Martin Billings Caribbean Crime Thrillers

by Ed Teja

  Discipline and ingrained training took over from my damaged consciousness. Operating on reflex, I checked my gauges, now thankful for Sammy’s flashlight. The air pressure was good, over three thousand psi; the air flowed freely. I thanked my lucky stars for that. I went down to a depth of twenty feet. Time, 21:35. That told me I hadn’t blacked out, but I had no time to waste. With my right side still hurting, I couldn’t swim as fast as I would have liked. Still, the plan allowed some extra time. I checked my compass. It was flooded, its face smashed in—it was useless junk.

  I came back to the surface to take bearings. In the moonlight, I could make out the outline of the bay. I could see the silhouette of Harm as she disappeared around the southern end of the island. I looked at the bay again. My breath was ragged. I wondered if I had cracked a rib, or if that was all. Well, personal damage assessment would come later, I had a long swim ahead of me. So, I tried to get a sense of direction and went back down, swimming as best I could toward my meeting with Highball.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The original plan gave me twenty minutes to swim into the bay, and ten more to get into position before Chris and Victoria were to arrive. Injured, I was making rotten time. I figured out that I could use the angle of the moonlight as it penetrated the water to help keep a bearing, and then tried to trust it. When it seemed wrong, I reminded myself that, without sight, in fog or dark, people tend to move in a circle to their right. Whenever I thought I might have drifted a bit, I angled a bit to port, to my left, that is. Still, I had to surface frequently to make certain that I was going in the right direction.

  There is one other way to navigate underwater that doesn’t require a compass, but you have to be near the bottom, and you have to be able to see. Swimming deep, you can use the topography and observe the kinds of plants growing on the bottom to show the way to shore. But it is only approximate, and like I said, you need light. It also helps to know the area.

  My other concern was air. By swimming shallow, I saved air, but my ragged breathing more than made up for that by being inefficient. Regular checks of my air supply and some quick calculations told me that it would be touch and go whether or not I had air enough to make the distance. At twenty feet, I should have been able to make that tank last well over an hour, but stress and injury changed the equations.

  Again, I had no choices, so I just swam with a steady and determined rhythm.

  I still had a painful way to go when I heard what had to be the throb of the engine on Chris’s launch. They were in the cut somewhere, and I had just gotten into the bay! At first, I was sure that they had to be ahead of schedule, then I reminded myself that sound travels five times as fast in water as through the air and they wouldn’t be as close as I thought. Besides, it didn’t matter where they were. I had to concentrate on getting my job done.

  By now, I knew, Harm was returning, approaching the south side of Isla Venados at a slow speed, engines just turning over. After ten, lights off, she would be drifting in place, and Bill would row ashore in the dinghy. My job was to be there ahead of him, using the advantage of surprise to spot and take out lookouts and, if possible, getting Maggie out of the way of danger. At the very least, I had to create a distraction to keep Bill from being a clear target.

  I finally heard a welcome sound—the lapping of water against a shore, making a sucking sound as waves fill crevices in the rocks then pull the water free again. It took an effort of will to keep from sticking my head above the surface to get a bearing on my approach to the beach, but I couldn’t risk it. If I surfaced in the moonlight, I’d stick out like the beacons at a used car lot.

  I was close to my goal. I was also, I realized, out of air. I decided to ditch my dive gear in the water. It would be awkward and noisy on shore. The bottle was good for a few more breaths, which I used to fill my lungs. I unzipped the pocket of the BCD to take the gun out. But the gun was gone.

  I ran my fingers through the pocket and found that the stitching had ripped out on one side of it, leaving the pocket wide open. It must have torn, and the gun fallen out, when I hit the log. I cursed myself for not checking the old BCD more thoroughly. I was guilty of assuming.

  “Assume makes an ass of you and me,” my dive instructor had taught me. What a time to find out she was right.

  I undid the straps of the BCD and rolled out of it, letting the jacket and tank sink to the bottom. It was only about thirty feet deep, and the gear would be easy to find again.

