by J. M. LeDuc
“That’s the greatest compliment you could have given me.” Sin hugged her friend and walked up the beach just as the sun was beginning to crest the eastern sky.
CHAPTER 17
The day was uneventful. Sin napped when her father did, thereby avoiding any questions as to why she was tired. She hadn’t heard from Troy, but knew he was working, so it wasn’t a surprise. She spent a good part of the afternoon in the carport going over the dive gear she received from the military. She had learned never to trust anyone else’s checking of her equipment, no matter how skilled they were. They may be proficient, but it’s not their life on the line.
As she tore her dive equipment apart and put it back together again, her mind kept drifting to the pictures of the girls she had seen. The stark images were impossible to shake. Charlie’s words about this being a death mission rattled in her head, but that reality only made her more steadfast in her resolve.
Equipment checked and loaded into a black dive bag, she headed inside for an early dinner and to spend some time with her father, Carmelita, and Maria.
Maria jumped off the couch when she heard Sin walk in and started talking a mile a minute in her native dialect.
Sin put her hands up in a mock surrender position. “Hold on, Sweetie,” she said. “I can’t understand everything with you talking so fast. Slow down.”
Maria repeated herself, talking slower.
“What is she asking you?” Carmelita said. “I can understand some of what she is saying, but it is a very tough dialect to understand.”
Sin took Maria by the hand and led her back to the couch. “She wants to know why I speak her language. She said there aren’t many people outside of her native area of her country that can understand her people, so how can I?”
“Good question,” her father said. “I was about to ask the same thing.”
“The mission is classified, so I’m not at liberty to say much, but I spent quite a bit of time in the mountains of Nicaragua. In order to do my job proficiently, I had to learn the dialect.”
Sin could tell by her father’s expression that he wasn’t quite convinced of her explanation, but he didn’t push it.
“Can I help you with dinner, Carmelita?”
“No, mi hija,” Carmelita smiled. “You relax and spend some time with Maria.”
After dinner, Sin asked if she could take Maria for a walk on the beach.
“Just be careful,” Carmelita said. “She is afraid of the water.”
Sin took Maria by the hand and they headed down to the sand. They walked down by the water, but Maria would not get too close. Sin picked up a smooth rock and skimmed it off the water. She saw Maria’s eyes open wide as she squealed in delight.
Sin found another rock and explained to Maria how to throw it. She did, but it just plopped into the ocean.
“That happens all the time when you are first learning,” Sin told her. She picked a few more rocks and walked Maria a bit closer to where the waves were washing up on shore. Standing behind her, Sin took hold of her arm and showed her the proper motion in order to get the stone to skip.
Maria bit her lower lip and scrunched her nose as she reared back and let the rock fly. It wasn’t much of a throw, but it made a tiny blip on the water before settling beneath the waves.
Maria jumped up and down, clapping her hands with pride. For the next twenty minutes, Sin handed her stones and Maria skimmed them like a champ. So intent in her activity, she didn’t realize she had stepped closer to the water with each throw. When she finally looked down at her legs, she was ankle deep in water, and she began to tremble.
Sin squatted in front of her, held her tight, and told her that she was fine. That there was nothing to be scared of.
Maria whimpered and said that bad things happen in the ocean.
“What kinds of bad things?” Sin asked.
“Girls like me are found dead in the ocean,” Maria answered.
Sin squeezed her tight in a long, protective embrace—neither wanting to let go first.
Sin clutched Maria’s hand as they walked toward the house. “Can I ask you something, Maria?”
Marie just looked up at Sin and nodded.
“Do you know how you got here?”
Again, Maria nodded.
“Do your mommy and daddy know where you are?”
Marie told Sin that her parents were dead. Killed by bad men in her country.
Sin stopped walking and again squatted in front of the little girl. “What kind of bad men?”
Tears filled Maria’s eyes. “Very bad men.”
Sin wiped the tears. “Did you see these bad men kill your parents?”
Maria nodded and told Sin how men used to make her parents pay money or they would punish them. “One night, they came,” Maria said, “but my father did not have the money. My parents hid me and told me to stay quiet. I heard my mother cry and my father scream, but I stayed quiet like I was told.”
Sin listened in horror to the rest of the story, hugging her tight.
“I promise no one will ever hurt you,” Sin whispered in her ear as she whimpered.
Sin held her until she had no tears left, and then picked Maria up and carried the sleepy child back to the house.
Thomas and Carmelita were waiting on the porch when they came into view. Sin placed her finger to her mouth. “She is sleeping,” she mouthed.
Carmelita went to take Maria from her arms, but Sin shook her head and said that she would put Maria to bed.
As she placed her in her bed, Maria’s eyes opened slightly. “Promise?” she sighed.
“Sí, mi belleza (yes, my beauty).”
Maria smiled and with a peacefulness that comes with trust, closed her eyes, and fell into a deep sleep.
Sin could practically feel the tension as she walked down the stairs into the family room.
Carmelita and her father were staring at her with anticipation.
