Shallow Breeze, page 12
part #2 of Pine Island Coast Florida Series
“No kidding,” Ellie heard Jet whisper. “Unreal.”
Ellie silently agreed with him. Whoever her anonymous caller was, he seemed to have been correct about Norman Hardy’s little side business. That a man as legitimately wealthy as Hardy would be running drugs up the west coast of Florida was almost unbelievable.
Jet said, “One more coming at you. Just cleared the jetties. It’s a go-fast by the looks of it.”
A couple minutes later the deep drone of gurgling engines sounded through the cove, and a cigarette boat turned in and slid easily through the dark water. As it docked Ellie took notice of the boat’s triple 400 horsepower turbo engines; heavy duty lower units that together would be capable of up to eighty knot speeds in calm waters. This was a serious boat and was extremely difficult to detect on radar, even more difficult to catch. The Coast Guard had answered such watercraft in recent years with a go-fast version of their own, equipped with anti-materiel rifles used to disable the engines of fleeing boats. Two men hopped out of the speedboat. The door to the shack opened, and Norman Hardy came out, followed by the first three arrivals. Norman stood to the side, and the other men worked quickly, unloading the go-fast boat and walking thick, square packages four or five at a time into the shack. After ten minutes they switched course and started loading the first boat - a long center console - with the remainder of the illegal cargo. It didn’t take them long to finish. When they were done, one of the men shook hands with Norman, said something Ellie couldn’t hear, and got into the fishing boat, followed by one other. The boat’s engine growled to life, and it quickly left the cove, heading south, most likely out toward the open water. Norman and another went back inside the shack. The last man stayed on the dock as a lookout.
Ellie needed to swim over to the go-fast.
She had one more thing to do.
Chapter Twenty-Two
She needed to get a tracker on that boat. The go-fast had most likely originated in Cuba or Mexico. That’s where it would be going back to. The odds were that it would meet another boat for fuel and then head off back to its home port. Jet’s team had Mondongo Rocks under surveillance, and as yet there had been no more gas drop-offs, not since Ellie had witnessed the last one herself. The surest way to track the go-fast boat would be retasking a satellite. But there were downsides to that, the foremost of which would be cloudy weather obscuring their view, causing them to lose the boat altogether. Besides that, the regional DEA division hadn’t been the most supportive in Garrett’s efforts to do anything beyond small, local raids that produced only a few kilos at a time. Getting access to a satellite would be an endeavour in pulling teeth off of a crocodile.
Ellie reached down and slipped her feet back into her fins. She removed the goggles and returned them to the pack still mounted on her chest. Then she pulled out the small tracker. It was the size of a half dollar. There were smaller trackers available but not one that would have a range of a thousand nautical miles. After securing the seal on her pack, Ellie took a couple good breaths and dipped underneath the water. No light penetrated the inky water. It was like she was swimming through a vat of used car oil. Using the pressure against her ears, she gauged her depth and stayed about six feet under so her fins wouldn’t disturb the surface in any way. With only her sense of direction and intuition to guide her, Ellie headed for the rear of the boat. It would be crucial to come up out of sight of the lookout. There wasn’t much ambient light - the moon was but a fingernail and the stars shrouded in erratic cloud cover. Still, the human eye had an uncanny ability to adjust when left in the darkness for a length of time.
The last thing anyone wanted was for this outfit to think they were being watched. If they suspected the feds being on to them, they would change everything: personnel, routes, logistics, locations. It would be a complete reshuffling of the deck, and everyone would end up with completely different cards. Ellie wasn’t interested in nabbing a couple runners. She wanted to go as deep into the organization as they could. A high-profile man like Norman Hardy was involved, but surely it went beyond him. Even if it didn’t, the DEA didn’t have the organizational schematics figured out yet. And that’s what was important to Ellie. Not just making arrests, but uprooting the networks and the people laying the roads, not just the ones driving on them.
