by Ted Bell
“You’re here illegally.”
“You come to my town, I come to yours. I do what you ask, huh? Return the stinking putas. The next thing I know, a little Mexican boy dies of thirst while in your personal hands. You Anglos place so little value on our lives, eh? Well, this will be a warning to you. No place on this border is safe. Never safe for us. Now, not for you, Mr. Tex-Ass Ranger.”
“Reconquista!” the riders shouted, fists in the air. “Reconquista!”
It was the secret war cry of the millions of illegal aliens crossing the border. Dixon, like a lot of border lawmen, believed the illegals were in fact an invading army, bent on reconquering the American Southwest. Their swelling number included actual armed members of the Mexican Army, mercenaries from North Korea, Russia, and other communist lands. Increasingly brazen, they fired on American Border Patrol officers and terrorized American ranchers. Reconquista was the title of the little speech he’d written for Key West.
“The boy’s blood is on your hands, Sheriff. Remember that in the days to come.”
Tejada twisted the throttle and popped the clutch, roaring away. In seconds the other riders accelerated, and the waves of Harleys roared past the lone man on the centerline.
The first wave brushed him pretty close on both sides, the first few rows of bikers keeping to their tight formation, once again firing into the air. After about five or six rows had passed him by, clipping his arm or his leg, some of the gangbangers started getting cute, swerving their bikes toward him and then avoiding him at the last second. He figured if he moved in any direction, he’d get hit for sure, so he just stood his ground.
It took a long time for the bikes to rumble past him.
Wyatt, Homer, and the rest of the officers stayed put until the last of the big choppers had almost disappeared up Main. Then they came down the brick walkway, weapons at the ready. The deafening roar of the engines was already becoming a distant rumble moving north and out of hearing range.
“You all right, Sheriff?” Homer said, quickly crossing into the street to where he stood.
“Homer, to tell you the God’s honest truth, I reckon we’re about one funeral away from a border war.”
Then he turned and started to walk away, go back inside and finish his lunch.
“Put that in your Key West report, Sheriff!” Homer called out after him. “I mean it!”
DIXON HEARD TWO more bikes coming toward him, big Harleys moving very slowly up the now empty street, headed the same direction as the departed Mexicans. He recognized the two boys he’d chased off the Brotherwood ranch the day the child died. Hambone and Zorro.
The two bikes rolled to a stop a few feet shy of Dixon. The riders stayed in the saddle, Hambone picking his teeth with his knife, both men grinning at the sheriff.
“Thought I told you two to move on,” Dixon said.
“We did,” Zorro said, “Just a couple of scouts, passing through. Keeping an eye on things for you, Sheriff. Looking for Mexicans. Seen any?”
Hambone laughed out loud.
Dixon craned his head around and saw the last bit of dust settling up the road. “You two roughriders are keeping a pretty safe distance, I’d say. You don’t want them to get away, you get on after them.”
Zorro said, “We ain’t necessarily looking for trouble, Sheriff.”
“Leastways, not yet, we ain’t,” Hambone added. “Still rounding up recruits. Getting sizeable, Sheriff. Two or three hundred riders in this county alone. I hear there’s a thousand over to Laredo. You let us know, come time for the last stand.”
“Take your gang violence elsewhere. This is a peaceful community. Now git out of it.”
“You might want to watch your ass, old man. Shooting war starts with Mexico, which side you want us on?” Zorro said.
“Yeah, Sheriff,” Hambone said. “Texans got to stick together in times of war. You need us.”
Dixon looked at him.
“Ain’t gonna be no Mexican war, son. We did that once already. Remember the Alamo?”
He turned and walked away to the sound of laughter.
“He fucking kidding?” he heard Hambone say to his back.
“Hey, Sheriff!” Zorro called after him.
“Yeah?”
“What the fuck do you think this is, if it ain’t war?”
31
THE AMAZON
C ould you please land this thing?” Harry pleaded.
