Every damned one of them.
Lying perfectly still, I waited, biding my time. We’d get where we were going sooner or later and that would be the time to act. Until then, I had to think. There were at least two men on board. I usually don’t worry about two-on-one fights. Strike first and strike hard. Then it becomes a one-on-one fight.
It must have been about twenty-thirty when I blacked out, no later than twenty-forty-five. Then I remembered the hissing sound from when I woke up earlier. A gas? Had to be. Some kind of odorless knockout gas. Assuming they just waltzed ashore after releasing the gas….
Wait, I thought suddenly. Tony and Art went all the way around the perimeter of the island, going opposite directions. They’d been all the way out on the north pier and were halfway to the south pier on the return. I remembered hearing them whispering on their earwigs. Mine was turned off, but I could still hear them.
Nobody had waltzed ashore. They’d have seen or heard something. How did the Haitians release the gas? Did it knock everyone out, or was there a firefight? Considering the boat I was on and the fact I was on it at all, it meant there was no firefight. So I had to have been out since just before twenty-one hundred.
An hour to get in and out after the gas was released and another hour to get to where we were now, in deep water. In deep shit, McDermitt, I chastised myself. You were trained by the best for many years to anticipate and adapt to unconventional happenings on the battlefield!
But my home’s not supposed to be a battlefield. “Head on a swivel!” I could hear Deuce’s dad yell inside my head. I’d wanted to believe I could live out my days in peace just a few years ago.
I’d love it if people would just leave me alone.
Didn’t matter.
What mattered was getting out of this. I was out cold for at least two hours and awake now for fifteen minutes, making it at least twenty-three hundred, but not yet dawn. I calculated we would have come at least twenty to twenty-five miles and no more than two hundred. We were somewhere between Cape Sable and my hometown of Fort Myers.
Yeah, I said to myself, or the middle of the freaking Gulf.
As if by my own will, I heard and felt a change in the pitch of the engine. We were slowing and the wave action was decreasing. We were nearing shore. Somewhere on the southwest coast of the Florida.
Good for me, I thought. For them? Not so good. They’ll come for me soon.
In the distance, I heard more voices. Though I couldn’t make out what they were saying, the tone of at least one seemed annoyed. The engine came down to an idle and two heavy thumps came from forward, near the bow, as the sound of the engine died.
“Fend her off, you stupid pricks,” the Texan shouted.
I heard a stomping sound from directly above where I was lying. “Hey, wake up down there! You’re here, bring him up.”
I sensed movement just a few feet away and slightly above me. Someone groaned and springs creaked as though they were lying on a bunk and sat up.
A sharp kick in the lower back from a bare foot cleared the last cobwebs from my mind. Wait for the opening, I reminded myself.
“Kanpe sou de pye ou, kochon! On you feet!”
“Untie his feet, dumbass,” the Texan drawled, his voice full of scorn and sarcasm. “That dude’s gotta weigh two twenty. You two skinnies ain’t gonna lift his ass up there.”
The ladder from the bridge creaked and someone jumped from it to the deck where I lay. “You dumb shit! You stepped on my finger!”
More voices from close by. Orders were given in Creole as the boat bumped what sounded like a bare wood dock for the second time.
Snugging her up, I thought, feeling someone tugging at the bindings on my ankles, and suddenly they were free.
“Pick his ass up,” Tex said. “If he ain’t awake yet, maybe a quick swim will do the trick.”
Hands grabbed me under the arms and two men jerked me to my feet. I pretended to collapse and they jerked me upright, where I wobbled for a moment, waiting. The dock grew silent and I sensed rather than felt the people out there all step away from the boat as one unit.
“Remove the bag from his head. I want to know you brought the right one.” A woman’s voice, one that I did recognize.
The hood was quickly pulled off and I let my head drop, but my eyes were open and my mind clear. It was dark. I knew that as soon as I looked up, I could learn at least two things and I might only have a few seconds to figure them out. First, how many people I was up against and second, how long I’d been out.
