They sat locked together in a one-sided embrace. Animal feelings were surging in him that he hadn’t felt since the early days with Vicki. He summoned all the strength he could muster and wrenched Kelly’s arms from around his neck, let her fall gently back onto the bed. She pulled the blanket up around her chin and look up at him with a smile that seemed to say they had shared something that would forever change the way they saw each other. Blake looked down on her for a minute without speaking, astonished at how beautiful she was, wondering why he hadn’t seen it before, fighting off an overpowering urge to take her back in his arms and kiss her. “Go back to sleep,” he said finally. “It’s okay.”
He stepped back into the bathroom, washed his face in cold water and told himself to forget it. Everything about it was wrong. He was an officer, she was enlisted, under his own command. Captain Hammer would have a field day with that one. They were from two different worlds, and nothing could ever be allowed to happen. He stretched out on the bed, lay back and tried to put it out of his mind. He laid his arm across his eyes and squeezed them shut, trying to blot out the smell of her hair, the warmth of her body. These feelings can’t be happening. People must go a little crazy when they know they’re about to die.
He drifted off again into an uneasy sleep with vague dreams that were undefined but decidedly pleasant. He knew it was only a few minutes until 0300, but the dreams seemed to last for hours. Suddenly he heard a loud crash and found himself sprawled across the deck, the chairs tumbling over him, the pain in his arm excruciating. He tried to stand but couldn’t get up. Kelly and Maria went flying out of their beds against the bulkheads, screaming. He heard a violent pounding on the door. Crawling on his hands and knees, he reached the door and pulled himself up by the door latch. He opened it, and Frank Kozlewski fell into the stateroom.
The chief stood clinging to the brass door handle, his face drawn. “Time to get this hunk of cold iron under way, sir,” he said, glancing around with wide eyes. “That cyclone you been talking about? It’s here.”
“Rouse the others, Chief.” Blake struggled to regain his footing. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The door closed behind the chief, and the ship stabilized momentarily.
Blake looked at Kelly in the diffused glow of the flashlight, wondering if he’d see what he’d seen earlier. She held the blanket around her neck, framing her face in a way that set off her high cheekbones, olive skin, dark eyes, auburn hair. He hadn’t been deluded by the passion of the moment; she was indeed beautiful, even in a clear frame of mind. He stared at her, amazed he hadn’t seen it until now.
“We’re going to need your help to get under way,” he said. “Maria’s too.”
Maria sat on the deck, her head lolling against the bulkhead. “I don’t know if I can revive her,” Kelly said.
“I’ve got to get down there,” Blake said, rummaging in his right rear pocket. After his outburst in the engine room he was certain that even a bloodthirsty animal like El Callado would understand the seriousness of the situation and not interfere with them getting the ship under way, but just to be safe he retrieved the snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver he’d found in the captain’s cabin and handed it to Kelly. “Here, you’d better take this gun. Bring her down as soon as you can.”
“Wake up, little one,” Dana Kelly said, patting Maria’s face. She sat on the bed beside Maria, holding on while the ship pitched up and yawed to starboard. “We’ve got to go help.” She pressed the light button on her Timex. Maria rolled over. It had only been five minutes since Blake and the chief had left, but the lieutenant said he needed them to get under way and she was getting anxious. The weather suddenly seemed worse.
Maria moaned and covered her eyes with a thin arm.
“Come on, sweetheart, we women have to pull our own weight.” Kelly looked down on the sleeping child, moved by her innocent beauty, feeling guilty for waking her. She retrieved a rag soaked in cool water from the bathroom and mopped the girl’s face. “Come on, honey. Wake up. The men need us.”
Maria allowed herself to be pulled groggily to a sitting position, then blinked her eyes open. “What time is it?”
“Time to get up. The guys need our help in the engine room.”
Instantly awake, Maria’s eyes opened wide with fear. “We’re going down there alone?”
“Not to worry, kiddo,” Kelly said, patting her hip pocket.
