At 5:45 in the morning, just at daybreak, four U.S. Coast Guard patrol boats set off from the west banks of Warsaw, Missouri, on the Truman Reservoir side of the dam, and headed south and upstream along the Pomme de Terre arm toward the location of the Namouna, which was drifting at anchor in the deepest water of the fork at the mouth of the Osage Arm, about 28 miles downstream of the yacht’s home marina slip in Osceola. Those boats carried a contingent of 24 federal officers in total, comprising a SWAT team with high-powered rifles and body armor, as well as divers with rubber rafts. A helicopter dispatched by U.S. Treasury ATF set down on a rise near Osage Bluff, the closest onshore rendezvous point and less than a half-mile from the marina from which Shackleton had set out this morning.
