Fallen Pride (Jesse McDermitt Series) (2 page)

We were anchored at the GPS coordinates that my old Platoon Sergeant, Russ Livinston, had last dove on and where he’d been murdered. In the last six months we’d learned a lot about the Confederate blockade runner Lynx. Some of it through research done by Chyrel Koshinski, a former CIA technical analyst and some from a man named Jackson McCormick. He was the great grandson of Lieutenant Colonel Abner McCormick, Commanding Officer of the 2
nd
Florida Cavalry during the Civil War. When the Lynx was sunk coming out of Fort Pierce, Colonel McCormick was aboard with 12 gold bars weighing a combined 120 pounds. He was in charge of taking the gold to a Colonel Harrison of the 1
st
Florida Battalion in Saint Augustine. The gold was a gift from the French government to help fund the Confederacy and had been melted down into Confederate gold bars at the mint in New Orleans.

Deuce and I had visited Mister McCormick several weeks
ago. Deuce was Russ Livingston’s son and had become one of my closest friends in the last year. He’s a Navy SEAL, but is now attached to the Department of Homeland Security. Last fall, he’d roped me into helping them and I’d sort of become a part of the team he was in charge of, searching out and eradicating terrorist threats in the Caribbean.

It was during that time that a woman I’d known a year earlier
, Alex DuBois, came back to the Keys and we’d quickly fallen in love. Actually, we were already in love but never realized it. She was kidnapped on our wedding day by the people Deuce was investigating and murdered that night. Since then, I’d pretty much given up on life and only found purpose in helping Deuce’s team on another assignment.

While
visiting Mister McCormick, he had shown us the letters his great grandfather had written to his wife. This was Russ’s first clue to what the Lynx was carrying. In those letters, Colonel McCormick had written that he had a French passenger that he was escorting to Saint Augustine, who would help finance the Confederate cause. The French passenger’s name, he’d written, was Douzaine Lingots Dior. Few people in Florida at that time spoke French, but the Colonel and his wife did. It was a rudimentary code telling her that he was taking a dozen gold bars to Saint Augustine. With just a glance, Deuce and I agreed that if we could find it, we’d cut Mister McCormick in. My old friend, Rusty Thurman, had a salvage license, so we enlisted his help. Rusty owns the
Rusty Anchor Bar and Grill
in Marathon and Deuce was engaged to his daughter, Julie.

W
e’d been looking for four days, with no luck. Sometimes we would spend eight hours a day under the surface of the shallow waters off Fort Pierce. We were taking a lunch break when Deuce said what all three of us were thinking, “Maybe Lester came back and found the rest, but didn’t tell Sonny about it.”

Elijah ‘Sonny’ Beech was a loan shark and smuggler in West Palm Beach and Lester was one of his crew. It was Lester that had killed Deuce’s dad and two other of Sonny’s crew that killed my wife
. All three murderers were now dead and Sonny was enjoying the sunshine in Gitmo, due to the fact that he attempted to smuggle terrorists into the country.

The more I thought about, the less likely it seemed.
“I don’t think so,” I finally said. “Lester had everything on him that he’d stolen from your dad and not pawned.” I found Lester more than a week after he’d knocked me off my own skiff and escaped into the northern mangrove keys, above Big Pine Key. He’d gotten lost, ran out of gas and was nearly dead from hunger and dehydration on a small island near Raccoon Key. I’m sure he died eventually, but not by my hand. “If we don’t find anything today,” I continued, “we’ll have to either give up or start again next week.” Deuce’s fiancé, Julie, was currently undergoing training with the Coast Guard at their Maritime Enforcement facility at Marine Corps Base, Camp Lejeune, NC and would graduate in three days. All three of us planned to be there when she did.

Rusty checked the onboard compressor and said,
“Tanks are full, let’s get back down there.”

