Pine Island Coast Florida Box Set, page 33
part #1 of Pine Island Coast Florida Series
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 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.
“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-One
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.
