Cast Off: A Jesse McDermitt Novel

Book 24: Caribbean Adventure Series

by Wayne Stinnett

Genres: Sea Adventures

Synopsis

After a terrible defeat in Key West, where the subject of Jesse McDermitt’s identity fraud investigation gets away, and which almost costs him dearly, Jesse returns home to his island in the Content Keys, determined to keep those he loves safe from harm.

He makes plans to fly his family and friends to the Leeward Islands for a very special occasion, unaware of events taking place on one small uninhabited island located a short distance from his destination—events that will suck him right back into the fray, as a past nemesis rears their head.

Gold will turn even the most docile into greedy, dangerous people. When the question of rightful ownership is brought up, legal professionals and government officials on the island, as well as those from France argue over a treasure estimated to be worth $20,000,000. But what is the price of one human life?

The simple life isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and danger abounds in the picturesque city of Gustavia, on the French island of St. Barts, and speeding Mini Mokes on steep mountain roads isn’t the cause.

 

Read more

Release date: November 1, 2022

Publisher: Down Island Press

Print pages: 223

Sample

 

Early August 1707

Saint Barthélemy, French West Indies

 

A dozen or more ships lay in the tranquil bay, each riding quietly at anchor. They were easily distinguished from the others by the light of a brilliant, nearly full moon, which hung directly above. The bay was well protected from wind and waves, being on the leeward side of the high, rocky island, and was a popular anchorage. Not so much for merchant ships to load or unload—they arrived and departed infrequently—but more for ships that were empty of cargo and in need of repair.

The inner part of the bay had a safe harbor that made almost a ninety-degree turn and had a flat, sandy bottom, which got shallower the farther in it went, making it an ideal place for careening.

Most ships were round on the bottom, relying on well-placed ballast stones in the lowest part of the hull to keep them upright. With the ballast unloaded and the crew pulling on long lines from shore, a ship could be hauled into the calm inner harbor at high tide until she ran aground in the soft sand. Then, as the tide receded, the ship would roll onto one side, exposing much of the hull below the waterline.

Places such as Le Carénage on the island of Saint Barthélemy always had ships waiting to be hauled in for emergency and routine repairs, the recaulking of planks, or just for cleaning a fouled hull. Repairs almost always took priority in such places, for obvious reasons, and Le Carénage was no exception. There were plenty of hull scrubbers, caulkers, boatwrights, and carpenters in the village and they never lacked for work.

Out in the bay, a longboat with two men hunched over the oars moved away from a small schooner that was anchored among the much larger vessels. A third man stooped over the tiller, his face long and gaunt. All three men moved slowly, as though stricken with age. If one studied them and their movements carefully, it would be noticed there was no wasted motion, no bickering, and the longboat glided steadily into the dock area. The men had obviously worked with one another for some time.

Their ship was essentially a cargo vessel, though much smaller in size than the large galleons in the bay. The schooner was more suited for shorter, faster crossings of only a few days to a fortnight, and it was only minimally dependent on wind direction.

The other ships in the bay were ship-rigged, with square sails that caught the wind and basically pushed the ship in the direction the wind blew, or within a few degrees.

The schooner was fore-and-aft-rigged, with triangular-shaped sails that, when handled by a skilled crew, could move the ship in almost any direction, save about a ninety-degree arc toward windward. The ship and rig were developed by Dutch shipbuilders and used in intercoastal trade in the North Atlantic, where the winds were erratic and unpredictable.

Moving goods from the West Indies to the northern colonies of the Americas was usually left to the larger ships, which could carry more cargo. But they were forced to sail west with the prevailing wind before turning north along the coast, to take advantage of the powerful current that flowed just offshore.

The usefulness of the fore-and-aft-rigged schooners in moving smaller volumes of goods in a timely manner soon spread throughout coastal Europe and to the shipbuilders in the colonies of New England and New France.

The three men in the boat were met at a dock by a burly French- speaking local who watched the docks at night. “Here now,” the dockmaster said in French. “What is your business here at this late hour?”

The man steering the boat turned the rudder just as the other two men lifted and locked their oars. The small boat came smartly alongside, and the helmsman stood and removed his hat.

“Capitaine Jean Laurent,” he said with a bow, then spoke in aristocratic French. “We are in need of careening, sir.” He swept his hat toward the schooner. “Only for cleaning and we are in no hurry, as we have not negotiated our next cargo. Who would I speak with to make arrangements to use the bay?”

“I can add you to the list, Capitaine,” the man replied, losing some of his surliness. “However, it will be at least three days. More likely, four.”

