Spy

Spy

Also by Ted Bell

Pirate

Assassin

Hawke

Nick of Time

Copyright © 2006 by Theodore A.Bell

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

With love, for Page Lee

“A border ain’t nothin’ but a law drawn in the sand.”

—Sheriff Franklin W. Dixon Prairie, Texas

Prologue

THE AMAZON BASIN

T he human target clawed up the mud-slick walls of the Xingu River; slipping, sliding, desperate. He heaved himself upon the bank, where he collapsed facedown and lay gasping. After a few minutes, his face half-submerged in a puddle of brackish water, he managed to roll over onto his back. The red equatorial sun flamed directly overhead, achingly bright. When he squeezed his eyes shut, it was doubly painful; one burning red orb scorched each eyelid.

The drums began again.

Kill you. Kill you.

The two-note drumbeat was growing louder, he thought. His fevered mind was no longer really sure of anything. Louder meant closer. Yes. His tormenters were still gaining, coming ever nearer. Just across the river now, were they? He pulled his bare and bloody knees up against his chest and wrapped his thin arms round them, trying to curve himself into a ball. His muscles screamed in protest.

He covered his face with his hands, allowing himself for a moment the childish hope that he might just curl up and disappear.

Kill you. Kill—

Magically, the drums had stopped. The Indians had stopped at the river! Turned back, for some mysterious reason. Retreated into the jungle thicket. Or, perhaps he’d only slept and the drums had ceased while he was unconscious. He was never sure anymore, really. Modes of existence merged seamlessly. Reality had become unreal. Was he running? Or, dreaming of running? Awake? Asleep? Daydreaming of sleep? It was all one and the same blur.

A plaintive howl had startled a dozen or so lime-colored birds chirruping in the trees above him. They instantly flew away. Odd. The wavering cry seemed to have sprung from his own lips.

He knew he had at last reached the nadir. His captor had succeeded in turning him into a howling monkey. A low groan escaped him as he dug into the muck with both hands. Scooping up handfuls of the slimy gruel, he slathered a thin paste of cool mud onto his arms, his burning cheeks, eyelids, and forehead. It afforded him some small measure of relief.

After months in captivity, the man’s skin was preternaturally pale. His waxy, deathlike appearance was accentuated by chronic dysentery and the resulting loss of blood. The man was naturally fair, and black-haired. Now his hair was long, falling in a wild tangle, and his nearly translucent skin was a delicate alabaster. After long months in the eternal semi-darkness, his once startling blue eyes had faded to a dull, whitish shade.

The present nightmare had begun months ago. Perhaps six months, perhaps more. He might well have lost track at some point. Slipped his moorings, crossing the bar. He no longer had any sense of time. Besides, what did it matter, when every day was a monotony of hunger and pain? He sometimes longed for some fresh hell to lift him out of the current one. The Indian drums had put “paid” to that foolish desire.

Since the ill-fated morning his “scientific” expedition had first met disaster on the river, and the subsequent personal trials he had endured in the jungle, the tall, gaunt white man had been living in a world of almost continual darkness. He had not been tossed into some underground dungeon where no light filtered through. His prison bars were made not of iron, but of wood.

The terrorist’s slave labor camps were deep within the rain forest. He had spent his days and nights beneath trees the likes of which he’d never seen. At their very top, some two hundred feet over his head, these impossibly vibrant organisms formed a nearly solid canopy of green. Even in the brightness of noon, only trickles of watery sunlight ever filtered down into his great green prison. The absolute gloom of the place, at all hours of the day, was nearly unimaginable.

Alone in the pit, his mind would drift to a treasured book from a boyhood long ago, the story of an innocent man likewise imprisoned in a world of darkness for crimes he had not committed.

I am lost, the hero of his book had said, a kindred spirit alone with his shadows. The book’s title now slid into his mind. It was so perfect a description of his current circumstances as to be almost laughable.

Darkness at Noon.

The runaway’s scruffy, lice-infested black beard reached well below his sternum. His wild black hair, which fell to his waist, was tied with a strip of canvas into a tail at the back of his head. He was, as the old expression had it, skin and bones. He knew he would be unrecognizable should he miraculously chance upon a sliver of broken mirror, or, in his wildest moments of delusion, some familiar soul.

His only clock was an occasional glimpse of the moon. He had seen, he guessed, at least six full ones. He had lived, by this lunar reckoning, for more than half a year in a place where life was sometimes cheap but more often worthless. In the foul hovel where he slept and slaved, the solid canopy of trees kept his entire camp completely hidden from the sky.

He hated every waking hour but most of all he loathed the temperature drop at nightfall. The pitch-black nights were spent in a cold hell that had nothing to do with sleep, peace, or dreams. His home, before he’d managed to escape, had been a shallow pit, a dank hole he’d shared with others of his ilk, men whose names he did not know. At the bottom of his pit, where he slept and ate and defecated, a fetid pool of water. It was bone-cold in that pit.

At night, a makeshift thatch of palm kept most of the nocturnal vampire bats away. But not all.

During his captivity, he had managed to close his eyes for only three or perhaps four hours per night. Mosquitoes stabbed at flesh rather than biting it, and swooping vampire bats seemed to favor a spot just below his right earlobe. It made sleep impossible.

Each new day, which varied only slightly from the night before it, he and his bleak companions were awakened with buckets of cold water dumped into their pit. Then they were hauled up with short lengths of hemp, bleary-eyed and shivering. Miserable souls all, they were formed up into rectangular squads for roll call and marched en masse out to the worksites at gunpoint.

There were many pits such as his. And there were probably many more such camps nearby. A vast army of laborers and soldiers was assembling. To what end, he could not say, for he had only the vaguest notions about what went on beyond his immediate perimeter. He was desperate to learn what engine powered this vast machine, but to enquire would be to risk a quick brutal death.

Curiosity had nearly killed him once already.

During the day, toiling with his machete or his shovel, he heard the constant chatter of automatic weapons. Explosions ripped the jungle floor, sending plumes of dirt and green debris skyward. Gunfire was his perpetual soundtrack. The guns never stopped. At night, when the prisoners had their weekly bath at the river, he saw tracer rounds arc across the sky, and shells bloom and thud, hammering the air. He never knew why. He didn’t know who was shooting. Nor who was being shot. Nor, after a while, did he much care.

The cannons shattered the insect hum of nature. The jungle thrummed with background music of an inspired composer, punctuated by gunfire.

There were guerilla soldiers everywhere. They trained at jungle warfare day and night. They used huge flaming torches mounted atop bamboo poles to continue firing rounds into the small hours. He’d once caught a glimpse of a small village of hollow buildings and fake-fronted houses. He saw men firing from empty windows and leaping over walls. The soldiers were training for urban warfare as well.

His work gang was dedicated to road construction. The gang was constructing a simple limestone causeway in the jungle. A road to nowhere. This rough-hewn road had no beginning and no end. It just was. It simply disappeared into the jungle. No one knew where the highway led. And no one, except he himself, seemed to care.

The highway meant something. It was part of a plan. He wanted to know. He meant to find out.

He was a natural spy. And, being curious by nature, the man kept his eyes and ears open, day and night. He had no end of material to record. He would have killed, truly, for a pencil stub, a secret journal, even scraps of paper. But of course there were no pencils and no paper available to him. He watched and listened and tried to retain what he could in the faint hope that he might survive.

He had heard it whispered that his section of limestone road eventually led north past the great falls at Diablo Blanco. Before his capture, he had been in Africa. These Amazonian waterfalls, it was said, made the towering Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe look like a spring torrent. The local Indian laborers he sometimes worked alongside called White Devil Falls “the smoke that thunders.” Sometimes, when the roaring guns went silent, you could hear that thunder.

One talkative prisoner, a young Belizean named Machado, told him of plans to escape upriver to an outpost river town called Barcelos. Machado had a beautiful, open face, with startling green eyes. His strange looks reflected the remarkable ethnic mix of his native country. Machado told him that he was Garifunas, a blend of African slaves and indigenous Caribbean islanders. Also in his family tree, he said, were Spaniards, British, and Asians.

One night in the camp pits, when the guard had left them alone, Machado confided that this outpost was the most dangerous place on earth. But, if you could reach it alive, you could make your way down river to Manaus. He was naturally curious about such a place and wanted to ask Machado more about it. One day he found himself breaking rock next to the young fellow who planned to escape to Barcelos.

“Why is it so dangerous there?” he whispered in his broken Spanish to the boy, taking a chance while the guards snoozed in the midday heat. Machado proudly wore a ragged T-shirt that said You Better Belize It!

