Shallow Breeze, page 11
part #2 of Pine Island Coast Florida Series
“What is this new guy’s name again?”
“Eli. Eli Oswald.”
“Okay.” He looked over at Chewy and pushed back thoughts of his dead cousin and the madre that he missed so very much. He set his hand on the door handle. “Let’s go forth.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ellie navigated her Bayliner east out of the open water and past the stonewall jetties that made up the northernmost point of Venice Beach. She turned north as they neared Snake Island, and Turner Key loomed in front of them. While not as small as its Snake Island or Bird Island neighbors, Turner Key was small by any standards, only a few acres and less than three hundred feet at its widest point.
Mark stood at her side casually looking at the island, and then turned away, playing the role of a disinterested pleasure seeker enjoying the water and the sun. Ellie came up on the west side of the key and slowly moved the boat onward at an easy pace of six knots. Ellie’s caller had told them the drop would occur on the east side, so she brought the boat around the north end of the island and dipped south into Lyons Bay. They had put fifty more yards of water behind them when Mark pointed his chin toward a break in the coastal vegetation. The mouth of the cove was no more than twenty feet wide. A dock that looked like it had seen recent repairs sat inside the cove on the left. A small old shed sat near the edge of the water and disappeared behind vegetation as they moved past. She and Mark looked away, looking uninterested, not wanting to draw any undue attention in the event that a spotter had been placed nearby.
Seeing the location in person confirmed an opinion Ellie had formed earlier in the day as she was reviewing satellite imagery of the area. “This is not a prime spot for an exchange,” she said as they pulled away and headed back to the jetties. One pass around the island was as much risk as she was willing to take and was all she needed.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Mark said.
The place was landlocked, and, other than long canals running through Venice and up to the north, there was no point of exit except the way they had come in. The barrier islands had no break back into the Gulf for miles. So, one way in, one way out.
Nothing about the location was a good spot. You had to go south fifteen miles before Stump Pass cut through the barriers and coves and the estuaries started to open up onto the inland coastline. That point on the map and all the way south past Marco Island were ideal spots for unloading and loading. Down there, hundreds of tiny inlets and miles and miles of untrampled swampland made for easy exits. Up here, once any boats got past the jetties, it was open water for ten miles either direction and nowhere but western facing beaches and the waters of the Gulf. Not exactly ideal if you’re noticed and the authorities come after you.
If Norman Hardy really was connected to this, he must be the singular reason for the unusual location selection. The older man did, in fact, own the island, that much they had confirmed. He was worth a few hundred million dollars, and from the little they had been able to find on him, had been a social recluse for most of the last thirty years, occasionally spotted fishing in the surrounding bays or metal detecting at local beaches during off-peak hours.
“If something is going down tomorrow, they’ll probably have an lookout stationed along here,” Ellie said, nodding to the jetties.
Mark said, “If I were on their side, I’d be drawing straws to try and get out of working the drop. They might as well be doing the exchange in a sewer pipe. There’s no other way out.” He looked at Ellie. “You think this is legit? I don’t have a good feeling about it.”
“Only one way to find out,” she said. The Bayliner moved past a channel marker, and Ellie opened up the engine and headed south back to Saint James City. The wind whipped at her hair and sent her blouse flapping against her neck like an angry bird. “I’m getting up close tomorrow night,” she yelled over the wind.
“Up close?” Mark yelled back. “What do you mean?”
Ellie grinned. “You’ll see.”
* * *
Ellie drove to Venice via US Route 41 and turned west onto Ablee Road. She parked her Silverado in a public parking space at Nokomis Beach. It was just before midnight, two hours before the supposed drug exchange was set to occur out on Turner Key. Ellie still had her doubts, still wondered if the call had been some kind of a prank or intended to put them on a false trail. Either way, they wouldn’t be walking into a trap. She would be the only one in the immediate area tonight. Jet, Mark, and Glitch, along with a couple other agents, were set up in a surveillance van just beyond South Jetty Beach, a mile south of Ellie's current location and a half mile south of Turner Key. Jet had wanted to send a couple of his men with her, but she stood firm in her decision to go at it alone. The fewer people around the cove the better, and Ellie could perform a surveillance operation like this in her sleep. Garrett had agreed that it was best for her to go solo and made certain that she was fitted with all the gear she would need.
