“Maybe you can, Fonko, but there’s some matters outstanding between me and the CIA. My Cambodia operation. That Sea Sprite I hijacked. Those CIA guys I shanghaied. Not to mention some other activities I’ve been involved in since then. There’s no such thing as statute of limitations with the CIA. They get their hands on me, I’m as good as strung up.”
“Hey, what about me?”
“Fonko, you’re okay, wish I could do better for you, but in the present circumstances…” He banked the Huey, quickly scooted down under them, then climbed behind them while they rotated around to meet us. “They can only shoot at us lined up nose-on. I don’t mean to sit still long enough for that to happen.” As the Cobra oriented toward us, we banked and peeled away, another spritz of tracer missing us aft. By not much. I smelled urine in the cockpit.
“Okay, I think we better return fire. No way you can bring it down with a G3, no use tryin’. I’ll try to set you up to go after the pilot.”
“I’m supposed to shoot at Americans?”
“I know you didn’t sign up for this. Neither did I. But at this moment, it’s them or us, and the odds are in their favor. Get ready with a G3 and have an extra clip at hand. The relative speeds here are different from with MIGs and Cessnas, we’ll practically be stationary in effect. I’ll try to give you a clear shot. It’ll be close to point blank range, don’t worry about elevation. I don’t know about windage, so empty your clip sweeping from about ten yards out one side, across the windshield to ten yards off the other. If there’s time, give ‘em another clip.”
“But…” I couldn’t get more than that out. As the Cobra maneuvered into position, Driffter suddenly turned broadside to it. “Now!” he shouted. What else could I do? The black chopper faced us from about fifty yards away. The gunfight at the OK Corral, a mile in the sky. I swept my sights across their windshield, my finger on the trigger. I popped the clip, jammed in another and raised the gun again, and their nose spouted sparks. I heard some loud thunks, our plexiglass windows filled with big spiderwebs, and Driffter let out a huff. We hadn’t changed position, so I fired off the second clip, same as the first but crossing from the other side. “Get us the hell out of here!” I screamed. The whole exchange had lasted less than ten seconds. Driffter may have taken one, but it didn’t slow him down. He put us into a winding dive, flinging us closer in toward land. I could now see shoreline clearly.
“I think you drew blood,” Driffter gasped, pain warping his voice. “They aren’t reacting, should be on our tail. I’m going to haul ass for yonder hills. You get that other Redeye and stand by. If they come after us, it’s our only hope. But maybe they won’t. They’re stretching their combat radius.”
The Cobra, or at least its crew, must have been ailing. It did not follow us in hot pursuit. Just as well, as shooting down an American chopper, even if unidentified and on the attack, I didn’t want on my resume. They somehow knew Driffter manned our controls, but with luck, not of my complicity, so if we landed safely out of sight in the mountains, maybe I had a chance of getting out of this with skin and freedom intact.
If we landed safely. Driffter’s breath rasped with effort. The fuel gauge indicated fumes. A fiery half-disk bade farewell over the horizon. We passed over Montego Bay, having provided four-star entertainment for thrill-hungry vacationers at the resorts. “You know what we saw down in Jamaica, Melissa? They had an honest-to-God dogfight between helicopters! With rockets and stuff!”
“Oh yeah? I bet some resort staged it? Like those pirate ships in Key West?”
We kept our altitude around 2000 feet across the coastal flats and into the mountains. I looked aft, no sign of the Cobra. Driffter steered us deep into a valley as the motor sputtered. The chopper slowed and angled down. Driffter backed off of the rotor as best he could to ease our descent, and the shadowed hillside forest swooped up toward our shredded windshields in welcome.
3 | Jamaica Farewell
Driffter’s Huey piled into a hillside at thirty miles per hour, fortunately hitting soft ground among undergrowth and saplings, and came to rest propped out at an angle on its nose. The gear in the cargo bay lay in a heap behind the bulkhead. Nothing hard and heavy had flown forward and brained us. So far, so good. We weren’t hung up in high branches. We hadn’t wrapped our nose around a solid tree trunk. My safety belt held, and my helmet kept the bump my head took against the roof from amounting to injury. Driffter slumped over toward the controls, held in place by his seatbelt, laboring through each breath. His chest oozed blood into his shirt front. His left pant leg was torn and bloody around the calf. His crotch and below were soaked. No dishonor there. “Only my laundryman knew how scared I was,” the chopper pilots used to say.
