Fallen Angel: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 9) (3 page)

Tony Jacobs and Art Newman were an unlikely pair, yet they worked together as one. Both were in their mid-thirties and both had been in their current line of work for over a decade. Tony was a wiry black man with a quick wit and ready smile, where Art was a tall white guy, always resolute and not exactly prone to excessive talk. Both were Navy SEALs and sort of
on loan
from the Navy to the Department of Homeland Security. The two men had been working, training, and fighting together for nearly a decade.

My old platoon sergeant in Okinawa had spoken often about men like the ones currently aboard my vessel.
Beware the old warrior
, Sergeant Livingston used to say.
In a line of work where few are given the opportunity to become one, he will be a formidable opponent
.

“Range to target is seven hundred meters,” Art said quietly.

I glanced down to the cockpit again. Tony was firing the minigun in short fifty to one-hundred-round bursts, aiming toward the island we’d just left. “Cease fire, Tony.”

He did as he was told and looked up at me. Below his own optics, his grin was ear to ear, perfect white teeth seeming to glow against his ebony face. “I bet those suckers never even heard of a minigun!”

The suckers he was referring to were a group of Jamaican smugglers and criminals, who had taken up residence on Cat Island in the central Bahamas. They’d constructed a compound of sorts, just east of Hawk’s Nest Resort on the southwestern tip of the island. The compound itself was on a small islet in the middle of the cove.

“Anyone hit?” I asked.

“Negative,” came Andrew Bourke’s voice over my earwig. “Our guests are comfortable in the salon. Nervous and full of questions, but comfortable.”

Bourke was the fourth in our little entourage. A likable man, just a year younger than me at forty-five. Unlike Tony and Art, Bourke’s background was in the Coast Guard’s Maritime Enforcement. A barrel-chested man, with a baritone voice and long mustache, his was always the calm voice in any stressful situation. The other members of this elite team seemed to look on him as a wise uncle and often turned to him for advice and guidance.

“Small craft exiting the marina to starboard,” Art warned me.

The greatest danger of running without lights in these darkest hours just before dawn wasn’t so much that you couldn’t see things. We were all equipped with night vision headsets, and the
Revenge
had a concealed infrared spotlight in the pulpit that illuminated the water ahead for a good distance, though the light was invisible to the naked eye. The newly installed IR camera on the roof had its own mini IR light and could be controlled with a joystick from the second seat, where the new monitor had been installed. The camera being a couple feet above our heads afforded Art a better view, and he was able to see over the rocky breakwater.

No, the greatest threat to our running blacked out was that others couldn’t see
us
. A forty-five-foot-long, eighteen-ton vessel moving at nearly forty knots and accelerating could put a serious hurt on any unsuspecting early-morning angler.

“Fishermen?” I asked Art as I reached to pull back the throttles.

“I don’t think so. Not unless they’re planning on shooting fish with AKs. Stay on the throttles, man. They’ll come into the channel a couple hundred feet astern.”

“Be ready, Tony,” I said in a normal tone.

“Always,” came Tony’s calm reply.

“Deuce, are you watching?” I asked. Russell ‘Deuce’ Livingston Junior is my friend, as his dad had been. Occasionally, like now, he was also my boss. He’s in charge of a counterterrorism organization that I sometimes provide covert transportation for aboard my charter boat. Right now he’s sitting comfortably in the little communications center on my island, watching from a satellite high above us.

“Yeah, I’m seeing it,” Deuce replied. “They’ll have to slow some to make the tight turn out of the marina and will likely be a bit further back than Art’s estimating. Looks to be a small center-console, maybe eighteen or twenty feet, with four men aboard. I doubt it can keep up with the
Revenge
.”

“Yeah, but their bullets sure as hell can.”

“You’re clear to engage
only
if fired upon, Jesse.”

I glanced to the right as we roared past the marina entrance, heading to the open waters of the Caribbean just a few hundred yards further. The center-console was just coming up on plane.
Gaspar’s Revenge
is a forty-five-foot Rampage convertible, with twin diesel engines that have been modified to punch out over eleven hundred horses each. Glancing at the knot meter, I saw that we were already nearing her top speed of forty-nine knots. The little center-console would be bucking a really huge wake in a second. I knew the shooters on board would be lucky if they could hit the broad side of a barn, so, I concentrated on keeping the barn off the rocks, knowing that Bourke would have a weapon aimed and ready, and in seconds, Tony would have the minigun on target as well.

