The Last Operation (The Remnants of War Series, Book 1) (2 page)

The driver looked at him and laughed, a short barking joyless noise.

"What do you think? You don't like, see it, it means you ain't involved Mister Deputy Fucking Sheriff. Well you know what? They'd fry you right with us. They expect this shit from people like us, not from you. Makes it worse, don't it, deputy?"

Schmus turned his head. His face flushed and his eyes burned. He felt a tremor in his hands that soon spread to his forearms. All around them the rich smell of decaying vegetation and tidal-flat mud bathed them in a miasma of alien scents.

The fat man leaned down and jammed the barrel of the .22 against the base of the beaten man's skull and pulled the trigger. A loud, wet plopping noise, like a champagne cork popping in a bag of jelly, disrupted the night. The body settled into the black mud, inert as a sack of rocks. That was the beauty of the .22. Enough power to penetrate the skull, and rattle around causing massive damage with no exit wound. A momentary silence enveloped them, as if all the night creatures of the great swamp had paused to watch.

The fat man reached down and put two fingers around a thick silver chain tight on the dead man's neck. He tugged and cursed as the chain refused to break.

"What the hell are you doing?" asked the driver. "Don't take shit from the man you just whacked. You wanna carry evidence on you?"

The fat man shrugged and took his hand off the corpse's neck.

The Indian came out of nowhere. He'd been part of the surrounding blackness, just another unmoving shadow upon shadows. Tall with rangy muscles like knotted steel cables, dark face hidden in the night and head covered with a formless bandanna.

"Shit, what the...," said the driver, jumping back. His hand went to the butt of the .357 Magnum in his shoulder holster. The Indian ignored him, stepped around the Lexus, picked up the corpse by both arms and dragged it away into the night like a human Panther slinking off with its kill.

"Let's get the hell out of here. This is too fucking weird," the driver said.

The fat man shrugged and got in the back. Schmus became aware of a stinging pain in the palm of his hands. He'd gouged out a little chunk of flesh with his nails.

It was there, in that moment, that Schmus felt a tilt in his world, a sentient feeling that ran below his normal senses. He was grateful for the darkness hiding the shudder passing through his body as he got back in the car.

In the stillness of the luxury auto's interior, they didn't hear the roar of an airboat engine starting as the Lexus backed out of the narrow trail.

Chapter 1

In the dark across the canal, shards of pain like lances of glass penetrated every inch of Bobby-Ray's skull. He felt it especially in the tender areas behind and above his eyelids. His head was on fire with the remains of Mr. Jim Beam, fine Kentucky sipping Bourbon, avenging itself in his system. He groaned softly and ran a hand over his face, feeling the small raw bumps. Not good to fall asleep in the Everglades where the mosquitoes were the size of small helicopters and aggressive as mad pit bulls.

Godamn
, he thought, as he sat up with a groan.
This shit's going to kill me yet.
Now that he was approaching the big Three-Oh, it seemed harder to recover. He didn't remember much about yesterday, barely recalled opening the quart bottle and the first drifting, beckoning whiff of fine sour mash. When the afternoon started that way you never knew where it would end, whose bed he'd wound up in, or this time, in the middle of the Everglades, passed out in his airboat with no idea how he'd gotten there.

It was black as the inside of a dead coalmine as a cloud cover snuck in and robbed away any starlight. He stood, held the center console and sniffed the air, senses alert as they could be under the vicious hangover. Something had wakened him, picked out by his subconscious as he slept.

Off to his left, about two hundred yards away, a moving glow of automobile headlamps appeared. Dimmed and reflected from the vegetation, the glow bobbed along slowly, bouncing with the difficulty of negotiating the primitive narrow path. It stopped at the canal's edge. Headlamps stabbed out over the water, promptly absorbed into thick darkness.

From the position of the car, Bobby-Ray had a good idea of where he was, anchored in one of the main canals that ran off the sides of Everglades City. He noted that his airboat was well under a large clump of overhanging Mangroves, invisible in the night swamp. The glowing dial of his commando watch read three AM. What the hell is a car doing here at the edge of the canal at this time, he thought. He picked a water bottle from its holder and splashed a little on his hands and rubbed it into his face as if it could chase away the pounding in his head. He frowned as the sound of a single shot washed over the canal. The noise, although muted, was distinctive and unmistakable as a 747 jet. It couldn't be poachers. There was nothing here so close to Everglades City. Game animals were much further in the wooded areas. The most valuable thing in the Everglades, the big, protected alligators, would be well into the bogs, outlying canals and interconnecting ponds. Besides, you don't hunt them with a popgun. That had been a pistol shot, small caliber he guessed.

As Bobby-Ray watched, the car backed away and the headlight glow retreated until it disappeared over the rise that marked the beginning of the shoulders of US 29.

A few minutes later he heard the bellowing roar of an airboat engine.

Bobby-Ray was the product of the public schools and culture of Florida's Collier County that encompassed, much as it could, the Everglades. In the seventies and eighties, when Bobby-Ray attended, those schools had been notorious for their mediocrity. Even then, he'd dropped out at fifteen. There were only a few things that mattered in the life of the young males in that Southern backwash country, and education wasn't one of them. Drinking, fishing, guns and pussy were king, right up there along with another biggy: Cars and engines. Six years with the US Special Forces had done nothing to dampen his enthusiasms for all those things.