“What? I can’t hear you!” cried Saladin Hassan, who was bouncing around up front, doing the driving.
No surprise Hassan couldn’t hear. Between the bellicose roar of the airborne Toyota’s unmuffled engine and the howl of wind and driving rain, you couldn’t really have a normal conversation. Harry Brock cupped his hands round his mouth.
“I said, try to stay on the goddamn ground!”
“Okay! Sorry!”
Harry sat back and tried to wipe away the rainwater streaming from both eyes and running like a river into his mouth. Unlike Saladin and Caparina, he had not thought to bring along a pair of swimmer’s goggles. He leaned forward and screamed again this time directly into the driver’s ear.
“I. Said. Slow! Down!”
They hit a ditch and launched again and Harry was once more hurled sideways against the thinly padded rear seat.
“Too slow and we get stuck in the mud!” Saladin Hassan shouted over his shoulder.
“What about the fucking mines?” Harry screamed, trying to hold on. “You said a lot of these unmarked trails are land-mined!”
“I don’t think this one is,” Caparina shouted over her shoulder.
“Really? You don’t think so? That’s good, Caparina,” Harry shouted back, “very reassuring!”
Harry was sitting, occasionally, on the narrow bench seat in the back of the mud-spattered Toyota Land Cruiser. This was definitely not your father’s Land Cruiser. There were no windows, no doors, and no damn top. About six inches of water was sloshing around his ankles, one foot in each of the rear foot-wells.
Saladin explained he had cut the roof off years ago. Who needs it? he said. For protection there was only a heavily padded roll-bar overhead. Harry was clinging to it now in hopes of remaining more or less inside the vehicle each time it left the ground. Colonel Hassan, Harry had learned the night before, was with an elite Brazilian spec ops group known as Halcon 4. It means Falcon, Saladin had said. Brock had heard of them. A secret government anti-terrorist unit working this region of the Amazon right now.
“You’re not on the road!” Harry yelled, palm fronds whipping across his face. “The road is to our fucking left!”
Saladin cranked the wheel hard left and they bounced back into the rut. Hassan, his beautiful ex-wife Caparina, and the American spy Harry Brock were careening down a twisting muddy trail full of unpleasant surprises. But at least none of them had been lethal so far.
Unlike Harry, Caparina, who was sitting shotgun and clinging to a grab handle on the dash, seemed to find this mad experience life-affirming and fairly amusing.
Brock tried hard to be philosophical. Be in the moment, Harry, as one of his old girlfriends used to tell him. One of the advantages of this rain was the effect it had on Caparina’s faded red T-shirt with the word Jamaica emblazoned across her lovely breasts in big black letters. He thought Saladin must be crazy. How could a man ever leave a woman like this?
Apart from the distinct possibility that this narrow twisting road was land-mined, you had to take it on faith there was no oncoming traffic from the opposite direction. Every turn was blind, with towering leafy green walls on either side. Every two minutes or so they’d hit another deep rut or streaming gully and go airborne for an eternity, returning to earth with a great splash of mud in all directions.
Caparina had a soggy, disintegrating map of the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in her lap. Periodically, she would try to show it to Harry, looking for some direction as to which way they should go. But, since the twisting gash in the rain forest they were c
urrently following didn’t appear on any maps, it was tough. They’d been driving all morning and Harry was more confused now than when they’d started out.
The driving rain and the mud-splashed windshield didn’t help your visibility either.
“Does any of this look familiar?” Caparina said, turning in her seat to smile at Harry. She put her finger on the map, “This area here?”
“How can you tell?” Harry said, leaning forward to give the map a cursory glance.
“What?”
“I mean, Caparina, that everything looks familiar here! Everywhere you go looks exactly like this!”
“Good point,” she said smiling at him.