The captain climbed the ladder and faced the dockmaster. Laurent was an older man, rail-thin, with deep lines around dark eyes and a pointed, gray beard.

“That will do very nicely,” he said, offering a gold coin with one hand and the line to the tender with the other.

The move was designed to establish dominance and it worked. The dockmaster took both the coin and the line, then looked out at the bay as the other two men climbed up.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a ship like that,” the dockmaster said. “She has but one small yard.”

He pocketed the coin and quickly tied off the painter.

“Likely not,” the captain said. “She is brand-new, built in the Massachusetts colony from a Dutch design—a schooner.”

“A schooner, eh? Not very big, is she?”

“No, she isn’t,” the captain readily agreed. “However, she can carry ten thousand marc plein of cacao from here to the colonies in New England in eight days.”

The man looked up. “Eight days? Why, that’s imposs—”

“Oh, it’s quite possible,” the captain interrupted. “With just the three of us, we can sail directly to New York and back in just over a fortnight. Now, is there a place where we might find wine and some food?”

“There’s a tavern just around the corner, Capitaine. What name shall I put in my ledger?”

“Taranis,” the captain replied.

The man’s mouth fell agape as the three sailors turned and started up the street. The ancient Celtic god of thunder was an apt name for the vessel, which could use storms to its advantage, steering close to them for added power and sailing faster than most any ship on the sea. In most sea-faring communities, the name might be viewed as a challenge to the gods themselves. But the captain and his crew had never been counted among the usual sea faring communities.

Jean Laurent wasn’t the captain’s real name. And he was no stranger to Saint Barthélemy, though he hadn’t been to the island in almost twenty years. His features had changed, and it was unlikely anyone on the island who knew him then was still alive, but it paid to be cautious.

His real name was still whispered among the locals to that very day.

It had been nearly two decades since Daniel Montbars had walked the cobblestone streets of Le Carénage, and most of the people on the island assumed he was dead.

Saint Barthélemy hadn’t changed all that much since the days when he and his men had controlled the port, distributing some of the Spanish treasure they’d plundered among the people in the bustling little village on the west side of the island.

When he’d first visited Saint Barthélemy, at the age of twenty-two, the island had only been settled for twenty years. He was now over sixty, but the island had been well-populated even before he’d left.

The fact that the bay had a natural place to careen a ship meant that strangers to the area were not uncommon. Using a different name was simple enough, and Montbars didn’t want anyone knowing of his presence. Which was why he’d inquired about a bottom cleaning—he knew there would be a long wait and he and his men had things to do—things that would require him to be there for several nights.

He didn’t need anyone asking what he and his men were waiting for.

He’d learned firsthand, as an able seaman aboard his uncle’s ship, that there was a hierarchy for work needing to be performed. Repairs, especially emergency repairs, always came first, most assuredly when it was a French warship. His uncle had brought his damaged frigate into Le Carénage after a fierce battle with a Spanish ship of the line. The frigate had been taking on water faster than the crew could bail. Entering the harbor under full sail, half the crew turned from bailing to unloading ballast as his uncle steered the frigate in himself, despite a strong northeasterly wind.

Such was Montbars’s arrival in the West Indies, assigned as an able seaman aboard a warship tasked to protect France’s trade routes. Cacao and sugar cane were farmed in Saint Barthélemy’s interior, as well as in many other of the Leeward Islands.

The three men walked quietly along the road, features hidden by large tricornered hats and bodies cloaked in long gray coats. The clip of their boot heels was the only sound heard, as Montbars looked around at the familiar landmarks, feeling like a stranger in his own home.

Soon after his arrival in the islands, his uncle’s ship had been attacked again, near Santo Domingo, while escorting two slower cargo vessels. The pair of Spanish ships had taken them down both sides, blasting great holes in the hull.

His uncle had been killed in the battle and his ship sunk. Daniel had escaped the hated Spaniards and managed to survive long enough to be washed up on the beach of the pirate stronghold of Tortuga. There, he applied his excellent education together with his newly acquired seamanship skills to a new form of trade—dealing vengeance to the Spaniards.

His hatred for the Spanish had begun long before he’d taken to the sea. He’d read accounts of how the Conquistadors had treated the Indigenous peoples of the West Indies and the injustices they’d inflicted in the early 16th century. Their barbarous actions had enraged him at an early age and his hatred for them only grew when his uncle had been killed.

