Reaching the narrow spit, I crouched low and made my way up to a few ancient coral rocks that I’d piled there while digging the basin. Peering over the crack between two rocks, I could see not one, but two boats. The nearest was an eighteen-foot bowrider that was adrift on the south side of Harbor Channel with two men on board. It was the other boat that caught my attention, though. A shrimp trawler just coming into the channel at full speed, Vince O’Hare’s unmistakable skull and bones flying from the antenna mast.
Flipping open the covers on the Unertl scope, I rested my left arm on the top of the rocks and looked through the scope, just as one of the men on the bowrider threw something overboard. A second later, a geyser of water shot up from where he’d thrown it, followed by the same muffled boom a second after that.
I looked beyond them at the trawler. O’Hare was at the helm inside the small wheelhouse, his shotgun protruding from the open windscreen. You idiot, I thought as I watched his ancient trawler charging like a decrepit elephant toward the two men on the boat, who hadn’t yet seen him.
The two men looked out of place on the water. Their boat was in danger of grounding on the shallows and they seemed oblivious to the fact. Both were young black men, dressed like they were from the city. Gang clothes. They didn’t look like the same two who’d murdered the Tolivers, though.
They suddenly looked up toward the trawler as the boom of O’Hare’s shotgun got their attention. I chambered a round.
O’Hare’s trawler was bearing down on them at its top speed of about twelve knots. The men could easily have started their engine and outrun the old trawler, but instead they both pulled out handguns and started shooting toward it.
They were within easy range and I’d have no problem putting both of them down. Not my circus, not my monkeys, I thought. In the Corps, I taught my snipers that there would be times when they’d be tempted to take a shot to stop something from happening. It had happened to me. Once. Sure, it stopped the immediate action that my spotter and I were witnessing, a young boy being beaten by a Somali warlord, but it gave away our approximate location and drew the attention of the dead warlord’s men. The boy’s body was found an hour later, mutilated and discarded by the new warlord. Another one always steps up. I taught my Marines that unless it had a direct impact on the mission, it was usually better to let it play out than risk giving away their position.
This wasn’t Mogadishu, and this was my circus. I ignored my own advice. As I sighted in carefully, my mind picked up on subtle variances and changes in the air. I looked through the scope with my right eye, and my left, having noted wind direction and speed on the water, slowly closed. I took another breath and slowly released it as my right index fingertip found the trigger and slowly squeezed, reaching the three pounds of pressure required to release the firing pin. The resulting explosion inside the casing of the round created over sixty thousand pounds per square inch of pressure in a microsecond, forcing the steel-jacketed projectile from the barrel.
Spiraling as it flew through the air, the bullet was affected all along its path by both air and temperature, all of which my mind took into account in an instant, before pulling the trigger. Covering the two hundred yards to the target in a quarter of a second, the steel jacketed projectile penetrated and destroyed everything in its path upon impact.
My first shot hit the engine on the bowrider about where I expected the aluminum block to be. I quickly chambered a second round and sighted in again. The heavy boom of my rifle’s first shot got the attention of the two men on the bowrider, who both turned away from the immediate threat of the approaching trawler. I watched as they scanned the water between them and me, not knowing where the shot had come from.
I fired again, giving away my position. Their handguns were useless at this range, yet they started shooting at me anyway, their rounds falling well short and hitting the water a hundred feet in front of me. My second shot shattered the casing of the shifter and throttle handles, mounted on the gunwale. If the first round hadn’t disabled the engine, there’d be no way they could control it now. I chambered a third round.
Just then, O’Hare’s trawler rode up onto the shallows on its own bow wave and crashed into the starboard bow of the much smaller boat. The impact and the wall of water the trawler pushed ahead of it rolled the small boat, sending the two occupants flying into the shallows and swamping the bowrider. O’Hare’s boat stumbled and lurched forward, grounding on the shallow sandbar, its prop churning up a foamy froth at the stern.