She undressed in the truck’s cab and pulled herself into a black neoprene wetsuit. It clung to her body like a second skin. She strapped a small waterproof rucksack across her chest. In it was a thermal camera, night optics camera, and a Glock 23 with an attached suppressor. She put a thin layer of dark grease paint around her eyes and encased her head in a black diving hood. She looked around and, seeing no one, grabbed her fins and stepped from the truck. Ellie stayed in the shadows of the small trees lining the inlet and stopped to put on her fins before slipping silently into the dark water.
Wanting to keep a low profile, Ellie hadn’t brought a snorkel, and three minutes later, when she reached the point where she had to swim in the open water, she took a deep breath, dove down several feet, and headed directly for the northern edge of Turner Key. When she arrived she came up slowly and, after recharging her oxygen levels, swam quietly and slowly down the eastern edge of the island. It took her six minutes to reach the mouth of the cove.
The first order of business was to scope out the area. Jet had a drone in the air, and it had picked up no movement on the island. Ellie wanted to make sure. If anyone so much as smelled her, they would call the whole thing off. Earlier that day Ellie had decided to set up inside the narrow cove, at the end farthest from the mouth. Satellite surveillance conducted earlier showed that, at its widest, the cove was ninety-two feet. The dock and the shack were halfway in on the left as she came in.
Staying at the perimeter, Ellie ducked beneath the surface again. She finned through the water and finally felt the spider-like roots of a buttonwood tree directly in front of her. Staying beneath the water, she reached through the thick roots. She was holding a small black cube, three inches across. Ellie pressed a button and dropped it. She started counting and then turned and silently swam several body lengths away. She timed forty seconds and swam back. The little box had generated a small electrical pulse that, for half a minute, shot out through the water in a fifteen foot radius. Anything hovering around the spot she desired to hide in would have scattered. One could never be exactly sure what was living within the mangroves. Ellie didn’t feel much like getting bit by some scared sea creature. She slid her body behind the roots, being careful not to snag on any oyster shells or barnacles, and slowly, quietly, came up, bringing her feet to rest on the sandy bottom. She turned her body around. The dock was now in front of her and to her left. The other side of the cove had a naked shoreline, no mangroves that would make it difficult to get to the grassy area around the shack. She squeezed her eyes, and droplets of salt water fell away. Opening the pack on her chest, she pulled out the thermal camera along with a breathable polyester hood, which she slid over her head. The hood was intended to hide the soft glow of the camera screen. Holding the camera up, she pointed it across the water and scanned the shack and the area around it. The topside of the dock and the roof of the shack glowed a muted orange, still holding some of the heat from the late evening sun that had gone down hours before. The camera couldn’t see into the shack, but it didn’t reveal any traces of heat through the cracks in the wood. As far as Ellie could make out, no one was inside. Everything else glowed a cool green and blue save for a small red blot on the screen a few yards beyond the shack. Ellie took it to be a small animal. She turned the camera off, pulled off the hood, and placed them back the pack.
Perfect. She was alone.
She adjusted her earpiece. “You have good eyes out there?” she whispered.
Jet’s voice came back. “Affirmative. All clear.”
“I’m going over. Keep eyes,” she said.
“Affirmative.”
She slipped her fins off and tucked them into a cluster of roots. She dove under the water and slithered up onto the land at a point thirty feet from the dock. She came out of the water and stepped softly into the wild grass. She walked another twenty feet to the edge of a thin treeline and stood motionless for two minutes, letting the water drip off her. It wouldn’t help matters any if someone got here well before the supposed exchange and saw wet footprints around the area. When she was satisfied that her legs and feet had relinquished most of their heavy moisture, she quickly made her way to the shack and set her ear against the old wood walls. It was quiet. Ellie had intended on planting a couple bugs inside, but now that she was seeing the structure in person there was no need. She could minimize any disturbance and risks of creating tracks by slipping the microphones into the cracks between the lumber. Reaching a hand into the front of the pack, Ellie plucked out two black dots the size of a dime, each less than a centimeter tall. The rusty corrugated roof hung off the edge of the shack a few inches. Ellie placed a mic under the lip then walked around the shack and wedged one in between the boards right next to the floor.
