Operation Stranglehold

by Dan J. Marlowe

  Hazel tapped the gas gauge significantly. It registered about the same as the ruptured one. “We’re going to have to ditch it, Earl,” she said.

  “Take a quick pass inland and look for something flat,” I said.

  Hazel eased the plane around again. She had reduced power; so we were barely maintaining altitude at 500 feet. Away from the shore the fog was much less thick, but it was darker too, obscuring details. The darkest patches of all must be trees, I thought.

  Ahead of us the darkest patches were bisected by a series of oddly meandering lighter patches, both in narrow strips. I strained to see better. “Is that—?” Hazel began doubtfully.

  “It’s a golf course!” Walter and I said together.

  “You want to try for the nineteenth hole?” Hazel asked kiddingly.

  “Put it down,” I said. “We may never get another chance as good.”

  “But those are trees, Earl!”

  “The dark patches are. Keep in the middle of a light patch.”

  “Perhaps if we made one more swing we’d see something—”

  The engine interrupted her. It coughed once, twice, then picked up again. If I knew anything about engines, we had two minutes air time left. “Check seat belts back there,” I said, turning to look into the back of the cabin. “We’re about to rejoin the pedestrians.”

  Hazel had nosed the plane down again at the first engine miss. She moved a lever, dropping the wing flaps in preparation for landing. Then she lowered the landing gear. “If that wheel holds up,” she said hopefully, “we shouldn’t be spread over too much of the fairway.”

  I sat there willing the plane over a bank of trees. We glided above them, but I swear by no more than six feet. The plane’s nose was lined up on a lighter strip. Hazel drew back on the throttle. Needlessly; the engine sputtered and quit. The propellor rotated stiffly for a few revolutions, then came to a stop in a vertical position.

  “Brace yourselves!” Hazel yelled. Her voice seemed extraordinarily loud in the confined cabin space after the sudden cessation of engine noise. All of a sudden we were mere feet off the ground, streaking along at a rate that seemed incredible with no engine pulling us. I braced for the ground impact of wheels or landing-gear stubs.

  Hazel did a superb job. She held the Navion aloft until its speed slowed, and it settled gently. Then a thundering rumble began underneath and the plane slewed and skidded on fog-moistened grass. We were sliding almost sideways, and another dark bank of trees was looming up ahead. “Brakes, baby, brakes!” I shouted instinctively before I saw Hazel pumping frantically.

  Then the landing gear seemed to collapse. Something broke with a loud snap. The nose of the plane dipped abruptly. The tail began to rise behind us. I looked back. I had one quick glimpse of the small, pale oval that was Lisa’s face before I faced front again, planting my feet.

  There was a jarring, shivering “whomp,” and despite my seat belt, I was flung against the padded dash with stunning force.

  CHAPTER X

  I didn’t black out, quite. I rebounded from the instrument panel with a sharp pain in my left shoulder, but sometimes pain is almost a pleasure. If it lets you know you’re still alive. The Navion was still in its nose-down inclination, almost as though we were in a power dive.

  I looked at Hazel. She looked as if she were frozen at the controls, but she was all right. I started to turn to look in the back, but my shoulder objected. “Okay back there?” I asked.

  “Okay. I think,” Walter answered. His voice was shaky.

  Hazel had cut the switch instinctively, but I could see the whiteness of the knuckles of her left hand, which was still gripping the wheel. Her teeth were digging into her lower lip. “What—happened?” she asked faintly.

  “I’ll take a look,” I said.

  I unfastened my seat belt, one of whose ring-bolts had ripped free, smashing me against the instrument panel. I opened the cabin door cautiously. It was much darker on the ground than it had been upstairs with the sun on the clouds after the worst of the fog had disappeared. It was darker than it had been cabana-hopping along the shoreline. I couldn’t see what was below the wing.

  I lowered a foot to the step-up rung, then eased my other foot down until it encountered a soft, yielding substance. It took me a second to recognize it. I looked in the cabin door at Hazel. “You forgot your wedge,” I told her. “We’re in a sand trap.”

