Fallen Hunter: A Jesse McDermitt Novel

Book 3: Caribbean Adventure Series

by Wayne Stinnett

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sea Adventures

Synopsis

Jesse McDermitt has been grieving the loss of a loved one to terrorists. He’s been holed up on his secluded island home for months, numbing his mind and body with endless, mundane tasks. But he has a plan for vengeance. A friend approaches Jesse seeking help for her dad who's been pressured into running drugs for a dangerous Cuban smuggler. When Jesse learns that the smuggler is also an arms merchant for Hezbollah, the terrorist organization responsible for the death of someone close, he once again looks to settle the score. Fast boats, beautiful underwater scenery, and blazing guns abound in this fast paced romp through the Caribbean, with stops in Cuba, Key West, and Cozumel, Mexico.

Release date: December 10, 2013

Publisher: Down Island Press

Print pages: 392

Sample

Chapter 1: Mission Ready

The two men sat across from one another at a table outside a Cuban restaurant. It was on Calle Ocho, at the end of SW Sixteenth Avenue, in the Little Havana part of Miami. The older man was about average height and weight, neither tanned nor pale. His dark hair was graying a little at the temples. He wore a light blue guayabera shirt, white slacks, and expensive-looking dress shoes. He looked at home in his surroundings, which is what he strived to do. The younger man was taller and heavier, but without an ounce of fat. He had fair hair, cut short, and tanned skin, with piercing blue eyes. He wore faded jeans, a black tee shirt, a fisherman’s hat, and topsider shoes. Unlike the older man, he stood out in the Cuban exile community, which is what he strived for, also. As people walked by the little sidewalk cafe and looked over, they noticed the younger man, but the older man was nearly invisible.

“Do you think he’s ready?” asked the younger man, in a serious tone.

The older man thought about the question, taking a sip of Cuban espresso from a tiny porcelain cup before answering. “I hope so. We need him on this. It’s been four months, the man can’t sit around on that little island forever. You intimated yourself that the message he gave me for you meant that he was ready.”

“Yeah, but that was just a week after his wife died. Most likely, he was still in shock.”

The older man took another sip of the strong drink and looked at the people moving up and down the sidewalk. It was sunny, but cooler, near sixty degrees. A warm day in DC, where the older man had flown down from just hours earlier. Here in Miami, that’s nearly freezing and the people on the sidewalk were dressed accordingly. “Go down and visit him, Deuce. Tell him what’s coming up. Use your own judgment as to whether or not he’s ready. I’m sure you’d like to see your young lady again, too.”

“Yes sir, Mister Smith,” Deuce said. “He’s a tough old salt, so maybe he’ll bounce back quicker than most.”

“Let’s hope so,” Smith said. “This mission is tailor-made for his unique skill set.”

“How long do we have?”

“Your team needs to be mission-ready in two weeks, no later.”

Deuce stood up and walked east on Calle Ocho for eleven blocks to the parking garage where he’d left his car. He never parked near where he was going to meet someone. He’d been trained that a tail is easier to spot if you’re on foot. Besides, he liked to walk. He had an office about twelve miles away at the United States Southern Command headquarters in Doral, just northwest of the city. However, he and his men stayed and trained at Homestead Air Force Base.

As he walked along Calle Ocho, he thought about the events of four months ago. He’d gone down to Marathon to find his dad’s old Marine buddy, to have him help spread his dad’s ashes on a reef that only the two of them had known about. Together, they’d survived a hurricane and then either caught or killed the men who had been responsible for his dad’s death. Those same men happened to be the targets of a terrorist investigation his newly formed team had been conducting. During the course of the investigation, he’d tried to recruit his dad’s friend, but only succeeded in getting the man’s wife kidnapped on their wedding day by the subject of the investigation. She’d been brutally raped and murdered. That’s a lot for a guy to get over in just four months, he thought. Even a warrior who was reputed to be one of the best Marine Recon snipers in the Corps.