She rubbed her fingers together next to the mic. “Test,” she whispered.
Five seconds later she heard, “Good to go. We have sound.”
That was all she needed to do up here. Ellie retraced her steps and reentered the water. She swam back to her previous spot at the far end of the cove and positioned herself back into the buttonwood and mangrove’s cage of roots.
She was perfectly placed. Branches and leaves hung over her, cloaking her. Tucked away from the entrance to the cove meant that she wouldn’t have any traffic moving past her. It was quiet - no boats were cruising in the bay this time of night, and the thick cover of the trees insulated against outside noises. Only the scattered song of cicadas or the gurgly warble of a spoonbill could occasionally be heard.
The water was warm, and this far north of the Everglades she didn’t have to worry about gators hanging around this near to the ocean. Occasionally, one would be spotted on a beach or in a residential pool, but for the most part the salty waters of the bays this far north detracted gators from spending much time in them. Gators were incredibly stealthy and in pitch black water would be almost impossible to detect. The tree roots acted like a jail of sorts, barring Ellie against an attack that was unlikely to come. But just in case, she had a nine inch fixed-blade tactical knife strapped to her outer right thigh.
Jet’s voice broke through the stillness of the evening. “We have something,” he said. “Parked at South Jetty Beach not two hundred yards from us. He’s climbing over the rocks of the south jetty. Hold.” One of the other agents in the van was operating the drone. The Wasp III was a miniature UAV, weighed less than a pound, was not even three feet wide, and was equipped with infrared and night vision cameras. If the operation went down tonight as anticipated, they would get a second one in the air to track any movements away from the island.
Jet’s voice returned. “He’s perched in a crevice in the rocks. Seems that we have a lookout. Ellie, we may have a green light.”
She didn’t reply. From here on, she would keep radio silence. Opening her pack again, she pulled out the night vision optics and secured them to her head, not yet setting them over her eyes.
It was thirty minutes after midnight, still an hour-and-a-half before the supposed rendezvous, so Ellie rested her head back and closed her eyes. This evening’s operation brought back memories of a similar mission five years prior, carried out in Boca de Briceño, Ecuador.
Her team was seven members, and only three of them had been dispatched to Ecuador. The target was an Egyptian mercenary who had been selling illegal arms to insurgents in the Sudan. From the CIA’s perspective, he was arming the wrong side of the faction. Three months earlier, the Agency had sent in a different team to take the man out. They had failed in their primary objective, only succeeding in killing two bystanders - a small girl and her mother - and their target escaped to South America. Ellie and her team had been called in to clean up the mess and to complete the objective.
Ellie’s team - TEAM 99 - was a shadow and never appeared on formal letterhead. Only a handful of people even knew they existed. On that particular night in Ecuador, Ellie had swum two miles up the coast and entered a small lagoon under the cover of darkness. They waited for the target’s mistress to leave, and Ellie’s team members - Voltaire and Cicero - came down off the hillside and quietly flushed him out of his vacation house. His retreat down the hill and toward the water was predictable. He exited the house wearing only his boxers and an untied cotton bath robe. A winding dirt path led down the hill to his private dock.
Simply executing him in his home or placing a bomb on his boat would have been easier, but the mission demanded that the target disappear, not go up in a fireball that made regional headlines. Trying to nail him in Cairo had gone wrong in every way. This cleanup needed to be smooth; no one would be able to point to murder or a planned assault.
The decision to place Ellie in the water was a simple one. They wanted no visible marks of any kind where his body had been dragged off, didn't want any blood to indicate foul play. No, he needed to simply disappear.