  I dropped down into the trap. The Navion was almost on its nose, its elevated tail silhouetted against the rapidly lightening horizon. Broad bands of light streaked the sky. Full daylight wasn’t many minutes away.

  One blade of the plane’s propellor was buried in the sand, bent at a sickening angle. That and the partially washed-out undercarriage, acquired at takeoff, guaranteed that the Navion wasn’t going anywhere for a while. “Everybody into the pool,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  There was movement inside the plane, and then Walter dropped down into the sand. He stood there for a moment rotating his head and neck as though making sure everything was operative. “Man!” he breathed. “That was some kind of experience!”

  Lisa slithered down the inclined wing into the sand. Her face was pale, but the girl retained her usual composed look. Hazel followed, looking as rattled as I’d ever seen her. She took one look at the Navion, then shook her head slowly.

  The tops of the pine trees which had been such a confusing darker mass from the air were now tipped in sunlight. Walter was looking at me expectantly. “So?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s changed,” I said. “We’ll stash the girls someplace, away from the golf course, and you and I will hike to La Perla.”

  “Let’s see.” He turned around and looked at the rising sun. “That’s—” He started to point, then hesitated.

  “Málaga was that way when we landed,” Hazel said, flicking a hand to the south. “Unless we groundlooped after landing.” She looked as if she were getting some of her natural ginger back. “Which could have thrown me off.”

  I indicated the straight path of the Navion’s wheeled track along the fairway. “No, you’re correct. We’re between Málaga and La Perla.”

  “Probably no more than five miles from La Perla,” Walter guessed.

  “Correct. We’ll keep to the shore as much as we can, although not on it. Someone’s going to report this plane down eventually, and then the roads will be patrolled.”

  “Let’s hope Spanish golfers don’t get out on the course early.” Walter glanced at the Navion. “Do we need anything from the plane?”

  “The compass,” I said. “In case we have to take to the woods and get turned around.”

  “Right.” He scrambled inside the cabin, found a screwdriver in the tool box, and busied himself unscrewing and prying free the compass.

  Hazel drew me to one side. “You hurt your shoulder, didn’t you?” she asked quietly. “I saw you rubbing it before you got out of the plane.”

  “Forget it. Any landing you can walk away from—”

  “—is a good landing,” she finished the maxim, but her smile was rueful. “Will you and Walter be away long?”

  “I don’t think so. We’ve just got to talk to this wine shop owner and get the word on the next link in Erikson’s chain. We’ll bring food back with us.”

  Walter dropped down into the sand again, compass in hand. He unbuttoned his shirt and shoved it inside. “Okay?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  We set out across the undulating fairway in a northeasterly direction. The first pine woods we reached proved to be just a belt with another fairway beyond. That was the boundary of the golf course, though. We surmounted a low stone wall laced with wildflowers at its base and found ourselves in real woods.

  “I thought the shore was closer than this,” Walter said when we had put some distance between ourselves and the golf course.

  “It’s not far now,” Hazel and I said together.

  “You’re forgetting how fast we wer
e moving in the air,” the redhead added.

  “Just so we’re not going in the wrong direction. I can tell you I’m not sure of anything after that landing. We—hey! I see water!”

  The trees had been thinning out without my realizing it as we pushed forward along a pine-needled, zigzag route between the tree trunks with the sun as a beacon. Blue water was indeed visible where Walter was pointing, although the shoreline couldn’t be seen from where we were because of the steep bluff along that whole section of coastline.

  “Back it up a little,” I said. “We want better cover for the girls than there is closer to the shore.”

  We retreated until we found a natural little glade surrounded by towering pines. Walter took out the compass and we made some careful readings. “Got to be able to find you again,” he joked to Lisa.

  “Get some sleep,” I said to Hazel.

  “You be careful,” she returned. She and Lisa were standing rather forlornly when Walter and I set out again.