While in Marathon, he’d met a woman that he enjoyed being with, that much was true. He still had his doubts if they could make it work, though. He was Team Leader for a Caribbean terrorist interdiction team with the Department of Homeland Security. Being a former SEAL, he was used to sudden deployments, but would she be able to handle it? Not many women could.

Instead of returning to his office, Lieutenant Commander Russell “Deuce” Livingston Junior drove to Homestead. When he got there, he went straight to the barracks where his team stayed. He met Tony Jacobs and Art Newman, two of his former SEAL team operatives, just as he was parking his sedan.

“How’d it go with the Director?” Tony asked.

“He’s insistent on McDermitt being part of the mission. Says it’s ‘tailor-made for his unique skill set.’ I’m flying down there to meet with him.”

“Don’t suppose you’ll have time to visit a certain waitress while you’re there, will ya?” Art asked.

Deuce rolled his eyes at the jab. “I might, but it’s doubtful. Need to get back here ASAP.”

“Well, tell Jesse we said hi,” Tony said and the two men walked on toward the training building next to the barracks.

Deuce walked the opposite direction, toward a small hangar where a white helicopter with US Customs and Border Protection markings on the side was warming up. He’d called the pilot on the drive down and told him to be ready. He boarded the chopper and handed a slip of paper to the pilot, who punched the numbers on it into the aircraft’s GPS.

“You sure about this destination, sir?” the pilot asked. “It’s just a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. No place to set down.”

“There’ll be an LZ there,” he answered. The pilot nodded, being used to some of the places he was assigned to fly to for these DHS spooks. Most weren’t even on a map.

The flight took less than forty-five minutes in the Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel. Within seconds of takeoff, they were enveloped in a primordial world of water and grass, with the occasional cypress stand and palm tree.  They flew southwest out of Homestead and climbed to five hundred feet. There were no landmarks for the first several minutes, then they flew over the small fishing village of Flamingo, then Cape Sable and out over the sparkling turquoise water of the Gulf of Mexico. Twenty minutes later they neared the island marked on the GPS and the pilot came in low from the northeast. He saw two flags flying above a small house, one an American flag and the other the unmistakable red Marine Corps flag. Noting the wind direction, he flew over the island, turned and approached from the west. From this angle he could see two smaller buildings on the north side of the large clearing in the middle of the island. He brought the chopper down in the center of the clearing, expecting someone to come out of one of the buildings.

“Shut her down,” Deuce said. “I’ll be here a while.”

Deuce got out of the chopper and looked around. The two buildings to the north were new. He didn’t recall seeing them when he’d been here four months ago. He walked toward the house, which sat high above the ground on stilts. He also noticed that the underside of the house, which had been open, with boat dockage underneath, was now fully enclosed. McDermitt’s been busy, he thought. He walked up the steps to the rear deck and called out, “Jesse! It’s me, Deuce.”

The only sound he heard was the ticking of the chopper’s engine as it cooled. He tried the door and found it locked. From the vantage point of the elevated deck, he looked all around, but aside from some pelicans diving on bait fish in the channel, he saw no movement. He walked back down the steps and crossed the clearing toward the new buildings. Both were low structures, built of wood, no more than fifty feet by twenty feet. Approaching the first one, he looked in through a window. Nothing inside except two rows of bunk beds along the back. He walked over to the second building and looked inside. It was a mirror image of the first. They both had a door at each end, one door facing the other at one end, and another in the back, between the rows of bunks. 

Barracks, was his first thought. Next to the buildings was a huge stone grill, with a large pile of driftwood beside it. Walking between the buildings took him through a new cut in the brush and trees surrounding the island, to a long floating dock extending over two hundred feet to deeper water.

He walked back over to the chopper and the pilot asked, “Nobody home?”

“Doesn’t appear to be. Take me to Marathon Airport.”

Minutes later, they were airborne again. The pilot called the airport to request permission to land and in ten minutes, they set down on the tarmac by the General Aviation terminal. Deuce told the pilot to go inside and get lunch as he might be a few hours and that he’d call when he was ready to leave. This was another thing the pilot was used to.

