Born to Run
( Jack Swyteck - 7 )
James Grippando
James Grippando
Born to Run
September 1960
Nicosia, Cyprus
Chapter 1
The Italians called him the Greek. The Greeks called him the Sicilian. He was from Nicosia. It was a funny coincidence that the largest city in his native Cyprus shared a name with a city in Sicily-the birthplace of his bride.
“Sofia,” he whispered in the darkness.
His wife of eleven months lay sleeping beneath a clingy cotton sheet, the gentle curve of her hip a silhouette in the shadows of night. A late-summer heat wave had sent them to bed naked, and like true newlyweds, they’d made the best of it. Cyprus was the mythological birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who couldn’t have held a candle to Sofia. She was a classic Italian beauty, a strong and passionate woman with dark hair, captivating eyes, and flawless olive skin. The Greek felt lucky to have her, and he marveled that she loved him enough to leave her family and run all the way to Cyprus with him.
He only wished he could stop running.
“Sofia, did you hear that?”
Her head didn’t move from the pillow.
The Greek slowly slid out of bed, crossed the room in silence, and went to the open window. The lace curtains were motionless in the warm night air. He crooked his finger and parted the panels just enough to check the quiet street from his second-story apartment.
The cloak of night could hide centuries of decay, and Nicosia was beautiful in the moonlight. Flanked by the Pentadaktylos, the five-finger mountain, Nicosia was one of the oldest cities in the world, the geographic heart of an island paradise in the eastern Mediterranean. Behind thick sandstone walls, Cypriots had defended themselves from a host of invaders and occupiers dating back at least to the Byzantine Empire. The mid-twentieth century had proved to be another violent chapter, with five years of armed struggle finally bringing an end to more than eighty years of British rule. The Greek had taken no stake in that fight-which was why real Greeks called him the Sicilian (or worse)-but he’d grown accustomed to noisy nights, even gunshots.
It was purely instinct, but tonight the Greek felt another type of raid coming-one that had absolutely nothing to do with Greeks, Turks, or any of the country’s traditional ethnic divisions. He stood quietly at the lone window in their one-room apartment and listened. He was certain that he had heard something, and it took more than a cat on the roof to wake him from sleep after sex.
He walked around to the other side of the bed and sat on the edge of the lumpy mattress.
“Sofia, wake up.”
She grumbled and propped herself up on one elbow. Even at 3:00 A.M. she was beautiful, but she immediately sensed his concern.
“What is it?” she said.
He didn’t answer. He sat and listened for that noise again. There it was-a thumping that came from the first floor of their building.
“They’re coming!” he said in an urgent whisper. He sprang from the bed and quickly pulled on his underwear.
“Who’s coming?” said Sofia.
He pulled on his pants. The thumping noise was louder, like a herd of stallions charging up the stairs.
“It’s me they want, not you.”
“Who? Who?”
“Listen to me. Don’t tell them I was here. Just say-tell them I left you.”
He kissed her before she could protest.
The loud bang on the door was definitely not a knock. Someone had put a shoulder into it. They were busting their way in. The Greek couldn’t find his shoes or his shirt, and there was no time to grab anything-except his gun in the top dresser drawer. He dived through the open window and out onto the balcony as the chain lock ripped from the frame and the apartment door crashed open.
He heard his wife scream.
“Sofia!” he shouted-which accomplished nothing, except to give himself away.
“Out the window!” a man yelled from inside the apartment.
The Greek could only run for it. He grabbed the rain gutter and pulled himself up to the second-story roof. His first step loosened an old barrel tile, and it crashed onto the street below. As he regained his footing, the Greek glanced back to see the lead man climbing up onto the roof behind him.
He was wearing a police uniform.
The Greek didn’t hesitate to shoot, the sound of Sofia’s scream replaying in his mind. The return gunfire told him that he’d missed-and the bullet ripped through his hand. He cried out in pain and dismay as his revolver flew from his grasp, slid down the roof, and landed in the gutter. Another shot shattered the clay roofing tiles at his feet.
