Free Silent Hunt by John Lescroart

JOHN LESCROART
VS.  T. JEFFERSON PARKER
    T he genesis of this story goes all the way back to 2009 when John and Jeff discovered a shared love of fishing, while contributing a short story to an anthology called Hook, Line & Sinister . Then, in 2011, the two hung out together on a deepwater fly-fishing trip to East Cape and Cerralvo Island in Baja California. Every day for a week the anglers set out at dawn in pangas (Mexican fishing boats) seeking tuna, dorado,roosterfish, amberjack, pompano, or whatever else might be biting. Their guides were a fantastic and personable collection of skilled pilots and fishermen, mostly from one extended family who lived in the nearby village of Agua Amarga.
    When they were approached with the concept for FaceOff, both immediately glommed on to the idea of John’s Wyatt Hunt ( The Hunt Club, Treasure Hunt, and The Hunter ) and Jeff’s Joe Trona ( Silent Joe ) teaming together. Both characters were close to the same age, athletic, and were more or less involved with law enforcement, so putting them together on a fishing trip to Baja was a no-brainer. As soon as the two characters showed up on the page together, the chemistry was clear and palpable. John and Jeff quickly discovered that if those two characters actually existed in real life, they would probably be buds. Friendship aside, though, this is a thriller anthology, so the story needed an adventure that would place the heroes in danger.
    Jeff had done quite a lot of research into Mexico’s narcotrafficantes. Headlines from around the world attest every day that there is a serious problem with drug trafficking in that part of the world. So what could be better, fiction-wise, than to have these gangsters threaten a tightly knit extended family of hardworking fishermen? And what would poor fishermen possess that could possibly lure the local narcotrafficantes out to their village so that they could steal it? These good people don’t do drugs. They’re not political. They fish and play baseball. But there is one other little-known, and only partially explored, commodity in Baja California that would draw the attention of gangsters.
    Gold.
    A hidden stash that could rejuvenate a little fishing town, providing money for a new electric generator to make ice and run refrigerators, to power streetlights, and buy new motors for the pangas . But the narcotrafficantes have also heard rumors of gold. Where it’s hidden. Who’s hiding it. They won’t hesitate to torture and kill to get their hands on it.
    What’s to stop them?
    Just two Americans, Wyatt Hunt and Joe Trona, down in Mexico on a fishing vacation.

Silent Hunt
    W YATT HUNT MADE IT TO his gate in the International Terminal of LAX with an hour to spare before boarding would begin for his noon connecting flight to La Paz. He was traveling light, with one brand-new light-brown-on-dark-brown carry-on duffel bag into which he’d stuffed nearly two grand’s worth of new fly-fishing gear, his toilet kit, and two changes of clothes, long pants of good wicking material that with a zip converted into shorts and two long-sleeved shirts, the latter items newly purchased from REI against what was forecast to be debilitating heat—eight hours a day on the water, no shade, average temperature around 110.
    It was September and his party of ten, all unknown to him, were going after dorado, roosterfish, various tuna, and the occasional marlin, sailfish, or shark. None of these fish would weigh less than ten pounds, and some might go to a hundred or more. Hunt, a lifelong fly-fisherman in streams for trout in the half-poundrange, was skeptical about the ability of his new gear to handle fighting fish of this size and caliber, but he was game to try.
    In any event, he was a gear freak and the new stuff—ten-weight and twelve-weight rods, reels holding over a hundred yards of sixty- and eighty-pound test backing, barbed and artistically feathered hooks