“It’s the crossroads of evil, señor,” the boy whispered. “The Black Jungle.”

“Someone stands at this crossroads?” he asked.

“The Devil.”

“Who is this devil?”

“The devil himself, I tell you, or his representative.”

“Does this devil have a name?”

“Devil. That’s all.”

“Where can I find this fellow, whoever he is?”

“You desire an intercession with the dead?”

“Something like that.”

“You will find the devil standing at the crossroads where the spirits cross over into our world.”

The boy would say no more.

He knew, he had learned the hard way, that it was unwise to be caught speaking and he surely didn’t care to draw attention to himself. So, after this exchange with Machado, he kept his head down and his mouth shut. He cleared jungle with his machete and he built his bloody road all day and silently planned his own escape. In this, he knew he was by no means unique.

He was but one of numberless hundreds, maybe thousands, of unwilling captives, an enslaved workforce at work in the service of some unseen and unknown power. All he knew for certain now was that another universe existed here in this green hell, a complex hive of relentless activity, at least a thousand miles inland from the mouth of the Amazon. And all of it lay hidden from civilization’s prying eyes.

Roads were being built. Airstrips too. Armies were being trained here and the gunfire was incessant. Everyone lived and worked and died under the canopy. From what little he’d seen, he doubted this was a force for good.

He’d seen horrible things. Slow starvation. Wanton punishment. Men shot on the spot for no reason. A hand or a foot chopped off on a whim. An untouchable, crashing through the jungle, his naked body a mass of blood blisters. He was still screaming when he disappeared into the vast green hills. No one would come near him. The virus, someone said, they were working on a new virus.

The untouchables lived in the white building across the river. The medical compound. He’d never seen it but he heard about it. Patients who checked in never checked out. Terrible things were said to happen across the river. At night, when it was still, you could hear things. Things you didn’t want to hear.

All this, he imagined, somehow led directly to the man who stood at the crossroads. The devil the boy had spoken of. It was he who had arranged the ambush of the expedition, killed his companions, and captured him. He knew the monster’s true identity. His name was Muhammad Top. Top, who made sure there were many days when he wished he’d been lucky and gone down with his friends.

That night, it was whispered in the pits that a boy had been shot trying to escape. He asked the name, but he already knew it. The one friend he’d made. Machado.

Many days he felt so alone he dropped to his knees on the jungle floor and prayed to God to let him die.

1

H e had never expected to survive the sinking of his boat. The river had been a quiet mirror that morning, meandering through the endless jungle. Just before the explosion, the leafy green walls on either side of the river had fallen silent. Then a lone bird cried a shrill warning and the peace was suddenly shattered. A sea mine blew the bow off of his beautiful black-hulled wooden yawl. The powerful explosion rocked the jungle; the sky above the river suddenly went dark with birds taking wing.

He knew his lovely Pura Vida was finished before he drew a second breath.

Pura Vida, the pretty yawl he’d fitted with a retractable keel, had shuddered to a stop, down by the head. She instantly began taking water. She had sunk with nearly all hands in minutes. Small-arms fire erupted from the forest. The river was alive with death. Unseen forces began spitting bullets from both banks. A chorus of fear rose from those choking and dying in the water. The machine gun attack killed everyone clinging to overturned life rafts or desperately scrambling up the muddy banks.

He himself had been fishing off the stern, his legs dangling over the gunwale. When he heard the explosion for’ard, and felt the yawl stagger and founder, he dove for a semi-automatic rifle kept loaded and stowed in the cockpit. Water rising round his legs, he emptied the thirty-round banana clip into the forest. When it was empty, he slammed in another mag and repeated firing off the port side.

He threw life rings, cushions, whatever he could grab. It was useless. He saw his colleagues in the water, many already dead or dying in a rain of lead. The ship was engulfed in flames and listing violently to port. Staying aboard another second was suicide.

He dove off the sharply angled stern and swam hard downriver, until his lungs, too, were afire. He surfaced and heard that the firing had stopped. Many riddled bodies were floating downstream toward him. That was when he heard the drums for the first time.

He saw painted faces atop long brown legs sprinting madly through the tangled undergrowth along the banks. He submerged once more and grabbed someone whose arm he’d seen flailing weakly minutes earlier. He pulled her to him and saw that she was dead. He held on to the corpse for a very long time. He was entering a patch of white water and he had no choice but to let his friend go if he was to swim safely to shore.

Her name was Dana Gibbon.

He grabbed an overhanging branch and watched the beautiful woman’s body drift away with the river. Her head was submerged but one arm was still draped around a piece of debris from Pura Vida. Dana had been a brilliant young marine biologist from the University of Miami. She’d been doing her thesis on the Rio Negro. At night on deck, they had sipped mojitos and played gin rummy. He never won a hand. And he’d kissed her only once.

Dana’s body was lost in a tumult of white water and then she disappeared.

Shortly after Dana’s loss, a chance river encounter with a water boa, an anaconda nearly thirty feet long, had left him with a crippling wound to his right hip. The untreated injury became infected. He was no longer able to run. Couldn’t run, and he couldn’t hide. It was this circumstance that finally led to his first capture.

For some reason, the Indians who originally caught him had not killed him on the spot. He was a healthy specimen if you discounted his wound. He stood over six feet and was very fit. He supposed that was his salvation. He looked fit for work. He was blindfolded and dragged through the jungle to be sold to the highest bidder.

He was sold to Wajari, a great chief of the Xucuru who guarded one of the work camps for Muhammad Top. Top learned he’d been captured. The first night he’d been dragged from the camp and nearly interrogated to death by Papa Top. Somehow, he convinced his interrogator that he was a British scientist and not a spy. Shortly thereafter, he was sent back to the camps to do slave work for the guerilla armies. There, it was assumed, he would die of natural causes.

His role at the camp was one with an extremely low life expectancy. He was not good at following rules. Now, in addition to his road construction, he was part of a doomed brigade used day and night as human targets.

He’d offended a guard by not responding quickly enough to an unintelligible order. The man had struck him on the side of the head with the butt of his gun, knocking him to his knees. He’d gotten to his feet, his blood up, and grabbed the man by the neck. When the man spat in his face, he’d disarmed him and nearly beaten him to death with his bare fists. No one even bothered to watch. It was over in a minute or two.

He stood glaring at them, taunting the guards with their automatic rifles leveled at his heart, waiting for one of them to kill him on the spot. Two of them grabbed him from behind and bound his wrists behind him with hemp. Then they took him away.

Only Machado wished him farewell. “Go with God,” the boy said.

“You better Belize it!” he said to the boy as they dragged him away to the camp commandant’s tent.

His punishment was swift and typical. After two nights in a hellish device called the Barrel, he had been assigned to what the guards jokingly referred to as the Green Berets. This joke derived from the fact that new initiates had their heads dipped in a vat of green dye. The Green Berets were a group of condemned men sent into the jungle for target practice.

The tactical commanders for guerilla combat training in the dense jungle had devised this system to provide a more realistic experience for their young guerilla fighters. The need for fresh targets was never ending. Most were killed by live fire. Mines or sniper bullets felled others. A few committed suicide to end the agony, and a tiny fraction escaped.

HE HAD ESCAPED. He had done it by melting away during a live fire exercise with many other fleeing targets. He had found his spot, stopped, clutched his gut, and screamed as if mortally wounded. He then dropped into the shallow water of a muddy stream. He waited for five minutes and no one came. He started crawling, later swimming as the water deepened. He swam to where the stream joined a wide green river. He rolled over to his back and let the water take him away. The sun broke from behind a cloud. His face broke into a wide grin: go with the flow.

In this environment escape was a relative term. He had been on the run for five days and nights. He had even less food than he’d been provided with in the camp. Beetles and grubs became a staple. He was exhausted, dehydrated, and on the brink of starvation.

On the sixth day, he could not get to his feet. And the drums were getting louder. Willing panic to subside, he rested quietly on his back for a few moments, hidden by the thick reeds, his emaciated chest heaving. His head suddenly jerked spasmodically to one side. He’d heard something, indistinct, but nevertheless disturbing.

After survival as a living target, his ears were keenly attuned to any variation in jungle sound. He gently placed a hand palm down on a patch of dry ground, a recently acquired method of detecting hostile vibrations.

A tremor, a snapping twig, or a parrot’s sudden shriek might herald the approach of a war party.