Maria’s eyebrows raised. “You have a pistola?”
“You bet your boots.” Kelly grinned. “If that clown shows his face, I’ll fill him full of lead.”
“No, señorita.” Maria grabbed Kelly’s shirt. “El Callado has eyes that see in the dark. We must not leave this room.”
“We’ve got to, honey. The men need us, they’re counting on us.” Kelly smiled gently. “But more important, all the women in the world are counting on us. You don’t want to let them down, do you?”
Maria nodded.
Kelly laughed. “You don’t mean that.” She pulled the child close, hugged her and kissed the top of her head. “Don’t be afraid. Let’s go.”
Kelly opened the door a crack and cautiously peered out into the dimly lit passageway. “Come on, pal. All clear.”
Maria hesitantly followed her out of the room, glancing around like a doe in a field full of hunters. “Let us go quickly.”
“We’ll be there in two shakes,” Kelly said, taking her hand. They stepped around the linen closet and walked toward the open stairwell that led down to the main deck. Kelly paused at the opening and peered down into the shadows of the deck below, some instinct telling her to stop.
Maria pulled at Kelly’s hand. “Listen. Did you hear that?”
Kelly shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything,” she said without conviction, knowing something had made her hesitate.
Holding her breath, straining to hear, Kelly heard a faint sound, catlike footsteps on the deck below.
“It’s him, he’s down there,” Maria whispered in Kelly’s ear, terror constricting her voice.
Heart pounding, Kelly placed her finger across her lips in a shushing motion, listening.
Staring down the stairwell, eyes adjusting to the gloom, Kelly saw the composition of a shadow change, something moving back into the protection of the darkness.
“It’s him, it’s El Callado, the silent one,” Maria rasped in Kelly’s ear. “We must go back.”
“We can’t,” Kelly said in a whisper, her mouth suddenly dry. “They need us down there.”
Fumbling in her hip pocket, she withdrew the revolver Blake had given her and tightened her fist uncertainly around it, her damp palms sticking to the varnish on the wooden grips. She’d never fired a revolver before, but the Chief’s Special was small enough for her to hold comfortably, and she thought she could handle it. She studied it in her hand. It looked like all you did was point it and pull the trigger. Hands trembling, she stepped toward the stairwell.
“No!” Maria screamed.
Kelly saw the dark figure of a man break from the shadows below, then disappear. “Come on. We’ve got to get this guy before he kills someone else, or we’ll never get out of here.”
“No!” Maria shouted again. “Let the men do it. Killing is not for women.”
“The men have their hands full. Remember what I said about, ‘Women can do anything men can do’?” She took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Well now’s the time to prove it.”
Maria dragged behind, tugging at her, whimpering, while Kelly cautiously started down the ladder, eyes flashing in every direction, peering down into the semidarkness.
“Por favor, señorita,” Maria said behind her, crying with muffled sobs. “Do not go down there, I beg you.”
“Shh.” Kelly took one step down the ladder and heard the rusty screech of a light bulb being twisted out of its socket. The dim light on the deck below faded into darkness.
“Look. He has removed the light. He can see in the dark,” Ma
ria hissed in Kelly’s ear. “I beg you, do not go down there.”
Kelly peered down into the shadows; the only light now was coming from the deck they were standing on. “We don’t have any choice,” she whispered. “The men can’t get under way without us.”
“If we go back to the cabin and wait, the teniente will come for us.”
“Yeah, and that guy will just sit there in the dark and wait for him to come.” She thought of the intense closeness she’d felt with Blake’s arms around her and desperately wanted to feel him close to her again. She knew there was no chance of that happening - it was a relationship that could never be - but she’d never felt this way about a man before, and wasn’t about to let this creature get to him. “We can’t just sit in our cabin and let this guy ambush the lieutenant when he comes to get us. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”
“No,” Maria cried, snuffling and wiping her eyes.
“Then it’s up to us. Come on.”
