Steady As She Goes: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 21)

by Wayne Stinnett

  Once the bird had settled and Charity had given the okay, I put away the headset, unbuckled my seatbelt, and opened the door. The sound of the rotors and turbine were much louder outside.

  The dogs leapt to the ground beside me as I helped the boys and Savannah out of the back.

  “Head down to the far side of the dune!” I shouted over the noise.

  She took the boys by the hands and moved away from the bird, with the dogs trotting ahead. Chyrel and I helped Tank get out. When Bud and Travis joined us, we started down the dune as well.

  Charity waited until we were a good distance away before taking off, swooping forward and out over the waves quickly to avoid kicking up too much of the fine, powdery sand.

  Together, we all climbed to the top of the dune. The view was unbelievable. White sand glistened as far as the eye could see, giving way to tiny waves. Beyond the surf, the water looked like gold, colored by the sand beneath the surface. Then it changed to turquoise and a deep, dark blue, no more than fifty yards from shore.

  Looking to the south, all I could see was a vast expanse of sand dunes all the way to the horizon. I knew the dunes extended a good ten times farther than what I could see into the interior.

  “Can we go exploring?” Alberto asked.

  “Don’t go far,” Savannah replied, her eyes following the contour of the beach. “We’ll set up a spot right here on the high ground.”

  Alberto and Fernando took off like a shot, the dogs spreading out to either side of them, running along the shoreline. Finn and Woden weren’t young dogs; they had a combined weight of over two hundred pounds. But the boys weren’t fast and the dogs easily kept pace. I realized that they probably needed this as much as the crew. All dogs like to run.

  We unfolded two large beach blankets, anchoring them at the corners. The wind off the water was light and refreshing, the sand already warm from the early morning rays of sun. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and everything seemed right with the world.

  Chyrel pulled a folding chair from a long, red, canvas tube and set it up for Tank before sitting cross-legged on the blanket in front of him.

  Savannah removed her shorts and T-shirt and lay down next to Chyrel. “It’s so nice to be on land again,” she said, propping herself on her elbows. “The water looks so beautiful in the shallows.”

  Bud had brought a chair also and set it up next to Tank’s. “You doing okay?” he asked.

  Tank watched Chyrel wiggle out of her shorts, tossing them and her tank top aside before stretching out in the sun.

  “Right as rain, Captain,” Tank replied with a grin. “Savannah hit the nail on the head. This view is gorgeous.”

  Travis faced the interior of the island, scanning the dunes for any unseen visitors. Finally, he looked at me and nodded his head toward the beach. “Let’s walk.”

  I fell in beside him and we headed down off the dune to the shoreline, in the opposite direction the boys had gone.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked, once we were out of earshot.

  “Your friend’s friend,” he replied. “What’s a CIA operative doing here?”

  “You checked him out?” I asked, getting a nod in return. “He’s just a friend of Tank’s. They served together in Vietnam. He’s retired.”

  “Spooks don’t retire,” he grunted.

  “He knows you,” I offered, getting no reaction. “He recognized your name when you came out onto the foredeck last night.”

  We walked a while before he continued. “Have you ever heard of Operation Condor?”

  “The guerilla fighting campaign back in the seventies?”

  He looked over at me a moment. “It was a lot more than just guerillas. Backed and trained by the CIA, intelligence operatives in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil kidnapped, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of leftist political dissidents—union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and yes, a few suspected guerrillas.”

  I looked back at the group. Bud, with his long, gray ponytail, was staring out over the waves.

  “Yeah, he was one of them,” Travis said. “What his role was in South America is still classified and even I couldn’t access it.”

  “But you suspect he had a role in it?”

  He stopped and turned to look back at our group. “I don’t suspect things, Jesse. I simply deal with the facts as they’re presented. I do know that this isn’t Bud Ferguson’s first time in Brazil.”

  My eyes followed his gaze. “His being here could be happenstance.”

  “Says the guy who doesn’t believe in coincidences,” he countered.

  I shook my head. “Tank wouldn’t cover for him,” I said. “He wouldn’t lie to me about Bud being his pilot in Vietnam or withhold information on why he went to the Keys to visit. Hell, Tank probably didn’t even know where we were when he asked Flo to contact us about a visit.”

  “That part’s true enough,” Stockwell said. “He was the chopper pilot your friend served with during the rescue operation that eventually led to his receiving the Medal of Honor. Ferguson left Southeast Asia shortly after that, tapped to work covertly for the CIA while still serving in the Marine Corps as a reservist. He’s fluent in French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The CIA sent him to Brazil in 1975, at the start of Operation Condor. I’m just saying, you should watch him.”

  Woden had returned and sat beside Tank, who draped an arm over the dog’s massive flank. The boys and Finn were a hundred yards beyond the group, walking back unhurriedly. There was something odd about the way Woden sat there, looking up at Tank. Since his first visit, Woden had always seemed more affectionate toward Tank than he usually was with strangers. With most people, he was always a bit standoffish.

  I could hear the helo returning. Looking out over the water, I saw the two launches in the distance, both heading toward shore. I waved my arms over my head and Charity adjusted her course toward us. I pointed toward the high dune, and she waggled the bird side to side in response.