The three comrades, who had only recently decided to join forces, had talked into the wee hours over a late supper and many drinks the previous evening. They decided the first thing was to try and relocate the airstrip where Harry’s shot-up airplane had put down three weeks earlier. Harry estimated that, after his capture, he’d been transported over about five miles of rough jungle road, then crossed a river. He’d been taken to one of the many “detention centers” located around the perimeters of the terror training camps. Harry, along with a bunch of rural youths, was there for his “political indoctrination.” Harry listened politely, but it didn’t take. That’s why Top had ordered him shot.
Saladin Hassan was convinced that if they successfully located the secret airstrip, as identified by Brock, they’d be that much closer to finding Harry’s former detention center; and, thus, that much closer to finding Top. Saladin, in his undercover role as one of Papa Top’s henchmen, had never been allowed to visit these sensitive places without first being blindfolded.
“There should be a river around here somewhere,” Saladin said, slowing down and peering over the steering wheel.
“I think we’re in it,” Harry said, kicking his feet and splashing water forward beneath Caparina’s seat.
“I like him,” Caparina said to her ex. “He’s funny.”
Saladin said, “Wait, what’s that up there?”
Brock leaned forward. He saw a dark mass a hundred yards ahead, moving left to right across their path.
“What the hell is that?” Harry said.
“Water buffalo,” Saladin said.
“That’s got to be your river,” Caparina said. “Stop!”
Hassan stood on the brakes and they fishtailed to a halt just shy of the swollen torrent. He raised the little fish-eyed goggles up on his forehead and smiled at Harry.
“See? We made it!”
“Made what? I don’t recognize this. I don’t have a fucking clue where we are!”
“Calm down, Harry,” Caparina said.
EVERYBODY CLIMBED out of the Toyota into slushy mud that came up to their knees. Saladin led the way forward to check out the river. Harry, bringing up the rear, could barely make out the small herd of water buffalo moving away along the flooded bank.
Ahead, Harry saw, the road plummeted and seemed to disappear, dead-ending in a muddy brown river some two hundred yards wide. The heavy rains of the past few days had caused the thing to overflow its banks. The raging stream was churning with submerged kapok logs, most likely from a logging station upriver. Logs and other debris were flowing by from left to right. The rain, mercifully, had subsided a little. For a few moments they were able to speak more or less normally above the sound of the rushing river.
“Take a look at this, Harry Brock,” Caparina said. She had flattened the rain-soaked map onto the hood of the Toyota.
“I think we’re here,” she said, putting her index finger on a small tributary. The unnamed river ran west to east through an area of floodplain and flooded forest.
“Yes,” Saladin said, studying the map. “That makes sense. What’s this larger river over here called?”
“Igapo,” she said, “Black Water.”
Harry looked around and said, “Is there maybe a waterfall nearby?”
“Impossible to say. Certainly not one on the map. There are so many in this part of the jungle. Some big, some small. Some exist only during the rainy season.”
“Why do you ask?” Saladin asked Brock.
“I hid in one. After the plane went down.”
“Tell us,” Caparina said, putting a hand on Harry’s shoulder.
“We all survived the plane’s landing. I was the last one off. When Top’s welcoming committee started shooting at us, I made it into the jungle. I was the only one who got more than a hundred yards from the plane alive. After slogging it for about an hour, I found a waterfall. I hid inside when I heard the dogs coming.”
“Inside. You mean, behind the water?”
“Yes. There was a deep indent in the rocks at the base of this waterfall. A small cave with a tunnel leading deeper inside. Unfortunately, they caught me before I could do too much exploring. But it looked interesting.”
Saladin looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘interesting’?”
“It looked like the tunnel could have been manmade.”
“How far do you think these falls were from the landing strip?” Caparina asked, suddenly much more interested.
“I didn’t get very far from the strip,” Harry said. “The jungle was so thick and I only ran for about an hour. Probably less than three miles.”
“We’re probably here,” Saladin said, pointing to the map. “And with this flood, we’re not going any further right now. Let’s track the water buffalo on foot along the river. There’s still a lot of light left in the day and it’s better than turning back.”