When Bobby-Ray heard the sudden roar of the airboat engine running straight pipes, he recognized it immediately: Chevy big block, 327, bored and stroked. The deeper whoom on acceleration told him dual Rochester Quads. Only one airboat engine like that in the Everglades.

White Hawk, AKA The Indian.

What the hell is going on, thought Bobby-Ray. Someone had met White Hawk on the edge of the canal, and a pistol shot had been fired. Now White Hawk was taking off in that souped up airboat, all at three in the morning.

Basic curiosity crowded out the little demons with stabbing pitchforks lurking behind Bobby-Ray's eyes. He reached into one of the side compartments and pulled out a helmet, goggles and a clip-on light attached by long wires to a power pack.

Bobby-Ray knew every inch of the sixteen-foot platform of Olive-Drab stainless steel and aluminum. He'd built it and equipped it all himself. In total darkness he clipped the light to the top of the propeller cage and flipped the on switch. A dull red glow shone out of the lamp and seemed to be immediately swallowed by the voracious blackness of the night. He put on the helmet, adjusted the goggles and turned them on.

The night immediately sprung bright and clear into the infrared goggles for fifty yards around him. It was like noontime under a green sun, but visible only to Bobby-Ray. He started the engine. That had been his special creation, a fuel injected Honda V-6, turbo-charged and muffled, driving a variable pitch aircraft propeller. The power plant faced the transom, enclosed within a stainless steel protective cage. He strapped himself in the console as he stood. The boat had no seats. Bobby-Ray engaged the drive and stepped on the accelerator. The engine let out a low pitched growling whine as the airboat shot out of the little cove into the canal.

He drove at three quarter throttle while the infrared generator lit the night all around him. Up ahead he could see the bobbing dim light of the single beam on White Hawk's boat. There wasn't a chance the Indian could hear his boat over the din of his own boat. Still, if he made a sudden stop, he might be able to hear the Honda's whine over the Chevy's deep-throated idle so he had to be careful.

The boats flew over the water, past Everglades National Park ranger station on the left, the tiny Everglades City airport on the right, and Billy's Marina a hundred yards or so further down. The spread between the boats widened as Bobby-Ray slowed periodically, listening for White Hawk's engine noise. The Indian's single beam light grew dimmer and finally vanished. Now Bobby-Ray's boat emerged into the widening bay that marked the beginning of the Ten Thousand Islands.

Aptly named, the Ten Thousand Islands were an uncountable number of Mangrove islands interspersed by connecting ponds and natural canals, peat bogs, swamps and rivers of saw grass. Always shifting and changing, most of it poorly charted, the area was home to an amazing diversity of plant and animal wildlife, much of it dangerous. It's been said that the Everglades contain everything that can cure any illness and also much that can kill in blindingly painful seconds.

The needle on Bobby-Ray's tach hovered around 2400RPM. With the variable-pitch high performance propeller, it translated to a land speed of about forty miles per hour and still he was losing White Hawk's boat. Now he followed the signs of passage of the Indian's airboat, the crushed clumps of elephant grass and tamped down saw grass that had not had time to straighten. Large, sleeping great Blue Herons flashed by in the green world of the infrared goggles, the eyes glowing phosphorescent white.

The boats, now several miles apart, burst through the edge of the Ten Thousand Island regions.

As the sky began to lighten just a shade for the coming dawn, Bobby-Ray stopped the boat and took off the infrared equipment. Like a primitive bloodhound on the hunt he sniffed the air and listened. In the distance, dim as a muffled whisper, came the fading sound of an airboat engine. Dawn waited a couple of heartbeats away. There was enough light now so he could be spotted. Better to wait until White Hawk left and then see what he'd been up to. He had stopped long enough in that one spot up ahead. Bobby-Ray wanted to check it out. He could always catch up with the Indian if he had to.

Chapter 2

A lifetime of running in the Everglades had taught Bobby-Ray all the signs. He knew the great swamp like his favorite tee shirt. Following the thin reeds in the murky salt marsh, newly broken and crushed, he saw the wide trails of the big alligators and the patches of muddied brackish water that would take hours to settle. Just past the trailing end of Lostman's River, he found a pond flanked by two, partly concealed, alligator holes. Half a dozen turkey vultures pointed the way from the apex of shallow lazy circles. The giant birds' great wings rode low, warm currents, their buzzard heads fixed on the scene below with patient but ravenous anticipation.

Bobby-Ray idled the airboat to the commotion at the edge of the pond. Three great bull alligators trashed and sent mud splatters a dozen feet in the air. They fought and tore at something, the wide toothed jaws snapping and dismembering great gobs of flesh, bright white and red in the chalky pre-dawn light. The great reptiles liked what the Indian had dropped off. Shreds of cloth bobbed in the red-tinged water and off to the left, a shoe floated right side up. Remains of a human foot stuck out of it. A splintered white bone protruded in the air like some sort of obscene mast.