W
e put our gear back on and stepped off the dive platform at the stern of my boat,
Gaspar’s Revenge.
She’s a 45 foot Rampage convertible that I use for fishing and diving charters, though lately I wasn’t doing much of either. I’d bought the
Revenge
, along with my tiny island in the Content Keys, six years ago when I retired from the Marine Corps. This past winter, I’d learned that my late wife left me an inheritance, most of which I donated to causes that were important to us both. I had my military pension and under an agreement with Deuce’s former boss to make myself available to move his men and equipment around on the
Revenge
whenever the need arose, I really didn’t need to take out charters very often.

We descended
to the bottom and once more split up, using underwater metal detectors to sweep the ocean floor. We’d moved the boat several times over the last four days, but never more than a few hundred feet from the coordinates that were on Russ’s GPS and we restricted our searches to an area no more than fifty feet from the boat. As I swam along a small ridge, my detector pinged. We’d had dozens of false readings, but this one was strong. I pulled a small gardening shovel from my belt and started probing the bottom where the detection was strongest. Almost immediately, I hit something large and hard. I dug away the sand to reveal what looked to be a large, heavily encrusted anchor chain. I uncovered more and more of the chain, until I could see a good ten feet of it. Each link was about six inches long and three inches wide with the rings being at least three quarters of an inch thick. As I pondered the chains significance, I looked over at the ridge we’d been following. Suddenly, it struck me. I was looking at the remnants of a boat, the lines still clearly visible in my mind’s eye.

I reached back and pulled on a plastic ball that was bungeed
to my tank and released it. It made a loud clanging sound that traveled a long way underwater. A few minutes later, Deuce and Rusty swam over the ridge and down to where I rested on my knees on the ocean floor. I pointed out the chain and Deuce swam to it and examined it closer. He looked up and nodded, thinking the same thing I was. Could this be the anchor chain of the Lynx? All three of us had studied the shipbuilder’s drawings, read everything Chyrel found on the subject and the chain was the perfect size to all the references we found on it.

Then I pointed to the ridge itself
. At first, Deuce and Rusty didn’t see it and looked back at me with a shrug. I cupped my hands, with the outside edges of my palms together, the signal for ‘boat’. They looked back at the low wall and I watched as both their heads turned studying the length of it. Together we swam toward it, then up to the top. I used the gardening shovel to move some of the sand away from the edge and soon found what looked like a large ships rib just below the sand. Moving exactly two feet along the top of the ridge I did the same thing and found another. Rusty moved the opposite way and found a third one. He then pointed away from the ledge where the bottom fell away about 20 feet from where we were. I kicked toward the surface until I could hover about 10 feet above the others to get a ‘bird’s eye’ view. Rusty and Deuce joined me and I could tell from the look in their eyes they could see it also. There on the bottom, was the outline of a broken ship, over 200 feet in length. However, unless you were looking for a ship, it appeared to be just two ledges that ran parallel, then came together at both ends. We knew the Lynx was steel hulled, but underlaid with wooden stringers. It was the stringers that had caught my attention, seeming to be too symmetrical. The steel hull had long since rusted away to nothing.

I looked up at the position of the
Revenge
and noted she was nearly on top of us. I needed to move her straight forward of the current position about fifty feet, slightly more than a boat length, then we could use the mailbox I’d bought to clear some of the sand away. A mailbox is a large tube that turns at a 90 degree angle and fits over the propeller of a boat to force water straight down.

I motioned to Rusty and pointed at the center of the ship below us, then pointed to Deuce and myself and up to the
Revenge
. Rusty and I had probably made a thousand dives together and he knew instantly what I wanted him to do. He swam down to the bottom, positioning himself right in the middle of the old ship.

Deuce and I swam to the surface and I climbed aboard, telling Deuce to hang on the swim platform and tell me when to stop.
I climbed up to the bridge and engaged the anchor windlass. Fortunately we’d let out a lot of anchor rode. Slowly the
Revenge
crept forward, pulling the anchor line aboard. After a few minutes Deuce called up to me, “Hold it there. I’m directly over Rusty.”