  “I’ll keep an eye on him,” I said, turning to face Travis. “Maybe Chyrel can find out something.”

  “Do that,” he said, as Charity landed on the dune a hundred yards down the beach. “That’s not all.”

  We started walking back toward the group, the sound of the rotors diminishing.

  “It never is with you, Colonel. What else?”

  “Your new cook,” he said. “Forty-five years ago, a young Marcos Santiago fled his native Brazil from the region where it borders Venezuela and settled in Maracaibo.”

  Marcos was Brazilian? I thought.

  As we approached, Chyrel got up from her blanket and set up a telescoping umbrella, adjusting it so Tank was shaded from the morning sun. Behind him, she bent and wrapped her arms around her husband, holding him and saying something into his ear. Even from a distance, I could see him smile, tilt his head back, and accept a kiss on the cheek.

  “Where did y’all wander off to?” Savannah asked, rolling on her side, and looking up at me.

  “Just finding a level spot for Charity to land,” I lied.

  She eyed me suspiciously, knowing full well that if Charity had a need to, she could land on the side of a building.

  “How’re you feeling, Tank?” I asked.

  Woden turned his big head toward me, the hair bristling along his spine as a low, menacing growl barely rose from his chest.

  “Now you stop that,” Savannah scolded him.

  Tank’s eyes were closed, but he was still smiling.

  “Tank?” I said, stepping closer.

  Chyrel’s face was buried in his neck, her arms still holding him in a loose and loving embrace, stroking the side of his face. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes.

  “He’s gone, Jesse,” she said, a sad smile on her face. “He just told me he couldn’t feel the pain anymore and then he stopped breathing.”

  Savanna
h and Bud scrambled to their feet as I knelt in front of my old friend. I put a finger to the carotid artery in his thin, frail neck. There was no pulse.

  I looked up at Savannah, a tear in my own eye, as the boys came running toward us.

  “Look what we fou—” Alberto started to say, holding out a large queen conch shell.

  He dropped the shell in the sand and took a step closer, as Charity and the others approached. “Is Tank…?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly, then looked up at Stockwell. “Will you take Fernando to his parents? They’re coming ashore from the launch now.” Then I turned to Bud. “Please ask Charity to bring a stretcher from the helo. Tank needs to be exfilled.”

  He took one more look at his former crew chief, then moved away more quickly than his years dictated. He intercepted the group Charity and Val were leading from the chopper.

  Charity had her flight suit unzipped, pulled down around her waist, the sleeves tied. Under it, she wore a lime green bikini. Val was similarly dressed in a blue bikini top and shorts.

  The three of us knelt around Tank’s still form, Savannah clutching Alberto tightly. I lowered my head and felt three hands lightly touch my shoulders, as I spoke. “At ease, Master Guns.”

  We moved away, giving Chyrel some time alone, and joined the crew now milling around the helicopter.

  The loss of someone close is never easy, not even when you know it’s coming. It’d happened to me more times than I cared to recall. Maybe what Charity had said the previous night was true: that what we say and do didn’t amount to anything in the “grand scheme” of things. But Tank mattered to me. He’d mattered to a lot of people. A dozen men owed him their lives. Those dozen men might be the fathers of two dozen or more and grandfathers to more people than now stood on the beach with him. And that didn’t even come close to the number of people Tank’s life had touched over the fifty years since then. My parents mattered, as did my grandparents. Alex mattered. Russ Livingston mattered.

  Matt approached and nodded for me to join him. We stepped away from the group.

  “I know it’s a bad time, Cap’n, and I’m truly sorry for your loss. But that freighter almost swamped our boat.”

  I turned my attention away from where two of Travis’s men were bringing the stretcher with Tank’s body toward us. Chyrel walked alongside, clutching Tank’s hand.

  “What freighter?” I asked absently.

  “The one was doggin’ us all night, several days ago,” he replied. “The Canopus.”

  I looked out to sea, though I knew it wasn’t likely I’d see anything beyond a few miles.

  “It came close,” Matt said. “The buggers actually turned toward us. Men on the rails yelled.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Cap’n, they pulled their pants down and shook their willies at us, asking how much we wanted for the women.”

  I looked back at Matt and could see the fire in his eyes.

  “It’s the only time since leaving Her Majesty’s SBS that I wished I’d had a gun on me, yeah?”

  The British Special Boat Service was the equivalent of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL teams—the elite fighting element of the British Royal Navy.

  “We’ll worry about that later,” I said, as the two men arrived with Tank’s body, now covered in the blanket on which we’d planned to relax and enjoy the day.

  Charity opened the back door of the helo and folded two facing seats down, creating a spot where we could secure the stretcher.

  The men loaded Tank into the helo and Bud climbed in front. He, Chyrel, and I would escort Tank back to the ship.

  I looked back at the sad faces of those gathered beside the helo. Woden sat off to the side, slightly away from the group, as if he knew Tank was gone.