Ellie kept on, keeping her hands out in front to feel. If she hit her point, she would come up on the left side of the transom.
And she did. She rose slowly, ensuring that she didn’t make any noise as she penetrated the surface. She moved around to the port quarter so the man on the dock couldn’t see her. The tracker was in two parts: the first, a thin piece of metal matching the size of the tracker; the second was the tracker itself. Treading water, she removed the backing off the thin piece of metal and then slid her arm around to the inside of the motor and over to the lower section of the exhaust housing. She pressed the metal sticker into it and rubbed her hand over it. Next, she took the tracker and cautiously held it over the sticker. There was a magnetic attraction, so Ellie kept a finger between the two pieces to keep the click from sounding when they came together. When she was finished, Ellie moved to the port side. The tracker would remain in place until the boat reached its country and port of origin. Once the DEA had that piece of information, they would also have their course across the water and could share it with the Coast Guard. There was nothing to be done with the adhesive plate. That would stay on the boat, and the crew, whenever they discovered it, would wonder what it was, who put it there. The tracker, however, would be sent a signal as it came into port, and the magnet would be released, causing the tracker to fall off into the water.
Ellie stayed hidden by the boat and listened. She heard muffled voices coming from the shack, nothing from the lookout on the dock. She needed to get back across the cove. She slowly dipped below again and pushed off the boat’s hull to assist her depth. She swam out and finned through the water, coming up underneath a cluster of mangroves five feet left of where she had been aiming. She slid back behind the roots and put on her NVGs again so Jet and Mark could continue recording. She pressed a button at her temple, and the goggles zoomed in.
Through her earpiece she heard, “Have the tracker signal. Good job.”
* * *
The go-fast boat was gone five minutes later, the last two men having gone with it. Norman Hardy was left alone on his island and did not appear to be in a big hurry to leave. He casually strolled back-and-forth over the dock smoking a cigarette. Every few minutes he returned to the shack only to come back out after half a minute or so. Ellie kept the camera on him the entire time. Then, like a phantom misting up out of a coal mine, a dark kayak slipped up to the dock, and someone got out, a suppressed semi-automatic rifle slung across his back. The figure was large, muscular, and by his slow and controlled movements, clearly well-trained. Jet had not notified her. He must not have picked it up. They had most likely moved the drones to cover the boats as far as they were able. The paddler was so quiet Ellie hadn’t heard or seen anything until he was fully in the open.
Watching the video feed, Jet said, “Sorry, Ellie. I missed him.”
Norman was on the dock and walked up to the darkened newcomer. After a few words, Norman nodded and got back into his boat. He started the engine and slowly moved away from his island. The figure he left behind walked into the shack. The light went out. The door opened again, and then he stepped out, walked to the end of the dock, and lay down, then reached out and grabbed the line to the kayak. He stood back up and drew the kayak up onto the dock. Then, rather than leaving it there or dragging it on its bottom, he picked it up and walked it to the back of the shack where he set it down. Then he walked to the east side of the rickety structure and sat down in the wild grass, sitting upright in the darkness against the treeline, clothed fully in black and staring straight ahead. Ellie zoomed in on him with her night vision. His face was blacked out with black camo paint and a wide-brim boonie sat low over his eyes. Norman Hardy had conscripted professional security to keep an eye over the remainder of the packages that were still inside the shack. That’s when the words spun through Ellie’s mind - one right after the other - making a precise connection that caused a dim light of fresh knowledge to dawn behind her eyes.
Security. Private Security. Hawkwing.
More possible and probable connections came: Trigg Deneford, special forces; Hawkwing employed many ex-military; Norman Hardy connected to Trigg Deneford.
Then the question came, the one that popped up the day she met Trigg Deneford at the country club, the day she realized that he indeed was selling drugs. The question that kept tugging at her like an unhappy toddler in a grocery aisle.
Who was he partnered with down here?
And now she knew. Or, at least partially.