Deuce entered the terminal and flashed his credentials at the TSA agent at the arrival desk, then walked on through the building and out to the taxi stand. There was only one taxi waiting there, and the driver stood up from the bench he was sitting on, opening the front door for him.

“You know the Rusty Anchor?” Deuce asked the long-haired old man.

“Sure, man,” the driver replied. “Five dollars.”

Deuce handed the man a ten and asked for his card. The old man handed him one and they drove off. Five minutes later they turned down the familiar crushed-shell driveway and through the overhanging casuarinas and gumbo limbo trees. He got out and walked into the bar.

“Russell!” the auburn-haired woman behind the bar exclaimed. “Why didn’t you call to say you were coming?”

“Hi, Julie,” he said. “Didn’t know I was coming until a few minutes ago.” She ran out from behind the bar and hugged him tightly. She then looked up and kissed him deeply, right in front of all two customers. Neither of them even noticed.

“How long can you stay?”

Deuce looked down into her hypnotic brown eyes. She was a sight to behold. She took his hand and led him over to the bar. “Beer?”

“Tea would be nice,” he replied. Her eyes lost a bit of the sparkle when he said that, the significance being that he couldn’t stay long. She’d grown used to his unannounced arrivals and sudden departures over the last four months they’d been seeing each other.

“Sorry,” he said. “I flew down to meet with Jesse, but he wasn’t at his house. Any idea where he might be?”

“I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about it,” she said and he shook his head. “He hasn’t been here since the week after… what happened.”

The memory of those three days was still fresh in her mind. It wasn’t something a young woman could throw off very quickly. She had been maid of honor at their friends’ wedding. The bride, Alex, had been kidnapped and brutally murdered the night of the wedding. It was the groom, Jesse McDermitt, that Deuce had come to see. He’d been sort of recruited by DHS to ferry their teams to and from places they needed to go. He owned a big charter fishing boat that was the perfect cover. Not a good way to start a recruitment, losing your wife on your wedding day, Deuce thought.

Just then, a short, very round man with a bald head and thick red beard walked through the back door. He was talking with an older black man. The two of them stopped when they saw Deuce.

“Julie!” the fat man said. “What’d I tell you about letting Squids in my bar?” Then he walked up to Deuce and put him in a big bear hug.

“How ya been, Deuce?” he said. “Hope you can stay for supper. Rufus here just bought some fresh hogfish from one of the local spear fishermen.”

“Welcome bak, Mistah Livinston, sar,” said the old black man, extending his hand.

Deuce shook his hand and turned to the fat man and said, “Thanks for the invite, Rusty. I was looking for Jesse. Any idea where he’s at?”

“Up at his house, I’d guess,” Rusty replied.

“No, I was just up there.”

“Wah I heah,” Rufus said, “he be hepin Carl Trent wit a trouble he be havin.”

“Trent?” Rusty asked. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Jimmy was tellin mi bout it,” he replied.

“Who’s Carl Trent?” Deuce asked.

“Owns a shrimp boat down to Key Weird,” Rusty said.

“Is Jimmy around?”

“He just left a few minutes before you got here,” Julie said. “Probably at Angie’s houseboat. Carl is Angie’s dad.”

“Can I steal your daughter for an hour, Rusty?” Deuce asked.

“Sure, y’all run along. Me and Rufus can mind the store for a while. Just be back here by sixteen hundred, or that hogfish will disappear. Oh, and if ya find Jesse, there’s been a lawyer fella coming around looking for him. Let him know, okay?”

“Sure will, Rusty,” Deuce said.

Julie removed her apron and took Deuce’s hand as they walked out of the bar. They crossed the shell parking lot, then walked around the end of the small marina toward a path that led through the woods.

“Rusty’s fixed up the canal,” Deuce said.

“Yeah, we have three liveaboards staying here now,” Julie said. “Plenty of room for one more,” she added, elbowing Deuce in the ribs.

“I stay on enough boats as it is, babe,” he said. “Why would you want to live on one?” They’d been talking about getting a place together, but he was leaning more toward an apartment.

“Living on a boat would be so romantic,” she said.