  I let bubbles trail from my mouth as I made a slow ascent at a shallow angle toward the shore, hoping I would reach the surface close to the beach. Compressed air expands as you ascend, so it was easy to relax and maintain the stream of bubbles.

  The bottom rose up sharply now. When I surfaced, I found I was still about twenty feet from the beach. I let myself float in the shallows, riding the small waves, inching my way ashore with as little movement as possible, every minute expecting to hear or feel a bullet sent my way. Sand from the bottom, stirred up by waves, began getting into the wet suit. I slid off the facemask. I needed to look around, but its glass faceplate could reflect light as well as a mirror.

  When I raised my head, I could make out a human shape on the beach, just a dark, undifferentiated figure. I saw a flash of light near his face, it was light reflecting off the lenses of binoculars. Silently I took off my fins, and then scrambled up the soft sand of the beach, putting an outcropping of rock between myself and the lookout. I sat on the rocks and waited, listening, but heard nothing. I tucked the mask and fins between some rocks and checked my watch. It was after ten. I was late!

  I looked into the bay. I could just see the launch, sitting motionless. That bothered me. It was not in the plan. But it gave me a little extra time, and I was going to take advantage of it. Part of my job was recon. I wanted a head count of the bad guys.

  A radio crackled close by. “So, what the fuck is going on down there? Did the morons in the boat see the signal?”

  “Yeah.” The man on the other side of the rock said. “But they got the propeller caught in some fish trap on the way in, it looks like.”

  The voice on the radio said something else, but the man holding the receiver had turned it away from me, and I couldn’t hear what it was.

  It was time to move out. I had to assume that the man on the beach was armed. There was a chance that I could surprise him and get his gun. But a scuffle on the beach would attract attention, and I needed to keep a low profile.

  I pulled the knife out of the sheath strapped to my leg. It wasn’t much of a weapon, having been designed more for prying and poking than fighting. But this mission was coming down to basics. It would have to do.

  I shed the wet suit. I’d be cold without it for a time, but the suit inhibited my movements. I stuffed it in with the other gear and put some branches over the lot. Then I peeked around the rock. The gunman still watched the progress of the launch through his binoculars, and that gave me as good a chance to move as I would ever get with him still conscious. I glanced at the northern point and was rewarded by the glint from another set of binoculars.

  The sniper, I thought.

  There could be more, of course, but my instincts told me that there was just one. Highball worked with a small crew. The man on the north point would be able to see any double cross, and he had a clear field of fire over the bay. With the sniper in place and two or three others on the beach, he’d have a big enough army for what he had in mind. I knew that there was one on the beach and one on the hill at the northern point. There would be at least one more, besides Highball.

  I had thought a lot about the layout of the island, trying to guess where they might keep Maggie, and I had come up with one logical spot. At the top of this hill were the ruins of a small house. It had a view of the water from both sides and would keep Maggie away from the beach. It also meant that her guard could double as another lookout.

  The man on the beach had turned his back to me, stup
idly lighting a cigarette. He was a tempting target, but I had to leave him. If he stopped answering the radio, all hell would break loose. I gave him a wide berth and started up the hill, moving from rock to rock, hoping I wouldn’t set off an avalanche of dirt.

  This exercise presented a few problems. My movements were slow. Not only did my right side still hurt, making progress up the steep hill awkward, but I had to assume that Highball might be up at the house. He could come down the hill at any time and I had to be ready to hide myself if he did. Halfway up, I looked back. Chris and Victoria were still at the mouth of the bay. I still had time.

  At the top of the hill loomed the concrete walls that had once been part of a house. I took a deep breath, ignoring the pain, and started up again. When I reached the top, I lay flat. I could see a muffled light, but the roofless structure had been covered with tarps, turning a few of the rooms into tents.

