Fallen Pride (Jesse McDermitt Series)

PRIDE

A Jesse McDermitt Novel

By Wayne Stinnett

Published by Down Island Press, 2014

Travelers Rest, SC

Copyright © 2014 by Wayne Stinnett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or elec
tronic form without express written permission.

Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in vi
olation of the author’s rights.

Purchase only authorized editions.

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication Data

Stinnett, Wayne

/Wayne Stinnett

p. cm. - (A Jesse McDermott novel)

ISBN-13: 978-0615982915

ISBN-10:
0615982913

If you’d like to receive my newsletter for specials and upcoming books, go to my website:
www.waynestinnett.com

Other books by the author:

Fallen Palm

Fallen Hunter

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.

Most of the locations herein are
also fictional, or used fictitiously. However, I took great pains to depict the location and description of the many islands, locales, beaches, reefs, bars, and restaurants in the Keys, to the best of my ability. The
Rusty Anchor
is not a real place, but if I were to open a bar in the Florida Keys, it would probably be a lot like depicted here. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Florida Keys and El Caribe, fishing, diving, sailing, boating, and of course, drinking. I’ve tried my best to convey the island attitude in this work.

Thank You

I’d like to thank the many people who encouraged me to write
this third novel, especially my wife, Greta. Her love, encouragement, motivation, support, dreams for the future, and the many ideas she keeps coming up with have been a blessing. At times, I swear she was a Key West Wrecker in another life. Or maybe a Galley Wench, I’m not always sure. A special thanks to my youngest daughter, Jordy, for her many contributions and sometimes truly outlandish ideas. While only a twelve year old mind can conceive of some of the wacky ideas she has, many of them planted a seed in my mind that wound their way into the story. The title of this novel was her idea. I need to thank our other kids, Nicolette, Laura, and Richard for their support and encouragement, but mostly for not laughing at a tired, old, truck driver thinking he could write yet another book during the down time in the sleeper of my truck.

A very special thank
you to Nicole Godsey, of Nicole Godsey Photography for her outstanding cover photo. Also, thank you to her husband, Corey Godsey, and friend Zack Bolter, who appear on the cover. You can see more of her work at
www.nicolegodseyphotography.com

I
also owe a special thanks to my old friend, Tim Ebaugh, of Tim Ebaugh Photography and Design, for the cover design. You can see more of his work at
www.timebaughdesigns.com
.

Lastly, where would any writer be without a great Editor and proof readers? While I can come up with a decent story line and characters, it’s Karen Armstrong and her mighty red pen that puts the polishing touches on it all. Thanks also to Beta Readers Timothy Artus, Joe Lipshetz, Nicole Godsey, Debbie Kocol, Rob Pedrick, Mike Ramsey, Marcus Lowe, Alan Fader, and Bill Cooksey.

Dedicat
ion

To Greta.

My best friend, lover,
motivator, inspirer, and wife.

To you, I promise all of my tomorrows.

The Lower Florida Keys

“I’ve been followed and spied upon more than once in my life. An earlier life, anyway. I’ve spent a lot of time in Third World countries, jungle areas, the remaining dark places on this earth.”
- Marion “Doc” Ford,
Everglades,
2003

Two men lay among a cluster of large boulders. They’d been there over 24 hours, shivering through the still
, cold night, and sweating through the midday heat. Each man was covered with what’s commonly called a ghillie suit, a heavy garment stitched with colored strips of free hanging cloth meant to blend in with the surrounding elements. In this case, most of the surrounding element was rock and boulders, so there was a lot of gray in their covering. Indeed, they were nearly invisible from a distance. However, the ghillie suits were designed more for use in jungle and woodlands. Here on this desolate gray landscape they were quite visible if someone got within 20 or 30 feet.

Fortunately, there were few people in this p
art of Iraq and anyone that wandered within a hundred meters of where the two men lay waiting, were visible to them. Behind them was an overhanging cliff about 30 feet high that kept them shadowed throughout the day. No chance anyone would stumble on them from the rear. They’d chosen this particular location for just this reason. It offered ideal cover considering the options and was easily defended, should anyone from the small cluster of homes and shops below happen to come up into the hills.

One man had a high powered spotting scope mounted on a short tripod and covered with the same cloth their ghillie suits were made from. As he looked through the scope, he spoke into a small microphone
mounted on a boom in front of his mouth, “Alpha Six, Raptor has acquired the target. Looks like Nine of Diamonds, sending photo for confirmation.”