“Yeah, for about a week.”

They walked on through the woods and came out onto Sombrero Beach Road, which wasn’t on any beach that Deuce could tell. Another hundred yards further and they turned onto Sombrero Beach Boulevard. They walked hand in hand past Dockside Lounge and out onto the docks. They saw Jimmy and Angie on the sundeck of her houseboat and Jimmy quickly smushed out a joint they were smoking.

“Hey, Deuce,” he called down. “Hey, Julie. Y’all come aboard.”

They chatted for several minutes, Jimmy looking anxious because he knew that Deuce was a federal agent.

Finally, Deuce said, “I need to find Jesse, Jimmy. Rufus said y’all might know where he is.”

“Yeah,” Angie said. “He’s down in Key West, trying to help my dad out of a jam.”

She went on to tell them how her dad had been having trouble making ends meet by pulling shrimp and had been approached by one of his deckhands on the subject of picking up pot and bringing it in for a friend of his. This made Jimmy even more nervous. She said that her dad had done a few runs and then decided he wanted out and didn’t want to do it anymore. The deckhand’s so-called friend turned out to be a Cuban smuggler and had threatened her dad and family. Jesse had gone down there to take over running the shrimp boat and get the smuggler out of their hair.

“Honest, man,” Jimmy said, “Carl ain’t the smuggling type. He just got in a little over his head, man.”

“Don’t worry, Jimmy,” Deuce said. “I’m not here to pop anyone for dope. I just need to see Jesse. I don’t begrudge a man doing what he has to do to take care of his family. Shrimping’s a hard business.”

Turning to Julie he said, “Can you take me down there? I came in on a company chopper. Might blow Jesse’s cover, me arriving down there in it.”

Chapter 2: Two Days Earlier

I’d been working hard for over four months. Working with my hands allows my mind to drift. The first week after my wife was murdered, I blamed myself. So, for the last eight weeks, while working to enlarge my channel and turning basin, I’d been thinking and rethinking the steps I’d taken. I finally came to the realization that sometimes shit just happens. You hear all the time about good things happening to bad people and bad things happening to good people. Alex was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That settled things in my head, but not my heart. In the first week it took me to come to grips with that, I’d finished the channel and basin and then started on my island. Hurricane Wilma had sure made a mess of it. There was a lot of flotsam blown up onto the southern and western shores and quite a few trees knocked down by the high wind. I bagged all the small stuff that wouldn’t burn and dragged the bigger pieces to the barge my friend Rusty had loaned me. It was his barge and backhoe that I’d used to dig the channel. My dog, Pescador, helped by carrying and dragging assorted debris to me from the water. He’s a Portuguese water dog and really big. Equally adept in the water and on shore, it was nothing for him to drag a large tree branch hundreds of yards through the water. Most of what he brought ashore, I piled on the fire in the center of the island.

Alex and I had found Pescador the day after the hurricane. He was stranded on a little island, no more than a sandbar really, just east of my tiny island. He’s very intelligent and we were sure that he belonged to someone, but after we’d had him scanned for a microchip, placed ads in all the south Florida papers and entered his picture and description on a Hurricane Wilma lost and found website, nobody had claimed him.

When the work on the channel and island was nearly complete, I’d contacted a lumberyard and arranged to have a floating dock built and barged out to me, along with nearly three tons of building material. My first chore was cutting down a tall coconut palm that stood in the middle of a clearing I’d created a couple of years ago in the hopes of planting a small vegetable garden. The soil had proven to be too sandy and the groundwater too salty to grow much of anything. But, I still had hopes of maybe bringing in good topsoil and growing my own food one day. Lately, I’d been thinking of growing enough food for more than just myself.

The clearing was now a landing zone for a single helicopter. At least for one flown by a good pilot, since the LZ was small. A friend who helped me take down the men who murdered my wife worked for the Department of Homeland Security and they’d offered me a job, of sorts. It involved moving men and materials to places around the Caribbean, aboard my forty-five foot Rampage fishing boat, Gaspar’s Revenge. He was the Team Leader of a new unit within the DHS that would be working to eradicate terrorist threats in the Caribbean Basin. Eradicate, by any means necessary.

