A Desperate Need to Hurry

By Alan Meyers Starkey

In this fourth chapter in the series of Jake Snow, he receives a phone call from a craggy voiced, sponge salvager, claiming to have found his father’s boat; The Busted Flush, sunk in the deep waters off Marathon Key. His natural curiosity sends him to south Florida, where Derek O’Dowd and his crew convince him to join their diving expedition. In search of what they can find on a sunken Swedish cargo freighter found near McGee’s houseboat. In trade, Jake will be given time to explore The Flush.
During the dive to the houseboat, they have a frightening encounter with deadly Tiger sharks and have to develop an innovative way to lure the monsters away. What he and Siomara, the female, salvage rigger discover, shines light on the ugliness that took place nearly fifteen years ago and sends them crisscrossing the Florida Keys to unravel the story. They are in search of clues left behind by one of the original men who worked with George Meade’s lighthouse construction just prior to the beginning of The Civil War. Clues, which not only lead to the men who perpetrated the death of his father, but also point to the real reason for the outbreak of the war. Clues, which have been hand stamped in areas of the lights which are not easily accessed. Each stanza spells a new revelation in the story and the location of the next.
Upon the discovery of their motive, they encounter resistance from an ancestor of the killers, who masks his real life behind an association which is supposed to protect the off shore lighthouses. The local Sheriff is engaged and Jake and Sio find themselves dangerously close to being locked behind bars.
The truth about the events evolving in Washington and in Charleston, South Carolina during the days and weeks just prior to the first shots being fired on Fort Sumter, paint a new picture about the fifteenth President of the United States. The truth about his real life and the real reason why the war began. These revelations link forward more than 150 years to one of the most controversial topics in society today.
A Desperate Need to Hurry tells the story of how Jake and Sio rush to find the truth while time seems to be running out. And it also answers the questions of what really happened to Travis McGee.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Meyers Starkey
• Release date: Oct 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465809766

Alan Meyers Starkey

I really was born in Pennsylvania in the early sixties. My mother was always my best friend and was really the best writer in the family. She left this world much too soon. My father was an insurance man, then a car dealer for thirty-some years, and then found the desire to try his hand at fiction and poetry writing, without much success. He is still living. I have a brother and a sister, six and eleven years older. My sister has the special ability to shed the light on the things that shouldn’t be included in my books and slice them out with her editing knife. Some of which have been reinserted in the Blurbs section of my upcoming website. You may find some humor there. As I wrote in the Jake Series, I was raised in the farmland settings of south central Pennsylvania. There really was a one hundred and eighty acre farm. There really was an old path carved by the trolley cars from years before, and there really was an amusement park from the eighteen-nineties, complete with that special, hand carved carousel which now resides in the Smithsonian. All of the land is now suburban housing tracts. I think the old buildings in the park may still be there, though I haven’t been back there for more than a decade. I grew up racing go-karts and mini-bikes and motorcycles on the trails and in the clay pits, and rambling through the raspberry patch that was along the trail to old McClintock’s automobile junkyard. We always found ways to explore the creeks with makeshift rafts, and build tree forts in the woods with borrowed items. And... always being in that Tom and Huck mode, finding trouble was often easier to do than not. In those early years, I found a knack for performing in country club kitchens and fine restaurants. Cooking fancy dinners for hundreds every night. When I saw no clear path to success in the culinary arts, I dropped back and punted, to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. Initially, as a radio operator in a Hawk missile battalion when they found that I was color blind and then as a maintenance data analyst in the helicopter side of the air wing. There was a total of seven years, five months and ten days in service with the Marines, not one of which I have ever regretted. I have been to most parts of the world where Marines were found when I was with them. As the years went by I wound up in the maintenance field, and yes... I really am a conveyor guy and have been for decades. In fact, I worked for many years with the company that invented barcode sortation. I can claim to have all the abilities and knowledge of a mechanical engineer, without the degree. I have a strong affinity for classic rock music and have fronted bands in years gone by. And... I really am a Light Sport pilot, albeit a bandit, which means I am not licensed. Now... I really do live in Central Florida and know all of the places and people Jake talks about. Most of the fictional characters are based on real persons. I’ve learned that the most successful writers either spin yarns about what they know, or have endless resources to research what they don’t. I live in the former reality. I am married to a wonderful Colombian girl, Maria, who has a beautiful, seventeen year old that I am proud to call my daughter, Licci. And... about four years ago, we were blessed with the birth of a boy, Henri Diamond Blue. There are some more works planned in and outside of the Jake Series. Maybe some of that will be a sharing of all those childhood adventures. I hope you enjoy my work and care enough to pass the word, if you do. Thanks to all of you who have spawned the inspiration and encouraged me. And...thanks have to go out to Tom Sawyer, Indian Jones, Popeye and Clark Kent. Without them, there would be no Jake. A.

