Merciless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 1) Read Free Page B

only twenty-one thirty. Lavolier and Horvac couldn’t possibly have moved that fast. In fact, they should only have arrived in Marathon by now.” He was talking about the leader of the Miami gang and the woman who somehow controlled him, that the group had rallied to protect McDermitt from.
    “Andrew,” Stockwell said, “get on the horn to the Coast Guard. Let them know one of our agents has been kidnapped.” Formerly with the Coast Guard’s vaunted Maritime Enforcement, Andrew now worked as the team’s liaison with the Coast Guard.
    “Linda!” Kim suddenly gasped. “Somebody has to call her.”
    “Do you have her number?” Tony asked calmly as he sat down next to Charity, nodding toward the chopper. “We’ll call her together. Charity has to get up in the air.”
    As Charity rose and headed toward the chopper, Tony helped Kim to her feet and started toward Chyrel’s office, which was now all lit up.
    “Donnie, go with Andrew in the chopper,” Stockwell ordered and turned to Bourke. “Andrew, coordinate with the Coast Guard and the sheriff’s birds from the air. Have the sheriff’s office pass the boat’s description to every law enforcement agency between here and Miami.”
    Going over the preflight, while waiting for the others to gather their gear and get aboard, Charity thought long and hard about what she was about to do. Accepting the file from Director Stockwell had put things into motion that now couldn’t be undone. At some point, she’d fly away from this group, and they’d be told she had stolen the helicopter and gone rogue.
    Pushing thoughts about the future out of her mind, she concentrated on the immediate task at hand: finding Jesse McDermitt.
    With the engine already running, Andrew and Donnie climbed aboard, Donnie in the back. He was still dressed all in black, after spending part of the night lying on a small stand on a nearby island with his sniper rifle and scope. From there, he could see nearly any approach to the island they were on—for all the good that had come of it. Apparently, the bad guys had gotten lucky and come from the opposite side of McDermitt’s island from where Donnie had been perched. Everyone had thought the water to the north too shallow to warrant more than occasional observation from one of the two sentries.
    Once airborne, Andrew got a text message from the director that their boss, Deuce Livingston, and several other team members had just touched down in Marathon in the company’s Gulfstream and would split up there, two joining a sheriff’s helo about to take off and two going back up in the G5, with its sophisticated radar, to act as command and control.
    Livingston had been an officer in the Navy SEALs. He was Tony and Art’s commanding officer, and both spoke very highly of him. He was an easygoing, good-natured man most of the time, but when times called for decisive leadership, that was when he was in his element. Tony had told Charity that the SEALs under his command would do anything he asked of them, relying on his intelligence and quick authoritativeness.
    Within minutes, the men on the G-5 were back in the air and searching the area with radar, reporting quite a number of possible targets. Kumar Sayef, a twenty-year man and Delta Force linguist, was in command of the plane and began the arduous task of directing the two helicopters and eliminating the boats to the east of the island, one by one.
    As the search progressed through the night, other helicopters and surface craft joined in. They’d intercepted and looked at more than ten boats already and were getting low on fuel.
    Kumar had given them another boat to check out. “Roger that,” Charity said. “We’ll have to refuel after this one, if it’s not the right boat.” The only description they had for the target boat was that it was a white dive boat, about thirty feet in length, with a hard top that extended all the way to the stern. This had come from McDermitt’s daughter