  I crawled to the nearest wall, scratching my bare arms and legs on acacia thorns and sharp rocks. Finally, I could lean my back against a crumbling wall. Wind whistled through chinks in the concrete. Looking down the other side of the hill, I could see Harm, drifting, dark. From inside came a voice on the radio. “Okay, they got it untangled, and it looks like they got the motor started again. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  Someone inside was pacing, broken concrete and rock crunching under a heavy stride. Cigarette smoke wafted from the shell of a house. There were at least two bad guys inside. The pacing stopped, and I heard Highball’s voice, sounding nastier than ever in his whiny, barrio Spanish.

  “Okay, I’m going down there to be with chico number two while they come up. Everybody stay put and be ready.” I could hear a muffled response, as if he had the radio to his ear. Then, “Right. Now, no more talk on the radio unless you see something funny. I don’t want to hear about any fucking fisherman.”

  Abruptly he came out of the building on my left. He didn’t look in my direction. He was wearing combat fatigues and boots and carried an Uzi machine gun. Loaded for bear, as they say. He started down the hill, and then suddenly spun around. My heart stopped. He looked right past me, his eyes on the house. The slightest movement on my part would get his attention quick enough.

  “Be ready to bring that bitch down to the beach muy pronto. I just know they’ll insist on seeing her pretty face before landing the shit.”

  A muffled response from inside got Highball angry. “Coño chico! Because I’ll call you on the fucking radio, that’s how you’ll know. What do you think I brought them for? Jesus!” He turned and went down the hill, following a path down a much easier grade than I’d come up, grumbling to himself.

  He didn’t bother to walk quietly, and I could hear him long after I lost sight of him. I counted seconds to force myself to let him get away before I moved in. It was a dilemma. I couldn’t risk moving too fast, but I didn’t know how long Victoria would be able to stall them at the beach.

  Standing, I could just see the launch drifting, toward shore. Victoria stood at the bow clutching the bag. Then I turned my attention to the house. I stuck my head around a corner of broken wall, keeping low. From that angle I could see Maggie. Her wrist was chained to a four-by-four that had been part of the frame of the house. She sat, slumped against the wall, looking like she’d had a rough time. I couldn’t see her face in the moonlight, but her body seemed to have no spirit left in it.

  I tried to spot her guard. Like his friend below, he helped me by lighting a cigarette. Even if I hadn’t seen the flare of the match, the smell of smoke would have pinpointed him. He sat with his feet pulled up, his back wedged in a corner. A rifle lay across his knees, and a handheld radio sat on the ground next to him.

  I couldn’t see any way to sneak up on him. Enough of the wall remained that his back was protected. I thought briefly of using the old tactic the good guys use in movies, of tossing a stone so that he’d stand up and go investigate, but there was an even chance that he’d just shoot in that direction and help would come running.

  I let myself relax, tried to stop thinking so hard. My martial arts teacher had always said that the hardest thing to teach Westerners was that too much planning made you rigid, unable to respond to what was happening around you.

  “Trust in the universe,” he always said. To most of us in his class, the admonition sounded too much like “Use the force, Luke,” to be real. Time and time again he had tried to demonstrate.

  Once he’d asked me, “And what do you do when you can’t come up with a plan, one that is acceptable?” I had said that I couldn’t imagine such a situation. He smiled. “All that indicates is the pathetic limit of your imagination.” I thought he was being cute. But I didn’t now.

  My plan had been to walk in and shoot the bastard. But I lost my gun, so I had decided I’d sneak up from behind and stab him. His sense of comfort, sitting with the wall to his back in total disregard of reasonable sentry procedures, made that impossible. I sighed.

  “Okay, Sensei. I’ll do it your way.” I took out my knife, stood up and walked in the door, taking a path that put me between Maggie and the gunman.

  “Martin,” she said as she saw me.

  “Hi, Maggie,” I said.

  The gunman jumped up, confused because we acted so normal and ignored him. He held the rifle in front of him, but in his surprise, he forgot to point it at me. And I didn’t give him a chance to. I turned, bringing my foot up in a spinning kick to the side of his head. He dropped in his tracks. Out cold. I let out a sigh of relief and picked up his rifle and radio.

  “Thanks, Sensei.”