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A Desperate Need to Hurry

Alan Meyers Starkey

Copyright 2011 by Alan Meyers Starkey

Smashwords Edition

This novel is dedicated to my father; Edgar Ray Starkey Sr. who passed his love for Travis McGee onto me at a very early age.

A cover graphic conceptual credit is due to Glenn Southwick. Cover graphics and original story concept by Alan Meyers Starkey. Editing credits are due to Donna Marie Keith.

This book is purely a work of fiction. Names, items, characters, incidents, and places are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any reference or resemblance to actual places, events, or persons, either dead or alive, is coincidental. The author may also employ some artistic licensing to add to the enjoyment of the story or when referencing other works of fiction.

Chapter One:

A father who never even knew he had a son.

The last month couldn’t have been stranger unless I’d lost the house too. I don’t really want to get into the whole story right now, but I will say that some Columbians had wreaked serious havoc on my personal life. Here in Lake County, Florida, they destroyed my Jeep Grand Cherokee and set my hanger on fire while my Beaver airplane was inside. All of it a total loss. In Cartagena, let’s just say they persuaded me to set up a distribution network to move designer drugs into the states through a business masked with legitimate products using the EBay stores organization. Please don’t ask the reason why I went to Colombia, or what else happened there. I don’t want to talk about her.

The insurance agent initially shook his head and said he’d get back to me, which he did with bad news. Their indemnity clauses caused them concern when some overzealous young claims adjuster became suspicious about me being involved with illegal activity. Sheriff Josh Watson came to my rescue, intervening with the results of his investigation which stated that there had certainly been illegal activity involved, but not on my part. The insurance company finally paid the claims and then promptly dropped my policy, with prejudice.

Although the Sheriff had helped to replace my damaged personal property, there wasn’t much he could do in the way of getting another insurance company to write a new policy on any of it. Without insurance, I couldn’t even work a deal with the rental car companies. And I didn’t think it would be real smart to get Johnny to rent something in his name for me to drive. So, I paid cash for a ten year old Chevy pickup to pick up the loose supplies while the boys from Johnson Construction helped me put up a new hanger. This one had to be a little bigger to house my replacement airplane. A de Havilland DHC2 acquired, somewhat questionably from the Colombians.

And I didn’t waste any time painting the new plane red and black to match the color scheme of the old light sport Beaver. It was a kind of memoriam to the plane that I’d learned to fly in and loved so well. My creed also got stenciled in small lettering on both sides the rudder blade and the pirate flag I’d attached to the top of it had already begun to fray at the trailing edge.

My name is Jake Snow, a guy who works in conveyor consulting stints just lucrative enough to keep my reserve cash flow at a level where I can live comfortably. Though my comfort level may be quite different than most peoples. My livelihood or that which interest me most is flying my float plane on the waters and over the pasture lands of Central Florida. I have a nineteen acre ranch which I converted from a horse farm, removing the stables and clay riding ring and replacing it with an east-west grass landing strip. The old barn was converted with a broad hydraulic hanger door and I kept that concept when the new hanger was built. Johnny Miller and I had acquired some lake front land during Real Estate boom and turned it nicely, which allowed me to just about pay cash for the ranch. I named the place The Fortuitous Landing because of the way it was acquired.

