The 960 agents handling Le Roux had him make a call on the boat's satellite phone, hoping to reestablish its location. "My car broke down," the captain told him. "You have to send a car for me." Then Le Roux called the captain's wife, in Thailand, who told him, even more cryptically, that her husband had called her to say he had been "captured by the fish people." The 960 agents suspected he was perhaps being held by pirates.

A massive hunt for the boat was soon under way. The DEA ac- tivated a system called the Pacific Transnational Crime Network, and authorities from the Cook Islands and Tonga were on the water, all looking for signs of the JeReVe. But a storm was brewing in the region, further reducing the already long odds of finding one forty-four-foot yacht in the vastness of the South Pacific.

On November 5, 2012, a pair of spear fishermen diving in southern Tonga spotted a yacht washed up on a shallow reef. The boat was lying on its side, saltwater lapping against its red hull and broken tiller. A tattered French flag fluttered from a small flagpole at the stern. Its name was written in golden script across the back of the hull: JeReVe.

One of the divers climbed onto the clean white deck of the ship, a Sun Odyssey 44, and made a grisly discovery. At the helm was the badly decomposed body of a man, much of it picked away by seagulls. The divers fled the ship, climbed into their own boat, motored to the nearby port of Neiafu, and called the local police.

Bad weather rolled in, and the authorities couldn't return to the JeReVe for two days. When they did, a group of Tongan officers examined it. Inside the hull, they took an ax to the interior walls and found a pile of clear garbage bags filled with neatly wrapped brown plastic bricks. Each contained a kilo of cocaine. All told, the boat had been carrying 204 kilos, worth more than $90 mil- lion on the street in Australia, where authorities suspected the drugs had been headed. It was the largest drug haul ever confis- cated in the South Pacific.

Tongan authorities identified the dead man as a thirty-five-year- old Slovakian named Milan Rindzak. They found several pass-