Florida Firefight (9 page)

As he booted the machine with his outlaw RUSTLED software, something suddenly touched one of his own memory electrodes:

“
Perhaps one day I will find you alone, and I will show you what a coward Pedro Cartagena is
…”

The words the Colombian had used to threaten Winnie.

Quickly Hawker pulled on his running shoes and found four more of the seismic plates. They would transmit over a mile, and her cottage was less than five blocks away.

Outside, he relocated the shovel. He hoped she was asleep and wouldn't hear him digging in her yard.

It was two
A.M.
by the ghostly glow of his submariner watch.

Down the bay he could see lights at Chatham Harbor. Maybe the Colombians were bringing in another load.

Hawker had hidden his anger from Buck Hamilton and the rest. Now it all came rushing up. James Hawker's eyes narrowed to slits as he studied the distant harbor.

“
Try me again, you bastards
,” he whispered in the night. “
Try me now that I'm ready. Please
.”

eleven

Hawker fell easily into the role of owner of the Tarpon Inn.

He even enjoyed it.

He had had two careers in his life, and this was the first that didn't demand he wear a uniform. Graeme Mellor slowly introduced him to the day-by-day operation of the lodge and was soon insisting that Hawker take control.

With little hesitation Hawker did just that. As far as Mellor and the rest were concerned, Hawker really was the new owner.

One of the hardest things was getting Buck Hamilton to leave town. Hawker finally had to take him aside and insist on it, reasoning that no one would believe the cover story if Buck hung around and persisted in giving orders to the staff.

A call from Jacob Montgomery Hayes inviting Buck to a duck hunt didn't hurt. Even so, Hamilton left grudgingly, vowing to return in time to help Hawker “kick a little Colombian ass!”

Everyone was sorry to see him go, including Hawker.

The lodge had three full-time staff members: Mellor, who tended bar and took care of the ordering; Sandy Rand, a buxom, good-natured blond waitress who also cleaned rooms; and Logan, a huge bearded Vietnam vet who was known both for his temper and his poet's touch in the kitchen. Of the three, Logan was the hardest to get to know. But Hawker made it clear that of the many problems the Tarpon Inn had, bad cooking was not one of them. Soon Logan was offering morning pleasantries, even smiling.

And the Tarpon Inn
did
have problems. Over the past year Buck Hamilton had allowed the place to go to hell. As Hawker well knew, it was a common problem. Discontent had spread through the community like an epidemic. And the epidemic was fear. Fear infested the island, and every business suffered. Mahogany Key was like a microcosm of Jacob Montgomery Hayes's American parable: Now was the village's time of chaos. In time—a very short time—the town would heave a final gasp and die.

Hawker and Mellor often talked about it after the bar had closed, sitting over cold beer.

Hamilton's first mistake had been to concession out the marina part of the operation. The couple running the marina were a man and woman who hadn't matured out of their late-sixties hippiehood. They wore their hair in ponytails, and they were rude and impatient with customers. Business hours at the marina varied with the amount of dope they had smoked the night before.

Hawker tried talking to them, but they treated him with the same contempt their customers suffered.

It was a mistake they wouldn't make again.

Hawker made a phone call and, with Buck Hamilton's blessings, gave the two their walking papers. He did some scouting around and found a third-generation Mahogany Key man whose boat had been sabotaged by the Colombians. He had a wife and four sons, and only the little bit of pride he had left kept him from applying for welfare.

Hawker invited him to the marina, showed him around and offered him the place on a straight percentage basis. There would also be a percentage bonus for any net volume that exceeded profits of the previous year. He could hire two of his sons to work around the marina, and they would all be covered under a new co-op workers' compensation and hospitalization plan Mellor had already arranged. Benefits would be paid for from the marina's gross.

The man became misty eyed as he accepted Hawker's offer, vowing to give Tarpon Inn the best damn marina south of Sanibel.