They say I have a knack for things. An ability to see things differently than most, call it an uncommon insight, or a gifted way of figuring things out. Johnny laughs when he calls me a slayer of dragons. I seem to get myself involved in situations that call for actions which may not be considered exactly inside the law. I don’t go looking for them; I don’t want to be in the spotlight. I don’t advertise and I hold no license or any certifications that would permit me to legally investigate anything. And I have no official affiliations with any type of law enforcement. But if I see that somebody has been treated wrongly, I feel a strong need to stick my nose in and make some kind of attempt to make it right.

I stand at just over six feet. Recently weighed in at a slimmer hundred and eighty eight pounds and my new choice of shoes are European leather clogs with a raised heel. I have eyes the color of fog on the windows of a rainy day. A pearl pale shade of gray. At least that’s what my mother used to tell me before she passed a long time ago. I was raised by her, alone, though she did convince the good Doctor Snow to marry her so that I would have a proper family name. The doctor spent enough time with us to instill a strong work ethic in me. It is however, a family name that doesn’t speak to the lineage of who I really am. This brings us to the story of my real father.

I got a phone call from a man named Derek O’Dowd, down in Fort Lauderdale a few weeks before the Colombian escapade. That would make it about eleven or twelve weeks ago. He said they’d found my father’s boat sunk in deep water off the coast of Boot Key, in the Florida island chains. They found it somewhere south of the Sombrero Key Lighthouse, during some kind of exploration. He said he’d get back in touch in a month or so, because they were planning to go back down and did I want to go along? I’d forgotten all about it during the hanger construction, until he did call back late last week. He said they had run into a snag that he’d like to talk to me about. So I was planning to catch a commercial flight down tomorrow and he’d pick me up at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International.

My father lived on a houseboat in a marina along State Road A1A. Bahia Mar Marina. The road separates the yachting center from the Atlantic Ocean. He lived there for more than thirty years, and had been there when he met my mother, though that meeting took place in New York. I never had the opportunity to meet him because I wasn’t made aware of who he was until after he and Doctor Meyer disappeared. Meyer, my dad’s best friend, also lived aboard a boat docked at Bahia Mar. My dad’s name was Travis McGee.

His occupation was loosely based around marine salvage. I say loosely because no one I’ve talked to ever mentioned anything about him doing any actual salvaging. They said he was a happy-go-lucky type who enjoyed the life of a beach bum, and would often disappear from the marina for varied lengths of time. They said Meyer had a knack for picking up chicks decades younger than him, and schooling them in the ways of the world. It often made me wonder just what kind of world he and my father lived in.

Someone did speak about my father hiring himself out, at a commission rate of fifty percent, to retrieve things that had been taken from somebody. I guess I got the idea that he was sort of a non-lawyer ambulance chaser. In my mind, a somewhat less than an honorable occupation. But maybe I’m wrong.

They say my father kept journals. Supposed stories of his life, sojourns about the events and people who were important to him. My natural curiosity wanted a peek at those journals, if they were still on his boat. And I guess I’d like to know more about the way he lived. There might be some interesting things to find on a sunken houseboat. But I am not that naïve to understand that it could be ugly down there in the deep water. It would be safe to assume the boat had been there for a long time since no one has seen my father or Meyer for more than fifteen years.

O’Dowd picked me up at the airport after I’d caught the first Tuesday morning flight of the day. He was older and smaller than I expected. He had the salt water tan only attained by those who spend lots of time on boats or at the beach. He wore a fading flowery Hawaiian shirt, un-tucked, and a pair of light green denim shorts. Dry rotting leather flip flops on his feet. He drove a big green Dodge, dual wheel, pickup truck with several large trailer hitch balls on a spinnaker receiver attached to the trailer hitch. His long light brown hair lay askew on his head, as if it had never felt the tines of a comb. There were more than a few gray wisps in his side burns.

