Fallen Hunter (Jesse McDermitt Series) (29 page)

“Use it?” I asked.

“Misinformation,” Tina said with a smile.

“She’s good,” Deuce said. “I wonder what Santiago would do if he thought I was his competition and was trying to hire you.”

I grinned and said, “Yeah, I like that. Let’s sweep it in the morning while we’re heading to the first dive.”

“Get your laptop,” Deuce said. “We need to let the others know, so that they won’t call us at a bad time.”

I powered up the laptop and opened the video communications program. Chyrel turned toward the screen and said, “Hey Jesse. What’s up, Boss?”

Deuce sat down next to me and said, “The boat’s been bugged. We plan to use it and give some misinformation. Until further notice, if you have to reach us call only Jesse. The rest of us are his charter clients.”

“Roger, Boss,” she said. “Tony and Art are in position. Tony will be going in, in just a few minutes. I was about to call you.”

“Give me a satellite feed,” he said. Within seconds, the screen switched to an infrared image from space, with a small screen at the top corner with Chyrel in it.
She tapped a few keys and words appeared, identifying Tony, Art, two guards and the camp. Both Tony and Art barely showed up, as their ghillie suits provided insulation making their heat signature harder to see with the infrared camera. Both men were inside the camp perimeter, with the guards between them and the bay. Art was stationary, but Tony was moving slightly, inching his way toward what appeared to be a structure. He appeared to be less than twenty feet from it, with Art another ten feet behind and to his north.

Art’s voice came over the com in a whisper, “Tangos are looking away.”

Tony got up from his prone position and walked quickly to the structure and disappeared inside. “I’m inside,” he said.

“Negative reaction from the tangos,” Art said.

Another box opened in the opposite corner from Chyrel. It was a video feed from Tony. “You getting this?” Tony asked.

“Roger,” Chyrel said as the infrared camera scanned the inside of what looked to be an Army surplus tent. There were boxes of many shapes and sizes stacked along two sides. Tony moved toward the first stack and
the lettering came into focus, Mk777.

“Quantity?” Deuce said.

Tony’s camera panned down, counting three crates, then right counting three stacks. Nine crates of Mk777 anti-tank grenade launchers.

“What else?” Deuce asked.

The camera panned quickly to the opposite side, where a lot more smaller crates were stacked. He zoomed in on one until the letters came into focus, OG-7V. He panned down counting five crates and then panned left to another stack of five with the same lettering. Panning further left was a third stack of the same, then two stacks of five crates with the lettering PG-7VR.

“Okay,” Deuce said. “Get out of there.”

“Wait one,” Tony whispered.

The camera panned quickly to the door. There was a clipboard hanging on it, with a list of nine entries made in handwritten
Arabic.

“Freeze that,” Deuce said. “Get it translated.”

“Roger,” said Chyrel.

“Get out, now,” Deuce said.

“Wait one,” said Art. Then he said, “Clear.”

Tony’s screen went blank and disappeared. We could see him leave the tent and move quickly toward Art. After twenty-five feet he went prone and became still. Slowly, he started moving parallel to Art, who was motionless. We watched for ten minutes until the both started moving toward a group of trees ten yards or so away. It took them another twenty minutes to reach the trees, then they stopped.

“Beef jerky time,” said Tony, impersonating a movie character.

We heard several people laugh from my living room and then Deuce said, “Okay, when you finish your supper get back to where you were, while Sayef translates that list.”

“Already got it,” came Sayef’s voice over the laptop speakers. “It’s a list of shipments, with descriptions, quantities and dates. The first three are for the MK’s and the next four are the ammo.”

“I saw
nine entries,” Deuce said.

“A shipment of
twenty-five AK-47’s and twenty-five AK-74’s is scheduled for tomorrow,” Sayef said. “Another shipment of thirty-five thousand rounds of ammo for each is scheduled for next weekend. It was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but that was scratched out and Saturday’s date penciled in.”

“Roger,” Deuce said. “Alpha One out.”