The go-fast had brought in a direct shipment - probably from Mexico - and the other boat had taken some of it, but not all of it. The remainder was behind a hedge of desiccated wood so fragile that a burly racoon could push it over. And now it was also being guarded.
Ellie thought of Eric Cardoza and how he had been sitting behind a desk at Mondongo Key Island, keeping an eye on - guarding - the small key a half mile out, monitoring a drop point for gas cans, ensuring the location remained safe and unnoticed. He worked for Hawkwing, and that connection is what had led her to Tampa to talk with Paul Greenberg and Trigg Deneford. But pieces were still missing. So far they didn’t know who was actually running the show. Everything, however, pointed to Nunez. His men tried busting Victor Calderón out of jail, so they knew he was still out there somewhere. The stash house at Ridgeside, where Mark and Ellie had seen Eric Cardoza, that address had known associations with Nunez. Was he the conductor? Maybe. The composer? Maybe that too. Mateo Nunez was a big player. He had a reputation for killing people who tried to squeal on him. All that and yet Ellie and her team still couldn’t trace him back to anything. It was starting to feel more and more like Ellie was in a maze looking for someone who wasn’t between the hedges at all but was up on high looking down on her from above, seeing every turn she made and evading her gaze.
For a half hour Ellie watched the figure, and he never moved. He never stretched, never scratched, never looked to be in discomfort from staying in the same position for a long period of time. He sat Indian-style with his wrists set on his knees. That kind of discipline could only come from the best training. Whoever was across the water from her was ex-military, probably ex-special forces.
“Discontinue,” Jet said. “We have what we need.”
It was time to leave.
The challenge now was that the cove was not empty as it had been when she arrived. Her exit would have to be precise. Any small splash or hint of movement would have the guard on his feet investigating, his rifle no longer slung over his back, but in his hands with his finger resting along the edge of the trigger guard.
Ellie debated heeding Jet’s words. If she stuck around, she might get decent footage of the drugs in the shack being moved out. They might see fresh faces behind all this and have them on record. But on the other hand, the longer she stayed in the cove, the greater the risk that she could be discovered. Especially if Mr. Darkman over there had a keen sense of intuition. Some people did. It was creepy. Adding to that, Ellie really didn’t want to spend the next few hours in the water. It would be daylight soon enough, and she couldn’t be here then.
“Ellie.” Jet was still watching the feed from her goggles and knew she had yet to start packing up. “I’m keeping aerial surveillance on the island. Discontinue.”
Ellie moved slowly, carefully. She turned off the goggles and slowly slid them up off her head and returned them to the pack. Reaching down, she made her feet snug in the fins and pressed her waterproof earpiece into her ear canal. Then, at the pace of a few inches every ten seconds, she moved out of the cloister of covering. She lowered herself down into the water until her lips were almost touching the surface. Then, for the next five minutes, she breathed very slowly. She now had to make it all the way out of the cove and past the entrance back into the bay before she came up and took fresh air into her lungs. Ellie could hold her breath underwater for just over four minutes while swimming. Well, she thought, maybe three. It had been some time since she tried. She was still in top physical shape, but it had been over three years now since she had been on TEAM 99 and tested her endurance every month. The key to holding your breath for long periods of time was to spend a few minutes breathing slowly and then, just before entering beneath the water, take a big, deep breath to fill the entire diaphragm with oxygen. So that’s what she did. Five minutes later she descended once again into the coal black water. She went low enough to give several feet of clearance between the tips of her fins and the waterline, then she slowly began finning through the water, keeping a course for where she knew the entrance to the cove to be.
She leveled off when, gauging the pressure against her ears, she guessed to be at a depth of eight feet. The fins helped, and she moved through the water swiftly. Finally, when she was satisfied that she had gone more than the proper distance, she started to rise. Until, that is, her earpiece sounded off. Jet said, rather urgently, “Ellie, we have another bogie coming in. Looks like a paddler identical to the first one.”