  The compass readings proved to have been unnecessary. Within five hundred yards we ran into a dirt road, and I marked the place we crossed it by a lightning-blazed, grandfather-sized tree. The road meandered along in leisurely curves, but it roughly paralleled the shoreline. We stayed twenty yards to one side or the other of it, depending upon how close it came to the bluff. The sun rose higher, and even in the woods the going grew hotter. Insects pestered us constantly.

  Then the bluff disappeared abruptly and a long, curving, white-sand shoreline came into view. In the middle of the arc, a dozen flimsy-masted fishing boats with ratty-looking rigging bobbed at shallow anchor. A single road, which could never be dignified with the name street, led back from the beach to a cluster of tumbledown shacks and a scattering of wall-enclosed stone buildings. Fishnets were drying on the sand near the boats.

  “Can that be La Perla?” Walter asked doubtfully.

  “It’s in the right place.” I scanned the area along the beach, looking for signs of activity, but there were none. “The fat man said it was small, but this is farcical. Strangers are bound to stand out like Lady Godiva on a black horse in such a small community.”

  “At least our clothes are in style again, not like they were in Madrid,” Walter said. “There we looked like country cousins.” His tone was absent. He was still looking at the fishing boats. “Funny-looking rigs on those jobbies. Something like a down east fore-and-after. I’ve sailed Dragons and Finns on Long Island Sound, but I’ve never seen rigs exactly like these.”

  “What are Dragons and Finns?”

  He looked at me. “Olympic-class sailboats.”

  The conversation was conducted with each of us taking alternate swipes at the clouds of gnats buzzing around our perspiring faces. “I don’t like what I’m thinking, Walter,” I went on. “I told that fat buzzard in the Madrid branch post office that if he’d sold me a pup I’d come back and feed him his own gizzard, but damn if it doesn’t look like he did it anyway.”

  “Maybe there’s more to the place than we can see from here,” Walter said hopefully. He swung his arm angrily through the gnat infestation. “I’m in favor of getting out of here, anyway.”

  “One thing first,” I returned. “They have a physical description of you, remember. Scrape up a little earth and darken your face.”

  He kicked pine needles away from the roots of a tree and then dug up the ground with his heel. He scooped up a double handful of loamy clay and with his eyes closed scrubbed it into his face. It helped. The dirt would dry lighter, but it took away the Ivy League gloss.

  “All right, let’s go down to the shore and approach the place from the beach,” I went on. “Maybe they’ll think we’ve come in on a boat.”

  “From the looks of things no one is going to bother to go down to the beach to check it out,” Walter answered. “The whole town must be asleep.”

  “For the last 1500 years, probably.”

  We angled through the woods down to the shore. It was cooler that close to the water, and the gnats disappeared. It was a beautiful beach; it seemed absolutely untouched. “After we couldn’t find a place to put the plane down on the beach near Málaga, how can a nice stretch like this be so deserted?” Walter put my thoughts into words.

  I was looking down at my shoes. The sand was sticking to them thickly. A closer look indicated that a thick, gummy substance was sticking to the shoes and the sand was sticking to it. Walter’s shoes looked the same. I pointed to them. “I read something about it,” I said. “Two or three bad oil spills from freighters breaking up in storms. The sand is so fine the top layer dries out, but the oil stays right beneath it.”

  “Imagine walking in it barefoot?” Walter asked, stamping a foot ineffectually.

  We were opposite the fishing boats. The sand was harder packed, not so oily. We turned toward the town. “The first thing we do is give your Spanish another workout,” I said as the dirt road climbed toward the village. “Even if we blow this linkup, we’ve still got to bring food back to the girls, so let’s get it first. Pick up one of those string bags everyone carries. We’ll look more natural lugging something, anyway. Watch for a store.”

  There was a little bit more to the village than we had been able to see from the woods, but not much. The houses had no eaves, but there were iron pipes at each corner through the walls, angled upward to the flat roofs to carry off rainwater. But everything was so dry it looked as though it hadn’t rained in centuries. Every footstep kicked up puffs of dust.

