Fallen Hero: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 10) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Dedication

  More by Wayne Stinnett

  Maps

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  More by Wayne Stinnett

  Copyright © 2016

  Published by DOWN ISLAND PRESS, LLC, 2016

  Lady’s Island, SC

  Copyright © 2016 by Wayne Stinnett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication Data

  Stinnett, Wayne

  Fallen Hero/Wayne Stinnett

  p. cm. - (A Jesse McDermitt novel)

  ISBN-10: 0-9981285-1-1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9981285-1-1

  Cover Photo by Fotomak

  Graphics by Wicked Good Book Covers

  Edited by Larks & Katydids

  Proofreading by Donna Rich

  Interior Design by Colleen Sheehan, WDR Book Designs

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Many people and places in this work are real, but used fictitiously with permission. Many of the locations herein are also fictional, or are used fictitiously. However, I took great pains to depict the location and description of the many well-known islands, locales, beaches, marshes, bars, and restaurants throughout the Bahamas and Port Royal Sound areas, to the best of my ability.

  There comes a time in every warrior’s life when he knows it’s time to finally step aside and leave the heavy lifting to younger men. There are also times when men of good conscience are ordered to step aside. The setting for this book is just before the 2008 Presidential election. Politics have no place on the battlefield, yet political winds are constantly influencing and changing the way international conflicts are handled.

  This will be the final novel in the Jesse McDermitt Caribbean Adventure Series, and the end of the Caribbean Counter-terrorism Command. But, don’t worry; the story ain’t over yet. Next year, Jesse and most of his friends will be back in Rising Storm, the first novel in the Jesse McDermitt Caribbean Mystery Series.

  As always, my greatest source of inspiration, ideas, and support for my writing comes from my wife, Greta. She’ll sit and listen to the same plot points over and over, offering suggestions and tweaking ideas, as I work the story out in my head. Without her as a sounding board, her continued support, as well as the support from the rest of family, none of this would ever have happened.

  Much gratitude to Detective Adam Richardson, for all his help with the day-to-day life of a police detective. I’ve gotten so much insight from his blog on www.writersdetective.com.

  To my Aussie buddy, Gary Cox, I owe many thanks for the idea of having two old Conchs sharing different sides of a common story over a beer. I truly appreciate it. Also thanks to one of my readers, Erin Finigan, who suggested the name for Jesse’s Noserider.

  My beta reading team went above and beyond on this one. These folks are the polishers. Much gratitude is owed to Mike Ramsey, Marcus Lowe, Katy McKnight, Dana Vihlen, Dave Parsons, Gary Cox, Charles Hofbauer, Karl Schulte. Debbie Kocol, Ron Ramey, and Dr. John Trainor. I rely on the vast experiences and knowledge these folks bring to the table, as well as their sharp minds and attention to details, to find all the holes in my stories. The writing process takes months, and they devour my work in hours, spitting out the bones of discordance, then rereading it to find all the things I’d forgotten about weeks or months earlier.

  Today is November 20th, and this foreword is the last thing I’m writing for this project before it goes for editing. It also happens to be a warm, sunny day. So I’m gonna fork the Hog and get some wind therapy. See you in the spring.

  To my eldest granddaughter Kira, who aspires to one day be a writer and spend half of every day in front of her computer, bleeding her heart out.

  “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”

  — Mark Twain

  If you’d like to receive my twice a month newsletter for specials, book recommendations, and updates on coming books, please sign up on my website: www.waynestinnett.com

  The Charity Styles Caribbean Thriller Series

  Merciless Charity

  Ruthless Charity

  Heartless Charity (Spring, 2017)

  The Jesse McDermitt Caribbean Adventure Series

  Fallen Out

  Fallen Palm

  Fallen Hunter

  Fallen Pride

  Fallen Mangrove

  Fallen King

  Fallen Honor

  Fallen Tide

  Fallen Angel

  Fallen Hero

  The Gaspar’s Revenge Ship’s Store is now open. There you can purchase all kinds of swag related to my books.

  WWW.GASPARS-REVENGE.COM

  Water stretched to the horizon in every direction, so clear that I could easily see a small crab moving across the sandy bottom, twenty feet away. The shallows in the distance were punctuated here and there by flat, mangrove-covered islands, seeming to float just above the glassy surface. I knew the mirage was caused by the calmness of the water, but it still looked a bit surreal, kinda like a Salvador Dalí painting. The scent of iodine and brine, mixed with the low-tide smell of the exposed flats, filled my nostrils with every breath. Above a few of the larger islands, the fronds of coconut palms hung limp in the warm, still, tropical air, silhouetted against a cobalt-blue sky.

