The three craft flew into a canal half a mile north of Teddy’s Marina. It was part of the same long, intricate series of channels that Casper had used to make his desperate escape five days earlier. The hundreds of miles of interwoven canals had been dredged during the early 1900s in a large-scale attempt to drain the southern Florida swamps.
Lynch and his men powered west through the canal, passing thousands of acres of farmland and zipping under bridges. The canal was flanked by a dirt road on one side and a footpath on the other. Even with their loud engines blaring across the landscape, there weren’t many people around to give them attention.
Two and a half miles inland, they turned with a sharp bend in the canal. The dredged waterway straightened out, then cut back to the west a thousand feet later. It was a good place to stop, with nothing in sight but flat, seemingly endless farmland.
They quickly pulled their boats up to the grassy northern shore. One of Lynch’s guys hopped off his jet ski, darted between a nearby row in the palm tree plantation, then started up a moving truck and backed it up to the edge of the canal.
Lynch ordered the two jet skis to be dragged ashore. Since the personal watercraft are nearly impossible to sink without taking them apart, their hulls having built-in foam to ensure they stay afloat, Lynch chose the next best thing. They dragged the jet skis and hid them under a row of palms.
Casper trimmed the engine all the way forward and dragged his skiff halfway onto the shore. They opened the back of the moving truck and began transferring the fifty gold bars into the bed. But the moment they started, an unwelcomed sound echoed through the air. Helicopter rotors.
Lynch gazed skyward and spotted an orange-and-white Sikorsky Jayhawk flying along the eastern shoreline in Biscayne Bay. It was just a few miles from their position, and heading their way.
“Taking too long!” Lynch shouted to his men, who’d just started lugging the bricks into the truck. He stormed to the stern of the skiff, unclamped the outboard, then kicked it free. The engine flipped backward and splashed into the murky canal, disappearing from view.
“Just lift the whole damn boat,” Lynch added, grabbing hold of the stern of the port gunwale.
His four remaining men did as their leader ordered. Each grabbing a corner, they lifted the five-hundred-pound boat off the shore, carried it to the back of the truck, then slid its metal hull inside. Casper, and two more of Lynch’s men climbed into the bed. Titus jumped up and slammed the door down, locking it in place. Within seconds, Titus and Lynch were in the cab, starting up the engine.
Lynch kept the passenger window rolled down, listening as the Coast Guard helicopter continued its sweep back and forth, heading closer and closer to them with each pass.
“Get us the hell out of here, Titus,” he barked. “But drive slow once we hit a main road.”
Titus held the wheel tight, put the big truck in gear, then accelerated them away from the scene.
THIRTY-SIX
I gritted my teeth and listened as our attackers loaded up the gold bars into their boat. Every time the heavy ore hit the metal hull, it was like a torturous metronome reminding me that I’d been bested. That this white supremacist leader and his motley crew had made fools out of all of us, and that he was about to get away with our find.
“I’m going back,” I said, holstering my Sig and climbing down the branches toward the small opening into the cave.
Ange reached over and snatched my arm.
“Are you crazy?”
“We need to stop them!” I hissed.
“How in the hell do we do that?” she said. “This brush is so thick, it would take us half an hour to reach the shoreline. And swimming back the way we came? They’ll open fire with their automatics the second we surface.”
I stopped, forced my eyes shut, and looked away. My heart pounded in anger. I fumed with every sound the men made, as if it were a constant reminder of my inability to do anything about it.
The whole thing didn’t feel right. I’d faced mountain-sized problems in my life before. I’d stood toe-to-toe with overwhelming odds, never batting an eye, never backing down, and always coming out on top. I wasn’t used to the run-and-hide strategy, and it didn’t sit well. It gave me a sick, gut-wrenching feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Dammit,” I spat. “How in the hell could I have let this happen?”
I said it more to myself than to Ange, but she answered anyway.
“We all let this happen,” she said quietly, keeping her head forward and her ears sensitive to every sound our attackers made. “No one expected this. Hell, even the police told us that Lynch was on the run.”
One thing became evident as a result of the encounter: Deacon Lynch wasn’t the dumb redneck we’d been led to believe he was. No, this was a guy with a plan. A guy with a head on his shoulders and the inclination to use it.
They finished loading up the bars. We could hear them as they climbed back onto their boats. They idled for a few seconds, talked amongst themselves, then took off. The three jet skis and the unknown fourth boat accelerated, their engines groaning and echoing across the flat landscape. The sounds quieted as the boats stormed back across the lagoon, heading for the exit.
Ange and I slipped
