by Jack Hardin
“If you respected me any more, I would own you,” she grinned. “Come on. I’ve got to get back.”
She grabbed her bag and stepped onto the dirt path whose center was worn clean of any grass. It led to Reticle’s offices and training center a quarter mile away. Tyler slid the Vortex Viper spotting scope into its canvas case, zipped it up, and handed it to Ellie. The two had met six months ago, less than a week after her arrival in Florida. They shared a mutual passion for shooting long-range precision rifles, and it didn’t take them long to establish a standing meeting each week where they shot their chosen rifle and acted as a spotter for the other. Tyler had moved to Lee County from West Texas only two years earlier and secured the land and licensing to open up Reticle, the only long-range shooting range in the area. If fifty women in Lee County had been interested in long-range shooting then, it doubled almost overnight when Tyler showed up. Everyone knew it didn’t have much to do with precision shooting as much as it had to do with precision fishing. The ladies were drawn to him the way a redfish was drawn to a swimming lure, but Tyler wasn’t interested in their advances. He had been married back in Texas but wasn’t now. Ellie had yet to get him to talk about what had gone wrong. Whatever had happened back in Texas was painful enough for Tyler to close up like a gun safe with the hinges welded shut.
Ellie took in a deep breath of the thick, humid air. Being back home was a surge of moisture to her dry, saltwater veins. After twelve years with the Agency, she was finally on the edge of what was beginning to feel like a normal life. She had arrived stateside six months ago, spending the first three weeks at Langley in exit interviews, debriefings, and paperwork. As soon as she was given the nod to walk out the door for good, she went straight to the airport and boarded the first flight to Fort Myers, then took the forty-five minute drive west.
Being back home didn’t require as much of a psychological adjustment as her exit shrink at Langley had informed her it would. Up until her decision to leave the United States’ most clandestine organization, she had spent her entire adult life as one of the Agency’s most efficient and lethal undercover operatives, running covert operations all over the globe. At twenty-two, two months before she had graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in linguistics, she was approached by the CIA to come work for them. Three months and four rounds of interviews later, she had accepted an offer to work at headquarters in Virginia as a wire analyst. In that role she reviewed recordings from the field, detecting hidden meanings in foreign voice inflection before filing them away or sending her notes back to those who needed them in the field. It was mundane and uneventful, but she understood the game. Stay true to what’s in front of you, and new opportunities will open up. It’s what her father had always taught her. And open up they did. Her second year in, she was tapped to enter a new program, one that would take her onto the international stage and slip her into the darkest shadows of geopolitical conflict.
She entered a vigorous training program that lasted eighteen months and brought her into the extreme heats of Dead Valley, the bitter colds of North Dakota, the frigid waters of Alaska, and the Daintree Forests of Australia. When it was complete, she and the six others that made up TEAM 99 - a total of five men, two women - were considered among the seven deadliest assassins the Agency had produced on this side of the Cold War. No one outside of their immediate management knew of the team’s existence. Even their trainers, while given precise instructions for the team’s maturation, were not privy to the team’s purpose or mission. They were black-ops and belonged to the darkest corner of the CIA’s Special Operations Group. For six years they carried out hits on the most sensitive of targets and covertly gathered intelligence on foreign troublemakers. Ellie had been surprised by the offer to train for such an elite team, but Langley had hired her for such a role from the very beginning. Between high school and college, Ellie had learned three languages fluently: French, Portuguese, and Russian. Her SAT score was three missed answers less than a perfect 1600, all of them in math. She had spent her teenage years achieving the level of black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu and had consistently ranked on top in national youth tournaments for sharp shooting. By the time she was fifteen, she could regularly hit a matchstick at a hundred yards with a .22 rifle. Langley had only given her the desk job to keep her under watch and to test her patience and analytical skills.