Moanin, he said when I opened the truck door, Jump on in. The accent; Deep South with a Cajun bend. There was the cragginess of a long time smoker in his voice. He extended a hand for me to shake.

Hey. I said with the shake.

I’ll take you down to the shop. We can set a spell talking ‘bout this dive trip, see if we can put something together. You eva’ go deep?

Not any deeper than about fifty feet. I replied.

You ever feel drunk or get the giggles down there? He stretched out the last word into two syllables making it sound like ‘they-er.’

No. I said shaking my head.

"You might get to feeling that way down where The Flush sits."

Yeah, don’t you guys use a different mix in the tanks?

Sometimes it don’t matter about the mixed gas, it affects everybody in some way or another, even me. He spoke with the confidence of a man who knew what he was talking about.

You can’t build up a tolerance? I asked.

It’s impossible to build up a tolerance, it ain’t like drinking boy. He laughed. He thought about it for a moment. It is a bit like drinking and driving, you have to learn to cope with the effects. The problem is in predictin’ how deep you can get before it gets too bad. We’ll try you on heliox first, the helium don’t load up the tissues as heavy as the nitro-jin.

Okay. This was obviously going to be an adventure in new technology for me.

We’ll carry an extra tank of argon to pump into your suit. It works real well keeping out the cold; it gets real cold down there.

We turned onto a street in the vicinity of Pier 66 and he slowed the truck when we went passed the 15th Street Fisheries. When we parked at his dive shop, I saw that it was fronted by a store that looked like it had been active at one time, but now I would be surprised if anything had been sold from there recently. When I asked about it, he replied in a tone that proved he was unhappy about it.

Anybody dives fifty times these days become some kind of dive master. They all open there own stores and run the kids up and down the reefs looking for colors. And they do it cheap. Cheaper’n I can. So I don’t bother sellin’ nothing no more.

There were seven people in the back room of the shop counting O’Dowd and me. Two men, both introduced as first mates, were Johnny Wales and Adam Millhouse. Derek said the reason for having two first mates was simply that they were both qualified to run the boat and choosing between the two would start a fight. A very dark complected girl of Latin descent named Sio, who was qualified in deep water and skilled in rigging and retrieving salvage. Andre was the ship’s cook, and Denny Yunez, the engineer.

Derek pulled out a large rolled map of the Keys and spread it out on the table. He pointed to the area of the Sombrero Key Lighthouse and then moved his hand about a half of an inch south. I could see where the blue color of the water got a little darker.

This is the edge of the Pourtales Terrace. It starts just east of the light. It’s connected to this long waterway here, called the Florida Straits. He moved his hand from Miami down to the end of the Keys. "They found this terrace while they were surveying to lay telegraph lines from Miami to Key West to Cuba, way back in the eighteen hundreds. They named it after the surveyor. The ledge drops off pretty quick, and runs down to a hunderd feet or so, that’s where we seen your daddy’s boat. You see where the blue gets darker, that’s where it goes deeper. Then from here it drops down to six hundred feet on a slope until it just falls off the edge to more’n a quarter mile and there’d be hunderds of sinkholes that go even deeper."

He moved his hand back to the area near the lighthouse. We went down in about here. We had an ROV, you ever seen a looker?

Not up close, I said. But I know what they do.

Well this one was a little different from what you probably seen on television. It had a cord attached, with wiring and cabling that led back up to my boat and into the control circuitry in the back of the TV screen. You’ll see all that stuff if we go out. It’s kind of like when a woman has a baby. What’s that called again?

Umbilical, she said, An umbilical cord. I looked over at her sitting on the edge of another table. Our eyes met and locked for a moment. I gave her one single nod. She smiled and then looked away.