To be sure he had the customer flow to do it, Hawker enlisted the ready aid of Dr. Winnie Tiger. He had seen Winnie just about every day since his arrival. The first week she had insisted on checking his stitches. The second week he had insisted on accompanying her on field studies. He had an ulterior motive in this, since it also gave him a chance to learn the lay of the land; it was knowledge he might need if he had to lead an assault team through back country.

He had Winnie, who was a competent photographer, get some shots of the marina fishing guide, Harley Bates, catching tarpon. Hawker picked the best of the photos, and he and Winnie pasted up an advertising layout on what Tarpon Inn had to offer. The rest of the photos were sent to major sporting magazines around the country, asking editors if they were willing to trade expensive advertising space for a few days' free fishing on Mahogany Key.

Many were.

Hawker knew he was getting the lodge—and the town—going in the proper direction. But he also knew it wasn't enough. So he made a long-distance call to Jacob Montgomery Hayes.

“Jacob, I need two hundred thousand dollars.”

Hayes didn't hesitate. “As I said, I'm happy to give you whatever you need—”

“It's not a gift I want. It's a loan.”

Hawker explained about the improvements he wanted to make. “But it can't be a gift, Jacob. I'll sign the note—not that I'm good for it. The people in this town will pay you back, though, once their dignity's returned to them. And getting these people working at something again will be a step in the right direction. A gift of money will just make them bitter in the long run. There's no pride in accepting handouts.”

So Hawker got his money the next day by wire. Graeme Mellor knew the Tarpon Inn a lot better than Hawker, so it was he who designed improvement plans. But it was Hawker who insisted that they draw completely on the resources of the community for labor and supplies. Mahogany Key's small hardware store and its trucking business had both all but closed as a result of the disastrous year the fishermen were having. Hawker had meetings with the owners of both and awarded each big orders, paying cash.

Hawker knew that in each community, there are men and women who, whatever their occupations may be, are craftsmen with wood or design or landscaping. He tracked these people down, employing just as many of the villagers as he could. Most were fishermen. All were more than ready to work at something constructive.

Their job was to return to the Tarpon Inn Lodge the splendor it had known when it was the hangout of Teddy Roosevelt, Clark Gable, Hemingway and the rest.

As he hired each individual, Hawker demanded only a full day's work for a full day's pay. It wasn't long before he realized he didn't have to ask. Enthusiasm for the project grew quickly. Workers began at first light and refused to quit until the streetlights came on. Everything was being renovated: the grounds, the foundations, the interior and exterior, even the docks.

Word spread around the island. And Hawker saw the change come over the people—people he was getting to know and who seemed to return his respect and friendship. As they watched the lodge being transformed from a rambling old hulk into a showplace, the decay of their own homes suddenly seemed intolerable.

Pride is a contagious thing.

Lawns were mowed, gutters were repaired and buildings were painted. It didn't happen all at once. But it was happening.

More important, as the people began to take pride in their town, they regained some of their self-esteem.

People hazarded smiles again. They waved at each other on the downtown streets again.

But there was still a shadow. And James Hawker knew that before Mahogany Key could be a healthy, thriving village again, that shadow had to be removed.

The reprisal he expected from his fight with the Colombians had yet to come. And he knew why. Using one of the marina's little rowboats, he had been making nightly trips to Chatham Harbor, the Colombian stronghold. Spying on them was risky business. Once he had almost been spotted hiding in the mangroves in the little skiff when one of the guards unexpectedly flicked on a searchlight.

Two other times he had found himself within twenty meters of someone lurking in the mangrove swamps. The first time he thought it was one of the Colombian guards. The second time, though, Hawker realized the guy was as anxious to avoid detection as he was.

Someone else, it seemed, was keeping the Colombians under surveillance. It was just another mystery in this increasingly complex puzzle.

The investigating he had done through his computer had confused him as much as it had helped him. He had tried data banks in Bogotá and found only that Pedro Cartagena—the man he had fought his first day in town—was a member of a Central American ultra left-wing guerrilla army known as the Tigre squad.

