sandbar until it sat dead low tide at 2:22 a.m., less than an hour before Colt showed up. A few hours and another eighteen inches of incoming tide later, and he would have skimmed right across.

Same thing if he’d been aboard the little Whaler he left tied at the dock.

ABOARD THE DR. J, Ron Billiot knew all about the sandbar. He slowed as he neared the shallows, and they flicked on the spotlights. A light-colored hull popped out of the darkness. Dr. J idled closer and the men aboard her could see Colt at the controls of the Intrepid’s center console, one hand on the throttles, one on the wheel. The police began shouting at him: “Stop!” “It’s over!” “You’re caught!” “Put your hands up!”

Colt’s hand came up; it was holding a pistol, though, and he fired.

The officers, each with an Uzi or shotgun aimed at Colt, saw the muzzle flash but didn’t return fire. They yelled at him to drop his weapon.

Colt hollered back, telling them to get the lights off him. Then he screamed, “Don’t come any closer! I’m not going back to jail! Don’t come any closer or I’ll kill myself!”

The two boats were only about fifty feet apart when the cops saw Colt lift the pistol to his head, shouting, “Go away! I’ll kill myself!”

The cops weren’t going away, though, and unlike at Granite Falls, they weren’t backing off. After a few tense moments, Colt pulled the gun away from his head. But he wasn’t giving up. Colt turned back to the boat’s controls and pushed the throttles forward. The Intrepid dug down in the stern, the props chewing into the bottom, but slowly it began to make headway. Colt had bogged down at the shallowest part of the bar, and now his boat’s powerful engines were plowing through the sand, taking him toward deeper water.

Aboard the Dr. J, Billiot told Sergeant Hart that if the Intrepid got just a little farther it’d be off the sandbar and they’d never be able to catch it. The Barefoot Bandit would get away again.

BACK AT ROMORA BAY, Kenny Strachan stood on the dock staring out at the black water when he heard what sounded to him like a war. “Bloom-bloom-bloom-bloom-bloom! On and on and on. I thought, Oh my God, they killed him!”

THE FIRST SHOTGUN BLAST hit the portside outboard engine. Other officers fired their Uzis, the 9mm bullets spraying the starboard engine. At least two rounds went toward the center console where Colt was standing. One passed through the stainless-steel piping in the middle of his seat, then tore through the cushion, and cracked the windshield. A second bullet punched into the steel pipe behind the seat and ricocheted inside until it was spent. Another round went well high and ripped into an aluminum outrigger ten feet above the waterline.

Bullets and shotgun pellets filled the air. Rounds careened off the outboards’ engine blocks and exploded back out, showering the boat with shrapnel. The police officers finally ceased fire after pumping at least twenty rounds into the Intrepid.

Acrid smoke filled the still night air. The only sound was the soft rumble of the Dr. J’s engines.

“Stop shooting! I can’t hear! I can’t hear!” Colt rose from the deck of the Intrepid screaming and waving his arms.

The police shouted for him to put up his hands, but Colt was still thinking. He opened his backpack and reached inside. Hart told Billiot to move in closer and the cops lined up with guns ready, yelling, “Drop your weapon! Show us your hands!” Instead, Colt pulled out his laptop and threw it over the side, followed by his GPS and iPod. Finally, he tossed his pistol and backpack into the sea.

When the Dr. J came alongside, the cops ordered Colt down on the deck. Once they saw that he didn’t have any more weapons, they jumped across and handcuffed him. At that point, officers say, a calmness came over Colt. All he said was “You should have killed me.”

MOSS’S BOAT ARRIVED AND officers jumped into the waist-deep water to try to find the gear Colt had thrown overboard. His backpack floated, and they picked that up, but now with three boats churning the shallows there was an underwater sandstorm and they couldn’t see anything on the bottom. Both captains marked the spot on their GPS. The cops transferred Colt to the Dr. J and a tow line was rigged for the Intrepid since both of its engines had been destroyed. At 3:15 a.m., they started back toward Romora Bay.

After the guns had gone silent, Kenny held his breath, fearing the worst. A few minutes later, his cell phone rang. “They say, ‘Kenny, we got him.’ And my God! I’m so glad they didn’t kill him.”

Moss received a radio call that a large crowd had gathered—or at least large for three in morning on Briland. About forty people were milling around the marina. “I didn’t know if they wanted to just observe or if they wanted to harm the suspect,” he says. “So we wanted to clear the path.” Those allowed to remain were guests off the boats in the marina, Kenny, and the police and Crime Watch folks.

When the Dr. J arrived and they lifted Colt out of the boat, the onlookers crowded around with cell phone cameras while police ordered, “Stand back! Stand back!” Moss hadn’t been able to get ahold of his police car by radio, so they’d backed a red golf cart down to the dock. As the cops steered Colt toward it, the crowd pushed in.