“Fonko,” he gasped. “I think I messed up some internals when we come in.”
“Let’s get you out of here onto solid ground and see what gives,” I said.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” he rasped. “You’re in travelin’ condition? Good. Nothin’ you can do for me. Save yourself. Get to a road and send the medics up for me. Maybe I’ll make it, maybe I won’t. “
“Come on, Clyde. I’ll get you out of this. We brought guys in worse shape than you out of the jungle in 1970.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Fonko. We ain’t a squad of Marines. You don’t have MedEvac back up. A damn fool’s errand to try to hump me out of the mountains. You’d never make it, only kill us both in the attempt. Look, get down to a road. Send people up after me…” He coughed, labored to catch his breath. “The party’s over for me.” The next breath came harder for him. He looked sideways at me. “A man…” he gasped. He looked at me plaintively with his country-boy eyes.
“Which man?” I asked him.
“A man,” he said again very flatly, very slowly, talking with a dry mouth. “Now the way things are, the way they go no matter what no.” He looked very, very tired. “Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere. Just like that. I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.” Obviously in great pain. Dread entering eyes that had ‘til then shown no fear. “A man,” he continued, looking at me. “One man ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”
He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out, and it had taken all of his life to learn it.
His dying words? He wasn’t dead yet, still had a pulse. But he was right, I couldn’t carry him down the mountain, and military honor didn’t apply here. Truth be told, he was, to put it charitably, an international outlaw. More bluntly, one of the world’s worst people. Wouldn’t be missed or mourned, except by other thugs and crooks, and by them only as a matter of business never to be done and IOUs never to be covered. There’s only so much a man can do. Getting myself out of there would be trouble enough. Driffter had taken his shot, had taken many shots in his cowboy life, and there he was.
So now what? I took stock of the situation. I’m on a hillside deep in a Jamaican jungle with a soon-to-be-dead body, and a suitcase full of stuff people wouldn’t stop at killing me for. And I better do something fast, as the curious will soon gather, and I sure don’t want to have to explain all this to any authorities. I’m in street clothes suitable for doing business in a tropical town, not for traversing jungle. At least I was wearing my desert boots—better than deck shoes or penny loafers. I’d no idea of the Jamaican terrain except that it had mountains down the middle and the capital, Kingston, lay on the southern coast. According to Harry Belafonte, the nights are gay, and the sun shines daily on the mountain top. A lot of help, that.
Speaking of nights, darkness was falling fast. The mountains were inhabited, I noticed shacks and little settlements in pockets and clearings as we came in. A crashing chopper surely doesn’t happen every day. People will come, and who knows who? I pushed debris out of
the way and crawled into the cargo bay to see what I could salvage. Not much useful. I pulled some blankets out of the tangle, uncovering the food locker. I wrestled that loose and opened it. A few sandwiches remained, as well as some bottles of water. Not much tea in the jug, and certainly no longer iced. I took two bottles of water for myself and took the third back into the cockpit to see if Driffter needed something to drink. Still out, couldn’t rouse a response. I figured to leave some water and some food for him should he come out of his funk, and take the rest. What else? The Uzi we’d taken off Vesco’s thug was awkward for a man on foot in the jungle, but I rummaged around and located a Glock automatic with a full clip, which wouldn’t over-burden me. What about the aluminum suitcase? Should I be sensible, leave it there and be rid of its curse? On the other hand, it must be worth a lot to somebody. Might give me some compensation from my inconvenience, maybe some bargaining leverage, which I might well need in getting out of this jam. I decided I’d tote it along for a while and see what developed.