A minute later, Rusty was aboard and we put two large Danforth anchors in the small rowing dingy we were towing. Deuce climbed into the dingy and rowed astern at a 30 degree angle until the 100 foot anchor line
s were fully paid out. He dropped the anchor overboard and Rusty hauled on it until the line was tight, then lashed it to the port davit while Deuce rowed in an arc to another position 30 degrees out from the stern in the opposite direction. There, he dropped the second anchor. Rusty hauled on that line and tied it off to the starboard davit, once it was taut.

Now we were anchored solidly above the wreck. Rusty and I lowered the mailbox, which I’d rigged without having to drill holes in the transom by
attaching it to the swim platform itself. It wasn’t perfect, but should work if I didn’t rev the starboard engine too high. As Deuce was rowing back to the boat, I noticed a Florida Marine Patrol boat approaching. It came along side as Deuce was climbing back aboard. There were two FMP Officers aboard, a Lieutenant and a Sergeant, the Sergeant at the helm.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” I said while climbing down from the bridge.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Briggs. Can I ask what you think you’re doing?”

“You could,” Deuce said. “
But we know what we’re doing.”

The Lieutenant looked from me, to Deuce.
“It appears to me that you’re doing some kind of salvage work here. You have to be a licensed salvor to do that and this doesn’t look like a salvage boat.”

Rusty had already gone to his bag to get his Salvor’s license, knowing the FMP Officer would want to see it. Handing it to the man he said, “You mean like this one, Eltee?”

The Lieutenant studied the document and looked at Rusty, then at the two of us. “I’ll need to see some ID. From all of you.”

Deuce stepped closer to the gunwale and stared down at the Lieutenant.
He’d retrieved his wallet from his pants pocket, lying on the cleaning table by the salon hatch, opened it and showed the Lieutenant his DHS credentials. “No you won’t. I’m an agent with Homeland Security. You can leave now.”

“Mister,” the Lieutenant said, “I don’t care if you’re James Bond himself. These waters are my juris….”

Deuce cut him off mid-sentence. “Lieutenant Briggs, you work for the state of Florida and I just identified myself as an agent for the Department of Homeland Security, a federal agency. Our papers are in order and you’re dismissed. Or, if you like, I can have Captain McDermitt here contact your boss and he can tell you you’re dismissed. Both ways, you’re gone and we’re in the water in less than five minutes. Your call.”

The Lieutenant looked at his Sergeant, then handed Rusty the license back. “No wonder nobody like
s you Feds,” he said as he motioned for the Sergeant to shove off.

Once they were well away, Deuce turned to Rusty and grinned. Rusty said, “You really get your rocks off doing that, don’t you?”

“Absolutely.” Then he looked over at me and added, “Let’s blow some sand away, Jesse.”

I climbed back up to the bridge and started the
starboard engine, while Rusty and Deuce looked over the stern rail on either side. I put the engine in forward and brought the rpm’s up to 1000. The mailbox would probably hold at 1500, but the water was only 20 feet deep and the big props on the
Revenge
move a lot of water. I held it there for about four minutes, then backed it down, put the transmission in neutral and shut off the engine.

“Can’t see shit,” Rusty said. “You sure blew up a lot of sand.”

We had to wait about ten minutes more while the compressor refilled the three tanks yet again. By then, the current had carried away most of the sand and we could see the outline of the ship clearly. We put our gear back on and headed back down to the bottom. We only had a couple of hours of daylight left.

Before we even got close to the bottom, Rusty pointed and we all saw it. The unmistakable glint of gold.
Even after more than 140 years buried in the sand, it gleamed like the day it was removed from the molds. Gold is too dense for anything to attach to it. Scattered in a small area were eleven gold bars and we each picked one up. I looked over at Deuce and Rusty. They were both having a hard time breathing, grinning around their regulators as they were. We each carried the bars up to the boat and I climbed up on the swim platform, while they went back down four more times. I stacked the gold bars in one of the fish boxes built into the deck as they brought them up.