Everyone on the new team came in with prior military experience - everyone but her - each of them already elite fighters in their own rights. But her specialized skills and brilliant mind had kept her from appearing or feeling inferior to her teammates. During their year-and-a-half of training, she quickly rose to the top, and, when they were finally deployed, she was second in command to the brilliant and fully apt Voltaire. Voltaire had formerly been a Captain with the Army Rangers and led the team with a humble intensity that was fueled by his need to execute each mission cleanly and bring each member of the team back home safely. The team operated well together, and, for six years out of their home base in Brussels, they carried out mission after mission, successfully eliminating threats to national security and to the U.S.’s foreign operations. They were finally disbanded. Budget cuts was the formal reason, but Ellie knew it went deeper than that, although she wasn’t exactly sure what. The timing, though, had been uncanny. Her last mission, an assassination scheduled in Saint Petersburg, Russia, was disrupted when she discovered an envelope on the nightstand of her hotel room earlier that evening. Who had placed it there and how they had gotten access to the room, Ellie never did find out. The contents of the envelope were, upon a cursory review, alarming but quickly moved to disturbing. The majority of the time, Ellie’s team were not given full reports on their targets. Faces, locations, transportation habits, associations, but rarely exhaustive details that were unnecessary to the mission. They got in, they got out, satisfied that they had scored a small but true victory for their country. But, that evening in Saint Petersburg, Ellie had spent over an hour cross-legged on her bed, reviewing new intel - papers, photos, sound recordings - on her target. His name was Boris Sokolov, that much she knew, an aspiring oligarch who had spent the last fifteen years consolidating his wealth into controlling interests in bioenergy corporations. Ellie had also been advised that he was a primary backer of Mother Russia’s broad and audacious attempts at hacking America’s national security systems. But, if the information in front of her was correct, he was being targeted by Ellie’s government for putting in a competitive bid for oil contracts in Iraq which had amassed considerable support with his people at the UN. Ellie had reviewed the new intel until she was confident that it was accurate, that she wasn’t being duped by misinformation or someone with allegiances different from her own.
That night, when Ellie had Sokolov in the center of her sights, she had pulled the shot - an easy three hundred yards with minimal crosswind - and the bullet landed in the wall five inches in front of his face. It took two months for the damage caused by the concrete chips to fully heal, but he had gotten off with his life. Ellie never found out if the disbanding of her team was the doing of whoever had provided her with the information. The older she got, the less she believed in coincidences.
Over the course of their six years together, only one member of TEAM 99 had been killed. Faraday, the only other female on the team. She had been hit by a sniper round while exiting a building in Mogadishu. The subsequent investigation had revealed that her exit from the rooftop had been sloppy and they made her before she slipped back into the stairwell. While in Afghanistan, and through diligent digging, Ellie had discovered Faraday's true identity. Sarah Cornish. Outside of her relationship with Voltaire, Ellie had grown the closest with Faraday, close being a highly relative word seeing as they couldn’t reveal much about their true selves. After the failed mission in Saint Petersburg, their team leader, Mortimer, called her back to Brussels into his mahogany-laden office and presented Ellie with two choices. She could exit the CIA with a thank-you and a pat on t
he back or she could request reassignment into a role that was more traditional. She chose the latter and moved into her new position as a case officer, a role that would require more interpersonal relations and challenges. She left Brussels two days later and was sent back to Langley for three months of training, much less than what was typical but shortened because of her previous experience in tradecraft and espionage. Back in Virginia she became proficient in asset recruitment and handling and was immersed into a study of the local customs and culture of Kabul. Then, before her first assignment in her new role, she had come home to Pine Island to visit for two months before shipping out to Afghanistan, where she remained until choosing to step away from it all that fateful day in Kabul six months ago. Being back home underneath the generous Florida sun and gently bobbing on its water had been healing these last six months. Paradise had a way of helping you forget your guilt.
Just not all of it.
Now, as her feet pressed into the sand-washed path back to Reticle’s offices, she looked over at Tyler and asked, “Tomorrow’s Friday night. You want to come hang at The Salty Mangrove or go see a movie?”