I figured that since I had an LZ, they might also need a dock and living quarters. Using Rusty’s backhoe, I’d attached the auger that was laying on the deck of the barge and run two deep holes about two hundred feet out from the northern shoreline in eight feet of water. I ran the holes down a good twelve feet through limestone and ancient coral rock, until only five feet of the twenty-five-foot-long telephone poles stuck out above the high tide. When the floating dock and lumber arrived, I’d only needed to attach the dock to the pilings and anchor it on shore. I’d helped the men on the barge carry the lumber ashore and stack it at the northern edge of the clearing.

The first thing I did was enclose the underside of my house with hardwood siding. The siding came from my friend Rusty Thurman, who owns a bar in Marathon. He had a huge lignum vitae tree come down in the storm and we’d sent it all up to a sawmill in Homestead. I now had four boats docked under the house, and the siding would keep prying eyes from seeing them. Along with my forty-five-foot Rampage, I had both mine and Alex’s eighteen-foot Maverick Mirage flats skiffs, and a twenty-foot Grady-White center console that my friend Deuce Livingston had given me. It had belonged to his dad, who I’d served with in the Marines. His dad was murdered by the same men who killed my wife.

Deuce had given me the boat and all his dad’s dive gear to sell for him. Rather than sell it, I’d made him an offer on it myself, intending to expand my charter business. He’d said he’d think it over, but then given it to Alex and me as a wedding gift. Alex and Julie, Rusty’s daughter, were launching it when Alex was abducted. I’d planned to just sink the thing, because of what it represented. However, after the weeks of working and thinking, I’d come to realize that it was just an inanimate object and it too was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, I kept her and thought about having the name Alex’s Revenge painted on the stern.

I didn’t really need plans or a building permit for the work I was doing. The purchase of my island six years ago had come with the stipulation that it be improved and maintained as a fishing camp within ten years. So, building two bunkhouses would satisfy that stipulation. I’d known in my mind how they should be built and I’d simply turned the picture in my head into reality. They were simple structures, built on a three-foot-high pier system. The piers were anchored on concrete footings, which extended five feet down into the limestone. Each building was identical, only twenty feet wide and fifty feet long, but flip-flopped and facing one another. Each one had six bunk beds and could house up to twelve people. Deuce had said his team consisted of about thirty people, but only half were field operatives. I figured my island might be able to be used as a remote training facility. I’d even put up a flagpole with a concrete-and-shell base, centered between the two bunkhouses, and a large stone grill with a chimney for cooking.

I’d just finished the flagpole and was fishing for lunch off the pier. Truth is, it would have been easier to let Pescador do the fishing. I’d seen him catch fish by diving into the water many times. But, the weather was nice for January and I wanted to feel that yank on the end of the line. I’d put two nice snapper in the cooler when I heard the sound of an outboard approaching from the south. I trotted across the island, which isn’t hard since it only covers a little over two acres. I climbed the steps to the deck and got my binoculars from the hook just inside the door. Looking out across the mangroves, I could see two people, a man and a woman, approaching in what looked like my friend Rusty’s skiff.

I went down to the new dock I’d built on top of the spoils from the dredging. It ran alongside the channel from the house out about fifty feet, nearly to the main channel, and rising only a foot above high water. My First Mate, Jimmy, and his girlfriend Angie, were tying the skiff to the dock.

“Wow, dude,” Jimmy said. “You’ve done a lot of work out here.”

Jimmy was a good First Mate, but also a stoner and he was obviously stoned now. So was Angie by the look of her eyes. Or, she’d been crying. I helped her up from the skiff and turned to Jimmy, saying, “What are you guys doing way out here?”

“Ang needs to talk to you, man.”

“Well, come on up to the deck, then,” I said.

The two of them followed me up. Jimmy had been here a few times, most recently when he’d helped bring the boats out and shown me how to run the backhoe. “You completely closed in the docks?” he asked.