Indian headhunters, elite centurions of a murderous cannibal tribe called the Xucuru, had been chasing him since his miraculous escape. He was weak, he knew, to the point of utter exhaustion. He’d slept, but only fitfully, and always with his ear to the ground.

Nothing of significant note, however, now reached his ears. An earlier sound, which had resembled the thrum of a small marine motor, must have been just the sound of his own blood thrumming in his skull. No, there was no motor. No tourist boat full of saviors headed upriver to rescue him and deprive the Xucuru warriors of their evening meal. The tourist idea was admittedly laughable. No tourist boat ever ventured this far upriver. Sane men seldom did.

He would die alone, but not wanting for company. The irony of the jungle. There was too much of everything. Too much vibrant existence, too much life, too much death. He felt it in his bones: the cellular activity of jungle life humming at every conceivable level.

Some of the worst life-forms were in the river.

He’d been drifting with the currents. The wide, olive-green river had been his refuge for two long days. He’d tied leafy branches to his head, arms, and upper body, hoping to blend with the half-submerged logs and floating vegetation on the river. The silvery piranha hadn’t bothered him, mercifully. Nor had the candiru, an eel-like fish that swims up any available human orifice. That was the one that terrified him most.

A young member of his expedition had been standing in the river, the water just above his knees, urinating. A week later, he died in feverish agony. A candiru had swum up the boy’s urine stream and become lodged in his penis. There, feeding on the host’s blood, the tiny creature had grown to enormous size. The resulting infection led to the amputation of the organ and the boy’s painful death.

He rolled onto one elbow and pushed the reeds aside so he could see the river.

The Xucuru warriors chasing him since his escape from the compound would not let something like a river stop them. In his mind’s eye, lying on the bank, he could see the savages racing through the jungle, their naked bodies slathered with streaks of black and red paint, their seven-foot bows and five-foot arrows, their clubs, their blowpipes, and their spears. All would have sworn the blood oath not to return without his head.

It was widely rumored amongst the prisoners in the camps that no one had ever really escaped. The Xucuru warriors hired by the soldiers were relentless in their pursuit of escapees. They would much rather die by each other’s hands than return empty handed.

Keep moving, his urgent mind told his wasted body. Wait, the body replied. Wait!

Five minutes.

Please.

Yes. Do nothing. Surely there was time to lie here on the banks of the Xingu to be warmed by the sun. How sorely he’d missed its warmth. To relax for a time, let the skin and bones dry out. He let his muscles go, digging his fingers into the soft mud beneath him. He felt his mind start to slip, and wondered if the sudden shivering was malarial. If yes, without the malaria pills they’d taken from him, he would surely die. How could one be so cold and yet so hot at the same instant?

The sun was just another brutal enemy. Once he’d regained some strength, he’d have to drag himself back inside the trees, else the harsh rays would soon fry his flesh. He was nearly as naked as the men who chased him. He was dressed only in what remained of the rags he’d escaped in.

He slept.

And awoke some time later to swarms of piums, clouds of invisible microscopic monsters, which attacked him mercilessly. They left smears of blood where they bit, blood that could attract the piranhas when and if he returned to the river. Fully awake now, for a time, he considered the pleasures to be had in simply dying. Cessation of hunger and pain. Peace. It would be so easy to give in.

His reserves were nil. In captivity, the daily battle to survive had taken its toll, left him depleted in body and mind. He was tired and desperately hungry now. He groaned loudly and fought the urge to sleep again. Hadn’t he just slept? How long? A minute? An hour? More? He had no idea.

Around him, the animals of the daylight, too, were noisily preparing for sleep. The nocturnal creatures, their omnivorous appetites whetted, were beginning to stir. The air was suddenly cool. The sun fell suddenly in these latitudes and left behind a sky of cobalt blue and vermilion against which the black palms marching along the riverbank were silhouetted.

High above the treetops, a small cloud, lit from within like a Venetian lantern, hovered above the dark sea of trees. It was really all so very beautiful here. This twilight hour was like some faint memory of love; or fading dreams of happier childhood times. He closed his eyes and tried to hold these comforting images, but they skittered away, leaving a vacuum that delirium could slide into unobserved.

He fixed his pale eyes on the waning yellow moon and wondered if he had the strength of soul to survive.

For not the first time in his life, death looked good.

Alexander Hawke, dreaming of peace, finally slipped into the waiting arms of a coldly beckoning Morpheus.

2

H awke’s vivid dreams were filled not with beauty but with looming images of death and horror. During his long months in captivity, he had become a new man. Different, and, he thought, during those periods when he felt rational, not necessarily better. He had seen true evil up close on a daily basis. For most of his life he’d refused to shake hands with the devil. Now, he felt they were on a first name basis.

The inhumanity he’d witnessed in the terror-training camps was of a different order of magnitude from anything he’d ever experienced before. In the waning days of the first Gulf War, young Royal Navy Flight Lieutenant Alexander Hawke had been flying close air support at low altitude over Baghdad. His airplane had been blown out of the sky by an Iraqi missile battery and both he and his weapons officer had been captured within the hour. It had been a most unpleasant experience. Yet even his brutal Iraqi jailers had shied away from the kind of cruel savagery he’d witnessed in the jungle camps.

He’d always suspected that men with absolute power were capable of absolutely anything. Now he knew that old axiom to be true. He felt weakened by the sureness of this belief, diminished by his new knowledge. Which was strange. Alex Hawke had always lived by the rule that what did not kill him only made him stronger. But Hawke did not feel strengthened by what he’d seen in the jungle.

He only felt colder.

Colder and harder.

The stars and bit players of these past episodes in captivity haunted his nightmares. In his malarial state, they crowded his waking hours as well. He would see a figure standing in a clearing, beckoning him; blink, and they would be gone. The thin line between nightmare and reality was becoming dangerously blurred. What was he really made of? What was he truly capable of? He didn’t know anymore.

The drums were silent. Perhaps the Xucuru had moved on. Missed him, somehow. He was conscious of a strange new sensation. Hope.

Now, lying hidden in his bed of reeds beside the river, edging toward consciousness, he was suddenly sure of one thing. There could be no surrender. Not now. Not yet. He must have slept all night, because he felt just a hint of the old vigor as he struggled awake.

No, not quite yet, old fellow, the narrator of dreams was saying in the background. Feverish and shivering, he allowed himself to drift upward, float into the conscious green realm of heat and jungle. The sun was up, fierce, reflecting off the brown surface of the river and the extravaganza of colors that comprised his forest. He rubbed his neck just below the ear, and his hand came away sticky. A vampire bat had nipped him during the night.

Blood, he thought looking at the smear on his palm. He smiled at the bright red oxygenated sight of it. He was probably infected, and probably dying of septicemia, but by God he was still alive. He had one chance, he thought, small as it might be. One last chance to escape.

You better Belize it.

There was a way, he thought now, sitting up in his bed of reeds, that the doomed expedition he’d led could be remembered as a success. If he could just put his current predicament in the correct perspective, he could argue that this one man, the lone survivor of an expedition purportedly launched to find El Dorado, the Lost City of the Amazon, had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

What he had discovered could prove to be vastly more valuable than some fabled city of gold. If he could survive to tell the tale.

He stood up, stretched his limbs. He was free. He had work to do. Yes. He was determined to survive long enough to raise an alarm about things he had witnessed. Evil was spawning under the perfect cover of the canopy. Even in his own span of captivity, he had sensed its insidious monstrosity. A force for terror was growing like some cancerous being, its tentacles reaching deep into the vast uncharted Amazon Basin, unseen and unchecked. Somehow, he had to live long enough to tell this story.

A howler monkey screamed just inches above his head and snapped him back to what now passed for reality. He froze. A lone jaguar was circling nearby, his nose in the air. He would easily die right here if he didn’t act fast and with something akin to rational thought. One needed to prioritize at times like this, that’s what his stint in the military had taught him about survival in hostile environments.

Hawke did just that.

One, keep breathing. Two, fashion some kind of weapon. Three, get to an outpost on the river. Get help.

A telephone. That’s what he needed. For that, he had to reach the nearest sizable river village. He had used the stars last night, making a rough calculation as to where he was. He believed the nearest outpost would be Cuiaba, a few days’ river travel to the east. It was hardly civilization but it would do for now.

He would need a sharpened bamboo spear. And a canoe. He’d learned their simple construction watching the Indians construct them in the camps. He would find and kill a tapir. With their short limbs, the small piglike mammals were easy to catch. Yes, first track and kill a tapir with his spear. Stretch its skin over a bamboo frame and build some kind of small canoe. Yes.