I’d stopped wearing a watch some time ago, except to dive. I found little use for it these days. The sun, moon and stars were my clock, along with the rise and fall of the tides.
The deck of the boat I could see was wood, the gunwales fiberglass, both stained from time and neglect. The bright work was tarnished and green, with more stains streaking the fiberglass from the mounts. Not a trawler. A really old and worn-out sports fisherman.
A hand grabbed my hair and yanked my head back, where I could finally see the stars. As fate would have it, my first glimpse of the night sky was to the north.
Polaris wasn’t in the right place. I’ve seen it every night for the last seven years from my island or nearby. Always in exactly the same spot in the night sky, never moving. As my friend Rusty would say, “Timeless and predictable.” It was just slightly higher now, confirming I was north of my island. By the position of the stars around it, I realized I’d been out for five hours and it was another three or four hours before dawn. I was somewhere about seventy-five miles north of my island. The Ten Thousand Islands.
I stomped hard on the instep of the man holding my hair and pivoted. I’d put on a pair of heavy boots after supper and the combination of crushing and twisting on the top of the man’s bare foot with my heavy rubber sole was more than he could bear.
As he screamed in pain, he released his grip on both my hair and shoulder, I continued the pivot, sweeping the legs out from under the other man. As he crashed to the deck on his head, I put my shoulder squarely into the first man’s gut and shoved hard.
One-on-one, here. Five more on the dock.
Before I could move, Tex grabbed my hair again and I felt cold, flat steel against my throat as my head was jerked back. “You so much as move, and I’ll mix your blood with a thousand fishes’ in the bilge.” I stopped struggling. He could kill me with just a twitch of his wrist.
“Know what this knife is, dip wad? It’s called a Ka-Bar, a Marine fighting knife, and I can kill you a thousand different ways with it. You understand me?” I nodded my head slightly. Whether or not this man really was a Marine didn’t matter. The steel mattered.
Tena Horvac stepped forward to the edge of the deck. “Don’t kill him yet.”
The moon was full on her face now. I’d met her briefly many months earlier and had been quite taken with how beautiful she was then. That was in full daylight. By the light of the moon she was even more so. But her beauty was tainted by the knowledge that she was one sick, deranged bitch.
“Put him in the shack,” Horvac said. “Make sure he’s tied securely and it’s locked. I’ll deal with him in the morning.”
A man stepped up next to her. He was dressed a little better than the others, but still he wore gang colors. He had a gold front tooth and what looked like a Mr. T starter kit around his neck. I recognized him from the pictures I’d found on the Internet.
“Why not just kill him here and now, Erzulie?”
“That would be too easy,” Horvac cooed, caressing Lavolier’s arm. The man became visibly weak in the knees and started breathing heavily at the touch of her hand. I noticed even under his baggy pants he had an erection. Poor son of a bitch, I thought. You’re dead and don’t even know it yet.
Two of the gangbangers held semi-autos leveled at my belly as two others reached for me and dragged me up onto the makeshift pier. It was little more than posts sunk into the muck with a floating deck attached to them. It appeared to
be made of wood pallets and thirty-gallon plastic drums, lashed underneath, half filled with water. I’d seen this construction technique in a lot of third-world countries.
One of the guns prodded me in the back, shoving me down the pier toward shore. The two men with the guns behind me were joined by a few of the others, while Horvac and Lavolier led the way. On shore, I was forced up a path cutting diagonally up a small limestone cliff to high ground.
Reaching the top, no more than ten or twelve feet above the water, I heard the boat’s engine start up and it begin idling back out to deeper water.
“Pleasure doing business with ya!” I heard Tex yell.
The limestone was a dead giveaway. I knew there was a cove just to the north of here where snook came by the hundreds at high tide to feed on the smaller fish every fall. They were hiding out on Panther Key in the Ten Thousand Islands. Just across Gullivan Bay from here is the resort town of Marco Island. I could just see the faint glow from the town on the horizon.