“I agree,” Caparina said. “Let’s follow this river and see what we see.”
“Go with the flow,” Harry said, smiling at her. Even soaking wet, she was a babe.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s get the weapons.”
A half-hour later, trudging in the rain through knee-deep mud behind a herd of meandering buffalo, Harry was feeling more than a little discouraged. But he began to notice that the current was speeding up dramatically. It was beginning to at least look more like a run of rapids. And, maybe it was leading to a waterfall.
Suddenly, Saladin, in the lead, halted.
“Listen,” he said.
“What?” Caparina said, pausing to hear.
“That dull roar. Up there, not too far. Hear it?”
“Yeah,” Harry said, his face showing some life. “That sounds like it.”
“All waterfalls sound the same, Harry,” Caparina said. “Some are a little louder, that’s all.”
“I know, but this one sounds like the one I found, that’s all I can tell you.”
Fifteen minutes later they were standing near the top of a very large waterfall, watching it cascade down into an almost circular pool some forty feet below.
“Yeah,” Harry said looking down and nodding his head. “I dove in that pool and swam under those falls. Let’s go.”
“You’re sure about all this, Harry?” Caparina asked.
“It’s a hell of a difficult climb down there,” Saladin said.
“Almost positive,” Harry said.
32
MIAMI
T his mystery man you’ve kidnapped,” Hawke said to Stokely Jones, “tell me more.”
“The Mambo King? You’re going to be talking to him yourself in about ten minutes. You want me to go faster?”
Hawke glanced at the big sixties style chromium speedometer centered behind the steering wheel and said, “Not really.”
The two men were rumbling loudly across the causeway spanning Biscayne Bay, strapped into the black leather-pleated front seats of Stokely’s outrageous new automobile.
Hawke, who favored more understated forms of conveyance, was fascinated by the GTO Pontiac. This street-legal racing machine, he had just learned, was capable of running the standing quarter mile in a shade under seven seconds. A small miracle. Hawke, for all his racing automobiles, had never owned anything that could touch this metallic beast off the line.
Alex Hawke was
eagerly anticipating his meeting with the Venezuelan officer. Stoke had arranged the rendezvous at the Key Biscayne home of his intended, the beauteous Fancha. He had somehow forged an agreement with the Coast Guard honchos in Key West to maintain custody of the man for forty-eight hours. Or, longer if necessary, since, as Stoke told the commander, it was clearly a matter of national security. The man was now parked temporarily in a staff apartment located above Fancha’s boathouse.
“What’s he like, your Venezuelan colonel?” Hawke asked.
“You know it’s funny.”
“What is?”
“Well, like I told Tommy Quick this morning, it’s weird, but I feel like I’ve known this guy all my life. Even though we only met two days ago.”
“Really? Why is that, do you suppose?”
“To tell you the honest truth, when we were out there in the Tortugas, I encouraged the man to let his hair down. You know, seeing as how I’d saved his life, I said to him, and this is a quote, ‘Fernando, if you got any frijoles, spill ’em now, hombre.’ ”
Hawke laughed. “So, he’s talking, is he? What the hell does he want?”
“Asylum for him and his family up here in the big Magic Kingdom, I think. That’s the best card we got to play. Anyway, I told him you were a big-time government guy and would listen to what he had to say.”
“You say which government?”
“Hell, I don’t even know which government. I can’t keep up with you anymore. You ought to wear those little flag pins, so folks know who they’re dealing with at the moment.”
Hawke smiled, and realized just how much he’d missed Stoke’s company. He looked affectionately at the big man out of the corner of his eye. The sixties steering wheel looked small in his big brown hands.
Hawke said, “You say you encouraged the colonel to let his hair down? Is that right?”
“Yes I did.”
“You mean you told this poor guy you’d leave him alone to die out there in the Tortugas. If he didn’t immediately agree to tell you everything you wanted to know.”