  What many parts of the country call fall is my favorite time of year down here. To Keys’ locals, it’s the quiet time between the different tourist seasons. The rowdy college-aged tourists are gone, pulled back to their campuses by schedules they have to keep. The annual influx of snow-birds has yet to arrive and for a few weeks, the water is uncongested and all is quiet in the back country of the Florida Keys.

  We just don’t have the changing of four distinct seasons that other parts of the country enjoy. It’s dry from December through April and rainy the rest of
the time. It doesn’t rain every day in the rainy season, but it can.

  The dry season was still almost two months away. I was in calf-deep water, several hundred feet from my boat. On a day like this, I’d have been surprised if there was anyone within five miles of where I stood. And if there was anyone around, I’d probably have known them. The back country was my backyard.

  The warm, slow-moving current gently parted around my ankles. Tiny swirls of water moved slowly away from where my feet were planted, as if the current were agitated or confused by this interruption of its twice-daily commute. My bare feet had been sucked down into the sand by the movement of the water and then covered over by the fine yellow-white crystals.

  “Do you see him?” I whispered to Finn, who stood motionless beside me.

  At just over a year old, Finn still had many of his puppy mannerisms. Physically, he was a muscular, full-grown, ninety-five-pound mixed-breed yellow lab. His previous owner had told me that he was three-quarters yellow lab and one quarter German short-haired pointer. Sometimes though, I couldn’t help but think that the quarter of him that wasn’t lab was actually clownfish.

  He looked up at me for a moment and whined, before returning his gaze to the horizon. Both of us scanned the water ahead for any movement.

  It was so quiet and still here, miles from anywhere, that I heard the gentle dripping sound, and again looked down at Finn. His left paw was raised out of the water, his body rigid, his eyes locked on something off to the right.

  Okay, so maybe he is part pointer.

  I followed his gaze out over the water, but at first I didn’t see anything. Then, almost imperceptibly, a slight shadow moved. It appeared like a ghostly gray apparition in the water, about forty feet away. I guess that’s where the “gray ghost” nickname comes from.

  Bonefish came to this sandy flat to feed when the tide was falling, and they were one of the hardest fish to catch, for a number of reasons. We’d seen this particular guy on three outings now, and each time we saw him he just seemed to vanish in the gin-clear water. He was one of the biggest bones I’d ever seen—and whenever he was there, the other fish left. The times Finn and I had fished there and not seen a single fish, we agreed the big guy was there, but he was just so good at concealment that neither of us could detect him.

  I knew a thing or two about cover and concealment. As a Marine sniper instructor, it had been my job to teach Marines how not to be seen, to stay alive. That seemed like a lifetime ago, though it had been only nine years.

  Again, the shadow evaporated.

  It reappeared for a moment, a good twenty feet from where I’d been looking; I began casting ahead of it, trying to anticipate which way he might go. Before my third whip of the lightweight fly rod, the great bonefish had disappeared again. I continued the whipping motion, keeping the fly in the air and not letting it touch the water, hoping he’d reappear. He didn’t.

  Finn whined again; when I looked at him, he had his head cocked to the side, which I’d come to understand was his way of asking a question.

  “I don’t know where he went, buddy.” That seemed to satisfy Finn’s curiosity and he went back to scanning the water around us.

  I live in the Content Keys, on a little island that’s barely two acres at high tide. It sits at the western end of Harbor Channel, where the channel turns south and disappears into a maze of flats and cuts that only those who know the water can navigate.

  The sand flat we were fishing is just north of Crane Key and Raccoon Key, both uninhabited. Slightly deeper water can be found in Cudjoe Basin to the west, and my island lies about four miles to the east. At low tide, I can walk home.

  To get to either my house or this flat, you have to first know where they are and then know how to get out there. The old joke about “you can’t get there from here” is apropos for the back country. Sure, it looks like water everywhere, but the unmarked deeper cuts are the only place a boat can go and you have to have a boat to get out here. And not just any boat—it has to be a shallow draft boat. Or you have to come down Harbor Channel, in full view of my island for several miles.

  There are no roads or bridges up in the back country. The islands all around look much the same as they did when early Spanish explorers first found them and deemed los cayos unworthy of settlement. They also determined that the waters around the Keys, known collectively as Los Martires, were too treacherous to sail. So, for the most part, they remained uninhabited for a couple hundred years after their so-called discovery—well, apart from the occasional Indian visitors who had been coming here for centuries, and a few piratical attempts to settle.