He shaded his eyes, peering over his stand of reeds, scanning the river in both directions for any sign of the Xucuru. Nothing. Only the indolent flow. The glare off the sun-flecked water was paralyzing, making his eyes red and watery. He needed to get out of the sun and find his tapir, build his boat. He felt dizzy and wanted to lie down again but there was no time for that. He must hurry.

His mind raced ahead of his body as he made preparations to move on.

He told himself he would be safe when his canoe reached Cuiaba. They would give him the pills for his fever. They would bandage his seeping wound. He would eat something other than roots and worms. He would dine on roast lamb and sleep once more in a feather bed. He would see friendly faces once more. He needed—damn mosquitoes!—he needed to get out of the blistering heat or he’d soon pass out again and then his goose would be well and truly cooked.

He managed to stagger a few steps through the deep mud and once more he was safely under the green umbrella. Gathering strength from some resource deep inside, he moved quickly through the tall thicket. He could see the bend in the river curving away. He had an eye peeled for a lone dugout, the inevitable Xucuru scout traveling in advance of the war party searching for him.

He made his plans for the possibility of survival. He would hide by day. He would fashion some kind of torch and travel by night. He would track and kill his tapir and eat its flesh. With its skin, he would build his canoe. When the sun fell, he’d return to the river and civilization.

That, at least, was the plan.

BY MIDDAY, with the sweat pouring off of him, and the subsequent chills, Alex Hawke had accomplished most of his objectives. He had eaten raw tapir with gusto. He’d built a respectable canoe, light and easy to portage. He desperately wanted to keep moving while there was still some light but he found he was completely spent and could do no more. The fever had overtaken him again.

The green world was spinning and he feared he might fall or slip into unconsciousness in an exposed or unprotected location. He quickly found a spot where he could remain hidden but still see the river. There he made himself as comfortable as he could under the shade of his newly built canoe. He needed rest, now, sleep.

As he drifted off, he imagined, or perhaps heard, the drumbeat mounting steadily in the jungle. It came to him as a repeating two-syllable beat, high-low, high-low. Slipping down to an uneasy slumber, he thought it sounded like kill you…kill you…kill you…

HIS REST was cut short by disturbing sounds on the river. His eyes popped open to see the sun was still burning high above. He hadn’t slept long. Someone was coming. He sat bolt upright, instantly aware of the danger. He groped for his spear but couldn’t find it. Had he left it leaning against the base of the tree where he’d collapsed for a moment? No? He must have done so. He must have—

It wasn’t a lone scout in a dugout canoe.

It was a sleek black jet boat from one of the camps with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted atop a squat tower at the stern. The twin jet drives were bubbling beneath the transom, moving the patrol boat forward at little more than idle speed. Besides the skipper at the helm and the gunner on the stern, there were two men in jungle camo on the bow, one sweeping a submachine gun from side-to-side and the other with a bullhorn.

The bullhorn was calling his name.

Hawke! Hawke! Hawke!

So. They had somehow learned his name.

He had no time to ponder that. From the jungle upriver, came an even more dreadful sound. It was the sound of fierce wild howling he’d heard late at night in the camps whenever someone tried to escape. It was the sound of the fighting dogs the guards kept for their protection and amusement.

They’d loosed the damned dogs on him, the dogs and the dark hooded ones who came in the middle of the night. Stood like ghosts above your pit.

“Las Medianoches,” Hawke said, whispering the name of every Brazilian child’s nightmare, and then he climbed to his feet and ran for his life. Medianoches…the word meant “middle of the night.” For that’s when the real monsters came out to play.

He ran in wild desperation. He ran well past the frontiers of exhaustion, deep into uncharted territories of pain. He knew he could not run much longer. The howling dogs were on his heels and he drove himself blindly through the dense jungle, tripping, falling, knowing it was useless even as he pumped his knees and tore through the thick undergrowth and looping vines.

Creepers reached out for his bare and bloodied feet, thorny vines lacerated his face and shoulders and arms. His mouth was a ragged hole from which no sound issued but hoarse breathing and an occasional curse when he stumbled.

Hawke knew he was already a dead man, down to pure instinct alone. He was running now simply to stave off the inevitable; he was running blindly and without hope, running to gain a few more moments of his short precious life before he would trip and fall and the dogs would be upon him, ripping the flesh from his bones.

This was no way for a man with a future to die.

Suddenly drenched in sunshine, he splashed through a clearing bisected by a small stream that meandered toward the river. Slipping on the mossy rocks, he steadied himself, trying desperately to get reoriented. Then, he hurtled forward once more, racing back into the dark world beneath the canopy that towered overhead.

He could hear the Xucuru warriors chanting behind him, ever closer; and yet closer, the vicious snapping and growling wild dogs that were leading them to their quarry. They were gaining, getting closer now. They were well fed, well rested, and strong. They were relentless trackers who knew the ways of the jungle. Hawke was lost, hungry, and afraid.

The Xucuru wanted blood: his blood, the poor diminished feverish stuff now coursing through his veins; and he knew they wanted to see it flow almost as desperately as he wanted to keep it flowing.

Running, he burst into yet another patch of sunshine. This sunshine had wings, diaphanous wings, brushing his cheeks ever so lightly, like cobwebs. Another illusion? Light with wings? He imagined the fever had finally sent his mind reeling, that he’d slipped over into spiralling madness. A second later he snapped back. He realized the circular clearing was filled with countless swirling yellow butterflies lit by the sun above.

He raised his hands and cupped a few of the shimmering mariposas, bringing them right up to his eyes. He wanted to inspect these tiny diaphanous creatures more carefully, each one an individual miracle of nature. He looked up. A swarming tower of these yellow beings rose all the way to the sky above. It was a miracle. He waded into dense but yielding clouds, walking as if in a dream. And stumbling into a sinkhole that sucked at his feet.

Cursing and finally freeing himself from the sucking muck of the muddy hole, he again plunged forward through the gossamer yellow insects, batting their delicate bodies and filmy wings away from his eyes, searching for the far side of the clearing.

He could only hope this mirage of yellow and the quicksand underfoot might slow the dogs and he used this hope to keep moving. He ran hard for a few more minutes. And then, he slammed into an immovable wall and all hope vanished from his mind.

It was a canebrake that finally spelt the end.

The towering wall of green bamboo rose sixty feet above his head. The profusion of stalks grew so closely as to appear almost solid. He sprinted along the wall in both directions, looking and feeling for some kind of a crack or narrow opening. Nothing. No prayer of an opening anywhere, no way to shinny upward either. He slammed against the barrier again and again in a rage of frustration but it was useless. The stalks were thick, every bit as thick as a man’s wrist and the bamboo curtain would not yield.

There would be no escape.

It was over.

No admittance, Mr. Hawke.

You’re dead.

3

H awke clung to the bamboo stalks, waiting for the inevitable. Letting his arms take his full weight, he hung his head, looking like a beaten man. His lungs were afire, his legs trembling and shaking uncontrollably. He had no idea how long he let himself hang there, but he knew that any second he would feel the sharp punch of an arrow or a spear between his shoulder blades.

Thunk.

The steel tip of a spear embedded itself deeply in the bamboo a few centimeters above his head.

It parted my bloody hair, he thought, with a mixture of dread and admiration for the chucker’s skills. He could feel the spear’s impact thrumming in his bones, the vibrations traveling down to his forearms to his hands. So this is how it would end.

Like a man before a firing squad disdaining the blindfold, he wanted to see. He lifted his head, craned it round, and saw another spear and then a third flying toward him. He was not prepared to die with a spear in his back and so he completely about-faced to witness the onslaught of whistling shafts, instantly calculating the angles, deciding which spear would strike where and how he must dodge them.

But they all fell short. A quick flurry of spears hit the ground, all striking at a forty-five-degree angle and forming a semicircle around him. The delicate precision of this instant cage, even in his cornered and desperate state, demanded some appreciation. It had to be deliberate, but why trap rather than kill? Then came the dogs. He saw the loopy saliva of the animals flying as they sprung toward him out of the undergrowth, racing toward him with their snapping jaws wide.

Another spear, then more, at first only a few, but then many, arced toward him. To his complete amazement the upright shafts began to form a more complete circle around him. Hawke braced for the dogs. But, upon reaching this strange and newly formed perimeter, they slowed, then stopped. Howling in frustration, they looked back to their masters, the Indians still in hiding.

Hawke saw that the dogs might easily go around the cage of spears and kill him, or, in some cases, even slip between them. But they did not. The dogs stood rock-still, eyes blazing and tongues lolling, and waited. Hawke, finished, released his grip on the canes and fell to the ground.