The procession wound along a path inland through the pine forest for a couple hundred yards. Soon, we came into a clearing where there were a number of simple wooden structures. I could hear a generator running and there were lights in two of the buildings. More people were there, milling about, but none looked at Horvac.
They’re afraid of her, I thought. What was it Gabriel had called her? The voodoo spirit of love? Spirits are highly feared among voodoo practitioners, especially the uneducated ones. The men here at this camp weren’t gangbangers, like Lavolier and Gabriel. These were the poorest of the poor, Haitian refugees. The mere mention of a spirit would cow them into submission. Mix that with what I knew about the woman’s affinity for herbs and pharmaceuticals and it was no wonder they trembled in her presence. Zoe Pound was probably using them for slave labor, to harvest pot in the surrounding forest.
One of the gangbangers shoved me toward a small building on the outskirts of the small settlement. “In dere, white boy!”
Another man opened the shed door, which I noticed was solidly built, and I was pushed inside, tripping over a piece of wood and falling to the ground. The door closed and I was enveloped in pitch darkness as everyone walked away, laughing. All but Horvac. While I couldn’t make out what she was saying, I could tell by the sultry sound of her voice that Lavolier would be busy for a while. Maybe some of the others as well.
They’d neglected to tie my feet. I rolled over and got my knees under me, then managed to stand up. Slowly, my eyes became adjusted to the near total darkness. I could smell wood smoke. A tiny amount of light leaked through the eaves of the roof overhang.
First, I needed to get my hands free and then find some kind of weapon or a way to communicate. I looked around the shed and couldn’t see anything. I started to move toward the back wall and ran into something hanging from the rafters. It swung slowly back and forth.
I moved around whatever it was and nearly tripped on another piece of wood. The smell of smoke grew stronger and I realized I was in some sort of smokehouse. Probably a deer hindquarter was hanging there. I backed up to the wall and felt around. The boards and studs were smooth. I couldn’t find any protruding nails or splinters.
Dropping to my knees again, I slowly rolled to my left shoulder and lay down on my side. As kids, an old friend and I used to play Houdini and see if we could get loose from being tied up. My reach made it easy. At six three, my arms and legs are pretty long.
Rolling onto my back and lifting my lower body with my feet tucked close to my ass, I rolled my shoulders forward. It wasn’t easy, because they’d tied my hands very well, but eventually I worked my hips between my elbows and was sitting forward. After that, it was just a simple matter of rolling onto my side and working my legs, one at a time, between my outstretched arms.
That accomplished, I had my hands in front of me. Biting and chewing on the restraints, I realized it was leather and the knots were on the underside, where I couldn’t get to them with my teeth.
Nor could I get my hands in my pockets, but I could feel what was in them. As far as I knew they hadn’t searched me. A laser bore sight was in my cargo pocket with my wallet. It’s used to sight a rifle fairly accurately without firing a shot. Insert it in the barrel and where the laser pointed was where the round would hit. Just adjust the sights until they’re on the red dot. I wasn’t sure how I could use it. Maybe I could blind one or two of the gang whenever they came for me.
I dropped to my knees and began searching the floor of the shed. Odds were they used scrap lumber for the fire whenever they had any, along with hardwoods. Scrap lumber meant imbedded nails that would be burned out of the wood. It took a long time, nearly an hour, but I found a bent sixteen-penny nail and started to work on the bindings.
Getting the crooked, rusty nail point against one of the straps proved to be harder than I thought. I finally got the nail started through the strap and using a hunk of burnt wood on the ground to press the nail against, it poked through the strap, gouging my left wrist. I was bleeding, but couldn’t stop working. I’d have to be more careful and repeat the process over and over, poking holes as close to the same spot as I could to weaken the leather enough to where I could chew through it. Rope would have been easier.
