Fallen Tide: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 8)

by Wayne Stinnett

  Hearing tires crunching on the crushed-shell drive outside, I looked and saw Jeremiah pulling back into the lot. I went down to my stateroom and changed quickly into black cargo pants and a black long-sleeved shirt. Then I grabbed two boxes of 5.56mm ammo for the Tavor bullpup as well as a box of 9mm cartridges for the Sig.

  Returning to the salon with my go bag, I found Linda and Kim were both busy in the galley, making sandwiches for us to take with us. Meg and Waldrup were sitting on the couch to the stern, talking quietly. I opened the case and took out the Israeli TAR-21 bullpup machine gun, checked that it was empty, and placed it into my go bag.

  As I began loading the four magazines that were in the case, Waldrup rose and came across the salon. “That boat has six seats,” he said.

  I looked up at the man. I knew exactly what he meant. His employer and his wife had been taken, and he was their head of security. He was also an Airborne Ranger, which further strengthened his loyalty.

  “Not my call, Miguel,” I said quietly while loading the mags. “You’ll have to clear it with Deuce.”

  “What kind of man is he?” Waldrup asked, quietly.

  Placing two loaded magazines in the go bag, I thought about the question for only a second. “Probably the most capable and honorable man I’ve ever met. And a crazy good judge of men. I wouldn’t be surprised if, after this is over, he doesn’t start trying to recruit you. But, going along on an illegal insertion to rescue hostages? I don’t know. Just be straight up and ask him. Maybe you can stay with me on the boat as ready reserve.”

  Waldrup left then and I went back to loading magazines, noting that Meg followed Waldrup outside. After finishing the last two of the Tavor’s magazines, I started loading the two 9mm mags for my Sig and then put them all in the go bag as well.

  “Will this be enough?” Kim asked. They’d filled a small cooler with enough sandwiches to feed a small army and a second one with at least a dozen bottles of water.

  I grinned at my youngest. “What’re the other guys gonna eat?”

  Kim punched me in the shoulder, grinning. Then she and Linda followed me outside. Deuce and Waldrup were standing up by the bow of the Cigarette in what looked like a deep conversation. Deuce appeared to be doing most of the talking. Stepping down into the rear cockpit, I went forward and stowed my gear in the small, now completely stripped, cabin.

  Originally, it had been nicely appointed with a small settee, a refrigerator, and a tiny private head forward. To offset the weight of the new auxiliary tanks, I had stripped it to the bare hull, leaving only the marine head and a small holding tank.

  “Not quite so pretty in there anymore,” Scott said as I stepped back up into the cockpit.

  “Extra weight,” I replied, starting the engines. “Don’t need it.”

  Scott and I joined the others on the dock, as Andrew and Jeremy casually walked up, as if they were about to go for a sunset cruise. We shook hands all around and I introduced the two men to Parsons and Meg. Marty still hadn’t made it back yet, but considering the disparity in the speed of his boat and the Cigarette, I didn’t expect him.

  “Good to see you again,” Andrew said, his big baritone voice punctuating his words. “You’re looking a lot fitter than last time I saw you.”

  “Linda’s been keeping me in line,” I said, glancing over to where Deuce and Waldrup appeared to be finishing up their mostly one-sided conversation. “Looks like we’re about ready to shove off.”

  “Gentlemen,” Deuce said, as he and Waldrup approached. “This is retired Army Captain Miguel Waldrup, formerly with the 101st Airborne and then with the 75th Rangers in Kuwait. With Jesse’s permission, he’s going to go along as part of the backup with Jesse.”

  I grinned at the big man. “Welcome aboard, Captain.”

  While the other team members shook hands with Waldrup, I turned to Kim. “Would you mind bringing me that other case and another box of five-point-five-sixes?”

  As Kim disappeared into the Revenge, Deuce stepped over and pulled me aside. “He has his own sidearm, and I deputized him.”

  “You can do that?”

  “At least until Monday morning,” Deuce replied, grinning like his dad once again. “He’s to be your backup, Jesse. He’s not to get off the boat for any reason. Think he can borrow something a little more useful?”