Moments later, the image was received by analysts at Field Operating Base
Grizzly in Camp Ashraf, Iraq. The FOB was where Alpha Company of the 1
st
Battalion, 9
th
Marine Regiment was based, attached to the 6
th
Marine Regiment. The image was scanned and facial recognition software only took a few seconds to confirm that the person the two men were watching was a high value target by the name of Ahmed Qazir al Ramani, the 9 of diamonds in the most wanted deck.

Over the
headset, the man on the scope heard a voice reply, “Target is confirmed, Raptor. You’re clear to engage.”

“We have confirmation Jared,” the man on the scope said to his partner. “
You were right, it’s Nine of Diamonds

The second man lay motionless behind an M-40A3 rifle, loaded with Lapua .308, moly coated, dovetail ammunition.
He spoke without moving his eye from the scope. “It’s a gift, Billy. Had it all my life. I see a face and can remember it forever. Range me.”

Marine Sergeant William ‘Billy’ Cooper leaned into the scope, taking readings. “Range is 905 meters. Declination
, minus 10 degrees. Air is still and heavy.” Billy was the spotter. Marine Scout/Sniper teams worked in pairs, almost always alone and far from the units they were assigned to, in this case Alpha, 1/9. The battalion was only recently reactivated, having been stood down in 1994. In Vietnam the battalion earned the nickname ‘Walking Dead’ and still carry it today.

The second man, Corporal Jared Williams,
was an accomplished shooter long before enlisting in the Marine Corps after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Born and raised in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, he’d won a number of shooting competitions starting at the age of 12 and all through his teenage years. He made a slight adjustment to the elevation of the rifle and said, “Target acquired.”

Billy relayed the message to
the FOB and waited. He didn’t have to wait long before the voice in his headset replied, “You’re clear to take the shot, Raptor. I repeat, shot cleared.”

Billy took a slow breath
. “You’re clear to fire when ready, Jared. No change in conditions.”

Jared hadn’t moved a muscle in more than fifteen minutes.
Only now did he make the tiniest of moves, his right index finger, which had been alongside the trigger guard, moved imperceptibly to the trigger. He could see the target clearly through the U.S. Optics MST-100 scope. He was inside a small stucco and stone house a little over half a mile away. He was sitting in a chair, reading. Jared slowly took the slack out of the trigger after taking a long slow breath and releasing it. It was an easy shot, conditions were ideal and the target was unmoving. He had 12 prior confirmed kills, all of them more difficult than this one. Eight on his previous tour in Iraq, and four in the last three months since joining 1/9 and arriving back in country.

The pressure slowly increased on the trigger as the image in the scope moved up and down a fraction of a millimeter at regular intervals, caused by the beating of
Jared’s own heart. He knew exactly the pressure required to release the firing pin and send the round downrange and timed it so that it occurred when the image rose with the beat of his heart and the cross hairs fell on the bridge of the man’s nose. The report of the rifle echoed off the granite cliff behind them, disbursing and seeming to come from all directions at once. Another reason they had chosen this site.

At half a mile, it took
slightly more than a second for the round to traverse the distance from the muzzle to the target. A second that would change the young shooter’s life, permanently. It all seemed to happen in slow motion as he continued to watch through the scope to confirm the kill. In the first half a second, a slight shadow passed over the man’s face as he was reading. In the next half a second, his eyes came up slightly over his reading glasses and a smile came to his face. In the following millisecond, which seemed to take hours, someone stepped in front of the man in the chair. His 8 year old daughter. In the next few milliseconds a hole appeared in the glass of the window and cracks radiated out from it like a spider’s web. In the last millisecond a pink mist emanated from the girls head, spreading over the man in the chair as the girl fell forward into her father’s lap, dead.

Jared Williams bolted upright, drenched in a cold sweat and shaking. The image of the dead girl in her father’s lap and the man looking right at him through the hole in the glass, was still fresh in his mind. As it always did, it took a few seconds to take stock and realize he’d had the nightmare again. He was in his bed, in his small apartment above a garage. The garage sat on a small corner lot in Old Town Key West with a two story Conch house next to it. It was owned by a wealthy Canadian, who was only in residence for a few months in the winter. Jared took care of the property and grounds in exchange for free rent.