“Open water ahead,” Art informed me. “Not a boat in sight. Turning the camera aft.”

“Roger that,” I replied, leaning forward over the wheel, as if the extra inches might give me more to see. Night vision optics take some getting used to. Everything is viewed in shades of gray-green, like an old black-and-white television that’s been dropped one too many times. You have no peripheral vision at all, seeing only what the optics are pointed directly at.

Head on a swivel
, I heard Deuce’s dad say in my mind. It seemed a lifetime ago that Russ Livingston Senior had been my platoon sergeant when I was assigned to First Battalion, Eighth Marines in Okinawa, Japan. Just as with his son, we’d become very good friends and I missed him.

I couldn’t help but duck when I heard the first crack of small-arms fire, a bullet whistling past us, just above and to starboard of the bridge. I concentrated again on the water ahead, constantly moving my head right and left, looking for other approaching boats.

This mission wasn’t supposed to go down this way. It’d been hastily arranged, with almost no intel other than what we were able to garner from satellite surveillance tapes. But it is what it is. Or as Russ would have said,
The first casualty of battle is always the battle plan
. Recently, the satellite had been turned over to Deuce’s two teams and parked in orbit above the middle of the Caribbean. All Deuce’s tech guru needed was a location and time and she could isolate a small area from the high-definition images recorded from space. It had only taken Chyrel Koshinski thirty minutes to determine where the captives had been taken to. We’d mobilized immediately after that.

“We’re under fire,” I heard Tony say in a calm voice.

“You’re clear to engage,” came Deuce’s equally unruffled reply. “Light ’em up.”

The scream of the electrically operated six-barrel Gatling gun left little doubt as to the outcome of the firefight. Normally used on helicopters, it was a formidable weapon, and aiming wasn’t really necessary. Not in the traditional way, at least. The steady stream of projectiles from the muzzle snaked out like a flexible laser whip, and all Tony had to do was move the fiery snake of a line onto the target and it would be chewed to pieces.

Over the scream of the electric-motor-driven gun came the sickening smacks of impact on fiberglass as Tony found his target. The explosion sounded closer than two hundred feet, and the brightness reflecting off the inside of the bridge momentarily overwhelmed my optics. I leaned further forward and my vision was restored.

“Splash one tango,” Tony said, quite unnecessarily.

Clearing the south jetty, I put the
Revenge
over on her starboard rail, angling north and away from the mouth of the channel into deeper water. The open ocean is her domain. With a beam of sixteen feet and her wide Carolina bow flares,
Gaspar’s Revenge
is most at home out on the blue, and very few boats can match her speed. We started encountering small wind-driven waves almost immediately, but they were nothing compared to what lay ahead, and didn’t do anything to the attitude of the boat, aside from making slapping noises on the hull.

“Anyone hurt?” Deuce asked. “Any damage?”

Each man responded in the negative and I added, “Damage assessment will have to wait, but I don’t think so. What the hell happened?”

“We’re still trying to figure that out. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there. In and out, grab the hostages and come home. At least everyone’s okay.” I could hear genuine relief in his voice.

I’d known Deuce for going on three years now. Actually, I knew him when he was a kid, a constant third anytime his dad and I went fishing or diving. We’d met again in 2005, just before Hurricane Wilma tore up the Keys. He’d come there to ask my help in spreading his dad’s ashes.

Art and Tony had known Deuce for many years before that. He’d been their SEAL team leader. Tony’d told me on more than one occasion that anyone who served under Deuce’s command for any length of time would gladly step in front of a bullet for him. With each mission, I was understanding that more and more. Besides being one of my closest friends, he was a natural-born leader who listened to and was concerned for his men.

“Zooming out,” Deuce said. “There isn’t a boat on the water anywhere for miles, and that’s commercial traffic to the south. Good job, guys! Bring it on home. We’ll try to figure out what went wrong and fix it so it doesn’t happen in the future.”

“Roger that,” I replied. “Tony, don’t break it down just yet. I want ten miles of nothing before we go overt again.”