The panicked target got to his boat only to find that his keys were not in the hidden compartment in the console where he kept them. From her position in the water and from beneath the cover of the mangroves, Ellie had fired a small, but quiet, air cannon. The weapon looked like a small grenade launcher and ejected a polyester net with a steel ball on each of its corners. A small pop was all he would have heard. And then the net enveloped him and he thrashed around as if he were caught in a spider’s web. Ellie gave a strong tug, and he tumbled into the water. Hand over hand she quickly pulled him toward her until his frightened eyes were looking into hers. She said nothing, only slid in behind him and, keeping a hand on his mouth so his screams could not be heard, wrapped herself around him and tightened her arm across his throat until his struggle slowed and his breath left him. Then she gathered the net and swam back the two miles to her entry point, towing his body behind her.
The mission had been executed perfectly. Her target had simply vanished. No headlines, no political backlash to deal with. Ellie had loved the work she had done with TEAM 99. There were some days, even now, when she missed it. The intrigue, the thrill. But even more, the belief that she was playing a small but effective role in defending the country she loved so much.
The target Ellie killed in Ecuador may very well have been an Egyptian mercenary selling illegal arms to insurgents in the Sudan. He may have been a peripheral threat to the United States.
Or, perhaps, he wasn’t.
To this day Ellie still fought against doubts that Mortimer - their team’s director - was who he had said he was. Mortimer had been a key part of selecting the members of TEAM 99. Their eighteen months of training had begun with nineteen others; a total of twenty-five trainees. Ellie was one of seven who made the cut. Mortimer had overseen the training personally - never as a participant - he was pear-shaped and most comfortable sitting behind a desk or in a deer blind. When the training was complete, Mortimer had invited Ellie to go duck hunting on his private ranch in Virginia, and, as they sat hidden against the treeline, he offered her the position himself. It was with a clear sense of sober anticipation that she said yes. One week later she, Mortimer, and her six new team members shipped off to Brussels where they set up in a small private compound at the U.S. Army Garrison at Benelux. Brussels was the home of NATO headquarters and provided ready access to locations in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East. Mortimer, who had held positions at the Pentagon, the NSA, and the CIA, was TEAM 99’s primary source of information relating to their missions. It was rare that an officer from Langley would come out and brief them in person. It happened, but not often.
That night in Saint Petersburg, when it became clear that some of their missions over the last six years may have been bolstered by false or misleading information, Ellie had started to wonder about Mortimer: who he was really working for and the true purpose of TEAM 99. She wondered if the team truly had been sanctioned by the CIA director himself, as they had been told, and she mused over whether or not some of what they had done went to further someone's personal agenda over that of the United States.
To this day she still didn’t know.
Now, sitting neck deep in salt water, hidden in the back end of a Florida cove, Ellie didn’t have to wonder which side she was on. She was home for good and, for the moment, remained intent on ridding the area of clandestine drug networks.
Jet’s voice pierced her thoughts. “A boat just cleared the jetties. Coming toward you from the south.”
Ellie secured her footing and pulled the night optics goggles over her eyes. She adjusted them. She looked toward the cove’s entrance and waited.
“Fifty yards,” Jet said.
A minute later and the white hull of a fishing boat, glowing against the green luminescence of the night optics, slowly moved into the cove and docked. Ellie reached up and flicked a button on her headset. Her optics were now wirelessly connected to a feed in the surveillance van.
Three men got out of the boat; two short, one tall, by the looks of them all Latino. They said nothing, walked into the shack, and shut the door. Ellie’s audio feed was connected directly to Jet, and she was unable to hear the feed from the surveillance devices she had placed at the shack. Soft yellow light came streaming through the cracks in the shack, and for the next fifteen minutes there was no movement from that side of the cove. Then, Jet gave her notice that another boat was coming in. It carried a single passenger: average height, no hair, shoulders beginning to slump forward. Norman Hardy. He pulled in, tied off, and, with slower, arthritic movements, got out of the boat and went inside.