I watched as O’Hare shut down the engines and came out of the wheelhouse with his shotgun, moving faster than a man of his age ought to be able. He ran out onto the pulpit and shouldered the shotgun. I was sure he’d shoot both men if given the chance.
My third shot impacted the leading edge of the pulpit, sending shards of wood into O’Hare’s lower legs. He looked up and scanned the horizon in my direction.
“Don’t shoot them!” I heard Bender yell from his position just a few yards to my north.
The two men slowly stood up in the shallow water as O’Hare covered them. I could see him saying something, but the distance was too great for the words to carry. He motioned them to the port rail of his trawler, now hard aground and listing to that side.
With the two men moving toward the far side of O’Hare’s boat and him covering them with his shotgun, I quickly made my way back to the house.
I met Bender there and we went up the rear steps two at a time, Pescador bounding ahead of us. I banged on the door and hollered, “All clear!”
A second later, Carl cracked the door a little, Pap’s old Colt clearly visible. He breathed a sigh of relief and said, “What’s happening?”
“Looks like a couple of Zoe Pound thugs had a run in with O’Hare. He’s got them aboard his trawler.” I turned to Bender and said, “Let’s go see what we can do.”
Kim took the rifle from Bender, but I kept mine with me. I told Pescador to stay with Kim and a few minutes later, we were idling out from under the house aboard the Cazador, headed to where the big trawler was stuck on the sand. The tide was rising, so if her back wasn’t broken from the impact or her hull wasn’t holed, we should be able to get her off in just a few hours. If she was holed, the tide would fill the hull almost to the decks, flooding the engine room. If that happened, recovery and repair would cost more than the old tub was worth. Hope he’s got insurance, I thought, bringing Cazador up on plane.
A few minutes later, I eased the Cazador up onto the sandbar next to the trawler and tossed an anchor as far as I could. Leaving a good twenty feet of line dangling from the bow, I tied it off and jumped from the bow into the knee-deep water. Pulling the line tight, I jammed the flukes into the sand before retrieving my rifle from the bow.
O’Hare had thrown a rope ladder off the starboard side and when I climbed up I found him sitting on a lobster trap on the trawler’s work deck. The two thugs, hands tied behind them, sat uncomfortably on the deck, their backs against the rough planks of the gunwale.
“You fuckin’ shot me,” O’Hare said flatly, pulling bloody wood splinters out of his right calf.
“No, if I’d shot you, you’d be dead.”
He looked over the two captives’ heads at their boat, with the ruined control box and engine, then looked at the rifle I held cradled in my left arm. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I wasn’t gonna kill ’em, though.”
I looked at the two men—boys, really, as neither looked to be more than twenty. “Who are you and what are you doing up here?”
One of them looked up at me with venom in his eyes, then seemed to recognize me and smiled. “N’ a gen kè sere, gwo moun.”
“English, motherfucker!” O’Hare boomed, standing over them and leveling his shotgun at the speaker’s head. “Do you speak it?”
“I have English,” the second boy said, raising his head for the first time. He grinned at me as well, ignoring the shotgun aimed at his head, and said, “You in big trouble, man.”
O’Hare turned to me, lowering his deck sweeper. “You know these clowns?”
“Never seen them before in my life,” I replied honestly. “But, I think I know someone who’d like to get to know them. Come with me, Bender.”
We walked up to the foredeck, leaving O’Hare to watch the two thugs. “We need to call Deuce,” Bender said.
“Just what I was thinking. He’ll need a place to interrogate them, though, and I have a thought. You being new to the team, you might not approve, so I want to go over what’s gonna happen before it does.”
I explained what I had in mind and after a few minutes he surprisingly agreed. “I’m no Boy Scout, McDermitt. If shortcuts can keep people safe, I’m all in.”
I took my sat-phone out of my pocket and called Deuce. After he answered, I said, “We need a dust-off, Deuce. Two of Zoe Pound’s men were caught red-handed near my island by one of the local lobstermen. Do you have access to a chopper with pontoons?”