“Some Americans was yelling, ‘Shame on you!’ ” says Kenny. “And Bahamians was sayin’, ‘Don’t come here, this no place for you to be! You come to Briland and get caught!’ Everyone was trying to get his picture, but he kept his face down and wouldn’t talk to anyone. I felt so sorry for him because he was not that kind of hard-core criminal like they thought he was.” Kenny helped them load Colt onto the cart and rode along to the edge of the property.

They took Colt to the Briland police station and handcuffed him to a chair. Moss sent word to Nassau that they’d successfully captured the Barefoot Bandit. He pressed his superiors to come get Colt as soon as possible because he didn’t have the resources on Harbour Island to handle crowd control and any “media frenzy” that might occur. “We just wanted him off the island,” says Moss. A nurse came to check out the scratches on Colt’s legs and feet while investigators gathered around. They hoped that, like many fugitives, Colt might be so relieved it was all over and that he’d survived, that he’d have loose lips.

Colt remained eerily calm and cool, though. He spoke politely to the officers but was careful not to implicate himself. “He was very evasive,” says Moss. The cops offered him food and drink: “No, I’m good,” he said. They brought out a photo of Spider Miller’s Cessna 400 nose down in the Great Abaco muck and asked Colt about it. “I never saw that plane before in my life,” he said. The officers laughed and began bantering, trying to get Colt to respond to some good cop–good cop.

“How you crashed if you a good pilot?” one of them laughed.

“You missed the runway, eh? You overshoot?”

One of the cops was a licensed pilot who tried flattery. “He didn’t crash . . . He did a good job. He meant to put it there. That plane didn’t break up, it didn’t explode . . . I couldn’t even do better myself with plenty years of experience.”

The other cops added the chorus, saying it’d been an excellent job. One said, “He land in the mud . . . That mud saved his neck.”

Colt laughed along with the police, but got testy when he noticed an officer was filming the interview on a cell phone. “Get that camera out of my face,” he said.

“Where you get that gun?” an officer asked him.

“I don’t remember,” said Colt.

IN A SEPARATE ROOM, detectives opened Colt’s backpack and laid out the contents. Along with a black nylon shaving kit, there were Ziplocs that had protected his important papers. These were the things he’d carried with him thousands of miles across the country, through all the campsites and chases and midnight boat crossings.

Inside one plastic bag was a series of drawings. Colt had been designing his fleet of future aircraft. One depicted an ultramodern helicopter with an enclosed tail rotor. Another showed a single-propeller plane on floats—larger than a Beaver and with similar lines to a Pilatus, it looked like a melding of the two planes in Chuck Stewart’s hangar, where Colt had spent so much time. Another craft was a twin-tailed wonder, a civilian spacecraft. The drawings showed a definite design flair. And all of the aircraft were marked with the name of Colt’s dream company: Phoenix Aerospace.

In the other Ziploc was Colt’s fifth-grade class picture from Elger Bay Elementary School along with his fifth-grade headshot. The only other paper he carried all this way was the certificate from the Boy Scouts of America awarding him the rank of Wolf Scout.

The Bahamian police claim that when they captured him, Colt had less than $40 in cash and no credit cards on him. By my accounting, though, Colt could have been carrying well over $20,000, most likely in a Ziploc. The money has never been reported found.

SHORTLY AFTER DAYBREAK, cHIEF inspector Moss grabbed his snorkel gear and went back out to the sandbar. Now high tide, he estimated it was about ten feet deep at the spot where Colt had gotten stuck—way more depth than the Intrepid needed to cross safely. Moss quickly found a black zippered case that held an Apple laptop. Then he spotted a handheld GPS, and Colt’s iPod with earbuds still attached. It took him fifteen minutes to locate the pistol, a black-and-chrome .38 caliber Walther PPK with the serial number filed off.

The Walther looks cool and, of course, has the “Bond, James Bond” cachet, but it definitely would not be the first choice for an experienced gunslinger headed to the Bahamas. Colt had spent the last week in the sand and muck and moist salty air. A Walther PPK, if not kept fastidiously clean in that kind of harsh environment, is prone to extractor failures.

Colt fired one round as the police approached. In a semiauto like the Walther, the force from one shot ejects the spent shell casing while a spring in the clip automatically loads the next round. Simply pull the trigger again and another round will fire.

When Colt fired his first shot, though, the shell casing never ejected, and the next round didn’t chamber. He could have pulled the trigger again, whether aiming into the sky, at the police, or at his own head, but until he manually cleared that spent shell, the gun wouldn’t have fired.

There were two live rounds left in the clip, both hollow points.