After sailing from Tortuga with his own ship and crew, Daniel had made Le Carénage his home port. He’d protected the small boatworks there and was generous toward the people for many years—generous enough with plundered Spanish gold to win loyalty but not so much as to cause excess greed. He’d even built a house on a hill overlooking the entrance to the bay.

Daniel paused for a moment and glanced across the bay toward the point where he’d built his home.

It was gone now.

Montbars the Executioner, as Daniel had quickly become known to his enemies, preyed only on Spanish-flagged ships and ports, raiding both with fierce discrimination and giving no quarter.

His ships rarely took Spanish captives, leaving the immobile wounded to suffer and die with their ship, or finishing off anyone still able to move.

He’d once disemboweled a Spanish captain, nailing his still intact intestines to a rail, then forcing him to dance by beating him mercilessly with a burning longboat oar until the rest of the man’s entrails fell out and he died.

Montbars had taken two gold rings from the captain’s hand and a small medallion he wore around his neck and had them melted down into a single, triangular-shaped medallion for himself. The shape resembled his family’s namesake, a mountain, and he had the goldsmith fashion a laughing skull on one side. He wore the medallion under his shirt for an emergency. It weighed nearly a marc plein and he could use it to buy his way out of a bad situation if need be.

He’d never needed to barter for his life, so it still hung there.

For all his hatred toward them, the Spaniards reviled Montbars even more and had placed bounties on his head. But they had also feared him, and Spanish merchant shipping in the Leeward Islands had declined.

So, Daniel had sailed far and wide, seeking them out, destroying forts as far away as mainland New Spain, and burning and plundering Spanish settlements in Puerto Rico and Cuba along his way. He attacked Spanish strongholds from Honduras to the Antilles, even capturing major cities like Vera Cruz and Cartagena for a time, looting and killing the inhabitants, freeing their slaves, then sailing on.

Eight years went by, the French West India Company dissolved, and possession of Saint Barthélemy had gone to the French crown. The government didn’t know what to do with the island and it had, for the most part, simply remained under Daniel’s control.

Then, when he was almost forty, Daniel had been wounded in battle for the first time. He’d been the first to board a foundering Spanish ship, swinging over on a line from one of the yard arms and dropping to the enemy deck amid a brace of Spanish soldiers. He’d killed two before falling to the blade of a third, just as his men had swarmed the deck.

His wounds took months of recuperation, holed up in his mountain enclave overlooking the entrance to the bay at Le Carénage. He’d gotten older and slower, and because of the long voyage home, he’d come almost to death’s door. It took a great amount of time for him to heal.

So, Montbars had settled into a life of ease, sending his ships out whenever a Spanish flag was spotted. The next ten years had been profitable, and Daniel had become rich, fat, and lazy, his treasure safely hidden on his property, guarded around the clock by his most loyal men and a pack of Beaucerons, large, nearly all-black dogs from his native France. He continued to live a comparative life of ease until the age of fifty.

Then, in 1685, Louis XIV passed Code Noir, a royal decree outlining how slaves were to be utilized, and forced labor was once more brought to Saint Barthélemy to raise crops. This infuriated Montbars, and, due to his outspoken criticism of the crown—often drunken outbursts—he’d been forced into hiding, when French forces surprised his ships at anchor, and burned his house.

The tide of politics had also changed, beleaguering him in his older years. War was coming. Daniel could sense it. The War of Spanish Succession was sucking in the whole world, and it would soon come to the islands. French holdings in the West Indies were tenuous at best, and Daniel was too old to fight another war.

When the crown sent troops to clean out the pirates, Montbars and his crews were forced to hastily flee Saint Barthélemy. The crown claimed a great victory, sinking and burning his ships at anchor, but he and most of his men had escaped. Some hired on with other buccaneers and others sailed away on the next cargo ship for parts unknown.

Daniel went to nearby Guadeloupe, where he assumed the life of a simple fisherman for ten more years, biding his time. He’d found it appalling that his own countrymen would adopt the same barbaric ways as the detestable Spaniards.

For fifteen glorious years, Daniel and his men had rained death and destruction on Spanish shipping and had pillaged and burned their strongholds all over the Lesser Antilles. But for Daniel, it had never been enough. He and his crews often returned to the safety of Saint Barthélemy with many boxes of coins and treasure, selling off everything but the gold, exchanging jewels and silver for gold coins. What country the gold came from didn’t matter. He melted everything into small bars that he’d hidden away in a deep cave behind his house, concealed by the surrounding jungle.

Montbars hadn’t wanted to fight his own people. Not like he had the Spaniards. Even if the offense against mankind was the same, just a different race.