“Well?” Thomas asked.
“Well, what,” Sin answered.
“Don’t be coy,” Carmelita said. “What happened on your walk? How did Maria’s feet get wet?”
Sin breathed a sigh of relief when she realized what had everyone worried.
“I showed Maria how to skim a stone across the water. She kept getting closer and closer to the water as she continued to skip the rocks. Before she knew it, she was ankle deep in the water.”
Carmelita’s hand went to her mouth and her deep brown eyes opened wide. “What did she do when she realized she was in the ocean?”
“She was frightened, but I held her until she began to relax,” Sin answered.
“Unbelievable,” Thomas said. “We’ve tried everything to get her over her fear, and you do it in one day.”
Sin poured herself a cup of coffee. “Don’t get your hopes too high, she is still very afraid, and it will probably be harder to distract her next time.” She took a sip of the Cuban brew. “But little by little, she will get over her fears.”
Sin thought about the things Maria told her. It will be a miracle if she loses her fear of the ocean.
Sin’s father soon became tired and Carmelita walked him upstairs to lie down.
Sin walked out on the back deck and lit a cigarette. She smoked the cigarette down to the filter before flicking it over the balcony. Using her binoculars, Sin looked out at the water. She was happy to see that there were no boats anywhere off the Key. She took this as her cue to leave and make her way to the north point of Tumbleboat to meet Charlie for a little ‘recreational’ night dive.
CHAPTER 18
Sin and Charlie did a buddy check on each other’s gear before they trudged into the water.
“It’s a moonless night,” Charlie said, “that’s good and bad.”
Sin nodded her understanding.
“We
can’t risk being spotted so we can’t use a dive flag and I don’t want to use any underwater flashlights until we reach a depth of forty feet,” he continued. “I checked the current and it’s running due south. Once we swim past the break, we have five minutes to reach our depth and turn on our lights. If we take longer than that, we may run right into the first reef and get torn to bits.”
“It sounds like you’ve made this dive before,” Sin said.
“Only from the chair in my den. You’re the only one I know that’s been crazy enough to have done it in reality.”
Charlie watched Sin look out at the water and bite her lip. “Anything you want to add?”
She pointed to where the waves made their final break. “About thirty feet in, where the waves begin to swell, there is a ledge. It drops from a depth of about twenty feet to eighty. The deeper we go, the less of a current we will deal with. I suggest hugging the bottom until we hit the inner reef.”
Sin watched the left side of Charlie’s mouth rise and she felt an inner pride. “You take the lead,” he said, “I’ll follow.”
He tied the end of a yellow rope to his weight belt and handed the other end of the ten-foot rope to Sin. She did the same. Silently, they turned toward the ocean, placed their masks on, put their snorkels in their mouths, and made their way past the rocks and coral of North Point.
For the first part of the dive, the only communication between the two was the pull of the rope when they strayed too far apart and a kick in the head when they were too close. Once Sin swam past the shelf where the ocean bottom dropped off, the descent was quick. Before she knew it, her lead hand was touching sand. She wasted no time turning on her dive light. Charlie’s soon followed.
He gave her the ‘okay’ sign, Sin signed back. They then made their way toward the inner reef.
When they arrived at the reef, Sin knew something was wrong. She hugged the sand, trying to belay the current as much as possible. Lying on the ocean bottom, she reached for her slate and wrote a short message. Finished, she handed the slate to Charlie.
“Looks wrong.”
Sin waved for him to follow her lead.
Charlie nodded in affirmation.
They held on to each other with one hand and the vegetation on the top of the reef with the other in order to swim against the strong pull of the current. They hadn’t gone more than thirty feet when Sin stopped. She looked back at Charlie and then suddenly dropped off the end of the reef.
In a matter of seconds, they were fifty feet deeper and hovering over a perfectly manicured ocean bottom.
Sin grabbed at her slate and scribbled like a woman possessed.
“Trough dug out.
Man-made.”
Charlie read the words and then pointed south. He signaled to Sin that he was taking point. She nodded and followed his lead.
Charlie removed the glove from his right hand and felt the sand in front of him. For every foot he moved forward, he made at least three passes through the sand with his hand. This went on for about twenty minutes and they had progressed less than fifty feet.
Sin tugged on his wetsuit to draw his attention and shrugged her shoulders.
Charlie grabbed the slate hanging from his waist and tapped a message.
“Too smooth. IEDs?”
Sin looked around and noticed the same phenomenon. She nodded and let Charlie resume his search.
A few minutes later—he stopped.
Sin watched as Charlie dug in the sand. He waved her forward and shined his light in the hole he had made.
Sin looked down and saw an underwater IED. She stared and thought, You’ve got to be shitting me.
Sin busied herself filling in the hole as Charlie discovered others. She glanced at her underwater GPS and realized they were just offshore of the fishing company. Her mind was going a mile a minute when she felt Charlie poke her. She looked to see him shining his light on his watch. Their bottom time was over.