Plus it was a handy carrying case for the trek out of the woods. I opened it to stow the food and the Glock, and what the…? The ledger books and the disks were still there, but the file folders had gone missing. How could that have happened? But what difference did it make? I couldn’t make any sense of them anyhow. What the hell, it lightened the load and left room for the goods I’d be carrying. I repacked it, made a blanket roll, gathered my gear and set out down the slope. The trees were mostly evergreens, not hardwoods like Indochina’s jungles. The undergrowth was not thick or densely entangled, easy enough to bushwhack until I came across a trail of sorts leading down toward the canyon floor. In the dark, I groped my way into a little clearing a ways off the trail and set up camp for the night. I won’t say I felt at home in that jungle, because who feels at home in jungles, besides people born and raised in them? They’re hot, steamy, sticky, itchy and creepy. They harbor diseases and little critters that want to feast on your fluids. But I’d spent a year patrolling the jungles in Nam, knew my way around them. Jamaica was far from the worst I’d spent a night in. There weren’t even any predators or poisonous snakes, as far as I knew. It had been a fraught day. I’d survived six flight hours in a chopper piloted by a madman. I’d bucked a shootout, three aerial dogfights and a helicopter crash. I needed shuteye. I laid a blanket over a level patch, crushed the vegetation beneath it to some semblance of comfort, rigged the other blanket overhead for a canopy, folded some of the ground cloth over the suitcase for a pillow of sorts and hit the rack, letting chirpy, squawky, hooty night noises lull me to sleep.
I slept fitfully. At one point I thought I heard voices passing along the trail I’d used, but I didn’t rouse myself to investigate. They weren’t bothering me, and the last thing I wanted was company. I awakened for good before dawn, checked myself over for wear and tear and decided I’d survived the night. My overhead blanket had absorbed the light sprinkle of rain misting down. The air was moist but warm. I ate half the food I had, drank a little water. I’d save the rest for the heat of the day when hiking downslope sweated me thirsty. From what I’d observed as we flew in, we weren’t too far into the mountains, the coast lying no more than ten miles down the stream in the canyon.
In the light of day I inventoried my kit. A pistol with nine rounds. Enough food and water to get me through the day. In my wallet $248 American, plus AmEx and MasterCard plastic. My only ID was my California driver’s license, no passport. A pocket comb. A ballpoint pen. Not your basic survival assembly, but I was on a densely populated, fertile, friendly island, not a trackless wilderness—situation not desperate. I hadn’t gone far from the chopper, so I assembled my gear, laid it out of sight in the clearing and climbed the slope back to the chopper to see if anything else useful might be there. I left the trail and crept through the underbrush as quietly as I could to where I could observe it, then waited. Nothing. Nobody. I approached it and found the cockpit and the cargo bay doors open. Driffter was gone! Who? How? What? Screw it. Nobody was in sight. The gear in the cargo bay had been thoroughly tossed. The rifles and Uzi had been taken, among other things. I sorted through what remained, found nothing useful. The food I’d left behind was gone. No problem. No time to linger. I returned to my clearing, packed up my gear to make it as portable as I could. Left the blankets in a heap on the ground and set out.
The trail got easier the further I descended. As days in the jungle go, this one went pretty well, with flowering plants all over the place, the trees and bushes full of birds. Lower down in areas cleared of trees I passed some huts, apparently not in use now. Creeks fed the stream, which became a small river tumbling down over rocks and ridges. When lost always follow water downstream, is the rule of thumb, and age-old wisdom again did the trick. Downhill quick-marching is hell on the knees, but you go fast. By early afternoon I reached a little settlement, a cluster of shacks mostly, where a paved country road crossed a bridge over the river. The people out and about, black every one, watched me warily from their distance. A white man coming down out of the mountains where a helicopter had disappeared had to be an object of curiosity.
A cement block building crudely painted in bright, raw colors and designs, topped by a rusted corrugated roof, stood at the roadside and seemed to be a general store. I went in and asked the man tending the counter if he spoke English. He did, in the local patois, sing-songy with a rippling rhythm, punctuated with “mon.” I won’t try to transcribe it here. Listen to some reggae music if you want to hear a sample. Even with my limited foreign language skills I could follow it, no worse than American ghetto slang. I asked how to get to Kingston. He told me a bus stopped there, the ride to Kingston more than 200 km, take “mos de day, de nex one come soon.” He didn’t ask any questions, though I’m sure there were answers he’d have loved to hear. He changed some American dollars into Jamaican ones. I bought a bus ticket, a coke, some rolls and jerky to eat just then, and cookies and bananas for a snack on the way. I sat on a bench in the shade to eat lunch while I waited. A young man in a white T-shirt and faded jeans went into the store. I sensed a hushed discussion inside, then the young man rushed out. Presently I saw him burst from behind a shack on a bicycle, a scrawny dog yapping up a ruckus as it chased him down the road.