He heard a man grunt and looked up.

A tall Indian warrior, a Xucuru whom Hawke recognized from the camps, had stepped into the tiny clearing. It was Wajari, the brutal chief who had been assigned to guard Hawke’s construction site. The man was wearing an old itip, a ceremonial loincloth with vertical stripes of black and yellow and red, the same regalia he wore every day.

Wajari, who normally carried a rifle on the job, now wore a machete, stuck inside the cinched waist of his loincloth. He approached Hawke, withdrawing the blade. It was almost over. A swift blow from the machete would put an end to his suffering. But there was something very odd about his eyes. Gone was the fierce expression, replaced by something new and terribly strange.

It wasn’t fear, exactly. No, it was worry.

Seeing those troubled black eyes, Hawke knew his life had taken a sudden turn for the better. His head might actually remain attached for a few days longer.

“Hawke,” Wajari said, making it sound like “Hoke.” Then he was gently taking Hawke’s arm and helping him get to his feet.

“Wajari,” Hawke said, letting himself be taken. The running was truly over. He felt a sense of relief flood through his body.

“Lord Hawke,” Wajari said, seeming to like the sound of it.

“So glad you could make it,” Hawke murmured as he was led toward the trees. “One doesn’t receive an invitation to a beheading every day.”

Wajari ignored his ramblings. Hawke collapsed at the feet of a fierce looking group of savages whose faces were painted in bright yellow and red. All held machetes above their heads.

To his enormous surprise, the blades did not fall.

Not only did these ferocious cannibals not behead him, but they treated him gently, with a strange blend of caution and respect. They gave him a bowl of manioc beer, which he drank in great gulping draughts. Wajari, who seemed to be presiding over this ceremony, ordered him wrapped in a blanket and placed carefully on a grassy mound.

They moved away, leaving him in the care of a single warrior with a spear. It occurred to Hawke that for some strange reason he was now worth more alive than dead.

Hawke lay under the shade of the trees, watching as the Indians hacked at the canebrake with their machetes. For an hour or more, they were busy cutting sections of four-inch-thick green cane, some about ten feet in length, some shorter. A female member of the war party came forward and presented him with a gourd of water followed by a small bowl of manioc bread.

He ate greedily and, after a time, feeling much revived, Hawke understood what it was the Indians were building.

They were using the bamboo poles and lengths of ropy vines to construct a cage. Ten feet long by four feet wide and approximately five feet in height. The bottom of the cage was filled with a bed of fronds.

It was to be home for the next five days, the large green cage borne upon the shoulders of four trotting savages as they raced through the jungle. These Xucuru, whom he now thought of as his saviors, would rest for short periods and when they moved, they moved very quickly. There was a sense of great urgency about his captors he found puzzling. When they slowed their pace, or spent too long at rest, Wajari would chastise them with his stick, prodding them along.

After three days of this they came to the brown swirling waters of another wide river. It was not the swiftly running Xingu, which he would put behind them many miles to the west. Hawke thought that perhaps this water was the great tributary called Tapajos, a river basin much ravaged by gold miners for the last few decades.

At the river’s edge, Wajari ordered a rest for his weary men. After some hours, after much bathing and drinking of manioc beer, his cage was lifted again and carried to the river. There, it was mounted atop a long dugout catamaran which had the skull of a jaguar mounted on the long snout of each slender prow. This large craft was one of many hidden in a small inlet in the bank. The secret flotilla had been covered with palm fronds.

With great alacrity, Wajari organized their immediate departure, and soon the long prows of the dugout canoes were gliding over the waters, headed upriver, even deeper into the green maze. Wajari, helmsman of the sole catamaran, brought up the rear and Hawke was reminded of an old joke. “If you’re not the lead dog, the view is always the same.”

The days were spent under an unrelenting sun. To amuse himself, in the midst of such stunning monotony, Hawke had used a needlelike sliver of bamboo to decorate himself. Using the dark juice of the chi-chi root, he tattooed “HOLD FAST” on the knuckles of each hand. It wasn’t much comfort, but he’d always believed they were good words to remember in times of trouble.

DEAD ASLEEP one night following yet another endless day on the river, Hawke was awakened by the crash of violent thunder. Jagged spears of lightning crisscrossed the sky and fat raindrops hissed on the water’s surface. A second later, hard rain hammered the river and everyone on it. Wajari, who manned the stern of Hawke’s flagship, was poling hard for the shore as they rounded a soft bend in the river.

Hawke sat up and rubbed his eyes, not quite believing what he was seeing. Through the undulating curtains of rain, long shafts of artificial light striped the black water and river bank. Such light on the shore could only mean one thing. Civilization! Indeed, as they drew nearer to the shore, a small village of traditional huts stood along the riverbanks. The settlement was lit by hissing arc lights mounted on wooden towers.

Artificial light was unheard of this deep in the wilderness, and Hawke was mystified. Then he heard the deep thrum of generators as they neared the riverbank. Civilization, or what passed for it, was at hand.

It was some kind of hastily built trading port, an unlovely facility, but still a welcome sight. The lights now revealed a long row of brown-thatched buildings perched along the shore. There was a long steel dock, perhaps two hundred feet in length, and upon it were stout wooden crates stacked as high as the rooftops of the riverfront storehouses. Men worked frantically with hand dollies, moving the heavy crates inside. It was a recently arrived shipment, Hawke thought, and they were hurriedly getting the crates sheltered before the impending thunderstorm.

No one took much notice of Wajari and the new arrivals from upriver. Not even the heavily armed men who were guarding the crates glanced toward them. Wajari stood on the prow, one hand resting on the polished jaguar skull that decorated and protected his vessel. He raised his hand in greeting to a tall man wearing some kind of ragged uniform as the catamaran bumped up against the dock.

The man uttered an incomprehensible greeting and had one of his dockhands throw the Xucuru chieftain a line.

Hawke’s cage was unloaded by the Xucuru and placed at the far end of the dock away from the crates. Except for Wajari, the Indian war party returned immediately to their dugouts. The rain had let up, so Hawke was content to sit in his bamboo cage under the dripping palms, eat from his bowl of manioc bread, and contemplate his fate. He saw Wajari go inside a smaller corrugated tin building, its windows lit from within. An office perhaps.

He understood without being told that he was being turned over to some new authority. Wajari’s concern now made sense. The chief had feared his captive might not survive long enough to complete this transaction.

But, nonetheless, Hawke’s spirits rose. He felt better than he had in months. He’d slept on the river, the deep sleep of a man no longer on the run. There had been plenty of water and bread. He had begun a program of strenuous exercise, using the bars of the cage to lift himself with his upper arms, pushing at the sides with his legs. Pilates, he believed the ladies of London called this kind of thing.

Even the fevers came less frequently now. Perhaps the malaria was subsiding. Wajari had fed him a foul, whitish herbal concoction every day. It wasn’t the milk of human kindness, he knew now. The man was simply trying to keep Hawke healthy long enough to collect the bounty that was surely on his head. He was in that small building even now, getting his thirty pieces of silver.

Hawke used this rare moment of lucidity and made a decision. He was not going back to the camps. No matter what his new captor planned for him, when Wajari returned and opened his cage he would kill him. Take the machete and use his own blade on him. He’d kill anyone who got in his way.

Then he’d see what he could learn in the small dock office. There were sure to be papers there, documents of some kind that he could use to support his story of the camps. And if he was really lucky, maybe even a vehicle parked on the other side of the warehouses. He’d heard the sound of a motor revving and then being silenced.

He waited patiently in his bamboo cage and plotted his escape. He knew in his bones he was still too weak to run far. But, if he could somehow steal a boat, even a dugout and summon the strength to paddle, make his way back upriver, maybe he could get to a wireless radio, or even a telephone. He would only get one chance to survive this ordeal.

Who would he contact first? There was a man he knew, who now lived up in Miami. A true friend of many years. A man who sometimes worked with a Martinique outfit called Thunder and Lightning. They were the best freelance Hostage Rescue team in the world. He had U.S. Navy connections, too, maybe good enough to get a search and rescue plane in the air.

His friend’s name was Stokely Jones.

Somehow, he would contact Stokely. The man was the most reliable soul he knew; the toughest human being Hawke had ever encountered. Stoke had survived and even thrived in the jungles of Vietnam and New York City. He was a true friend, one of Hawke’s closest. Over the years, he had helped Hawke out of far worse scrapes than this one. Hell, this rescue would be child’s play to the human mountain named Stokely Jones Jr.