Her heart rate spun higher. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t ask a clarifying question. A paddler? Where, then? Where was he? Still in the bay? Entering the cove? She couldn’t afford to be noticed. It would ruin the entire operation. She was still a couple feet from breaking the surface. Ellie estimated that she was probably five yards from the entrance, now on the bay side.
“Ellie,” Jet said. “He’s coming in from the south. The kayak just popped out of the fringe a few seconds ago, so we didn’t see it until then. It’s about twenty feet from the mouth of the cove.”
Ellie wasted no time. She started to duck her head and dive when she felt the water move hard against the side of her right calf. A paddle stroke had just missed her. She finned hard, forcing her arms through the water in a furious attempt to get out from under the kayak.
But it was too late.
The tip of a paddle hit her in the side of her left ankle. It wasn’t forceful - the paddler was skimming the surface, silently and expertly moving with as little noise as possible. Just like Mr. Darkman who was sitting like a statue on the island.
“Ellie, they stopped.” A pause, and then, “We can’t zoom in, but it looks like—”
Jet’s voice was still going, but Ellie tuned him out. She tuned him out when she felt the blade of the paddle’s tip crash down into her hamstring, sending a hot flame of fire up her leg, into her buttocks, and up through her lower back. She ignored it, ignored the panic trying to bulge in her chest. Panic that had come from not only the pain but also the realization that she had been found out. Whoever was up there had felt the paddle catch and had turned it into a spear. The paddle came straight down; a clean strike with no angle at all, forced down with the precision of fighter who had been trained to turn anything into a weapon.
With her leg burning and her air running out, Ellie swam deeper to get out of the reach of the paddle. It stabbed down again, this time missing her ankle by the width of a fishing line. She keeping swimming down, finally realizing just how much your hamstring played a part in moving your fins through the water. Through it all everything had been silent. Even the paddle piercing down through the water was hardly noticeable. The clandestine kayaker above wouldn’t know if she was a manatee, a dolphin, or a person. Clearly though, he was taking no chances. Now, as Ellie swam hard to get out of range, she heard a noise that she recognized as clearly as she did Major’s voice or Citrus’s yip. The sound of a bullet entering the water, chopping through it like a tiny submarine. The bullet hummed just past her left ear. Another. This time it raced past her right shoulder and, as it did, tore through her wet suit and the outer layer of her skin. The salt water stung as it raced into the fresh wound, and Ellie bit down hard on her bottom lip. Her lungs were screaming now, a fire of their own accord. Ellie could hear Jet’s frantic voice, but she couldn’t listen. She had two choices. Within seconds she could be at the surface with her Glock drawn. She could pop off two rounds into the paddler’s chest and swim off. But that would ruin the entire operation - she could have just walked up to the dock earlier and introduced herself to everyone.
Her only other option was to keep going.
So she did, ignoring the pain in her leg and arm and the liquid fire in her lungs. The alarming nature of the altercation had used up precious oxygen. One of the first rules of any operation was to always expect something to go wrong. To be prepared for anything. Ellie cursed herself as she moved further down. She had known better, of course she had, but once she had most of the cove behind her and was heading back into the bay, she had let her guard down.
Another round sliced into the water, this time hissing a few feet to her right. He was shooting blindly. That was both good and bad. But at least he had moved off of her. After hitting her with the paddle, he wouldn’t know where she was. He still wouldn’t know what she was.
One more bullet cut into the water, further behind her now. It was the last shot she heard. Now the only sound was the hum of her own angry blood rushing all too fast through her ears, propelled by an overactive heartbeat all too fast for her current situation. Deprived of oxygen, her lungs were betraying her, pleading for her to get above the surface. But she couldn’t - someone was only yards from her and would shoot her the moment she came up. She swam north. She still had her bearings, but after the skirmish and now the pain, she couldn't be exactly sure. There still wasn’t a sliver of light. She may as well have been diving on the Titanic.