  I let the fly drop into the water, dejected once again. Bonefish aren’t any good as a food fish, but they are tremendously exciting to catch, regardless of size. Their fighting ability is on par with fish twice their size, and they’re one of the smartest fish I’ve ever stalked. The inside of a bonefish’s mouth is bony, and you can’t set a hook. A barbed hook is useless for bonefish. The only way you can catch one is by keeping constant tension on the line and the point of the hook against his bony palate. If he charges toward you, and you’re not ready for it, the line will go slack and the hook will simply fall out of his mouth.

  “He wins again,” I said to Finn, as I reeled in the line. “It’s getting late anyway, close to beer-thirty. Why don’t we get back to the boat?”

  Finn barked once, his big tail wagging from side to side. I hooked the fly in one of the rod’s eyes, and together we started walking back through the shallow water toward my boat, swinging on its anchor line in about two feet of water almost a quarter mile away.

  Finn beat me to the boat, scaring a couple of gulls, who’d chosen my T-top for a perch, into noisy flight. Finn’s feet barely touched the bottom, so he half swam and half lunged to the stern, where he scrambled up the “doggy ladder” a friend had built for me, and over the transom.

  Just as I pushed myself up onto the gunwale, I heard a gunshot ring out. I immediately tumbled ungracefully forward into the cockpit of my little Grady-White, grabbing Finn and pulling him down. I’ve heard enough gunshots that I wasn’t confused that it might be a car backfiring, or kids playing with firecrackers. Besides, the nearest car was a good ten miles away and the only kids were the two on my island.

  I reached up and opened the storage box under the seat. Feeling inside, I pulled out my Sig Sauer P226, stripping it from its holster and thumbing the hammer back. I didn’t need to check if there was a round in the chamber.

  The gunshot had come from over my shoulder, to the northwest. It sounded like it was a long way off, but the only thing out there is Sawyer Key, Snipe Key, and a few smaller islands, all uninhabited. I raised my head over the gunwale and looked around carefully. Seeing nothing but the islands that lay nearly a mile away, I raised myself to a crouch and went to the side box of the console for my binoculars.

  Scanning the horizon to the northwest, I couldn’t see anything. Sound travels really well over water, and the gunshot might have been five miles away or it might have been ten. There wasn’t another sound, except the tiny waves rippling against the hull and water dripping from my body to the deck.

  Gunshots weren’t normal out here in the back-country, but they weren’t unheard of either. Lots of valid reasons to shoot out there; I did it all the time.

  Lots of less than valid reasons, as well.

  Finn put his feet up on the gunwale, looking over the side of the boat toward the northwest. “You heard it, too?”

  The big yellow dog glanced at me with amber eyes, made a motion with his tail that might have been a partial wag, then looked back to the northwest, his ears lifted and cocked forward.

  “You’re still hearing something, aren’t you?” I said.

  Finn whined once, never moving his head or eyes. Whatever it was out there, rednecks blowing off steam or a drug deal gone south, it was completely quiet now—at least to my ears it was. Obviously, Finn could still hear something. I put the binos aw
ay, decocked the Sig, and put it back in the holster and then back into the rear-facing storage box.

  Whatever it was, it was none of my business. I glanced at the compass and noted the direction that Finn was intently staring. Whoever it was out there, they were a long way out in the Gulf, at a heading of about three-hundred-twenty-degrees, from where we were near Crane Key. I started the engine and went forward to pull the hook. Finn barked at me once; I turned and saw that cocked-head, questioning look on his face.

  “Not my circus, buddy,” I said, stowing the anchor. “Not my monkeys.”

  Working the southeast quadrant of a fifty-foot grid of red-and-white interconnecting pipe, Jenny wondered again how she’d gotten herself roped into this job. Not that it was a bad gig—the money was good—but the days were super long.

  Up before the sun every day, she then had an hour-long ride in a slow boat to the spot she and James had been working for three weeks now. One of them was in the water not long after first light, and they’d alternated throughout the day for the last twenty straight days: one of them on the boat, off-gassing what little residual nitrogen their bodies absorbed, while the other worked on the bottom.

  The dives were shallow, meaning nearly an hour of bottom time. Then an hour surface interval, while the other was in the water. Six dives in a day weren’t a problem, physically, but the repetition very quickly became boring. When one of them was on the surface, they’d refill their scuba tank from the onboard compressor and keep an eye on the other diver in the water. Whoever was in the water last would be on the boat first the following day.

  At first it had sounded exciting—even romantic, in a swashbuckling kind of way. James wasn’t unattractive, and he was quite charming. The fact that they were looking for a lost treasure that was reportedly worth millions of dollars certainly added to the excitement level.

  James was all business, though. Over six feet tall and a trim but muscular two hundred pounds, with sandy hair and a bushy mustache, he had a laid-back approach to most things most of the time. He was an easy guy to like and Jenny had bought a couple of new bikinis to entice him. But on the water it was all about the job for him.