  Maggie stared at me, wide-eyed, as if she couldn’t let herself believe I was there.

  “Where are the keys?” I asked, pointing at the padlocks on her chains. She pointed to a table on the opposite side of the room. I saw a portable propane stove, a few dirty pots and some cans of food. The keys sat next to the stove, and I grabbed them. Maggie rubbed her chafed wrist as I unshackled it.

  “Is there a medical kit here?” She shook her head.

  I dragged the unconscious goon over near Maggie, and we chained him up, wrapping the chain around both wrists, his arms behind him. I took my knife and cut off a big hunk of his shirt and stuffed it into his mouth. “If he can breathe through his nose, he’ll be okay,” I said.

  “I’ll pray that he’s a mouth breather,” Maggie said.

  I took a good look at her. “I know it’s a cliché, but are you okay? I need to know how mobile you are.”

  She gave me a mean smile. “I’m sore all over, starving to death, my nerves are shot, and I have a sore ankle. But if you need me to, I’ll out-fight, outrun, and outshoot anyone on this rock.”

  “Good enough.”

  The gunman on the ground stirred and opened an eye. “Good,” Maggie said. “I thought you’d sleep forever.” Before I knew what she intended, she stepped forward and kicked him square in the balls. His eyes went big and then closed. He was out again before he was completely awake, and the gag had muffled his cry.

  “The gag was a good idea,” Maggie said.

  “I think that’s against the Geneva Convention.”

  “This isn’t Switzerland,” she said.

  Good point.

  “What is the plan?”

  I gave her a quick rundown on the overall idea. She frowned. “Sounds more like the theme for an improvisational theater production than a plan.”

  “Well, we didn’t have you there to critique it for us, so we did what we could.”

  She smiled. “For which I am grateful. I just meant that you are taking a lot of risks. All of you.”

  “If we don’t get our asses down the hill, Victoria and Chris will be taking more risks than are necessary,” I pointed out.

  “Wait,” she said. She went over to the corner of the ruined room to where the guard had been sitting when I interrupted him. After a minute she stood, holding a field jacket.

  “Cold?” I asked.r />
  She unsnapped a pocket and took out a 9mm automatic. “I feel a lot warmer now,” she said, pulling back the slide and forcing a round into it. I picked up the rifle the guard had been holding. It was a nice, but old, semi-automatic of European military origin. God knows how it got to Venezuela.

  “Must be a FARC reject,” Maggie suggested, referring to the Colombian guerrillas.

  The radio squawked, and Highball’s voice came through. “They are just hanging there doing nothing. It looks like they aren’t going to come ashore until they see the woman on the beach.”

  Another voice said, “They’re in range. I can pick them off easy. I have a nice clean shot. Just say which one you want first.”

  “No way,” Highball said. “I’m not trusting this to long range shooting when we can get them close. Kill one and the one left alive might dump the powder or just haul ass outta here. We need them on the beach. Bring the bitch down here where they can see her, got that muchacho?”

  I assumed he was talking to me, so I picked up the radio and hoped that he hadn’t heard the indisposed guard on the radio many times. “Si, ahorita,” I said, trying to keep my response as short as possible.

  “Damn right, right now,” he muttered. I clipped the radio on my belt.

  “Looks like you better play prisoner for a little longer,” I told Maggie. “You go first. I’ll put the safety on the rifle and be behind you.”

  “You keep that safety off,” she said. “If you need to shoot, I don’t want you fumbling for it. Just be careful.” Trusting woman.

  “Look, Maggie, before we get into this, I need to know, did they do anything to you? I mean, I know you hate them, but did they give you any reason to feel a pressing need to kill them all?”

  “They didn’t rape me, if that’s what you are thinking. It was mostly mental abuse and physical neglect. But not all.” She pulled down the collar of her tee shirt exposing her breast, and I saw a nasty burn. “He thought it cute to use me for an ashtray once while explaining in gross detail the role I would play as hostess at his victory celebration when this was over. He and his troops had ambitious plans.”