An hour later, exhausted, covered in sweat and black soot, I parted the leather and I was free. Confined, but free.
Didn’t matter, I could fight. I went straight to the back wall of the smokehouse and tested each board in the vertical siding. It wasn’t regular siding, but a lot thicker. Probably made from pressure-treated two-by-twelves. Busting through that was out of the question. The corner posts were six-by-six lumber, buried in the sand.
I dropped to my knees and started digging, pushing the loose sand as far as I could, knowing it would fall back in. I stopped every few minutes to listen for the sound of approaching footsteps.
Finally, my hands reached the bottom of the boards. Enlarging the hole and working furiously, I moved more and more sand and soot. Middle of February and every square inch of my clothes and skin was drenched in sweat and covered with chalky soot.
After nearly an hour of digging and removing a few large hunks of limestone, I slid my head and shoulders into the hole. I had to lay flat on my back and wiggle my way through, but I got my head up on the other side. I kicked with my feet and pushed more sand away from the other side until my feet were low enough inside the smokehouse to slide my legs under the wall.
I quietly slipped into the dense forest behind the smokehouse. I was free. I had an idea how to communicate, but it relied on a few things that the odds were heavily stacked against. I grew up just sixty miles north of here and fished the Ten Thousand Islands many times with Pap. With Mam too, a few times, and later with several friends and girlfriends.
I knew there used to be a low ridge just north of here, about the middle of the island. It had been burned off in some long ago fire and the limestone made plant recovery very slow. I’d camped here a lot of nights. The ridge had been bare from the time I was eight to when I left for Boot Camp and would likely be bare still today.
If I could get there, I might be able to send a signal, if anyone was looking for it. If there’s even anyone looking for me, I thought. I didn’t know what had happened on the island. There might not even be anyone looking for a couple of days. I pushed that thought to the back of my mind where it could kindle the rage I might need later on.
Deuce’s team has access to a multimillion dollar surveillance satellite. Chyrel told me about a year ago how it worked. It was actually designated for use by the FBI, but since all the alphabet soup agencies fell under the umbrella of DHS since 9/11, Stockwell could authorize the usage time and movement. Somehow, it could be held in a stationary spot above a fixed place on the ground, or moved around thousands of miles up in the sky. Chyrel explained how, but like with so many of her other explanations, my eyes crossed and I just nodded. I’m not a rocket scientist and don’t need to be. If she said it worked, it worked.
If everything was okay on the island, Chyrel would be given control of the satellite. I remember her saying that it took hours to get it in the right position sometimes, depending on where it was located. But once there, the computers could hold it in place so its expensive camera array could look straight down at a spot on the ground and literally count the blades of grass growing out of a crack in a sidewalk. I was hoping she was zoomed out a little further than that.
As the sky began to turn purple in the southeast, I reached the bare spot I remembered as a kid. The raw limestone sand prevented just about anything from taking root and was still bare. I found the most level spot I could and lay down on my back. This was going to be longest shot I’d ever made. But first, I had to find the right star to shoot.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tony stood next to Travis, watching the monitors. Chyrel had a direct feed from the onboard cameras of eight helicopters now, and every few minutes one would come up on a boat. Some were smaller pleasure boats, heading out for a day of fishing. Those they skipped over almost immediately. Some were way larger than the boat they were looking for, cargo ships coming and going from several ports along the coast. Occasionally, the size was right, but not the configuration.
It was a process of elimination and each boat they eliminated had a corresponding light on Chyrel’s laptop that changed from red to green. Less than thirty percent were green.
“It’ll be daylight soon,” Tony quietly noted.
“I know. You’re anxious to get out there and help search.”
“Wouldn’t be much help, but at least we’ll be on the water and out there when one of the choppers finds the right boat.”
Travis glanced over at Kim and Linda. They’d been talking for the last hour and had fallen asleep, Kim leaning on Linda’s shoulder. When he looked back, Tony could see the dejection in the man’s eyes.
Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) Page 21