Kelly started down the ladder, pausing on each step, eyes alert for any movement below. Maria lagged behind, tugging at her, not wanting to go forward, not wanting to lose contact. On the third step, Kelly heard a shuffling sound below and paused, straining to see into the darkness. She heard it again, directly beneath her, and looked down. From behind the stairwell, a hand reached through the open rungs of the ladder and tightened around her right ankle. A surge of adrenaline shot through her as a smooth pull backward jerked her off-balance. She pitched forward, desperately trying to catch herself. The next few seconds were a blur, the feeling of flying noiselessly through the air with the sure knowledge that she was going to die. The last sound she heard, before the crushing sound of her head against the deck, was the high keening sound of Maria’s anguished scream.
Jorge Cordoba stared at the tall helicopter pilot. The knot in the pit of his stomach tightened. “What do you mean, you’re not flying?”
“Am I talking too fast for you?” The pilot stared back.
Jorge swallowed, struggling to keep the panic out of his voice. “Listen, my friend. We’ve got to get aboard that ship. Now. You’ve flown into dangerous situations before. We’ll pay you a bonus.”
The pilot shook his head. “Only a fool would fly into a Pacific cyclone. And Michael Gaines’s mama didn’t raise no fools.”
“How does 500,000 sound to you?”
“No way.”
“All right, I don’t have time to quibble, let’s make it a million.”
Gaines laughed. “You don’t get it, pal. You can’t fly in that stuff.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a weather condition. How bad can it be?”
The pilot gave him a wilted smile. “It’s just a weather condition, all right. But there’s not a worse one in the world. When God made cyclones, at least He had the kindness to keep them over water. If something like that hit on the land, there wouldn’t be anything left and there won’t be anything left out there when it’s gone, either.” He looked at his watch. “We might as well be heading back for Lima. You aren’t going to be needing me to land on any freighter. By tonight, that sucker’s going to be hull-deep in whale shit.”
Major Portillo came walking up, cracking his riding crop against his boots. “Now that you’ve taken care of your business, Señor Cordoba, we have an appointment to keep. Come, we are late.”
Jorge shook his head, staring at the pilot. “The pilot says he can’t fly.”
Major Portillo raised his eyebrows. “Oh? And why is that?”
“He doesn’t like the weather,” Jorge said, not taking his eyes off Gaines.
The Peruvian officer frowned. “And if he doesn’t fly, what happens to our . . . agreement?”
“It’s off.” Jorge stared at the pilot. He would see how serious this loudmouthed yanqui was about not flying into a little bad weather.
“I have a vested interest in that particular flight,” Major Portillo said, stepping up to the American pilot. “I suggest you consider carefully the consequences of not flying.”
“And I suggest you butt out,” Gaines said. He glanced around at the soldiers in green camouflage fatigues. “You and all your little tin soldiers aren’t going to squeeze me into a ride like that.”
Major Portillo’s hand flashed out, startling Jorge with the crack of the riding crop across the American’s face. Gaines reeled backward with a stunned expression. He raised his hand to the welt rising across his face. The look of disbelief in his eyes narrowed into rage. Ignoring the clack of a dozen bolt-action rifles being cocked, he lunged forward, only to be met by a row of fixed bayonets. Major Portillo nodded to two soldiers who stepped up behind the pilot. One bound his hands behind his back with a leather thong; the other forced him roughly to his knees. The major unbuckled his holster and withdrew a 9mm Browning automatic pistol. Smiling, he pulled the slide back on the automatic with great deliberation and screwed the muzzle into the pilot’s left ear.
“Perhaps now the weather doesn’t look so bad to you, eh, compadre? Perhaps now you would like to get into your helicopter and fly away?”
“We fly when I say we fly,” Gaines said. “Kill me, and we don’t fly at all. Go fuck yourself, General.”
Major Portillo bristled and thumbed the safety off the pistol.
“Hold it” Jorge stood looking down on the pilot, satisfied that it was pointless to continue. It was clear that nothing would make him fly into a tropical cyclone. And if by some miracle the ship survived the storm, they would need him later. “He’s right. Release him.”