“I can’t tomorrow. I promised Hank I would go to the gun show with him up in Tampa. You could come too, you know.”
“You guys have fun. Maybe another time.”
“I’d have you back before bedtime,” he said. “And bring you home sober.”
“Right…” she laughed. “I’m going to lay low this weekend. You should come fishing sometime. There’s a lot of good snapper in the Sound right now.”
“Fishin’,” he said, slowly shaking his head. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Ellie, I don’t do boats. Not unless it’s tied bow and stern to a piling and has a mound full of dry dirt underneath it.”
“I’ll never understand how you can live in Florida, be five minutes from the ocean, and never get out on the water. You might as well live on Mars.”
He wagged his finger toward her. “Now you’re talking. See, I was going to wait to tell you this, but I’ve been spending my evenings building a spaceship in the back office. You’re welcome to come back and take a look. I put a couple really cool engine deal-ies on it. Even started on a spacesuit, but I ran out of duct tape and superglue.”
“You sure are a scaredy cat for a man who likes guns and gravy.”
“I like to know what’s inside things. That’s why I don’t enjoy hot dogs, ocean water, or all those energy drinks that everyone seems to like so much. I have it on good authority that one contains pig rectum, the other definitely has sharks, and the last I’m pretty sure is only slightly filtered monster pee.”
Ellie raised her brows. “Monster pee?”
“Indeed. I saw a documentary about it on Hulu, so it has to be true.”
”Still doesn’t mean you’re not a scaredy cat.”
“I’m not scared. I’m wise. But if you want to catch me some fish, I’ll eat them. I’m just not going to go look for them on purpose outside of a restaurant or a grocery store. The water gives me the willies.”
Ellie looked down the path and saw a large man approaching. He had thick arms and a lineman’s neck. A duffle bag was slung over a shoulder and a rifle clutched in his meaty right hand. “Ellie, Tyler. How are you two?” he asked. The man was Augie Smith, a Lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard and posted at the USCG’s station at Fort Myers Beach. He was one of Reticle’s first monthly charter members and could been seen somewhere within the boundaries of the training facility at least a couple times a week. He was a good marksman, getting better, trying to make good on a promise to himself that one day he would best both of the people now standing in front of him.
“Hey, Augie. You’re here early,” Tyler said. “You working the late shift today?”
“Yep. They have us running night patrol the next couple of weeks. Word on the water is that Border Protection surveillance has spotted a few runners lately. One of them was intercepted last week. Nabbed a few kilos.”
“Where?” Ellie asked.
“Cape Haze. Just across Charlotte Harbor. Little rats were tucked in at Turtle Bay unloading.”
“Was that in the news?” Tyler asked. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”
Augie repositioned his duffle strap on his shoulder. “Yeah, well, you won’t. Someone on the city council wants to keep it hush. Drug dealers running in these waters?”
“You don’t easily come back from that,” Tyler finished.
Augie snapped his fingers. “Boom. Give the man a prize.”
“I’ve already got the prize,” Tyler said, grinning. He nodded toward Augie’s rifle. “You haven’t beat me with that yet.”
“I will. I will. Give it time.” He smiled and nodded with a polite urgency. “Anyway, I’ll see you both later. I don’t have a lot of time out here today.”
They said their goodbyes, and Ellie and Tyler continued charting down the path.
“I hate that,” Ellie said.
“What?”
“Drugs. Running around a place like this. I know every place in the world has an underbelly, but I don’t like hearing about it being in my own backyard.”
“I’m sure it’s not much,” Tyler said dismissively. “If it was, they would have to notify the public for safety reasons. You heard Augie. They caught the guys. That’ll dissuade them, and they’ll look for cleaner entry points.”
Somehow that failed to relieve a nagging at the bottom of Ellie’s stomach. “Yeah, maybe.”