The Greek kept running.
The slope of the roof changed from pitched to flat. He gained speed and jumped across the alley-the canyon between buildings-and landed on the neighbor’s roof. A quick glance over his shoulder didn’t slow him down a bit. Two-no, three-men in uniform were in pursuit. The Greek ran faster, his heart pounding in his chest. Beat after beat, the blood pumped from his wounded hand, leaving a crimson trail across the rooftops. He couldn’t stop running. At any moment, he expected a bullet in the back. They were close enough to take him out.
He leaped across another alley, and this time it took his breath away. The ground had gone from two stories to four stories below him. The buildings on his street had the same roofline, but they were built on the slope of a hill, each one of increasing height.
Too high to jump.
He raced across the rooftop, but the footfalls behind him grew louder. His hand didn’t hurt-too much adrenaline to feel pain-but the loss of blood was making him dizzy. No way could he outrun these guys. He had to find a safe place to jump down and hide. The roof pitched upward, however, and the only way down from here was through the men with the guns. He climbed even higher, all the way to the crest, where the roof flattened into a wide expanse. It was a big building, like a warehouse. No, a hotel. The Mykonos Hotel-the last building on the block. No rooftop beyond it. No more alleys to jump.
Nowhere to run.
He went all the way to the edge, and his heart was in his throat. Six stories up.
Shit!
“Turn around!”
The voice confirmed his fears. The man was speaking Italian. There was no point in resisting. The Greek turned to face justice.
The chase had left the men breathing just as heavily as the Greek, but their faces bore the unmistakable smirk of victory.
“On your knees,” the man said. His gun was aimed at the Greek’s chest.
Again, the Greek obliged. He was too dizzy and exhausted to resist, even if he’d wanted to put up a fight.
The two bigger men stepped toward him. One grabbed his right arm; the other, his left. The Greek was no longer standing under his own power. His feet raked across the rooftop as the men carried him to the building’s edge.
“What did you do to Sofia?”
The man with the gun went to him.
“What does it matter?” he said, and he spat in the Greek’s face.
“What do you want?”
The man shrugged. “Nothing.”
With a wave of his hand, the two bigger men tightened their grip, and the Greek felt his feet leave the rooftop.
It all happened in a flash, but the next few seconds seemed like an eternity, as the Greek was airborne, flying up into the night at first, the stars seemingly within his reach. Then gravity took over, and just as quickly he was a meteor tumbling out of control, spiraling down, down, down-headfirst, feetfirst, headfirst.
He didn’t hear himself scream, or the Sicilians laughing, as his body collided with the cobblestone below.
Forty-six years later
&nbs
p; Chapter 2
They looked dead-except for the eyes.
Sleek and dark saurian bodies lay perfectly still, concealed in a flat pool of water that was black as ink. The heavy air of night stirred not a bit-damp heat, no breeze to speak of, sweetened by the perfume-like scent of surrounding water lilies. The surest signs of life were in the chorus of sounds from unseen creatures of the night: the rhythmic belch of bullfrogs, the predawn squawk of egrets and osprey, the steady hum of insects. At any moment, however, that peaceful pulse of nature could spike into tachycardia. The eyes of a bull gator lurking in the marshland said it all-primeval red dots caught in the sweep of a handheld spotlight. There was hunger in that eerie, ruby shine. And with good reason:
Nighttime was feeding time in the Florida Everglades.
Phil Grayson wasn’t precisely in the Everglades-gator hunting wasn’t permitted there in December-but this guided hunt on adjacent private land was the next best thing. Grayson stood tall in the twenty-foot wooden rowboat, his gaze fixed on the telltale eye-shine in the darkness. His love of hunting dated back to BB guns and doves on telephone wires, and when Grandpa gave him a Harrington amp; Richardson single-shot rifle for his eighth birthday, he considered himself a true outdoorsman, even if he wasn’t allowed to shoot without his dad looking over his shoulder. Over the next forty-six years, that passion continued to grow-from quail in Texas and duck in Arkansas to Montana deer and Canadian moose.