Hawke felt tiny sparks of hope-neurons firing somewhere inside his brain. For the first time in months, he began to think he might actually survive this bloody adventure. If he could just hold fast a bit longer, Stoke would think of some way to get him out. That was the ticket. Somehow, he had to live long enough to get to a bloody telephone.

Is that you, Mrs. Crusoe? Hold on a tick, will you, I’ve got young Robinson on the line.

4

MIAMI

S o how much you want for the trade?” the used car guy said to Stokely, eyeing the silver Lincoln Town Car rental. Man had his pink hanky plastered on top of his balding pink head to soak up the sweat pouring off of him. His clothes were plastered to the skin, like he’d just come in out of the rain. It wasn’t a good look. It was eighty-eight degrees, according to the radio. Which was warm for early December in most places and just a tad hot for the Miami-Dade metropolitan area.

Even the salesman’s little ponytail was limp.

Stokely Jones Jr., who had just recently packed up and moved lock, stock, and barrel to South Florida, didn’t mind the heat one iota. In fact, he enjoyed it. It was part of the reason he’d moved down here from New York City in the first place. Heat, humidity, and lots of sunshine. Big blue ocean to play in. Palm trees, swaying in the breezes, lift all the girls’ dresses above their kneeses. Paradise, man, no doubt about it. He absolutely loved it.

Stoke was keeping John Greevy, the Auto Toy Store salesperson out in the sun as part of his negotiation technique. Make him sweat. Somewhere on this vast lot full of heavy metal was an automobile he’d give his eyeteeth for. Not one of the fancy Italian F-cars or Lambos John was pushing, they were way out of his league. No, much better. And he was damned if he’d let this slippery pink rascal get the best of him.

South Florida car lots were notoriously dangerous places to begin with. The tricky thing now was, how to handle this negotiation. Stoke wasn’t sure all the wiring in the guy’s attic had been properly soldered on the day of installation. He had a bad habit of talking down to the customers. And, he wanted to take Stoke’s rental in trade on a new car.

“Let me take you through this one more time, John,” Stoke said, smiling at the little guy in the purple linen shirt. Johnny took pains to dress native, creamy slacks with no socks, and tiny little tasseled loafers, but the accent, the mannerisms, were unmistakable. Pure Brooklyn. Park Slope, maybe, but Brooklyn for sure.

“Can we do that, little buddy?”

“Please, Mr. Jones,” John Greevy said. “Be my guest.”

“This Lincoln right here? It’s not mine, okay? What I’m trying to tell you. It’s a rental. It belongs to Mr. Hertz. You can’t trade in a rental car to buy another car.”

“There are ways,” the guy said, bending over to check the Town Car’s left front tire tread. “Believe me, Mr. Jones, there are ways upon ways upon ways.”

“I do believe you. But I’m telling you one more time I’m not going to trade it in. Okay? Man, I haven’t even seen the eight-second Pontiac yet. So what are we even talking about here, Johnny? Where the hell is that Pontiac?”

The Auto Toy store guy had moved so he was standing in Stoke’s shadow again. Stoke was about six-eight and built like a very large armoire. He tended to create a lot of shade wherever he went.

Johnny mopped his brow. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You’ll see the Pontiac, all right? Just as soon as my boy finishes the detail. Like I told you. Look. Tell you what. Let’s step into my office over there and talk about it. I got air in there. You can sit down. I can get your information. You got kids? I got a nine-year old. Johnny Jr. He’s a pisser. Lemme show you his picture.”

Johnny whipped out his wallet and flashed some pictures in a cloudy accordion plastic holder. Stoke glanced at the kid and said, “Cute as a button all right.”

“Yeah. Kid just can’t keep his mind on his schoolwork because he—”

“Johnny. Stop. What’s that thing over there?”

“Which? The black Ferrari 430 Spider? Gorgeous automobile.”

“No.”

“That turquoise convertible? You don’t want that. No resale. A color only Ray Charles could love.”

“How do you know I don’t want it?”

“It’s a replica.”

“It looks real.”

“That’s why it’s called a replica.”

“Holy maca-moley.”

“What?”

“Is that it? Is that the car? Over there?”

A gleaming dark car had rolled out of the detail shed behind the guy’s back. Johnny craned his head around to look at it and wolf-whistled like he’d never laid eyes on it before this very minute.

Stoke was wishing his jaw was wired shut so it wouldn’t be hanging down on his collarbone like this. Bad negotiating tactic, see a car your jaw drops involuntarily on you.

Johnny let out another long wolf whistle.

“Oh, yeah, there she is, my friend, in the flesh. The 1965 Pontiac G-T-O convertible. Piece of friggin’ work, I kid you not, Mr. Jones. You’re looking at one bad-assed muscle car. Pumping major steroids, I shit you not.”

Stoke managed to get his own smile muscles under control before he let the guy see his face. He even managed a frown in reaction to the car’s absolutely gorgeous color.

“Black?” Stoke said, holding a hand up to shade his eyes. “Is that black? The ad said black.”

“Black? Hell, no it ain’t black. Black Raspberry, my man. Metallic. Totally custom job by my guys in Lauderdale. You like, amigo?”

“Yeah. I like. How much?”

Stoke, trying unsuccessfully to be cool about it, nonchalant as his friend and employer Alex Hawke might say, walked over to the car. Johnny followed close behind, trying to stay in his shadow.

“How much you ask?” Johnny said. “Well, we gotta talk about that, don’t we? How the hell you put a number on a piece of automotive art like this?”

“No. I mean how much horsepower has it got.” Stoke ran his hand over the almost liquid finish of the bulging hood.

“Were you a Marine? You carry yourself like a Marine.”

“Navy. SEAL. Three tours in the delta.”

Johnny was busy, opening the driver’s door and popping the hood.

“Cool. Semper fi, right? I got a lot of respect for you guys. So, what do we have under the hood? Okay. Very cool. Look at this thing, huh? Chrome headers. Everything you see here is street legal. For starters, we got an Alston chassis with Strange struts, spool and rear housing that holds a—”

“Strange struts?”

“Bear with me, sir, please. Strange is the manufacturer of the after-market struts. Okay? So, the transmission is a 1.96 low Powerglide with brake and TCI4500 converter. The engine powering this eight-second ride is an Indian Adventures special displacing 541 cubic inches and has a Moldex billet crank, Ross pistons, Oliver rods, Edelbrock wide port heads with T&D shaft rockers, a custom sheet-metal intake with two methanol toilets, MSD with crank trigger—”

“Toilets?” Stoke asked, sliding behind the wheel and glancing over his shoulder at the rolled and pleated red leather rear seat.

“It’s a racing terminology thing, Mr. Jones. Okay? Stop looking. There’s no toilet in the vehicle.”

“She’ll do a quarter mile in eight seconds?”

“She will. NHRA certified.”

“And she’s street legal?”

“Absofuckinlutely.”

“Mercy.”

“You want this car, Mr. Jones? I feel that you do.”

“I do.”

“Let’s do it.”

“I need a number.”

“Ballpark?”

“Yeah.”

“Step into my office.”

5

A n hour later, Stokely Jones was cruising south on I-95. He rumbled over the bridge connecting downtown Miami to where he lived on Brickell Key. He was at the wheel of his brand-new 1965 GTO, top down, wearing a super-sized shit-eating grin on his face. He simply couldn’t believe the chick-magnetizing power of a black raspberry GTO convertible. He’d gotten so many admiring glances driving back to Coconut Grove, his left arm and jaw muscles were tired out just from all the waving and smiling back he’d done in acknowledgment.

There’d been a high school car wash going on at the Dixie Crème and a mess of cheerleaders had swarmed over the car when he’d stopped for a light at the intersection. You girls behave, he’d said to them, blipping the throttle and watching them jump back at the throaty roar. Hey, it’s just an old GTO, what are all you ladies so excited about? And it hadn’t stopped there.

Now, as he came over the rise on the Brickell Island bridge, two blonde babes in a red Mustang convertible were pulling out of the Mandarin Hotel entrance. As he cruised by, surprise, surprise, Mustang Sally and her cute friend too were totally magnetized.

He checked the rear view, almost surprised they hadn’t hooked a damn U-ey and followed him home.

He pulled into the underground parking at One Tequesta Point, the tower that was home to his new Miami palazzo in the sky, blipping the GTO’s throttle again as he rumbled past the old security guy, Fast Eddie Falco.