  I nodded toward Kim, stepping over the Revenge’s gunwale, carrying the other, shorter fly rod case. A few onlookers were down the dock, watching. I recognized all of them as liveaboards.

  “Miguel,” I called over to the group. “Take that fly rod case from Kim and put it down in the cabin. It’s yours for a while. Open it and rig the tackle while you’re down there.”

  Quickly disappearing through the tiny hatch, I had a mental image of him trying to move around in the low, cramped space. I had to bend over to keep from banging my head, and he was nearly as tall as me, but much bigger everywhere else.

  “Scott, Jeremy, get the lines,” I shouted and turned to Linda and Kim. “We’ll be back before twenty-one hundred,” I said, taking Linda in my arms and holding her close for a moment. Then I stepped back and pulled Kim into the hug. “Don’t worry. We’ll all be fine.”

  Waldrup came up out of the cabin, grinning. He easily vaulted the gunwale and went over to where Meg stood in the shade of a royal palm. They seemed to be having an intimate conversation, which surprised me. They’d only known each other a day.

  Finally, Marty’s patrol boat idled up the canal. He quickly tied off and came over to where we were standing. “Glad I got here before you left,” he said. “That thing is fast!”

  “If you want,” I said to Marty, “you can stay aboard till we get back. We have encrypted communication, and you can keep track of what’s going on.”

  “Thanks, Jesse,” Marty replied. “I will.”

  “We’ll be back by twenty-one hundred,” I told him firmly.

  He grinned at Kim. “Yes, sir. I know. Rules eight and ten.”

  Slapping him on the shoulder, I stepped over the gunwale and got settled in the first seat and Andrew took the second seat to my left. Waldrup was forced to the port side, since the two outboard seats had a couple of extra inches of shoulder room.

  Each of Deuce’s team members carried redundancies for just about everything. I knew before we left the canal, one of them would give Waldrup an earwig. He was dressed in blue jeans and a dark brown long-sleeved shirt. The team didn’t usually carry extra clothes, and even if they did, nothing they’d have would fit the guy. So, he was as covert as he was going to get.

  Rusty shoved the bow away from the dock as Deuce pushed the stern out. I put the starboard engine in forward and the port engine in reverse, spinning the forty-two-foot racing boat and pointing it toward the end of the canal. Then I put the port engine in forward and we idled toward open water, the growling engines seeming to anticipate the fast crossing of the Gulf Stream to come.

  I knew none of the people watching from the dock were fooled for a second. Six men, like we had aboard, don’t go fishing in a Cigarette boat. Rusty would come up with some kind of story that would appease anyone who asked. But, here in the Keys, people mostly don’t bother asking. We’ve seen it all before.

  Reaching the small jetty at the end of the canal, I eased the throttles forward slowly. The sonar unit wasn’t as good as the one on the Revenge—it wasn’t directional, but it showed me that we had six feet under us. Enough depth for most boats with an equal draft to throttle up and get on plane. But the sheer power of these engines could displace a lot of the water very fast and swamp the stern as the props dug into the sandy bottom.

  Digging in my cargo pocket, I took the tiny box with the earwig out. Opening it, I turned on the device and put it in my ear, adjusting the springy mic around my ear so that it was in contact with my upper jawbone.

  “Alpha Two. Comm check,” I said in a normal tone as I took my Pulsar Edge night vision goggles out of my go bag, which was secured next to my seat. It
was still more than thirty minutes until sunset, but once underway, I didn’t want to have to fumble with it.

  “Alpha One,” Deuce’s voice said, sounding as if he were whispering in my ear.

  “Alpha Three,” Andrew chimed in. One by one, the four men in back reported, Waldrup last.

  “Good luck, Alpha Team,” came a familiar voice.

  “Didn’t know you’d be joining the party, Colonel,” I said.

  “You should know by now, Jesse. I’m with you guys in one way or another every time you go out.”

  Deuce’s voice came over the earwig. “Alpha Seven, meet my boss, Colonel Travis Stockwell.”

  “You be careful, son,” the colonel said. “You’re strictly backup out there. Hooah?”