Yeah, what she said, he continued. You drive it with a joystick while you watch the screen. Denny, you want to explain what happened? I gotta take a leak. He walked out of the doorway and back into the store. Denny stepped over and began to explain their mission. He spoke in a much more intelligent way.

They initially went down planning to survey a reported find of The Diane, a one hundred and twenty foot Swedish cargo freighter, wrecked initially off the east coast of Islamorada in September of eighty nine. No one could get to her because a million count school of barracuda had taken up residency right away. She lay in forty feet for about ten days before the currents of hurricane Hugo came up from the south and cut her loose. She was lost for twenty three years. They actually thought she went to the bottom. But Kat Lightener said he caught something on his ship’s deep water echo sounder and had a science team from the research vessel, Seward Johnson look into it. They’re not the type to kiss and tell. They said she shaped on the screen like The Diane, so we decided to make a pass by her on the way to harvest some sponges. We were about to find her using our own sonar blips and that’s when we ran the ROV up on The Busted Flush in about a hundred feet. She’s wedged in pretty good against the ledge, big rocks on the downstream side so she won’t let go in the Gulf Stream current.

Sio, wind up the video footage for me, will ya? She kicked off the table and went to a cabinet against the rear wall. We taped a couple of minutes during the pass. While he waited for her to set up the DVD, he went back to the story.

"Then we found The Diane, a little deeper and about two hundred feet upstream of The Flush. She’s real large and there’s an open hatch cover over her port hold just waiting for someone like us to go in and see what’s in there. All the manifest records of her went down with her. Seems there was a mistake made with the paperwork when she launched out of Stockholm Harbor. She was headed down through the Panama Canal, but some type of explosion knocked a hole in her bow.

Sio had The Flush video ready and he told her to push play. I saw the video go from dark to light and then the topside framework of a barge type cabin cruiser came into focus. We were approaching the boat from the left side. She rested on her starboard side on a slight angle along the rocks so that the top of her was facing us. The boat was better than fifty feet long and the aluminum trim, all the glass and the railings were covered in green algae. Some parts of the side wall were exposed. I could see the upper operating controls exposed through the frames which obviously used to hold a canvas top. She was rectangular, a flat deck with a two section cabin. It was impossible to tell by the light of the camera what her original colors were. There was a large chunk missing from the port side deck, back near the aft, and it was distinctly clear that this was the damage that sunk her. As the camera panned across the stern, I could make out the raised lettering of her name. It was in amazing shape even though it had probably been resting in this spot for more than fifteen years. In a few more seconds the camera went dark.

Denny went on to explain their mission. They had reeled out the cord and O’Dowd let the ROV fall out over the ledge. The ROV is an acronym for; Remotely Operated Vehicle. An underwater device which is lighted, has a camera and is controlled remotely through a tether cord attached to the ship.

They were looking for a new genus in the deep recesses of the Terrace, a newly discovered sponge that contains chemicals very important in the research to fight cancer. Hugely financially rewarding if harvested. Medical research places these creatures in very high demand. But they are difficult to find. The sponges mount themselves to the rocky shelf, but the Gulf Stream is so powerful it constantly scrubs the shelf clean. Sponges available in one area today may be long gone tomorrow.

You have to be careful gathering sponges, he told me, if you are too aggressive, the sponge will release a toxic substance, not unlike squid or octopus ink. This toxic chemical is what is used to make the medicines. The skeleton of the sponge, what we use commonly, is just tossed away.

Down in deeper water, he said, the reefs are much different from those in shallower depths. Some of them are mounds of mud and debris called bioherms, but some have high reliefs of jagged structure called lithoderms. These are pinnacles of limestone rock with living families of large coral massed over it.