Jorge turned and kicked a clod of dirt, exploding it into the sultry air. Because of these bumbling Peruvian fools, and that treacherous puta of a flight attendant, he had missed his one window of opportunity to recover the ship. He knew he should call Don Gallardo with the bad news, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
There might still be a chance. His last hope now was the American officer who was aboard. It all came down to him, a faceless stranger who held the fate of the organization in his hands. He was grasping at straws, but the tantalizing idea that the American might somehow get the ship going and maneuver it through the storm seized him. It was wishful thinking; the chances were slim, almost non-existent, that any young officer would be able to keep an ancient ship like the Latin Star afloat through the kind of storm the pilot had described. Still, the will to survive was man’s strongest instinct.
He decided to wait until the storm had passed and he had a definitive answer about the ship before he called Don Gallardo. He would use the talks with Colonel Suarez as an excuse to delay the call. Hopefully, the storm would have dissipated by then. If the ship survived, they would simply revert to their original plan. If not, nothing else would matter anyway.
Major Portillo removed the automatic from the pilot’s ear and stood looking at Jorge with the pistol dangling at his side. “And our agreement?”
Jorge nodded. “You’ll be taken care of.” He wasn’t disposed to quibble over the relatively small sum of $2 million with an agitated man who had a loaded gun in his hand.
He glanced at Enrique Lopez, who had been watching the ruckus with a look of anticipation on his pockmarked face. The director of security looked disappointed that he would not see the American’s brains splattered in the dust.
“Continue to monitor the storm closely,” Jorge told Lopez. “As soon as it passes, determine the status and location of the ship, assuming it’s still afloat. I’ll be back as soon as possible.” He nodded toward the pilot. “I’m leaving him under your protection. See that he is made comfortable.”
The five-minute march to the Peruvian Army base at Punta Arenas took fifteen minutes by Humvee over the potholed road. Jorge sat in the rear seat next to Major Portillo and looked around at the dense jungle overhanging the road as the all-terrain vehicle lumbered along. Needles of sunlight flashed through the vegetation like laser beams, blinding him. Laboring to breathe in the humid air, he wrinkled his nose at the smell rising up from his cro
tch and thought about the flight attendant. If it hadn’t been for that puta, he could have avoided this mess, headed it off. No matter how this whole thing turned out, he had a score to settle with her.
The four-wheel-drive vehicle labored up a hill, and from the crest, Jorge could see the Army base sprawled out below. It was bigger than he had expected. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with spirals of concertina wire surrounded the compound. On the perimeter, a pair of Caterpillar tractors worked ceaselessly to hold the jungle at bay while armed guards watched idly from atop wooden towers. The hum of diesel engines grew louder as the Humvee bumped its way down the hill and ground up to the main gate.
Two sentries in green uniforms snapped to attention and saluted with their rifles while soldiers in camouflage fatigues scrambled to open the gate. Major Portillo touched his helmet, and the vehicle proceeded through the gate down a wide boulevard that cut through the center of the base. Jorge glanced at the unpainted wooden barracks and soldiers slumped around in the stifling heat. Near an open water tower, a sprawling one-story brick structure stood nestled in a landscaped area of the base. It looked like a combination office building and luxurious private residence. Guards were everywhere. The Humvee pulled into a curved driveway, and before it came to a halt, a young officer wearing the silver bars of a first lieutenant stepped up with his hand on the door. He came to attention and saluted.
“Good morning, Major.”
Major Portillo touched his helmet with his riding crop. “Lieutenant.”
“The colonel is waiting for you, sir.”
The young lieutenant escorted Jorge and Major Portillo through wide mahogany doors into a large, air-conditioned reception area. Jorge glanced around, amazed at the luxurious decor. The lieutenant stopped and turned to Jorge with his hands outstretched. “With your permission, sir.”
Point of Honor Page 23