Fast Eddie, cold cigar stub firmly clenched in his teeth, was reading the Miami Herald in his customized golf cart. Reading in the cart seemed to take up a lot of Eddie’s time. When he finished the sports section around noon, Stoke knew, he’d whip out an old paperback and dive into his afternoon reading program.

Because the two of them shared a liking for mysteries, Stoke and Eddie had recently started a small book club, just the two of them. They called it the “John D. MacDonald Men’s Reading Society.” Right now they were reading the Dress Her In Indigo, and it was one of Stoke’s personal favorites. Next Sunday, Eddie’s day off, the two of them were planning to drive up to Bahia Mar in Lauderdale and see if they couldn’t locate slip 14-A where Travis McGee moored his houseboat, the Busted Flush.

Hey, Stoke suddenly realized, they could take the GTO.

“Eight seconds, Eddie,” Stoke said to the security man as he pulled into his reserved parking spot right next to Fast Eddie’s reserved parking place. Reluctantly, he turned the key and shut her down. Fast Eddie still had his nose buried in the paper.

“You hear what I said, Ed? Eight seconds! You believe that?”

“Take your time,” Eddie said, not bothering to look up and flipping to the Living section. “I got all day.”

You had to laugh.

Stoke hit the switch that raised the ragtop, locked it up, gave it one long last look, and headed for the elevator. He punched 35, his floor, and leaned back against the wood-grained elevator wall, trying to imagine the look on Fancha’s face tonight when she saw his new baby pull up outside her place over on Key Biscayne.

It was Saturday and he was taking her to dinner tonight, Sly Stallone’s new fusion place over on South Beach’s main drag. It would be Rollerbladers on parade tonight on Ocean, and all the muscle boys skating outside Sly’s would be ogling the heavy iron parked along the strip. He’d slip the valet guy a twenty to leave the GTO out front where he could keep an eye on it.

Sweet.

He’d been whistling an old tune all the way home, couldn’t get it out of his head. Ronnie and the Daytonas, if he remembered correctly. What were the words?

A wa-waaaa, wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaaaa—

He stepped off the elevator into the bright sunshine of the open-air thirty-fifth-floor lobby, strolled down the corridor, keyed in his number on the pad, and walked through his front door. Had to stop right there and admire the view, the sun lighting up half of Biscayne Bay beyond his living room windows. It was beautiful and it was all his.

A wa-waaaaa, wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaaaaa—

Man. Life was good.

Two bedrooms, two baths, and a wraparound terrace overlooking paradise spread out below. To buy the condo, he’d sold the small house and large apartment building in Bayside, Queens, that his sainted mother had left him. There was still some money left over to decorate the new crib. And now there was a brand-new piece of automotive art in the parking garage downstairs waiting for him.

He walked over to the tall windows to inspect his universe. A huge freighter was being towed out to sea, moving slowly through Government Cut. A new wide-load cruise ship had just arrived at the Port of Miami, probably quarantined because of some weird bacteria. A little farther east, he saw Blackhawke.

The two-hundred-forty-foot black-hulled yacht belonged to his longtime friend Alex Hawke, and she’d been in Miami for the last couple of months and was just out of the yard. Some kind of a weapons and engine refit while Hawke was down in Brazil or Argentina on his quasi-scientific expedition. In reality Alex was doing some unspecified government work. This time it was the British government. Usually, the work was unspecified and so was the government. That was the way Hawke operated.

There was work going on over at the big yacht. Day and night. Tom Quick, Hawke’s chief of security, had ordered bulletproof windows installed on all three decks after the near-miss incident in the harbor down in Santo Domingo. And they were upgrading the weapons and propulsion systems. The boat was Hawke’s floating operations center and he used it all over the world.

Stoke grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge and walked back out into the living room. The light was blinking on his machine and he plunked down into the deep suede chaise and punched the message play button. Probably Sharkey, he guessed.

“Hey. It’s me,” the disembodied voice said, not disappointing him.

It was Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, a Cuban guy he’d recently put on his Tactics International payroll. He was the new company’s very first employee, he told Luis, so he’d better be good. Luis’s nickname, Sharkey, was because as a boy fishing with his father, he’d lost some of his left arm to a big bull shark down in the Keys. All he had now was a stump. He looked like, yeah, a Sharkey, Stoke had decided. Shark was a fairly laidback individual, maybe just a little nervous for Stoke’s taste, but he’d been a mate on a charter out of Key West for a couple of decades and he knew his way around that vicinity.

Not long after he was hired, Shark had told Stoke he liked this espionage gig a whole lot more than fishing. Stoke paid him five hundred a week plus expenses. Sharkey thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Went out and bought himself a sharkskin blazer to wear to work. Pair of secret agent sunglasses pushed back on his forehead, answering the phone in the rented office space in Coconut Grove. Stoke had to laugh.

Gonzales-Gonzales was Stoke’s only employee. Hell, it was only a month now since Tactics even had a payroll. But Stoke’s newly formed company had recently landed its first client and it was a good one. His clients had their home office in a big five-sided building up in D.C. called the Pentagon.

Hawke had given Stoke the seed money to get his company started. He’d even helped steer a guy they’d both worked with before, a CIA spook named Harry Brock, to him. Brock, who was now a military intelligence advisor to the Joint Chiefs, had met with him and had put Tactics on a retainer. They wanted him to poke around a little bit down in the Caribbean. Five grand a week plus expenses was a good start. It covered the rent and payroll and even kept the lights on.

From what Stoke was allowed to know, it seemed Harry Brock was planning on making some big presentation at an upcoming seminar on Latin American terrorist activities. Harry had hired Stoke to gather information to fill in the holes in a presentation he was planning to make. Harry told Stoke to look into one specific area, namely Cuba and the Florida Straits.

Harry’s boss in Washington, JCS chairman General Charley Moore, was getting very worried about a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Latin America. He was especially juned up about the new Cuba-Venezuela connection. It was that connection that had Washington’s pantyhose all twisted up at the moment. Harry Brock was calling in a lot of his sources. Every one of them was tasked to gather intel on the Chávez-Castro love-fest for the State Department’s Key West pow-wow.

The State Department was convinced Fidel was buying arms from the Russians with money from Chávez in Venezuela. Then he was shipping out weapons to all his new Latin American buddies. That was the theory anyway. But they needed confirmation and Stoke was one of the guys assigned to do that.

“How’s it hanging, Señor?” Sharkey’s recorded voice said. “Que pasa, hombre? Listen, man, I think I got something for you. This is still very private but we got to move fast or it won’t be. Like, we got to fly down first thing in the morning. Does that work? It does if you want to see this thing before the Federales find out about it. So, lemme know, okay, because—”

Stoke hit the save button and speed-dialed Sharkey’s cell.

“Fly down where?” he said the second the real-live Sharkey answered his phone.

“Dry Tortugas. Just south of Key West.”

“Tell me why, Luis.”

“Fortune offers us an opportunity, boss.”

“Good answer.”

“Oh, yeah. Look, I got us a seaplane out of Dinner Key. She’s called the ‘Blue Goose.’ Seven o’clock a.m. Mañana. Don’t be late.”

“What about the pilot?”

“Name is Mick. Mick Hocking. No worries, mate, like the man says. Dude ain’t saying nothing about nothing to nobody, man. I checked him out through a friend of mine at Miami-Dade PD. He’s okay. From Australia or New Zealand or some place. I’ll give you his number, you want to call him on his ‘mi-ble’ like I do all the time.”

“What’s a ‘mi-ble’?”

“What this Mick Hocking calls his cell phone.”

“Oh. Mobile. Got it. Hey. You know what the shark said to the clown?”

“No.”

“You taste funny.”

“That is so lame. Man, I can’t believe you even tell a handicapped person a joke like that.”

“I’m politically incorrect. Hey, listen. What are we looking at down there? It better be good, compadre, I’m telling you, ’cause I got a lot of paperwork and shit to deal with right here on the homefront.”

“It’s good. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, I’ll see. I’ll swing by and pick you up at six-thirty.”

“You get the car?”

“You’ll see.

6

THE AMAZON BASIN

W ould you kill for a cigarette? Commit murder for a single puff of burning weed? Could the sweet scent of Turkish tobacco drive a man insane? These were the questions the wild creature squatting inside the bamboo cage asked himself. The guard, who smoked in a very civilized manner, affected an air of boredom. He was leaning casually against a wooden bollard, gazing at the river.

Inside the small dock office, an argument was raging. Wajari’s basso profundo rose and fell.

Hawke, desperate for a smoke, decided to try to communicate with his guard.