I closed the laptop and looked at Deuce. He ran his fingers through his hair and let out a low whistle. “This is bad,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“What were those boxes?” Tina asked.

“I recognized the larger ones,” Julie said. “RPG launchers, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The smaller ones are the grenades for the launchers. Fifteen cases of anti-personnel fragmentation and ten cases of armor piercing anti-tank rounds. It’s the frags that scare me most. Terrorists having those means only one thing.”

“Soft targets,” Deuce said. “Civilian targets, malls, sports stadiums. Sayef said the next shipment is tomorrow
and the last one was scheduled for Wednesday, but changed to Saturday. That fits with the conversation they picked up earlier and is probably the one he wants you to make. Seventy thousand rounds would weigh just over a ton and the rifles would be just under 400 pounds. His other gunrunner must have a smaller boat.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The launchers are bulky, but light and the grenades are small, but heavy. The other boat would have to be big enough to carry nine large, lightweight crates, but a weight limit of less than a thousand pounds. That Winter fit the bill easy enough and could probably do the ton of ammo. Since he doesn’t have that anymore, he
’s using something smaller, maybe a twenty-five footer, but needs the
Revenge
to fill the last part of the order. I doubt he’s using that Riva, though.”

“That’s some good intel,” Deuce said. “We’re looking at a force armed with fifty automatic rifles and nine rocket launchers. At least sixty men. Get Chyrel back.”

I powered up the laptop and got her back on video. Deuce said, “Chyrel, were you able to get an idea on how many people are in that camp?”

“Hard to be precise, Boss,” she said. “The infrared doesn’t pick up the heat signature as well when they’re inside. My best guess, confirmed by analysts up in Quantico is there are more than ten, but less than fifteen.”

“Thanks, standby.”

“The main force isn’t there,” I said. “Either they’re coming, or already in the States. My bet is that they’re coming. If they were already in the States, they wouldn’t be shipping the arms to Cuba. Once the main body arrives there and the last shipment arrives, they’ll undergo a couple of weeks of training, then load everything onto a cargo ship.
They’re planning an attack on a large group of civilians for early to mid-March, somewhere in south Florida.”

“Carnaval Miami,” Tina said. “
First week of March, on Calle Ocho. The biggest Hispanic celebration in the country. There’ll be hundreds of thousands of people there. In ’88 they set the record for the longest conga line, almost 120,000 people.”

“I thought Carnival was in November,” I said.

“That’s Carnival, with an i,” she said. “Carnaval, with an a, is in March.”

Deuce looked at her and said, “If terrorists attack a large crowd of Hispanic civilians and the government’s unable to protect them, there’d be a huge uprising in the Hispanic community.”

“Checking terrorist chatter on Carnaval,” Chyrel said. “Yes, increased chatter in the last two months, with Hezbollah.”

“That’s it then,” Deuce said. “Get some rest, Chyrel. Remember starting tomorrow, any communication goes through Jesse, on normal channels and in code. Improvise.”

“Roger, Alpha Base out.”

“Holy shit,” Julie said. “You guys are amazing.”

“We, babe,” Deuce said. “You’re one of us now. Let’s turn in, it’s late. Chyrel will call if anything comes up.”

The two of them left the room then. I leered at Tina and said, “You want to slip into something more comfortable?”
She smiled and disappeared into the bedroom.

I was up before sunrise the next morning. Rigorous exercise, long nights and little sleep used to have little effect on me.
However, I was tired. I must be getting old, I thought. There was an automatic coffee maker with a timer in the kitchen and I’d set it last night before going down to the boat. The fresh aroma of Columbia’s best filled my nostrils. I poured two cups, when I heard Tina padding barefoot across the tile floor. “Good morning,” I said.

“Good night, too” she said with a lecherous grin.

There was a knock on the door and I said, “That’ll be Deuce and Julie. I saw him look at the coffee maker before they left.”

“I’ll let them in,” she said. I hear
d them exchange greetings as they came down the hall.

“Coffee?” I asked pouring a cup for Deuce.

