by Jack Hardin
She plopped into a wide upholstered chair in front of Ryan’s desk and slicked a hand down her face. She closed her eyes and immediately recognized the mistake. All she saw was blood. Not her own.
She opened her eyes and stared at a fixed spot on the floor. Assam and his family were just another number in this American crusade. Besides her and the few people involved in today’s mission, no one on this side of things would even remember them. No one ultimately cared that a husband, a wife, and two innocent children had been murdered today. Ryan did. The soldiers out there with her today did. But the suits behind mahogany and walnut desks did not. This family had been murdered because someone made a deal where it was beneficial for them to let Assam’s name slip. Not just his name. His time and place of extraction too.
Her boss stood and walked to the front of his desk. He sat back on the corner. At forty-eight, Ryan Wilcox was almost fifteen years her senior. The short hair on his temples was beginning to show gray, and the crow’s feet stamped around his eyes were deepening. He looked down on his agent. The blood on Ellie’s shirt was darker now that it was dry. The skin on her knees was gone, the side of her face littered with tiny cuts.
“Are you okay? Have you been looked at?”
“I’m fine, Ryan.”
“Ellie, look. I know this is hard on you. You were close to them. It’s hard for me too.” Ryan brought his fingers up and slowly rubbed his temples. “I hate that this happened, and I’ll do whatever I can to find out who’s to blame. Your training doesn’t exempt you from feeling shock. Just go get checked out and get some rest. We can talk about it in a couple─”
“No, Ryan.” Her voice was icy now. She paused, allowing a heavy silence to fill the room. “I’m done. I’m done with whatever it is that you think we’re doing.”
“Ellie, Assam made his own choices. He knew the risks.”
Ellie’s head snapped up, and her eyes burned into those of her boss. “He trusted us. He trusted me. There is no good reason why this happened. None. We’ve got billions of dollars and thousands of the world's finest behind us.”
“Ellie. You’re the best officer I have out here. Your experience and training are unmatched. I can’t just make a call and replace you.”
“Replace me? Why would you need to do that?” she hurled back. “The very reason I was brought out here is in a hundred pieces in a back alley across town. You don’t get it, Ryan. I’m not quitting.” She paused again and lowered her voice. “I’m opting out.”
Her superior lifted a brow.
“I came into the Agency because I love my country and wanted to make a difference. I moved into handling assets because I no longer believed what I was doing for the Agency was the right thing to do. I believed in what I was doing here. But the bureaucracy and the incompetence comes with a price I’m not willing to pay any longer. What happened today should never happen. Never. We both know that. But it did, and it’s happening all over the Agency with more frequency than ever. This wasn’t a technological mistake or a training failure, Ryan. Somebody, somewhere on our side, leveraged that family to get something in return.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to ask good people to put their lives and the lives of those they love at risk just so they can further some fat suit’s agenda in Washington or wherever they happen to be. Some moron who’s going to kiss babies and shake hands and never really know about what happened here today because he doesn’t really care.”
Ryan stood up and went back to his chair. “Where will you go?”
“Home. I’ve been gone for too long anyway. I’m thirty-four. It’s time I learned what it’s like to live a normal life. I want a dog. I want to get back out on the water. I want to breathe again.”
“So my best trained and most experienced officer is going to move to South Florida and spend the rest of her life fishing? You can’t be serious.”
“I haven’t figured all that out yet.” The tinny smell of drying blood drifted into her nose. “I just know I’m out.”
Her boss calmly searched her eyes. He had never known Ellie to make any decision driven by emotion. This was personal, that much was obvious, but he knew well enough that it wasn’t the primary factor in her decision. He tossed his hands up. “What can I say? I’m not going to convince you. To be honest, I respect you too much to try.”
“Thanks, Ryan.”
“Your renewal is coming up in three weeks. I’m guessing that’s when you’re stepping out?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” he conceded reluctantly. “Well, you know the drill. I’ll have to restrict your access and bury you in exit reports.” He raised his eyebrows. “You’re sure about this?”
She winced as she rose from the chair and headed toward the door. “I have to take a shower.”
CHAPTER TWO
PETE WELLINGTON THROTTLED down on his NauticStar 22XS, and the Yamaha 200 four-stroke that powered it eased the spin of its rotor. He brought the boat to a stop, dropped anchor, backed down on it, and set it. He shut off the engine, grabbed his YETI coffee cup, and sat on the flip-down bench positioned at the stern, then closed his eyes and breathed in the cool air sitting over the waters of the Sound. This was his respite, his blood pressure medication. At his old age, some people went on walks, bike rides, or to those group workout sessions at the local gym, but Pete’s battery was recharged by being the only person out on the water. It was only him all alone in the vastness, producing an intimacy with nature that couldn’t be bought with a charter or an African safari.
Each Friday Pete’s alarm went off at three-fifteen in the morning. He would be out on the water within thirty minutes, when the shrimpers were still a couple hours from coming back in and before the deep sea boats headed out to their favorite spots. Times like this, out here alone in the inky blackness, it felt like the world was his. Sometimes he would throw a hook in and see if he could come up with a snook or a snapper, but most Friday mornings he would just sit here on the bench seat, close his eyes, and listen to the wind blow gentle sheets of air across the water.