Gator hunting, however, was new to him. In fact, this cool autumn night in south Florida was his very first stab at conquering the king of Florida’s freshwaters.
Grayson had spent two days exploring the nearby Everglades, which was not at all the dismal swamp he had imagined. To the north, Lake Okeechobee gathered water from rain-filled rivers and streams. Tea-colored water flowed for a hundred miles, south to the tip of mainland Florida and west to the Gulf of Mexico, much as spilled milk spreads across the kitchen table. All across these millions of watery acres grew the tall reeds of saw grass, a rare species of swamp sedge that has flourished here for over four thousand years. This legendary “river of grass” divided the east coast of Florida from the west, an utter North American anomaly where visitors found exotic reptiles, manatees, and rainbow-colored tree snails, roseate spoonbills and ghost orchids, towering royal palms and gumbo-limbos. Here, biblical clouds of mosquitoes could blacken a white canoe within seconds, and oceans of stars filled a night sky untouched by city lights. Grayson had traveled all over the world and never seen any place like it.
“Twelve footer, I’m bettin’,” his gator guide said in an old-Florida drawl. “That’s sumptin’ special.”
There were two boats in their hunting party, each in its own channel, each hunter with his own guide. Grayson’s guide was a retired county sheriff named McFay, who took his gator hunting seriously. He rarely smiled, and when he did, his crooked teeth showed the stains of chewed tobacco. He reminded Grayson of the redneck version of Captain Ahab. No peg leg, but his left ring finger was missing, lost to the snap of a mammoth jaw and three thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. Grayson wondered if it was the same giant that had left an inch-deep bite mark-and a tooth-in the side of the boat.
McFay switched off the electric trolling motor. It was barely big enough to push along two men in a rowboat, but the quiet hum didn’t scare away gators the way gas-powered engines did. McFay was a stickler for details, which was why he insisted on a wooden boat over noisy aluminum. The glare of a spotlight was the one hindrance to the hunt that he could put up with. Not even the craziest of gator cowboys relied solely on moonlight
Grayson released the bale on his rod. He could feel the power, and with good reason. His saltwater fishing gear could have whipped a hammerhead. Rod thick as his thumb. Microfiber line testing 150 pounds. Treble hooks in size 14/0.
“Get good ’n’ ready before you cast,” the guide said. “When there’s a hook up, that line’s gonna pop like a rifle shot.”
“Bring it on,” said Grayson.
Once an endangered species, the Florida alligator had grown in population to a robust million-plus-one for every eighteen people in Florida. Firearms were nonetheless illegal in gator hunting, except for the handheld.44 bang stick that delivered a death blow directly to the brain. Experienced hunters used a variety of weapons to snag their prey, from crossbows to snares, harpoons to slings. McFay was partial to a saltwater rod and reel, which allowed him to catch and release small gators.
Over eleven feet and-bang-lights out.
Grayson cast his line into the darkness. With a sniper’s precision, he placed it just a few yards away from the glowing red dots at the surface. It was dead-center of the narrow channel that cut through razor-sharp reeds of ten-foot saw grass. Feeling for tension, he slowly retrieved the line, not sure what to expect. Clearly, however, that was no largemouth bass peering back at him through the night. Out there-all around him-was an unending fight for survival that bordered on prehistoric. He had witnessed that fight with his own eyes, and in most dramatic fashion, right before sundown. Grayson was visiting Florida on official business, trying to learn more about the latest threat to the Everglades-pythons. In the first five years of the new century, more than a million had been imported by the United States for commercial sale. Nearly half of them went to Miami. An alarming number of those were now thriving in the Everglades, growing to over twenty feet in length and rivaling gators for the top of the food chain.