He had
experienced the same recurring nightmare hundreds of times since that day two years earlier. His gift of remembering faces was now a curse. After the incident, he and Billy made their way around the cliffs and up into the mountains for helicopter extraction two days later. While being debriefed by an unidentified agent with Central Intelligence, the man insinuated that Jared had killed the girl intentionally. Jared came unglued and lunged across the table in a fit of rage and nearly beat the man to death before Billy could pull him off. The following month was spent in the brig, before being flown back to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina for a quiet court martial. He was sentenced to time already served, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, reduced in rank to Private, and dishonorably discharged. The pride of the Marine Corps couldn’t handle any more bad press about its Marines killing innocent civilians.

His next two months were spent in a
n alcohol induced stupor when he returned to his home in Kentucky. His brother had followed him into the Marine Corps and was currently stationed at Camp Lejeune, though Jared didn’t get a chance to see him before leaving. His mom and dad, now empty nesters, pulled up stakes and headed south to get away from the cold mountain winters. But, Kentucky was his home and where his friends were, so that’s where he went. It didn’t take long for him to find that his old friends from high school were no longer the same. Many had left the hills and taken jobs in the surrounding cities, or headed off to college. Those that remained in the small town of Sassafras, near the Virginia border, seemed different from him somehow. A few years older, but they seemed to be perpetually stuck in high school. Unable to find a job, he was soon almost out of money. He sold his 1985 Ford pickup to a friend, bought a Greyhound ticket to Key West, and called his dad to ask if he had room to put him up for a week or two, until he could find work.

Arriving in Key West was like entering a different dimension.
The verdant green hills and mountains of Kentucky were replaced with the flat blue of the tropical ocean. The regimented military lifestyle was replaced with the wild abandon of this centuries old pirate town.

His dad had taken a job on a shrimp trawler as
a mechanic a year earlier. His reputation quickly grew in the small island community as a man with a knack for understanding and being able to fix all sorts of mechanical problems. In a place with almost as many boats as people, he’d found plenty of work on his days off, repairing boats, cars, trucks, and even did some mechanical work on private planes. He’d saved up, got his private pilot’s license and bought an old float plane, with the idea of taking tourists and fishermen around the island chain to places you couldn’t get to by car and get them there faster than by boat.

Jared’s
folks didn’t really have room in their small mobile home on Stock Island, but let him stay on the couch anyway. His dad made it clear that it was temporary and gave him a month. David Williams didn’t raise his boys to be slackers and they weren’t. Less than a week after arriving, his dad had made the arrangement for the garage apartment with a fly fisherman from Canada he’d met earlier that winter and taken up in his plane several times. A few days later, a friend of his mom told her about a job opening at a restaurant and bar just off of Duval Street, where most of Key West’s hot spots were located. Arriving at the Blue Heaven and meeting the manager, he learned that the opening was for a bouncer/bar back. Being just over six feet tall, 200 pounds, and muscular gave him an edge and the fact that he had served in the Marines got him the job. He didn’t mention that he’d been dishonorably discharged and the manager never asked.

He’d worked hard for two years,
making friends around the island and at the restaurant, a popular place with locals and tourists alike. The job suited him. He quickly found that his training on the battlefield gave him the ability to read people better than most and usually could stop an altercation before it even started, simply by imposing himself on the occasional rowdy drunk. This was something his boss liked. He looked after the waitresses and bartenders like they were his little sisters and soon they looked up to him as their big brother, even the ones that were a little older than him. During his time off, he worked out a lot. The Canadian had a complete weight set in the garage and the work around the property could be hard at times, especially after a storm. He would cut up the many branches that fell from the oak and elm trees, using an old buck saw he’d picked up at a yard sale. He soon added fifteen pounds of hard muscle to his already powerful physique.

The nightmares didn’t go away, though. One of the regulars at the bar was an old guy named Jackson Wainwright that everyone just called Pop. He seemed like a harmless guy most of the time
. On the smallish side, maybe 5’-8” and a wiry 165 pounds, with long gray hair and beard, he was usually barefoot or wore flip-flops, baggy shorts and a worn out tee-shirt. One night, a year after Jared arrived in Key West, Pop went completely nuts and started a fight with two Vietnamese tourists. Jared had to break it up and kick him out. That’s when he learned that Pop was a Vietnam Veteran. Once he got the old man outside, struggling all the way, he collapsed at the curb, sobbing incoherently. Not knowing what to do, Jared sat on the curb next to the old man and within a few minutes each realized they were kindred spirits. He sought out Pop many times after that night, when the tension and nightmares came. It seemed to help them both, just to sit and talk about their experiences and fears. Still, the nightmares didn’t go away.