He took a sip of his coffee and felt the hot liquid run down the back of his throat. The preferred choice was black: no cream or sugar. If he didn’t drink it all, the YETI would still have it warm at dinner. But he would finish it within the next hour.
A fish - he guessed a mullet - flipped out of the water behind him and made a loud splash as it reentered. He waited and listened. They usually jumped out two or three times before moving on.
Voices. He heard voices. Murmurs, too far away to make out, but in a cadence that wasn’t English. Spanish, perhaps. He opened his eyes, and his brows lowered. The sounds were coming from behind the darkened shape of a small cluster of mangroves on his port side. Pete stood up and walked to the bow, stopped and listened again.
“...date prisa!” It was all he could make out. The Spanish voices were muffled and spoken in low tones. Curious, Pete moved back to the console and turned on the single outboard motor. He gently moved the throttle and, after backing over the anchor and pulling it, idled his way around the vegetation. He hit the switch that turned off the LED canopy lights and the green underwater lights, then killed the engine as the coastal shrubs slid away from him.
He could just make out a speedboat bathed in soft red light a hundred yards out. What looked like a barrel was floating in the water next to it with dim yellow light streaming out of the top. Pete didn’t know enough of the language to make out any of it. A crease formed between his brows. He squatted and pulled up on the ring to the deck’s small storage compartment. Looking in, he found his binoculars and drew them out, then walked back to the stern. Setting the glasses to his eyes, he squinted and slid a finger across the focus knob. The scene in the water sharpened. Several men were scrambling around the speedboat carrying black packages. One man was leaning over the side, looking into the barrel. The boat was thirty-eight to forty feet in Pete’s opinion. He couldn’t make out the brand etched onto t
he side, but by its size, outline, and the three outboards locked onto the transom, he guessed it to be a Nor-tech. If he was right, he was looking at a half million dollar boat.
He looked back to the barrel and blinked hard. A man’s arms appeared at the top of it, coming up from the inside. The arms pushed a black package up to the man looking down from the boat. Pete’s stomach clenched. That was no barrel. He took a couple steps toward the stern, set the binoculars back to his eyes, and focused on the tube coming out of the water. He could see water slightly displaced on two sides of it, as if something was just under the surface of the barrel. He removed the field glasses and brought a hand up to his forehead. He rubbed his brow, and his heart beat a little faster. He swallowed hard as he realized what he had just stumbled onto. Something he’d heard distant stories of somewhere far out in the real world and had seen plenty of times on television shows. It was a drug exchange. And the barrel was no barrel. It was a small, privately-engineered narco-sub. Semi-submersibles could carry several tons of product worth one to two hundred million dollars. He knew they had become popular with Mexican cartels as another covert means to avoid U.S. radar and sneak their cargo into the States. Most of the waters in the Sound would be too shallow for even a small submarine to get through. Whoever these guys were, they knew these waters well and were exactly where they wanted to be.
He swallowed again and stepped back into the console. His favorite place on Earth had just become the last place he wanted to be. As far he could tell, no one had seen him. All the lights on his boat were off, but the white powder-coated paint of the canopy was reflecting the light from the quarter moon. All he had to do was slip back behind the cover of the mangroves and he should be all right.
He placed the binoculars on the seat and stepped over to the keys that protruded from the ignition. He held his breath and turned them, keeping his eyes on the scene ahead. The engine growled to life and began to churn water behind him. Pete turned the wheel and brought the throttle up an inch. The motor growled louder and pushed the boat forward, and he turned the boat around and slowly retraced his previous wake.
He was still holding his breath.
The boat did not have a marine radio, and Pete never brought his cell phone out with him on a Friday morning. There was no need to. At least, not the last five hundred times he’d come out here. Now, all he could think of was getting back to the marina and calling the Sheriff's Office. The back of his neck warmed as his anger grew within. Drug dealers in his own backyard. Every few years you heard rumors of the Coast Guard reportedly finding a rogue package of drugs floating on the water somewhere around. Drug movement on a scale that required a narco sub was unheard of in these quiet parts. At least, he thought so. Apparently it was happening right under their noses while Pine Island slept and dreamt of fish and piña coladas.
A muffled drone hit Pete’s ears, one above the noise of his own engine. He turned and saw the shiny glint of a boat hull and the whitecaps made by its high wake. The hair on his arms stood up, and he shot the throttle up as high as it would go. It was another seven miles to his slip at the marina. The bow tilted upward as the boat shot forward and quickly reached its top speed of eighteen knots, a speed that was impressive for an engine of this size yet no match for the three outboards strapped to the boat behind him, each of them likely running at four hundred horses. They would be on him in thirty seconds.
His fishing tackle was back home, most importantly the fillet knife that accompanied it. Pete’s handgun was resting quietly in his nightstand drawer. He had nothing with which to defend himself if it came down to that.