But later in the same expedition, Denny went on to explain, O’Dowd ventured the ROV too far into the Stream where it was swept into strong currents. O’Dowd lost control of the ROV and it crashed against the jagged rocks and coral floor. They watch the camera bounce along and turn to capture the debris kicked up by the crashing of the vehicle. Then the camera went out. When they retrieved it, there was nothing left at the end of the tether except the knuckle fastener and the torn wiring. The video unit on the ship had also shorted out. The unit was a total loss and without the recovery of any sponges, the expedition failed. There was no insurance and no money to replace the expensive machine. Derek returned with a cigarette between his fingers and took over the conversation.

We tried to lease another looker, but they want a bunch of money down ‘cause they heard we lost the last one. I can’t borrow any money; it seems my credit score is a little lower than it ought to be these days. And when we talked to the people who have one of those submersible crafts, you know, the submarines with the windows and the tentacles, they wouldn’t take on any partners unless we had some kind of certification in marine biology. The man told me to my face he didn’t think I had enough experience to be doing this stuff. Denny broke back in to the conversation.

"We looked at building a unit, it can be done fairly inexpensively, but when you get into deep water the deal changes. The pressure gets really great so the camera has to be able to stand it and that type of camera costs a lot of money. Also there is a question about maintaining the proper ballast when the cord is reeled out pretty far. The thrusters are constantly working against buoyancy. It starts getting into rocket science.

So, we figure the only way to make enough money to buy another unit is to go back down to The Diane. It looks like the only promising move to make. We took some video of her too, and it looks real easy to get in there. We hope she’s carrying something valuable enough to trade for a unit. We wouldn’t be able to sell any of it, at least not publicly. We don’t exactly want to announce her discovery. The Swedes might throw a claim around her and we’d be out of luck again.

So that’s where you come in, Jake. It was Derek speaking again. We were hoping you could help us fund the expedition. We’d cut you in for a piece of anything we find, over what it takes to get another looker. Or you could let that ride and grab a full share of the next gig to harvest sponges. He hesitated while watching my reaction. I didn’t give him any change in my expression.

And… he said with a sigh, "we’ll give you a window of time to look into The Flush after we go into The Diane."

Okay, how much are looking for? I asked him. They looked at each other and finally Denny spoke.

We just need enough for the fuel and the dive gas. And Andre needs to replenish the kitchen stock. It won’t take us longer than five days. He also hesitated, gauging me for a moment. Say…twenty-five hundred? It was actually less than I’d expected. Something in the original phone call gave me a hint that they were looking for money. But I didn’t dwell on it. I know you don’t get anything for nothing, and I guess that finding out more about my father was worth what they were asking.

When do we go? I said. The whole room erupted in noise. These were that rare breed of people who lived for exploring the sea. I’d just put them back in the game and they were quick to show their appreciation.

Before Derek took me back to the airport, we sat around talking about

the trip. O’Dowd said he knew my father, and he also knew of the stories about the journals that he kept. The journals were supposedly kept sealed and hidden somewhere in the forward portion of the boat, in a hidden compartment.

He said everyone in their clique over at the Bahia Mar marina wanted to know about that stuff, but Travis was always so secretive about his personal affairs, never wanting any type of publicity. There was even supposed to be stuff in the journals that Meyer didn’t know. Travis told everyone to bide their time, the stories would be published - all in due time. He was banking on their financial popularity to take him into his final relaxation, as he referred to it. I told them about my desire to find the journals.

I’m very curious to know about my father’s life. I said. A father who never even knew he had a son. My mother never contacted him about me, for reasons of her own. I got the impression she didn’t want to burden his lifestyle in any way.

We made a deal to leave on Friday. They wanted to go right away because there was a tropical depression brewing in the southern Caribbean.

You never know what one of them bastards can turn into. O’Dowd remarked.

He took me over to a Wachovia bank branch and I withdrew the twenty-five hundred, hoping this all wasn’t some type of elaborate scam. But then Derek wrote me a check for the same amount. The check had his dive shop name and address, and several contact numbers on it. On the back of the check he wrote a brief statement outlining the terms of our contract. "Just in case you feel you