  “Hooah, sir,” Waldrup replied, grinning.

  Easing both throttles a bit further, the go-fast slowly came up on plane. I pointed the bow southeast, toward Dog Rocks at the northeast corner of Cay Sal Bank, and slowly inched the throttles further.

  I kept the speed under seventy knots until we cleared the reef line, then pushed the throttles to the stops. As the boat rocketed forward, the powerful racing engines screamed like banshees and pressed us all into our seats.

  “Holy shit!” I heard Waldrup say, followed by a couple of muted laughs. “I thought we were already going full speed.”

  The crossing to Dog Rocks only took forty-five minutes, the sun disappearing before we got there. Andrew spent nearly all of that time concentrating on the gauges on his side and feeding me updates in a calm voice. I had matching gauges for oil pressure, oil temperature, and water temperature on my side. But at a hundred knots, if you take your eyes off the water for even half a second, the boat will travel a good eighty-five feet. In the dark, even with night vision, a glance at the gauges would take a lot longer than that.

  Turning south at the edge of the bank, we began taking the small rollers on the port beam, so I slowed to eighty knots. As we knifed through the inky darkness, the night vision goggles turned everything to a gray-green, which didn’t really give any clue as to water color, a good indicator of depth. I stayed half a mile off the nearly straight line that bounded the bank, knowing we had very deep water out here.

  There’d been the usual conversation among the men in back. The same typical questions military men and women ask one another when they meet. The team felt Waldrup out to determine where he’d been, what action he’d seen, and what his skills were. Waldrup in turn asked a few questions about the team. But as we neared the spot where we planned to transfer the insertion team to the Zodiac, talk ceased. All the men donned their own night vision goggles and began going over their gear once more.

  Ten minutes later, I could see the surf breaking on Bellows Cay and turned toward it. From there it was about eight miles to South Anguilla Cay. I slowly brought the speed down, and just a couple hundred yards from the tiny island, we came down off plane and I shifted the engines to neutral and shut them off. There was no chance that the throaty rumble of the big engines could be heard this far away from the Anguillas.

  Within a few minutes, without any conversation, Andrew and Jeremy had the Zodiac inflated, the motor mounted to the transom, and the gas tanks aboard. Andrew started the forty-horse muffled Mercury engine, the sound of water spraying from the piss tube making more noise than the engine exhaust.

  A moment later, the other three men transferred their equipment and climbed over into the inflatable boat. It was more than large enough for twice as many people, so they had plenty of room. With Jeremy in the bow as lookout and Scott and Jeremiah taking up spots on either side behind him, they shoved off and Andrew had the little boat up on plane, moving almost soundlessly away to the south.

  Waldrup took the second seat and I started the engines. “Feel around in my bag,” I said. “There’s a Night Spirit monocular in there.”

  He found it and turned it on. Standing, he braced his hip against the side of the boat and steadied himself against the light chop with his left hand on the low windshield. Raising the small scope to his eye, he scanned the area in the direction the Zodiac had disappeared. “What is it you want me to tell you?”

  “Just locate and keep an eye on our guys,” I replied. “Alpha One, do you have eyes on the target yet?”

  “Not yet,” Deuce responded. “That cove they were anchored in shelters them from oblique view. The bird’s nearly overhead, though.”

  “Are you sure you gave me the right coordinates, boss?” I heard Chyrel ask in the background. “’Cause I’m not seeing anything down there.”

  Putting the engines in gear, I gave the boat just enough throttle to get up on plane. At only twenty-five knots, the responsiveness of the big racing boat was sluggish at best, as it wallowed in troughs between the small rollers, stern down and bow high in the air.

  The insertion team was heading to a spot on the lee side of the island a little north of where we’d seen the shack. They would go ashore there, and I’d power up and go screaming around the southern tip of the island as a diversion. This would allow the team to move faster across the island, secure the building, and then move to the west side and take the boat.

  “Found ’em,” Waldrup said. “They just passed the end of this island here and are turning away from us.”

  “Keep a close eye on them,” I said. “Let me know when they disappear on the west of the Anguilla bunch.”