KENNY WENT OVER TO the Briland police station later that morning to give his statement. He sat down in a chair next to Colt, who, he said, looked a little worse for wear from his Bahamian visit. “Oh, he had skin look like checkers from mosquitoes! He had a lot of bits in him!” As Kenny sat there, a nurse came to check on Colt again. “The nurse was asking him if he was all right, if he feel any pain, and he said, ‘No pain, I’m okay.’ He was extremely mannerly, respectful, humble. He didn’t give no aggressive answers like I seen some criminals when I was livin’ in New York.” Kenny laughs. “But he wasn’t giving too much information!”

Colt did eventually loosen up enough to tell the Bahamian police what his future plans were—no crime in just thinking about it. Like he’d told Mauris, Colt said his next stop was Cuba, where the American authorities wouldn’t be able to follow him. Once he lost them, he said he planned to move on to the Turks and Caicos Islands because his research showed they had very few cops.

It wasn’t a bad plan, but it had some problems. A number of U.S. citizens have gone to Cuba to stay out of the reach of American courts. However, they tend to bring very large amounts of cash with them to smooth their way, like Robert Vesco, or else they’re high-profile asylum seekers, like Black Panthers Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.

Colt may have been packing some new Spanish vocabulary words, but he didn’t mention any plans to officially seek asylum. His $20,000-plus—if he had it—would have gone a long way in a country where doctors earn less than $50 a month. Even if he made it to the island without getting shot down or blown out of the water, though, the odds of a six-foot-five gringo fading anonymously into the Cuban countryside were slim. The Cuban people are very open and friendly, though, so if he arrived with enough greenbacks that he didn’t have to steal to feed himself, and kept a big smile on his face, Colt might have been okay.

It would have been bad timing, though, to make the Turks and Caicos a long-term stop on his Caribbean tour. The British had recently kicked out a crooked premier there who’d been putting the banana back in the concept of a banana republic. The Brits reinstituted direct rule from Westminster and had launched a law-and-order campaign to keep the islands safe for tax evaders and tourists, the two legs of the Turks and Caicos economy.

Colt would have most likely had a similar experience in the Turks as he’d had in the Bahamas. If he’d been able to stay at large for a couple more months, he’d be heading into the Caribbean’s September swelter season when the air becomes a sopping, oppressive stew. A week in that late-summer tropical humidity—caked with salt sweat and covered in no-see-um bites, with fine sand invading every orifice—is enough to force a nun into taking a bird bath in a baptismal font. If Colt couldn’t find an air-conditioned hideaway, he’d be begging to get back to the cool Northwest.

A TEAM OF OFFICERS arrived from Nassau and took charge of Colt. They wrapped a heavy chain around his ankles and closed it tight with padlocks. And Colt finally got the bulletproof vest Pam wanted him to wear. Then they hustled him—still barefoot—onto a ferry boat and to the North Eleuthera Airport where an RBPF plane waited.

OVER AT PETAGAY’S, THE instant the service came back on, our phones lit up with the news Colt had been caught. On the Romora dock, I met Kenny, Mauris, and police officers who were on the boat that caught him. Going through the events of the entire night moment by moment with them, there was only one spot of disagreement: how Colt got out to the Intrepid. Both Kenny and an American boater who claims he saw Colt as he motored away say that he waded in from the shore and swam beneath the dock out to the boat. Chief Inspector Moss, though, noted that Colt’s T-shirt and shorts were “perfectly dry” when they captured him, meaning he must have simply—and once again, audaciously—ninja’d his way past all the cops and down 275 yards of dock to where the Intrepid was tied up.

At the Intrepid that morning, one of the policemen was watching the owner tie the boat alongside its mothership, Lady BJ. The owner told the cop he wished they’d shot “the little shit” instead of his outboards.

I asked the officer if Colt had ever threatened to shoot back at them.

“At one point, yeah,” he said. “I guess when we opened fire he sorta changed his mind.”

When I looked closely at the Intrepid, I spotted drops of blood on the rod holder and the driver’s seat. Kenny, standing next to me, said that Colt had not been hit by any bullets or pellets. “He was all torn apart with trees and briars from coming through the bush and running on the rocks with his bare feet.”

It was, once again, almost inconceivable that Colt wasn’t seriously injured or dead. Black night, jerking spotlights, the chase boat rocking as police jostled into firing position, Colt’s boat lurching along the sandbar, Colt actually firing a shot, then refusing to drop his gun . . . then somehow not getting hit by a stray, a ricochet, or one of the shots that went straight toward the spot where he’d been standing.

“You can see on the boat that they did fire a shot to hit him!” Kenny said. “But God put it so it was not for him.”

The RBPF say they didn’t shoot at Colt. When I press Chief Inspector Moss, he admits that Colt gave his men more than enough excuse to fire at him instead of the boat engines. Moss credits the “experience, professionalism, maturity, and discipline” of the officers on the boat as to why Colt came out of it alive . . . along with “divine intervention.”

Kenny agrees with the last part. “The Lord put it so Bandit come runnin’ to me,” he says. “He needed to get a blessing to make sure he don’t die that night.”