They came to Reticle’s main building and stopped. It was a one-story, stucco structure that housed small locker rooms for ladies and men, a gun shop, and a smith shop in the rear. Besides the eight-hundred yard range they shot at today, Tyler’s setup boasted two five-hundred yard lanes, three three-hundred yard lanes, and twenty outdoor handgun stalls. Ellie swung her rifle off her shoulder and clutched it between her fingers. “I’m going to head inside and give this girl a cleaning.”
Tyler sighed, almost reluctantly, and started walking away. “And I have a class to teach with ten women who I’m pretty sure aren’t all that interested in shooting.”
“Quit complaining. You enjoy it.”
“I enjoy it more than hot dogs.”
Within twenty minutes her rifle was clean, reassembled, secured in her personal locker, and she was in her truck headed home.
Chapter Four
Reticle was situated a few miles north of Florida State Road 78, at the southwest corner of Yucca Penns Preserve, just two miles from the Gulf of Mexico lining Florida’s western edge. The air whipped through Ellie’s long, honey-blonde hair as she turned her dark grey Chevy Silverado west onto Pine Island Road, named after the long stretch of land that Ellie called home.
Pine Island, Florida, was the largest island in the tropical state and began its northward ascent just above its more famous cousin, Sanibel, ending seventeen miles later in Charlotte Harbor. It stood apart from Sanibel and neighbors like Captiva Island and Cayo Costa in that it had no beaches to speak of. Their sugar-sand beaches so attractive to tourists were noticeably absent on Pine Island. The locals considered such a topographical anomaly a major contribution to the island’s perpetual charm. Instead of beaches, its circumference was fringed with generous mangrove forests whose branches were teeming with roseate spoonbills, wood storks, and pelicans; its underwater root systems swarming with snapper, snook, and redfish, making the Sound the perfect environment for dolphins and manatees.
The Old Florida feeling of Pine Island was maintained by the continued resistance to any major development or construction projects that would indubitably replace the warm and trusting atmosphere of the island with cold, impersonal progress. Hiking trails, kayak and canoe waterways, and ancient Indian shell mounds added to its charm in a state that was quickly becoming over-commercialized. The tourists came and locals stayed on for the island’s secluded, small town atmosphere, and, outside of seasonal tourism, the locals supported themselves by fishing, fruit and palm farming, and a funky art
community. Stepping onto Pine Island was like entering into the kind of story you would hear while sitting at the feet of a benevolent grandfather, listening to him talk of the old days when life moved slower and stress wasn’t a thing. It’s where Ellie had grown up and where, for her entire adult life, the best parts of her had longed to return.
Ellie eased down on the brake, and the truck slowed at the four-way stop sign where Pine Island Road and Stringfellow Road came together, the intersection where all roads in and out of the island found their source. Pine Island had not one stoplight and wouldn’t be getting one anytime soon; its ten thousand inhabitants saw no need for one. Outside of weekends hosting one of several festivals, “traffic” just wasn’t in the local vocabulary. Ellie pressed down on her blinker, pointed the truck south, and began the seven-mile stretch of road to St. James City, the southernmost community on the island and where Ellie spent most of her time.
She filled her lungs with the fresh, salty air that swirled through the truck. The drive south never got old, it never got boring; miles of near-empty land filled with wild grass, pine and palm trees, and dotted infrequently by turn offs and small island homes. The last mile the breeze coming off the water cooled the air another five degrees and created an anticipation for the destination that was never disappointed by the reality.
Ten minutes later Ellie arrived at the southern tip of the island and turned the steering wheel slightly right and into the narrow, crushed-shell parking lot that lined the edge of the road and butted up against Henley Canal. She turned off the engine and stepped out, the broken shells crunching underneath her sneakers until they hit the upward slope of the boardwalk, where visitors were greeted with a large red sign that told them, in case there was any doubt, that “Island Time Begins Here.” She walked up the protracted incline and faded right when she got to the top and it leveled out. It was another twenty feet to The Salty Mangrove, another hundred beyond that to the marina.