We rode in silence, each passing minute putting us nearly a mile further out to sea. The wind was coming astern from about the four o’clock position, and the chop it was kicking up was pretty nondirectional. Three- and four-foot waves collided with one another, occasionally sending water up over the bow. The
Revenge
took it all in stride and could easily take a whole lot more.

“Another boat coming out of the harbor,” Art said, watching the radar and IR monitor. “Three miles astern. Another center-console in the twenty-foot range. Not a thing ahead of us to the radar limits.”

“Bet he won’t come any more than a quarter mile out of that harbor,” I heard Bourke say over the earwig.

“Ten says he turns back before half that,” Tony said.

“You’re on.”

Art laughed. “Looks like you lose, Andrew. He didn’t even clear the jetty. Heading back in.”

As we continued further to the northwest, seas became less choppy, but the waves were bigger. It was a following sea and very manageable. I throttled back to the
Revenge
’s best cruising speed of thirty knots. The high-pitched whine of the pair of twin superchargers dropped until the sound was nearly gone, the wind and bow wave replacing it as the chief sources of noise.

“Go ahead and break it down, Tony,” I said, removing my headset and flipping on the running lights and forward spotlight. “Lights on, going overt. I didn’t hear any impacts up here. Mind checking the transom and rear bulkhead for bullet holes in my boat?”

“I didn’t hear any down here, either,” Tony replied. “But I’ll check it out once I get your toy put away.”

A few minutes later, Tony joined us on the bridge, plopping down on the port bench seat. “Checked as much as I could see, compadre. Didn’t see no holes in your boat.”

“Good,” I replied, relaxing a little. “I’d like to keep this one for a while.” About a year ago, someone stole my previous boat, unaware that their cohorts had orders to blow me out of the water. My boat and the thieves had gone up in a huge fireball.

“Why don’t you guys try to get some rest?” I said. “We’re a hundred and seventy miles from Nicholls Town and won’t get there until just after the sun comes up.”

“Already a step ahead of you,” Bourke’s deep baritone voice came over the earwig. “I reassured our guests that they’ll be home in time for supper, and they’re in the forward stateroom. I’m stretching out in the salon.”

“Go ahead, Art,” Tony said. “Blowing shit up always cranks my adrenaline into overdrive.”

After Art left the bridge, Tony maneuvered behind me and took the second seat to my right. “Think we’ll have any trouble at Nicholls Town?”

I gave the question a moment’s thought. We’d been lucky to get into the harbor on Cat Island unobserved. As far as I could tell, it was only the bad guys that had seen us leave, and it was doubtful they’d contact the authorities. We’d cleared customs in Bimini two days earlier and refueled in Nassau, before coming out to Cat Island. Knowing we’d need fuel again before leaving, I’d sent word to an old friend on Andros Island for an out-of-the-way fuel stop. As far as the Bahamian authorities knew, we were just what we looked like. Big-time sportfishermen out cruising the TOTO somewhere, looking for another trophy to mount on the wall.

An extremely deep trench in the Great Bahama Bank lies east of Andros Island. Curling in from the deep ocean just north of New Providence, it’s surrounded by banks, shoals, and islands, looking just like a deep bay. It probably was, a long time ago when sea levels were lower. It’s called the Tongue of the Ocean, or TOTO, due to its appearance, running almost north to south for a hundred and fifty miles and roughly twenty miles wide. I knew the crushing depth of the bottom was more than a mile down and seas there would likely be a lot bigger, kicked up by the outer bands of a hurricane sitting a thousand miles to the east. The TOTO was favored by rich fishermen in big expensive boats, just like the
Revenge
. So I wasn’t worried about the authorities.

I’ve known Henry Patterson nearly my whole life, though I’ve only seen him a handful of times in the last twenty-five years. He and Pap had fought together in the South Pacific. When he returned home, he went into public service. A mud-slinging campaign by an opponent during a Florida senate race nearly twenty years ago left him physically and emotionally drained. His wife had only recently passed away, and with no kids, there really wasn’t anything keeping him in Fort Myers. He’d bowed out of the race gracefully, though there was nothing to the allegations, got on his boat and disappeared. At eighty-four now, he ran a small fleet of fly-fishing skiffs and offshore charter boats on the north end of Andros.