“Why can’t we land at your island?” he asked.
“We’re not at the island, but close by. My daughter’s there and we’re not going to take these guys to it.”
“What’d you have in mind?”
I explained my plan to him and he chuckled softly. “Yeah, I’d kinda like to go there myself. Where should Charity pick you up?”
“About two hundred yards east of my house, you can’t miss us. And bring Tony and Kumar.” Tony Jacobs used to be part of Deuce’s SEAL team and came over to DHS with him. I remember a different interrogation some time ago, when Tony’s actions really put the fear of God into the subject. Kumar Sayef is also one of Deuce’s team members and a former Delta Force special operator and linguist specializing in many Arabic dialects. Not that his linguistic skills would be needed. It was his appearance that would work.
I ended the call and told Bender to send O’Hare up here and then I called Kim. She answered on the first ring, firing off several questions. I explained that everything was alright and shortly Deuce would arrive by chopper and we were going to take the two guys in, but I’d be back within an hour to help get O’Hare off the sandbar. A partial lie, but I didn’t want her to know our real plans.
She didn’t like it, but I assured her everything was fine, as O’Hare approached. I ended the call and said to O’Hare, “I have someone coming that’s going to take these guys off your hands.”
“Cops?”
“Not exactly,” I said with a grin. “I think you’ll approve of what we have in mind. Your boat’s stuck here for at least three more hours, until the tide comes up enough that I can pull you off that sand. Wanna go with us for the interrogation? It’s not far.”
He thought about it a moment and said, “Boy, I fought in the Second World War, you know. Battle of the Bulge. Never got a scratch. Fought in Korea, too. Still carry a bullet in my shoulder from them Commie bastards. I been all around the Caribbean since then and I know a thing or two about island folks. These two are just trash, nothin’ more.”
“Yeah, you might be right. But, I bet you’d agree that they’re superstitious trash.”
His head came around and looked me straight in the eyes as a slow smile spread across his face. “You got some bad juju for them two?”
I grinned back at him. “That I do. Hope you’re not the squeamish type, O’Hare. Sorry about those splinters, I didn’t know what you were gonna do.”
He chortled as he looked back at the two men trussed up against his gunwale. “Naw, I ain’t squeamish. And these little nicks? Hell, I got worse injuries than that from just screwin’ a Trinidad hooker.”
After explaining the details of my idea, we went back and sat on lobster traps, drinking coffee and basically ignoring the two thugs trussed up on the deck. They whispered a word or two to one another in Haitian Creole. Apparently O’Hare spoke it as well, leaning toward me and whispering, “Bigger guy said he’s scared.”
I remembered the stories about O’Hare’s Creole wife, Constance. Of course he speaks the language, I thought. All the more reason for him to come along.
“That’s good,” I said with a grin, looking up to the northeast, where I was just beginning to hear the heavy whump of a helicopter’s blades beating the dense air at low altitude.
“Let’s get ’em up and in the water,” I said loudly as I stood up.
“How you want to do this?” Bender asked.
“Like this,” I replied, grabbing the smaller young man by the collar of his shirt and yanking him to his feet. He seemed to be the leader of the two. I took two long strides toward the transom, dragging him stumbling along behind me, then I heaved him over the transom head first. His legs kicked frantically as he screamed, splashing into the shallow water on his side.
Bender and O’Hare did the same thing with the other guy and both quickly struggled to their feet in the knee-deep water, spitting and shouting obscenities in two languages.
The chopper came in low and fast. I looked up at the Jolly Roger on the antenna mount and knew that Charity would fly over and execute her signature climbing turn to burn off speed and land into the easterly breeze.
The chopper was a black Bell 206L Long Ranger, with dark tinted windows, no markings at all, and black pontoons in place of the normal skids. Charity landed it in the shallower water just south of where we stood by the stern of O’Hare’s boat, which I saw for the first time was named Constance. There was no need for Charity to anchor the bird. Once it settled it was in contact with the bottom.
