Gates Of Hades

Chapter Sixteen

Providenciales International Airport

Providenciales, Turks and Caicos Islands

British West Indies

The next morning

There was something downright strange about Charlie Calder's four passengers, the ones who had just gotten off the international flight from Miami.

They didn't smile, unusual in a place where the sun was almost always shining, the beaches and water almost always beautiful. People were mostly happy to get here and smiled a lot. It was the eyes, Charlie thought, dark, almost black eyes that seemed to scowl from faces that looked very much like they had spent time in a boxing ring, faces very much like those of the six men he had seen here at the airport last week.

Those men, he understood, had chartered a fishing boat run by his cousin Willie, but had done nothing but drift outside the North Caicos reef and look at the beach through binoculars before having Willie put them ashore at North Caicos's only dock just at dark. As far as Willie knew, they were still over there.

Now here were these men, just as dark, just as grim, and just as big and muscular, who wanted Charlie to fly them over to Grand Turk in the charter service's aging Piper Aztec just as soon as they had recovered their baggage from the airport's sole carousel.

Odd. Their only luggage appeared to be one briefcase apiece, leather attache cases that could easily have been carried on board. Why check such little luggage? Hard question, unless maybe there was something in the cases they didn't want scanned by security before the boarding gates. What would somebody bring here like that?

Willie said his customers carried only briefcases, too, ones they never relinquished once they took them from the baggage claim. Strange, too, that they were willing to pay to charter the Aztec, because Turks and Caicos Air had a flight to Grand Turk that left in a little over an hour. The Twin Otter, a ten-passenger job, was a lot roomier than the Aztec, but Charlie guessed they were in a hurry, something no native ever was.

In these islands, people in a hurry usually got angry when things didn't move fast enough for them, and these men looked like they were angry about something the minute they got off the international flight and walked into the charter office. Charlie wasn't sure what, but they spoke back and forth between themselves in a language he had never heard before, one that seemed as angry as they did.

Another thing they had in common with those others, the ones Willie had taken to North Caicos: although they wore golf shirts and jeans like any visitor to the islands might, all the clothes were new. Wherever they had come from, apparently they didn't wear golf shirts and jeans.

Of course, wanting to go to Grand Turk explained a lot, Charlie guessed. Most people who went to Grand Turk weren't going for fun. That might explain why they carried only the briefcases.

Well, it wasn't any of Charlie's business. They paid him in cash, crisp new dollar bills. Providenciales and Grand Turk were only about seventy miles apart, a distance even the old Aztec could cover in a half an hour, including climb-out. In thirty minutes or so, he'd be on the ground, waiting to take his big, unhappy passengers back.

At the same time seventy miles away, Jason was rubbing eyes he had fought to keep open all night. If he was being held here for interrogation about the fire on North Caicos, no one seemed in a hurry to ask the first question. The only official he had seen had been the white-haired old man who had brought him supper and now stood outside his cell with breakfast. As though serving an animal, the old man stooped without a word and slid a steaming bowl under the bars of the door. If last night was the standard, he would return to collect the empty cheap plastic container and fork in a few minutes.

Jason was more interested in the ring of keys jingling on the jailer's belt than in the meal he had brought.

From the bones sticking out of the steaming dish, Jason guessed he was getting another serving of bonefish and grits, a strong-smelling yet bland native dish. It was a meal to be eaten carefully and slowly. Swallowed, one of the sharp bones would likely puncture something vital on the way down the throat.

The thought gave Jason an idea.

Cautiously probing the grits with the fork, Jason extracted a four- or five-inch section of bone with a wickedly sharp point at one end. He finished his meal and listened to the conversations shouted between cells. He was unable to understand most of the words, either because of dialect or because they were in the Spanish of the Dominican Republic, or in Creole, the combination of French and African peculiar to Haiti, both less than a hundred miles away.

At fifteen hundred feet, Grand Turk was visible from ten miles out. Charlie squinted into the morning's haze for the airport. Constructed as a part of the Atlantic Range recovery station during the early days of the United States' space program, the runway was unusually wide, built to accommodate cargo aircraft, a broad black asphalt belt across the island's southern tip.

"Got the field," Charlie said into his headset, noting that he was the only aircraft on the frequency this morning. "We're out at fifteen hundred."

With the prevailing if fitful southeast breezes, the landing clearance that came back almost immediately was no surprise. "Cleared to land runway niner, wind light and variable, one-two-oh to one-four-oh, altimeter two-niner-niner-eight."

He and his passengers would be on the ground in a few minutes. If he was lucky, Charlie would have time to go over to the TCA office and see how his application was coming along. Flying for the charter service beat fishing for a living, but the airline paid a lot better.

The seals in the windows and doors of the Aztec were worn, making Charlie raise his voice to a near yell to be heard over the engines and airstream as he asked the man next to him, "How long you reckon you'll be 'fore you wants to go back?"

His question provoked a chilly stare from eyes like brown ice. "You've been paid enough to wait."