So, he’d fled. But not far. He still held possessions on the island, even if his home and ships had been burned. And only he knew where the treasure was hidden.

He and his men were going to New France, but he wasn’t going to leave the West Indies without his gold.

Along with the only two men left of his hundreds of buccaneers, both also old and gray, he’d sailed into Le Carénage to wait several days to get their hull unfouled. And while they waited, they’d be loading the gold.

“It’s changed,” Montbars said, his voice low and gravelly, echoing off stone walls.

“Oui, it is a bit different, Capitaine,” the taller of the two men with him said. “It feels…altered, somehow. Gentrified.”

Henri Garnier was Daniel’s trusted first mate and had been by his side in many a battle. The shorter man was Paul Corbin, who had sailed with Daniel out of Tortuga almost forty years earlier.

“It is that,” Montbars replied, pushing open a door to a tavern and seeing a dozen faces turn toward them—several of them bar girls. “But some things remain the same.”

November 1, 2022

Marathon, Florida Keys

 

The reef looked healthier—brighter and more robust than I remembered. It was amazing to see what just a couple of years of reduced boating and diving activity had done. With fewer diving and boat-renting tourists, there was less damage and older injuries were recovering.

Delicate purple sea fans waved a welcome from the edges, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of brightly colored fish darted in and out of the crevices in the many corals, Gorgonias, and sponges.

I drifted lazily in the water column, five feet above the sand, taking it all in. A lone barracuda hung motionless above the reef, waiting for something to stray too far from the safety of the many hiding spots too small for him to get into. Facing into the light current, like I was, its torpedo-like body required almost no tail movement at all to hold its position, while I was slowly kicking my fins to stay in the same spot.

The underwater world was far from silent. Clicks, hums, and buzzes reached my ears, but direction couldn’t be determined. Our brains automatically know the direction a sound is coming from by the infinitesimally short difference in time it takes sound to reach each ear. Water was denser and sound traveled much faster, meaning the time interval is much shorter. There were soft trills and murmurs, if you listened closely enough.

A queen angelfish moved effortlessly among the fans and soft corals. It paused, sifting sand in its mouth for tiny bits of algae, then gracefully moved on.

I hadn’t dived Conrad Reef in a very long time. Too long. The closed-circuit rebreather I wore instead of a scuba tank was almost silent. Soft clicking sounds came from the unit as the valves opened and closed and air moved through the scrubbers. I was trying out a brand-new Dräger BG 4 Plus, a state-of-the-art, closed-circuit rebreather. The new CCR was a good deal quieter.

I looked over at Savannah, who lay prone on the sandy bottom, wearing my older model Dräger unit. She was peering into a tiny crevice at the edge of the reef. What she was looking at, I didn’t know. Her long, blond hair floated around her head like a halo, though it was tied in a ponytail. My breath caught in my throat for an instant and I smiled behind the full-face mask.

Just the fact that she was with me, and we were both there on that reef made me happy beyond belief. It almost never happened. Several months ago, just a week before I was to embark on a long mission as captain of a nuclear-powered research vessel, I’d gotten into a situation in Key West that put her in danger, and she’d taken a bullet meant for someone else.

It was only a flesh wound and she never even lost consciousness, but it was one of the few times in my life that I had been truly afraid, and I still remembered that feeling of total helplessness. Looking down into her blue eyes as blood spread across her blouse had frightened me more than anything I’ve ever faced.

So, I’d done what any sane husband who did undercover contract work for the government would do—I retired.

Savannah quickly recovered and soon became active in social events in Marathon and Big Pine Key. She’d never questioned my announcement that I was leaving Armstrong Research. Neither of us had any need for a job—our inheritances and investments over the years would mean financial security for generations to come.

While Savannah did volunteer work in the community, I helped Jimmy on the dive and fishing charters, if for no other reason than I liked being out on the water. We never did a lot of chartering and there was no reason to change that. We’d developed a clientele who were experienced, interesting, and fun to be around, so we’d always kept the business slow.

But today, it was just me and Savannah. Jimmy’d said he hadn’t taken the Winter center console out in some time, so with him and Naomi available to watch after Alberto and Finn for the day, and having nothing else to do, I’d decided to take a day and just go play and have fun with my wife.

I slowly drifted over beside her to see what she was looking at so intently. She turned her face toward me and smiled. She was also wearing a full-face mask, though mine was a bit more tactical than the civilian model she wore.

She moved over a little and pointed into the crack. I edged closer and gazed in. Just inside the crevice was a small patch of turtle grass trying to make a start. It took a moment, ...