A banged-up old bus, covered with exotic graffiti from stem to stern, lurched to a stop across from the store. A few people got off, and I followed the several who climbed on. I threaded my way through luggage, parcels and protruding limbs to a seat in the rear and settled in next to a dignified, grey-haired man. I positioned my aluminum case behind my legs, leaving little forward clearance for my knees, and surveyed my fellow passengers. They comprised a motley collection of types and burdens. Fat, brightly-swathed mamas with squirmy children. School-agers toting books. Young men bent on missions unknown. Judging from the array on the roof-rack, some had wares to market, others had packed well-used trunks and bags for extended stays. At least I wasn’t sharing my seat with a cage full of roosters.
As the driver finished his break and took his seat a large, well-polished white BMW rushed to a stop by the roadside shop. Two sharply dressed black men with dark glasses got out and strode in through the door. As we pulled away, they rushed outside looking up and down the road. Uh oh. I bent over and stayed down until we were well underway on the road. Then I took another look at my fellow riders. I was the only white person on the bus, or anywhere in sight. Another uh oh. With my straight dark hair, my olive complexion, my changeling face and my slightly less than average height I’ve always been able to blend into any crowd outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Those talents got me a job as a Hollywood extra when I was in high school, and they’ve gotten me through tight spots in my later adventures. I hadn’t thought of the Caribbean, which I have since learned was exploiting black African plantation slave labor centuries before it caught on in the U.S. of A, and whose present demographics reflect that history. My immediate goal was to evade capture by ill-meaning parties unkno
wn. My immediate difficulty was, I was in a population where I stood out like Mama Cass in a bathing beauty lineup.
“Are you a tourist, sir?” my seatmate asked. In contrast to the storekeeper, he was well spoken.
“Mmmm, in a way,” I said. “Taking in the sights. Going off the beaten track, seeing how the people live.”
“Poorly, but happily,” he replied. “Where are you staying?”
“Nowhere in particular. I’m in transit right now.” Tourists! A crowd I could blend into while I got my bearings. The bus lumbered along at a good clip, traffic being light out in the country at that hour. I couldn’t spot the BMW. If the storekeeper told them I’d bought a ticket to Kingston, they might figure to hang back and intercept the bus there. “The fact is, I haven’t yet decided on my next destination. Perhaps you could recommend a good place for a tourist?”
“Ochos Rios is very popular with the American tourists,” he said. “A good selection of hotels, many shops, world-renowned beaches. Tourist cruise ships stop there regularly. But you’ll learn little about how, as you put it, the people in Jamaica live. Too pricey for Jamaicans, but I gather that Americans find it a bargain.”
“A day or two at the beach would be refreshing. Where is Ochos Rios?”
“We’ll be arriving there in about an hour.”
And so, after a ride of fits, starts, lurches and high-speed chicken around mountain curves, we did. “Kingston ticket no good no more for you stopping here, mon,” the bus driver informed me. “Muss buy nudder one.” I assured him it was no problem and alit. I scanned the parking area, spotted no white BMWs. The beach resorts and hotels lay a moderate walk away, but that shiny aluminum case in my hand was a beacon to all evildoers. I needed to minimize my visibility. I had a taxi drive me to a shop that sold luggage and travel gear where I bought a comfortable, nondescript backpack, a canvas book bag for the ledgers and a little case for the computer discs. Much less awkward to tote, and feather-light compared to the packs I used to hump in the LRRPs. In the cab, I transferred my gear from the two-suiter. When he dropped me off in front of an econo-class hotel a ways back from the beach, I paid him off and was going to leave the aluminum suitcase in the back seat until it occurred to me that anyone curious could quickly find out where the man who left it had been last seen. Better to leave it behind in the hotel.
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 5