He looked over his shoulder. The boat had already covered half the distance. Somehow a serene morning had turned into the run of his life. This couldn’t be real. Not here.
A voice yelled out to him. He kept on. It yelled again. The speedboat gunned up to his starboard and matched his speed. Four Hispanic men were staring at him, one waving him down. He smiled politely, nervously, but didn’t slow, kept his hands on the wheel. The men called out again, their tones becoming increasingly angry. Pete could see the lights atop the Matlacha Pass bridge about a mile out. He didn’t have to make it back to the marina. He just had to make it to Matlacha. There he could shoot into one of the canals off Island Avenue, jump out, and run for his life.
The speedboat eased down, and Pete’s NauticStar was alone once again. He felt some tension exit his muscles, and he turned back to see where they had gone. Panic filled his chest as he heard their engines roar again, and the other vessel shot forward to his boat’s port side. The boat blazed past him and turned hard directly in front of his bow. He threw the throttle down to prevent a head-on collision, and the speed boat moved out and around his stern.
They were doing circles around him, leaving him stationary, their furious wake spraying a fine mist of salt water into his face. They were willing to risk a collision with the knowledge that their boat would take an impact better. Pete grimaced and turned the engine off, tossed his hands up in defeat, and brought them back to rest on the wheel. The speed boat slowed and came in swaying at his starboard. The NauticStar bobbed hard in the high wake their antics had created.
A thin man with a thin mustache grabbed the speed boat's gunwale with one hand and raised another toward Pete. Another man shined a spotlight on Pete. “Hey, mi amigo!” the man yelled over their engines. “Podemos hablar?”
Pete’s bushy eyebrows lowered, and he raised a fist and extended a middle finger. The four men laughed. He was seventy-two now, and there was one of him, but Pete Wellington wasn’t going down without a fight. He had seen what he had seen. They had seen him see it.
“Eh, Mister!” the man called out again. “You talk, yes?”
“No!” Pete growled back.
“What you doing? It...is dark...early, yes?”
“That’s none of your damn business,” he snapped.
“We talk,” the man nodded like he had made a decision. He stepped onto his gunwale and jumped off, landing on the deck of the NauticStar, which now drifted over the other’s boat’s wake.
“Get the hell off my boat!” Pete stepped out of the console and faced the man. A chill went down his back. The man seemed amused, indifferent to the anger in the eyes of the older man before him, anger generated by the fact that he had boarded another man’s boat without consent. His eyes twinkled with a pleasure that made Pete feel like a mouse before a herd of cats.
Pete didn’t hear the second man jump off the speedboat and land nimbly behind him. He didn’t see the gun tucked in the small of the man’s back nor did he see the man grab it. He had no time to process the cold steel making contact with the back of his head before everything went dark.
CHAPTER THREE
ELLIE LOOKED PATIENTLY through the Nightforce scope and tuned in to her breathing and heart rate. Her desert brown McMillan Tactical was chambered in a .338 Lapua, ready for her final shot of the morning. She had adjusted from her previous shots and had most recently dialed in a degree on her scope’s external windage knob to take into account the growing breeze coming off the ocean a mile to the west. Her target was eight-hundred yards downrange, a sixteen inch gong made of AR500 steel, painted white with a small black dot to indicate center. It hung from a railroad tie using transport chain. She slowly pressed the two-pound trigger. The trigger was light, one pound less than the factory or tactical standard, but she liked to be surprised when the bullet discharged. It made for a crisp execution that minimized the chance of pulling the shot and contributed to greater accuracy.
The gun jumped into her shoulder as the bullet exploded and slid out of the twenty-seven-inch barrel at three thousand feet per second. Ellie waited less than a second, and the target jerked and swung back and forth on its chains.
“You shoot like a girl,” a deep voice said behind her.
Ellie smiled but didn’t look back. She took her hand off the gun and waited.
“Eight inches, left.”
Her lip
s tightened. Not bad. But not her best either. At this distance anything within ten inches was golden.
“Overall groupings were wide on me by 1.25 inches. That means that today, compared to me, you lose. How does that feel? Losing to me again?”
Ellie raised up from her prone position and came to rest on her knees. She smiled back at Tyler Borland, who, at six feet, two inches, stood four inches taller than she when she was on her feet. A red, sun-faded ball cap with gray stitching reading Hornaday was pulled low over his forehead and served as a permanent fixture on his body. Ellie had never seen him without it, and he was unmoving in his conviction that the hat had been there when his mother brought him into the world.
“Seeing that you generally set the bar so low, it feels terrible,” she countered.
“Ouch. If I respected you more, that would have hurt.”
She leaned over, grabbed her pencil, and scratched down her final numbers. As a safety precaution, Ellie slid the bolt through the empty chamber then lifted her gun. She gathered up her mat and gear and came to her feet. She slung the gun strap over her shoulder and looked at Tyler. His eyes were a deep green, like they were made from tiny strips of woven palm fronds. His sandy brown hair fell just over his ears, and he kept a couple days worth of stubble over a square, cleft chin that looked like a child had poked him at the edge and the skin had never folded back out.
“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.