  Since their first meeting, the big Rottweiler had bonded with my old friend, surprising everyone, including Savannah. Whenever Tank was around, Woden had stayed close to him. She’d said Woden had never done that with anyone. I think he’d somehow sensed that Tank was sick.

  As I helped Chyrel into the back, I wondered if dogs felt loss like we did. When I glanced over, Woden’s eyes met mine. He looked sad, but somehow relieved and calm.

  “You want to go with him?” I asked.

  Woden rose from his haunches, his head high, ears forward.

  “Come on,” I said.

  He sprinted across the sand, as if he’d just seen a prowler, then leapt into the passenger compartment, settling beside Tank’s body.

  As I climbed in and closed the door, Charity began spooling the turbines up. In just a moment, we were airborne and headed back to Ambrosia.

  Chyrel sat in her seat, still holding Tank’s hand. I’d never pried into what their relationship was like—she was much younger than him. Initially, he’d told me that he wanted to marry her so his pension wouldn’t end—a simple business arrangement. He figured that after fifty-one years of service, the government owed him more than just a couple of years of retirement, and by marrying someone younger, he knew that money would continue to fund his charity for a long time.

  She’d agreed. But after a while, I knew there was love between them.

  Chyrel looked at me and smiled, then put her headset on.

  “It was exactly how he’d said he wanted to go,” she said. “Sitting on a beach in the sun, surrounded by the people he cared most about.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, not really understanding why those words needed to be said.

  “Hush, Jesse,” she said. “I think he endured the pain beyond what he should have, just to get here. He greatly admired you and wanted to see you one last time. He’s still with us, but now he doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  I reached over and took her other hand. “And our pain is just beginning.”

  Charity settled the bird onto the flight deck. She’d radioed ahead and the same two crewmen were waiting, Grady Lawson and Bernie Knight standing by with them. Once the bird was secure, Charity killed the engine and we got out.

  “What happened?” Bernie asked.

  He’d agreed to stay behind to listen to the sonar, saying he didn’t like beaches and sand.

  “Cancer,” was all I could say.

  “What do we do with him?” Chyrel asked, her voice cracking a little.

  “I can clear out one of the coolers,” Grady offered.

  Her face showed alarm. “He can’t be frozen. There has to be an autopsy and a declaration of—”

  “I’ll take care of it, ma’am,” Grady said.

  I took Chyrel by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Once the crew is back aboard, we’ll make for the nearest medical facility.”

  “There has to be a death certif—”

  “I know,” I told her. “We’ll do everything by the book. Exactly the way Tank would want it done. Leave everything to me.”

  “Thanks, Jesse.”

  I turned to Grady. “Go clear the cooler, son. Set it to thirty-six degrees.”

  “Aye, Captain,” he replied, then hurried down the steps.

  Then I turned to the two crewmen, Al and Jocko. “Please be careful taking him out.”

  They both nodded somberly at Chyrel as Bud and Charity joined us.

  “Matt just called on the radio,” Charity said. “They were able to get everyone into the two launches. It’ll take a bit longer for them to return, but they should be here by the time you have the boat ready to get underway.”

  “Go with him,” I said to Bud. “Then make sure Chyrel gets to her cabin.”

  “I don’t want to be alone, Jesse,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to join you on the bridge.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Bud said to both of us, then followed Al and Jocko, who were carrying the stretcher toward the steps.

  Chyrel and I followed Bernie down the steps and into the empty bridge. I looked back and didn’t see anyone in the op center, a
first since I’d come aboard. I was suddenly struck with a sense of enormous loneliness.

  The man I’d so greatly admired for most of my adult life was gone.

  Suddenly, Heitor’s voice came over the comm. “Engine room to bridge.”

  We weren’t alone. Bernie, Al, Jocko, Grady, and Heitor had all decided to stay aboard. Our original plan was to stay anchored here for a couple of days and they’d all planned to go ashore tomorrow.

  I pushed the intercom button. “Bridge.”

  “I heard what happened,” he said. “My condolences.”

  “We’ll be getting underway as soon as the crew returns,” I said. “Maybe twenty minutes. Will you be ready?”

  “Whenever you say the word,” Heitor replied.

  “Bridge out,” I said.

  Chyrel moved next to me, putting a hand on the back of the helm seat, absently moving it back and forth.

  “It all seemed so simple,” she said. “When Owen first explained his great plan to me.”

  I put an arm around her shoulders and guided her into the chair, then sat down at the sonar station and turned to face her.

  “At first, he just wanted someone who would carry on his legacy,” she began. “It made sense to me. ‘You’re only thirty-eight,’ he’d said, then explained how his pension could continue to add to his trust fund for a long time if I married him and didn’t remarry when he was gone.”

  She looked up at me. “Was it weird?”

  “You know I don’t judge,” I said. “What two adults do is their business.”

  “I never wanted a husband,” she said. “Still don’t. We had different rooms in the beginning. We barely knew one another.” She turned and looked out over the bow. “But he made me laugh, Jesse. We watched sunsets, walked along the beach, and he told me stories about his life in the Marines—all the people he’d met and admired.” She glanced back over at me, then. “He talked a lot about you.”

  “Tank was one of the greatest men I ever knew,” I said.