As the engine shut down and the blades slowed, three doors opened and Deuce got out of the copilot’s side and came around the nose, sloshing through the water in jeans, combat boots and tropical khaki shirt. Tony and Kumar stepped down onto the float from the back seat on the near side. The way they were dressed didn’t escape the attention of the two prisoners. Tony and Kumar both wore the traditional Islamic men’s hijab and all three wore full beards, which was something new. Then I remembered Deuce’s boss saying that the team should appear less military and blend in more.
Tony and Kumar stood off to the side of the chopper as Deuce came forward. He shook my hand and I introduced him to O’Hare. Deuce walked over to the wrecked bowrider and looked in the cockpit area. There was a wooden box on the deck and he lifted the lid. Inside were a half dozen American-made hand grenades.
Deuce walked over to the two captives and said, “Where did you get these?”
The smaller man looked at Deuce and spat out, “Zafè ou!”
O’Hare stepped toward the man and in a menacing growl surprised him by saying in Creole, “Nonm lan reponn!”
The shock was evident in both thugs’ faces.
“How much for the little one?” Kumar shouted in thickly accented English.
I’d seen this before and barely suppressed a grin. Kumar spoke with almost no accent at all, unless need be. By cursing Deuce in his native language, the smaller thug started their little improv skit. Deuce and his tight-knit team of former Special Ops, police, and intelligence people worked on extracting information through the perceived notion that something worse than death might be in store for the subject. One of his people, the team’s weapons handler, was once a stage actress and worked with the other members on how to improvise and create a perceived notion to cause an emotional response by any means necessary.
I’d told Deuce that the kid could speak English, and I was certain he in turn had given this information to his people to use against the two gangbangers if a chance presented itself.
The notion Kumar created with that simple question had exactly the hoped-for effect. It was further exacerbated when Tony turned to Kumar and began chattering in words, whistles, and clicks. The first time I’d seen this I thought it was a put-on. Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe Tony did speak some kind of Amazon pygmy language. It sounded convincing enough to me.
Kumar turned back toward us and shouted, “Five thousand American dollars if we can eat them after playing with them.”
De
uce is a big man, almost as tall as me, but probably twenty pounds heavier, most of it in his wide shoulders and thick chest. His dad was Norwegian, but Deuce got more of the Viking genes than his dad. He spun around, his neck muscles bulging, and shouted through clenched teeth, “I said we’d discuss price later!”
Deuce’s fierce appearance, with scraggly dark red hair and beard, and the idea now forming in the young man’s mind created a bleak uncertainty and was completely evident in his face. His voice cracked as he said, “Manje nou?”
Until that moment, the taller of the two had been standing quietly defiant, sure that these people were the authorities and the gang leader would get them out of jail. His face went blank hearing those words and he looked to the other for guidance.
O’Hare caught onto the charade immediately and stepped up to the smaller man’s face and snarled, “Yeah, they want to eat you. But not until after they have a little fun.” To emphasize the point, he moved his fist to his mouth, like he was holding a turkey leg and mimicked gnawing off a huge bite.
“Get ’em on the chopper,” Deuce said.
Bender and I shoved the two punks toward the chopper as Deuce walked ahead with O’Hare, talking.
I was less worried how they’d react on reaching the tiny island of Crane Key than how Deuce would. It’s a couple of miles southwest of my island and I’d left a man there to die some time ago. He probably would have died anyway—he’d been stranded there for weeks and was near death when I found him. He’d murdered Deuce’s dad and was the one responsible for putting the wheels in motion that had caused my wife to be murdered.
Charity landed the chopper in the skinny water on the north side of Crane Key, about a hundred feet from the little bay entrance I remembered. The chopper only had seven seats, so the two captives were just tossed on the floor and we all held them in place with our feet for the short ride.
Fallen King: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 6) Page 12