  Walter nudged me. Across the street an open door disclosed a fly-specked glass counter and shelves of cans and bottles behind it. We went inside, and an old crone with a shawl over her head came through a hanging curtain. The curtain made me think of the one separating bar and back room at the Dixie Pig in Hudson, Florida, where I’d first met Hazel.

  Walter picked up a string bag from a pile on the counter and began to jabber to the crone. I went to the doorway and looked up and down the street. Nothing was moving. It was the only street that I could see, really; a few paths branched off from it in different directions. A hundred yards farther along a car was pulled off to our side of the narrow road, against which the few houses came right out to the edge. There were no sidewalks. The car was an anachronism in an atmosphere that seemed more likely to produce Moorish cavalrymen with fixed lances riding down the street.

  The car was covered with a thick layer of the powdery dust, but underneath the dust it wasn’t hard to see it was new and shiny. I looked at it a long time. The plane could have been found and the word sent out and a dragnet set up already, but that would have been fast work even for the efficient Spanish police. I had a feeling the car represented something else.

  Walter bumped me in the doorway, and I stepped down to the street. “Don’t look at that car when we pass it,” I said from the corner of my mouth. “Don’t walk fast. Slow it down.”

  When we were level with the car, I could see from the corner of my eye that the windshield wasn’t dust-covered. And then I saw the man’s dark face. He was sitting low, slumped down, where he could watch the street. It must have been oven-like inside that automobile, but there he sat. I couldn’t see a uniform, but I didn’t need to see one.

  We slogged past the car as though we had plowed twenty hectares behind a mule. A dozen doors beyond I saw it: a wooden sign that said EL TIO PEPE. Beneath it in smaller letters, it said VINOS Y LICORES. The cop was sitting where he could watch the entrance to the wine shop.

  “Keep going,” I said to Walter. He had seen the sign too.

  “Trouble?” he whispered without looking at me.

  “You know it.”

  We came to the end of the houses. The road curved left, away from the shoreline. After another fifty yards I drew Walter off the road and we sat down behind a willow tree. Across the road was a clump of cedar. A short distance beyond that was a flowering eucalyptus. After the morning spent in the stark pines the change was restful.

  “Break out something t
o eat in case the cop in the car gets curious and drives around here to check us out,” I said.

  “Cop?” Walter asked. He took black bread and cheese out of the string bag. I sliced off a slab of each with my knife. The bread was hard and the cheese was gamy.

  “Sure,” I said. “Erikson’s fat boy sold us out. There’s no way the police could be watching the door to that grog shop unless Guardoza turned us in.”

  “Man, it’s always something, isn’t it?” Walter sighed. For the first time in a couple of days he sounded quite boyish. The kid had really been pulling his share of the load. He chewed thoughtfully on bread and cheese. “I figured out why there’s no one on the street,” he announced. “These people fish at night, and there’s probably no other industry.” He could see I wasn’t listening. “It’s a good thing you had sense enough to have us get the food now that we can’t go to the wine shop.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Walter. We just can’t go to the front entrance.”

  He shook his head, smiling, his white teeth a shining streak in his dirty face. “How many tight spots have you been in during your life?” he asked. Frank curiosity was in his voice.

  One more than yesterday this time, I thought to myself. The Spanish narcs now had a description of me from Guardoza. “A few more than you have,” I said. “Now let’s see if we can find a way to the back door of that wine shop and have a few words with the owner.”

  Walter repacked the bread and cheese in the string bag. “Maybe we should go back down to the beach and work our way up through the trees?” he offered.

  “We may have to, but all we need is enough cover to get behind the houses on that side of the street. Let’s see how it looks.”

  We left the shelter of the low-hanging willow and crossed the road. I led the way in a deeper arc than the curve of the road, closer to the water. We came to a path going in the same general direction, hard-packed earth rutted out of coarse grass by thousands of passages. Other paths crossed it, most appearing to lead down to the beach. I was sure we were between the village’s only street and the waterline.