“None for me,” Julie said as Deuce took the cup.

“Are we going to dive the wall today?” Tina asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Nothing too deep though. Palancar Gardens is thirty to eighty feet. We’ll stay above fifty. There’s some cool towers, caves, and swim throughs there.”

“
If you’re comfortable with the Gardens, we could do Yucab for a second dive after lunch,” Julie said. “It’s fifty to sixty feet deep.”

“Yeah,” Deuce said. “Turtles.”

“I’ve never seen a sea turtle before,” Tina said.

“Yucab it is, then,” I said. “We’ll start the Gardens at thirty feet and slowly move down to fifty. The current’s pretty strong there, so we’ll anchor on the
up current side and pay out a couple of hundred feet of rode. That way when we surface, we can drift back to the boat.”

An hour later, having had a nice breakfast in the hotel restaurant and not seeing Senorita Espinosa, we boarded the
Revenge
. Deuce studied the lock on the salon hatch closely. He even pulled a small magnifying glass from his bag. He looked at me and shook his head, letting me know it hadn’t been tampered with. Then he pointed to himself and up to the bridge and pointed at me and made a talking motion with his hand.

I understood immediately. Most RF bugs are sound activated to conserve battery power. I started talking to Julie and Tina about the two reefs we were going to dive, while Deuce climbed up to the bridge. It only took him a few minutes, before he climbed back down.
“Under the first seat,” he whispered. Then in a louder voice he said, “Are we ready to get underway, Captain?”

“Yes sir, Mister Smith.” I climbed up to the bridge and started the engines. Once both evened out to a quiet burble, I muttered under my breath, “Damned
drug smugglers.”

Deuce and I planned the charade during breakfast, using his generic name, Jason Smith. It was also his boss’s name, but I was pretty sure not his real name. The three of them went up to the bridge while I cast of the lines. Tina and Julie were to play the subservient wife and sister.

As we motored away from the dock Deuce said, “Would you ladies excuse us? Maybe go powder your noses or whatever you do?”

“Of course, dear,” Julie said rolling her eyes.

Once they were below in the salon Deuce said, “Have you given any thought to my proposal from last night, Jesse? I want to land on both feet in West Palm when I move down there. My boss up in New York said that with that Beach character out of the way, there would be room to operate freely.”

“It’s a generous offer, Mister Smith,” I said. “But, like I told you, I just agreed to work for someone else out of Miami. Wouldn’t look right jumping ship the first week.”

“What’d he offer you?”

“Fifty large,” I said
, intentionally exaggerating Santiago’s offer. “Once a month, open ended.”

“I’ll match
it,” he said. “Same arrangement, once a month, three thousand pounds out of Freeport. That’s a seventy mile run versus a four hundred mile run, for the same money.”

“You’ll have to give me some time to think that over,”
I said. “Can I call you next week, after I see how the first run with my new boss goes?”

“Of course,” he said. “It’ll be at least two weeks before I move down there. My sister’s taken quite a shine to you. Maybe she’ll want to leave New York, too.”

“Why don’t you go below and get ready,” I said. “We’ll be on the reef in fifteen minutes.” Deuce gave me a thumbs up and I pushed the throttles forward, bringing the
Revenge
up on plane.

Deuce went below, on the off chance that
Isabella Espinoza was watching and listening. Twenty minutes later, we were anchored above the deeper end of Palancar Gardens, our dive flag flying, with two hundred feet of anchor line payed out. We’d agreed over breakfast that after the misinformation session on the bridge, all talk would be about diving and anything else would be written on our slates.

Once we got in the water, we descended along the anchor line to the sandy bottom at thirty feet and drifted back through the Gardens.
Some of the rock spires and cliffs are twenty feet tall here and covered with colorful gorgonian, sea fans, sponges and corals, with a few places you can actually swim through towering arches. There weren’t a lot of tropical fish, but plenty of grouper, parrotfish, and one really large green moray eel. After one swim through, we saw a large, male loggerhead sea turtle swimming along the wall and we drifted along with it, until it dove deeper.