It was time to surface.
They quickly covered the other mines and rose from the bottom, the current pulling them south onto South Point.
Safe on land and their equipment off, Charlie grabbed their tanks and tossed them into a mangrove sanctuary.
“What are you doing?” Sin asked.
“We’re about to have company,” Charlie answered. “Come on.”
Sin grabbed her fins and mask and ran behind Charlie until they were hidden in the tangle of the mangroves.
“What makes you think we are going to have company?”
“The IEDs had two wires attached to them. One is a pressure and vibration sensitive trip wire. The other one made no sense. As we surfaced, I started thinking that maybe it was connected to some sort of early warning system.”
“Okay,” Sin said, “But that still doesn’t explain why you think we tripped it or that someone is coming.”
“Call it a hunch, I just don’t like the way things feel right now.”
Sin thought for a moment and then said, “Do you think this might have something to do with how the agents got caught?”
Charlie was about to answer when headlights flooded the parking lot. “Hold that thought,” he whispered.
Two men stepped out of a truck. They were dressed all in black and their faces were concealed behind black headgear. Each held an automatic machine pistol.
Sin could tell they were aggressive and thought they were immortal by their nonchalance. She heard one yell with bravado, “You search up by the plant, I’ll take the shore line. You see anyone, shoot to kill. We can dump them just like we did those FBI peckerwoods.”
Sin wanted to jump out and kill the bastards, but she didn’t have a weapon.
Within ten minutes, the men were back in the truck and gone.
Sin and Charlie waited in complete silence for another fifteen before either made a sound.
“It was them,” Sin said, pointing to where the truck had been. “The bastards that killed Alex and the others.”
“Don’t go jumping to conclusions.”
“Conclusions?” Sin snapped her head around and glared at Charlie, “Didn’t you hear what he said?”
“Yeah, I heard,” Charlie’s voice stayed calm as he spoke, “but I didn’t hear him say if they killed the first three agents or Alex or all the above, and more important . . .” Charlie put his hand on Sin’s shoulder to silence her, “I didn’t hear who gave the orders.”
Sin looked down at the ground and kicked a few loose shells.
“Did you notice the weapons they were carrying?” Charlie asked, dragging Sin back into the moment.
“Among other things,” Sin said. “They looked like Glock 18 machine pistols. You don’t take those to a party unless you plan on doing some serious damage.”
“What else did you notice?”
“Can we get away from here and continue the debriefing then?”
Charlie smiled. “Sorry, old habit.”
Sin nodded her affirmation.
“Before we leave, we need to sink our equipment.”
“The Navy isn’t going to be too happy about that,” Sin said.
Charlie chuckled. “Nothing the Pentagon won’t replace at hundreds its actual cost.”
“You are just one big conspiracy theory.”
“You can thank my conspiracy minded brain that you weren’t on the receiving end of one of those Glock 18s.”
Sin stopped mid-motion as she was picking up her air tank and heeded Charlie’s words. “Good point.” She then grabbed the tank and handed it to him.
He took it, strapped it to the other equipment and wrapped everything in their weight belts.
Standing at the end of the Point, Charlie and Sin both grabbed the wrapped equipment.
“On a count of three,” Charlie said.
Sin rolled her
eyes. “Let’s go, Jacques Cousteau, I’m wet and cold.”
Charlie grinned as he counted.
They heaved the bundle out as far as they could and watched it sink.
“Come on,” Charlie said. “I parked an old truck at the Dairy Queen a half mile south of here. We can ride back to North Point and talk about what we found.”
On their drive back, Sin mentioned that the two men they saw were definitely professional. “Whoever is fronting this operation isn’t just using local talent,” she said.
“The locals are just the scapegoats,” Charlie said. “If anything goes wrong, they are going to leave the idiots to be hung and try and get away scot free.”
He glanced over and again Sin was biting her lower lip. “You really have to stop doing that,” he said. “What are you thinking about?”
Sin released her lip and pushed her wet hair away from her face. “I’m thinking there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and the church and fishing company are the next two pieces to explore.”
Charlie nodded. “The church is important, but I don’t think the fishing company is the place we need to search.”
Sin thought for a moment and pointed a manicured nail toward him. “The orphanage is in the same building. That’s where we need to search.”
Charlie smiled.
Sin looked at her watch. It was almost one a.m. “I’m going to go over there later today and see if I can get a tour of the place. That will give us an idea of what to look for.”
“I still have a little bit of searching to do in order to get all the architectural drawings of the church,” Charlie said as he pulled the truck next to Sin’s vehicle.
“Let’s meet at four p.m. at the hangar, compare thoughts, and figure out the next step,” he said.
Sin leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks for always being there for me.”
Charlie blushed. “Get out of here and be careful.”
Sin opened the door and slid out of the truck. “You, too.”
CHAPTER 19
Sin knew that Carmelita had friends who worked at the orphanage, so she asked Carmelita to call and arrange a tour for her. At ten a.m., she was dressed and headed out the door.