Hawker had heard of that band of lunatics before, and it sent off a gang of alarms in his head. Finally he remembered: the Guatemalan who had murdered young Jake Hayes had been a member of the same organization.

But Bogotá didn't have a file on Medelli—not one that could be unlocked, anyway.

On a hunch he tried the data banks in Washington. There he got a brief file on both Medelli and his mulatto bodyguard, Simio. Medelli was a jet-set Colombian playboy who had been granted a diplomatic position in the United States in return for political favors. Simio had been involved in a number of bar fights in Washington, D.C., almost killing one man. Because of diplomatic immunity, he had never even been arrested.

Both of them were aides to an upper-echelon South American diplomat. Hawker didn't recognize the name. But if he had been the interpreter on the phone the night Jake Hayes was murdered, he would have.

The diplomat's name was Guillermo.

Somehow it all fit together.

Hawker didn't know how.

But he did find out why the South Americans had not come after him right away. They had been unloading, warehousing and transporting a massive drug shipment. Their men had been working almost around the clock.

But the work wouldn't last forever. Soon their ringleader, Medelli, would come cruising in to collect his dirty money—and there would be a confrontation.

Hawker still had much to do, and not much time.

He sensed war in the wind.

And that war was all too soon in coming.

twelve

It began on a Friday night the second week in January, a night of cold bright stars and a south wind that smelled of open sea and Cuba.

The noise was a high-pitched whine, like bees.

Hawker incorporated the noise into his dream. In the dream he had rounded the stone corner of the barn in his birthplace of Dun Dealgan, on the moonscape coast of northeastern Ireland.

It was the dream in which his mother and three older sisters are destroyed by the bomb. The dream in which there is a yellow shock of heat and light, and the terrible ringing in a tiny boy's ears.

His ears.

It was the dream in which the young Irish father runs screaming toward the smoking cottage, crying vengeance on heaven and hell, and Ulster's Orange Order.

James Hawker had never seen his father cry before that day.

He never saw his father cry after that day.

But this time the dream was different. There was the flash of yellow as the bomb exploded, and the
whack
and
thump
as pieces of the stone cottage fell to earth. But there was no ringing in the little boy's ears.

There was, instead, the strange whining.

Like bees …

Hawker jolted upright in bed, rolling to the floor. Sweat coated his face, and adrenaline raced through him. Beside him on the table, the seismic intruder alarm droned out a general alert.

Calmer now, Hawker found the little Ingram submachine gun under the bed and moved to the window. He had not pulled out the sliding stock, and the weapon was like a handgun in his big fist. The silencer made it bow heavy.

It was a warm night, and he peered through the screen. It was a night without moon. Light from the street lamps filtered through the trees. The hood of his Monte Carlo was open, and a man was hunched over the engine. Another man stood guard.

Hawker wondered if they were Colombians or if they were just two local kids trying to steal a battery. He decided to watch for a time before doing anything.

The men finished their work. They closed the hood of the car and did a Keystone Cops pantomine, tiptoeing away. They carried no battery.

Hawker decided to follow. He pulled on jeans, soft-soled shoes and a black sweater of oiled wool. The sweater was rough against his skin. He pulled his pants up and strapped a Gerber Mark II attack knife in an ankle sheath to his leg. He grabbed the Ingram, found the proper toggle channel on the seismic intruder alarm and flicked it off.

The whine of the general alarm continued.

He gave the aluminum case a rap, thinking it had jammed. Then he stopped, frozen in slow realization. He fumbled for the desk light and switched it on. The visual indicators on the alarm unit were mounted in plastic disks, like the volume meters on some stereo systems.

One needle flapped madly in its case. It was the channel frequencied to the transmitters at Winnie Tiger's cottage.

Cursing his stupidity, Hawker charged out the screen door into the darkness. He didn't slow at his car. The men he had seen weren't teenagers looking for spare parts. He knew that now. The car had been booby-trapped.

It was revenge night for the Colombians. The thought of how they might take their revenge on Winnie Tiger sickened him.