  Knowing this particular island only slightly, all I could really recall is that it had a pretty high profile compared to the other islands that made up Cay Sal Bank. The windward side is mostly undercut cliffs, four to six feet high, with few places to land or go ashore. The center is probably ten feet above the high tide. The target boat was pretty low profile, even with its higher rear decks. Tucked deep inside that little cove on the western side, Chyrel might not be able to see it until the satellite gets almost directly above.

  “When you’re feet dry, Alpha Three,” Deuce said, reading my thoughts as he so often does, “get small and wait until we have eyes on the target from above.”

  “Roger that,” Andrew replied.

  We continued at a very slow twenty-five knots for the next few minutes, the engines burbling just above an idle. Keeping pace with the Zodiac, which was now running inside the edge of the bank in just ten feet of water, we paralleled their course. Though less than half a mile from them, we were in over three hundred feet of water.

  “They disappeared behind the first of the islands,” Waldrup said, sitting back down.

  “I can see both of you,” Deuce said. “Alpha Two, you’re gonna have to just hang out offshore until we have eyes on the target.”

  “Roger that,” I said, slowly bringing the go-fast boat down off plane, then shifting to neutral and killing the engines.

  I felt pretty confident that anyone on the boat or island, which were now only a few miles away, wouldn’t have heard the sound of our engine while we were barely idling along. Removing the starlight goggles, I waited until my eyes adjusted, then took the thermos from my go bag and filled a mug.

  “Want some?” I asked the big man sitting next to me.

  “Sure,” he replied and I handed him the mug, pouring more into the screw-on cup for myself. “Waiting’s never been one of my strong suits.”

  “You can’t hurry time,” I said. Then, because I knew Deuce and the others were listening, I added, “We’re just taking a coffee break out here, Alpha One. Let me know when you have eyes.”

  “Be advised, Alpha Two,” Deuce said. “Binkowski has taken Darlene Minnich into custody. Both her brother and sister-in-law are cooperating fully, but she’s lawyered up.”

  “Marjory’s fired, at the very least,” Waldrup muttered.

  “Don’t rush to judgment,” Deuce said. “It might have been just pillow talk, then the brother innocently told his sister, because she and your boss used to have a relationship.”

  “A violation of both OpSec and PerSec on her part, sir,” Waldrup replied, st
anding and looking toward the far island through the monocular. He leaned forward over the dash, as if trying to see over the island that separated him from the people that might have abducted his employers.

  He was right, but he was also a military man, employed by a civilian company as head of security. I figured he’d probably written both the operational security and personal security doctrines for the company himself.

  “More information coming in,” Deuce said. “The boat’s a Cuban-flagged fishing boat, home port of Guadiana Bay.”

  Guadiana Bay, I thought. Popular place for bad people. And the only place in Cuba where I’ve actually set foot on shore. “What else is there?” I asked.

  “Internal National Revolutionary Police Force communications indicate the crew was surprised at the dock just before putting to sea almost a month ago. A gang of seven Caucasian attackers used automatic weapons to execute the crew members in front of onlookers. One of the attackers then used a chain saw to mutilate the bodies in full view of other people on the dock, as a threat to keep quiet.”

  “Apparently, at least one ballsy person didn’t take the threat sitting down,” I said.

  “The most recent email is from the Minister of the Interior himself,” Deuce said. “Ordering the local police to not pursue the case further.”

  “Black marketers and politicians,” I muttered. “In bed with each other for the almighty dollar. A few poor fishermen’s lives don’t count for shit to these people.” There was silence for several minutes, each member of the team weighing the information Deuce had just given us.

  Some folks say that money is the root of all evil. I’ve even heard Bible-thumpers shouting it from soapboxes. It’s not true, though. Money can be used for good. My grandfather taught me this when I was very young. I was raised by my dad’s parents from the age of eight. Pap and Mam were wealthy by most standards, and Pap gave a lot of his earnings to his church and his charities. He showed me by example how good it felt to give and help others. It’s the love of money, greed, which is usually at the center of bad things happening to good people.