Grayson felt the hook drag. With the angler’s touch, he worked the line and set it firmly.
A growl in the pitch darkness made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The noise that followed was like a bus dropping into a lake. Line screamed off the big spinning reel as something truly gigantic thrashed amid the water lettuce, lily pads, and pickerel weed.
“Coming right at the boat!” McFay yelled.
“Under the boat!” Grayson shouted back.
Bubbles and mud boiled up from below as Grayson worked the bent double rod around the bow.
“Out on starboard side!” said McFay.
The mighty tail slammed the wooden hull as the gator motored away. McFay popped from his seat to help his client screw down the drag, and off they went on a gator-powered sleigh ride in a twenty-foot boat.
“Bigger ’n twelve feet!” shouted McFay. “Hold on!”
Grayson’s arm suddenly felt numb. Sweat ran from his brow.
“I…can’t,” he said weakly.
The tingling gave way to a sharp pain in his chest that shot all the way up to his jaw. The fishing rod slipped from his hands and sailed over the bow. Grayson lost his balance and tumbled backward.
“McFay!” he called, but he was beyond his guide’s grasp. In the blink of an eye he went over the side, headfirst into the marsh.
Suddenly, spotlights shone from virtually every direction. It was as if someone had flipped a giant switch, the way the channel lit up. Voices called to him. Grayson was kicking, flailing, and screaming for help, but it was nothing compared to the noises around him-ominous splashes, echoes of the one he’d heard upon hooking that bull gator. Two more, five more, ten more.
Gators!
They were fleeing the barrage of bright lights.
Or maybe it was the Secret Service agents diving in to rescue him.
The life jacket should have kept him afloat, but he felt himself sinking into the muck. Or being dragged down. The pain in his chest was now crushing, and he struggled to overcome it, but his mind was swirling. His body felt stiff and unresponsive. His only choice, it seemed, was to respect nature, to become one with black water, to be the third and weakest leg in a bizarre and deadly triangle. One angry gator. Untold pythons.
And Phillip Grayson-the vice president of the United States.
“Sir, give me your hand!” he heard a man shout.
But he couldn’t lift his arm. He couldn’t turn his head to look. He couldn’t move his mouth to speak.
Vice President Grayson couldn’t e
ven breathe.
There was that intense brightness again-the emergency spotlights, or some other kind of light. And then everything was black.
Chapter 3
It was the big one. The other side of the mountain. The downward slope. Half dead. Four-oh.
Forty.
Jack Swyteck was born on December 7, exactly twenty-five years after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He’d been stepping on land mines ever since.
“I can’t afford this,” said Jack.
He and his best friend, Theo Knight, were in the chrome-and-glass showroom at Classic Cars of Miami, standing beside a fully restored 1968 Mustang GT-390 Fastback. Jack was on his heels, reeling from sticker shock.
“You can’t afford not to do this,” said Theo.
“I have no desire to make a big deal out of forty.”
“Dude, I said it before: ‘There’s two kinds of people in this world-risk takers and shit takers. Someday, you gotta decide which you’re gonna be when you grow up. And today is that day.”
The Mustang’s Highland Green finish gleamed beneath the halogen lights. Jack could hardly wait to see it in the south Florida sun.
It had been four years since Jack’s beloved 1966 Mustang convertible with pony interior had gone up in flames at the hands of some pissed-off Colombians who had their own special way of getting his attention. Theo was at Jack’s side as the wrecker towed the burned-out shell away-just as he’d been there for Jack’s divorce, Jack’s run for his life in Cote d’Ivoire, and everything in between. Theo was just a teenager when they’d first met, the youngest inmate on Florida’s death row. It took years of legal maneuvering and last-minute appeals, but Jack finally proved Theo’s innocence. Becoming the best of friends with a badass from Miami’s toughest African American gang had not been part of Jack’s plans, but Theo had vowed to pay his lawyer back.
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