“Yeah, had to,” I said. “A house way out here, with four boats parked beneath it, would just invite scrutiny.” I suddenly realized that this was the first time I’d talked to anyone other than Pescador in almost four months. Since the barge came that delivered the lumber.

“Have a seat,” I said, pointing toward the built-in wooden table that served as both an outdoor dining table and a workbench. I opened a cooler sitting next to the bench and got out two cold Jamaican Red Stripe beers and a bottle of water. The water was for Jimmy, who rarely drank alcohol. “What’s on your mind, Angie?” I asked.

They both were looking out across the clearing, to the two new bunkhouses. “You planning on opening a fish camp or something, Jesse?” Jimmy asked.

“Yeah, something like that. Now, what’s the problem, Angie?”

She turned back to look at me and her eyes were moist. No, she wasn’t high, I thought. Something was weighing heavy on her mind.

“It’s my dad,” she said. “He’s a shrimper, out of Key West.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve met Carl a couple of times.”

“The thing is, Jesse, about a month ago he got into smuggling weed. He didn’t want to, but he just wasn’t making ends meet with his boat, what with all the new taxes and regulations. One of his crew suggested it. Said he knew a guy that would pay him good to just hide a few bales in his boat, while he’s out trawling. He decided he’d try it once. You know, just to see what he could make. Well, one thing led to another and he wound up making several runs for the guy. Now, he wants to get out of it, says he can’t justify the risk for the money. The guy threatened him, Jesse. Not just him, mind you. Dad’s a pretty rough guy and can handle himself okay. The guy threatened our family, though. I’m the oldest and I been helping him as much as I can. He and my stepmom have two little kids, my half-brother and half-sister. They’re just little kids, and the guy said that if he didn’t keep running the weed, he might come home from a trawl and find that they all died in a fire.”

I listened to her politely, not seeing where I fit in. A lot of commercial fishermen have done the same thing. Hell, if it weren’t for my inheritance seven years ago from my grandpa, I might have been tempted.

“So, why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

Jimmy answered, “Carl needs help, man. He doesn’t have any family left here, besides Angie and the little kids. He respects you, man. I think you might be able to help him out somehow.”

“He respects me?” I asked. “We’ve barely nodded to one another over a beer at the Anchor. He doesn’t even know me.”

“Jesse,” Angie said, “you could probably count the number of close friends you have on your fingers, but everyone knows you and knows you’re a stand-up guy. Can you at least talk to him?” Her eyes started to well with tears.

“Does he know you came out here to see me?” I asked.

Jimmy started to fidget on the bench, a sure sign that he was nervous about something. “Not exactly, man,” he said. “Truth is, Carl’s a proud dude and will probably try to handle this himself. I’m, er, that is, we’re worried he might get himself hurt, or worse.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go talk to him. Maybe we can come up with a way to get him off the hook with this guy without anyone getting hurt.” The fact is, I’d been able to do a lot of thinking. It’s amazing how you can just let your mind wander while doing hard, physical labor from before sunrise until after sunset. I probably went through the whole grief cycle in the four months since Alex’s death. I was ready to move on and getting off this rock would be a good first step.

Angie hugged me around the neck and said, “Oh, thank you, Jesse. You have no idea what this means to me.”

“I can’t promise anything, Angie. He might not even cop to what he’s doing. And if he does, we might not be able to come up with an answer. But I’ll go talk to him. Where’s he live?”

She got a piece of paper and a pen from her purse and wrote down an address on Stock Island, the last island before Key West. I knew that most of the people that lived there were working stiffs. A lot of trailer parks. She said he’d be home for a couple days before going back out. I agreed that I’d go down there tomorrow and asked Angie if there was a dock near where he lived. She gave me the name of a marina just a couple blocks from his house. We talked about other things for a few more minutes, then Jimmy said they had to get back because Angie had to work. Once they left, I walked back and sat down on the bench. Pescador looked up at me expectantly.

“What do you think, Pescador?” I said. He looked across the clearing, toward the bunkhouses and the dock beyond, and barked once, then looked back up at me. “I agree. Let’s go catch some more.”