The tall, coppery fellow’s uniform was torn and faintly recognizable as British. On his head, a filthy white turban splotched with brown patches that appeared to be dried blood. An Arab, certainly, though perhaps of mixed descent. He carried himself with authority and his dark, heavily lidded eyes betrayed an intelligence beyond his station.

“Speak any English?” he asked, with little hope of a response.

“What’s that?” the man said, looking over at him with annoyance.

He spoke in a clipped English accent, with the unmistakable air of a chap unaccustomed to being addressed by caged animals.

Surprised, Hawke answered, “Actually, I asked if you spoke a bit of English.”

“More than a bit.” Afghani, on one side of the coin.

“What’s in the crates?” Hawke asked.

“Who wants to know?” the man said, as if the prisoner were a piece of rotted meat even the tigers wouldn’t touch.

“The Great Satan, of course,” Hawke said.

The man bent over and peered intently through the bars for a few seconds.

“Satan, I’ll grant you. But, great? I think not.” He rapped the muzzle of his gun on Hawke’s cage. “Tell me who you are.”

“The fifth richest man in England, at your service. Now give me a cigarette for Christ’s sake.”

“You’re not Hawke?”

“Not me.”

“Lord Alexander Hawke? You must be”

“Never heard of him.”

“It’s you, all right. I was expecting an Englishman, not the wild man of Borneo. Damn it, man! I’ve been half expecting you to show up around here. You were supposed to surface a week ago.”

“Sorry I’m late. I was detained. Cigarette?”

“Why not? I have to wait until they finish your paperwork anyway.”

“My paperwork?”

The man didn’t answer. Leaning his carbine against the bollard, he lowered himself to the dock, letting his legs dangle over the edge.

“Mind the piranhas,” Hawke said cheerfully.

The fellow pulled a crumpled package of black market smokes from his torn khaki shirt and shook one loose.

“Thanks.” Hawke bent forward so that he could accept a light. “I am eternally grateful. What’s your name?”

“Wellington Hassan,” the man said, lighting another.

“Wellington Hassan. Quite a name.”

“Saladin’s good enough. My middle name.”

“Saladin it is, then. Sal-a’ha-Din. Slave of God. You Talib, Saladin? Taliban?”

Saladin Hassan laughed deeply. “Me? Taliban? Hardly. Afghan, though. I bled for your side, Mr. Hawke.”

“Where’d you get your English?” Hawke asked, withholding smoke until it burned.

“My mother. An English rose from Devon. Her family name was Wellington. She met my father when she was working as a nurse in Kabul. We always used English in the house. When the shooting started in Afghanistan, I was recruited as a translator for a British regiment advising the Northern Alliance. I had a military engineering background and some experience of artillery and explosives.”

“Really? Which regiment, may I ask?”

“Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire Light Infantry.”

Hawke nodded and said, “What theatre?”

“Up in the north. Near Mazar-e-Sharif. Helping the Afghan government develop democratic institutions and disarming militias.”

“Good work.”

“Until an unfortunate incident, yes, it was.”

“What happened, Saladin?”

“We came under fire between bases. I’d told my commander the road had been cleared of IEDs. I checked it three times. I thought it had been. It hadn’t. We lost three.”

Hawke looked away, inhaled the harsh smoke deeply and felt almost human. Nicotine brought a great clarity to things, so fresh it was startling. This was, he realized, his first real human conversation in over six months.

“Pretty rough,” Hawke said, “I’m sorry.”

“What are you doing here, Mr. Hawke?”

“I was with a scientific expedition before your friends in there captured me. These people are your employers? Las Medianoches?”

“Perhaps. But only temporarily. I’m an independent contractor. Since I retired from the military, I work for anybody. Recently, I’ve been doing odd jobs for El Salvador del Mundo.”

“The savior of the world? Big job, saving the world. Is your current employer up to it?”

“My employer believes world salvation starts here in the jungle. This is where it all begins. At any rate, my life story is of no consequence. You, on the other hand, are quite a celebrity in this part of the jungle. You’re going to the highest bidder.”

“Really? Who’s bidding?”

“A man named Muhammad Top and an American who calls himself Harry Brock.”

“Harry Brock?” Hawke knew the name well. Harry was a bit of a piss artist, but also a tough, hard-bitten intelligence operative with a particularly American sense of humor.

“Yes. He came down here looking for you. Top found him first, sentenced him to death for spying. He said he had information for you.”

“So Harry’s dead.”

“Not yet. He’s a very smart man, Brock. He played to Papa Top’s ego, gave him a ton of information, most of it probably false. They sent him to die in the camps. Somehow, he got away. Top hired me to find Brock and dispose of him.”

“Ah. You’re an assassin. You kill him?”

“Got a better offer.”

“Doing what?”

“Harry’s paying me to keep an eye on Muhammad Top. And, look for you. So, now that I’ve found you, there is a small seaplane moored upriver. We can steal it, fly to the town of Madre de Dios. From there, I can get you somehow to Manaus. And, from Manaus, well, there are many flights to Rio. You look like you could use a good doctor.”

“Let’s fly. Now.”

“We will fly, m’lord. Give me a few seconds to straighten things out in the office.”

Saladin got to his feet, picked up his carbine, and went inside.

A loud staccato roar of automatic gunfire erupted inside the small office. The lights were instantly extinguished and glass exploded outward, showering fragments on Hawke in his bamboo prison. There were loud screams and curses. Then another burst silenced the cries from inside.

Saladin Hassan stood in the doorway with a smoking carbine in his hand. He pulled a blade from a sheath on his belt and started working on the cage.

“What was that all about?” Hawke asked.

“I had to shred your paperwork.”

7

PRAIRIE, TEXAS

C ome on in, why don’t you, it’s open.”

Daisy hadn’t even heard the cruiser pull up in the drive out front. Now she could see the good-looking boy from the kitchen table. Standing out on the front porch, plain as day.

“It’s Homer, honey,” she said.

“I can see who it is.”

Homer Prudhomme was right outside the screen door under the yellow bug light. Reason he wasn’t in any big hurry to come inside, Daisy guessed, was the bad news writ all over his face.

“Homer,” her husband said to the boy, swallowing his macaroni and scootching his chair back from the table a few inches. “Come on inside the house, son. You are not interrupting anything special in here. We eat supper every night.”

Homer pulled open the flimsy door and stepped inside the parlor, taking off his hat and riffling the dusty brim through his fingers. His big dark eyes were a little puffy and red. He had waves of dark hair and a cowlick that just wouldn’t pay any mind to Brylcreem.

“Sheriff,” he said, nodding to Franklin. “Evenin’, Miz Dixon.”

“Hey, Homer,” Daisy said to the boy, “You got something in your eye, baby?” It was true she wanted to mother this child. Nothing wrong in that.

Homer wiped the back of his hand across his face. “No, ma’am. Had the windows down driving out here, that’s all. Just a gnat or something flew in my eye.”

They waited for the boy to say something else, but he didn’t. He had been crying, that much was plain to see.

“What brings you out here this time of night, son?” Franklin said.

“Bad news, Sheriff.”

Homer was a tall, good-looking kid with the uniform hanging off of his bones. The Tuesday Girls down at the Bon Jour beauty parlor all had a crush on him. Hell, every churchgoing one of them, every lady in Prairie had a sneaker for that boy. The general consensus was he looked like Elvis right before he got famous, when he was still living at home with Gladys and Vernon.

Homer was older than that, shoot, he was almost twenty now and a high school graduate. But he had those same sleepy eyes and those long silky eyelashes. Behind his back, all the gals called him La Hilacha. The threadbare one. Homer had grown up semi-Anglo in the barrio part of town.

“Speak up, son.”

You could see the boy’s mind looking for a way to say it, whatever awful thing it was he’d come out here to tell her husband.

“Let it out, Homer. It’s all right, honey,” Daisy said.

Those bedroom eyes looked like they were liable to start filling up again. But Homer bravely took a deep breath and got himself under control.

“They’ve done…I’m sorry, Sheriff, seems like they took another one.”

“Another girl.”

He rubbed his sleeve roughly across his eyes. “Yessir. I reckon I’m not too good at being the bearer of bad news. I just came from telling Mr. and Mrs. Beers about what happened to their daughter. They’re pretty shook up.”

Daisy wanted to get up and hug the boy.

She would have, too, if not for how embarrassed he’d be in front of Franklin. It had been a tough year for him. He lost his American father when they had that explosion out at the fertilizer factory here about a year ago. Family had to move out of their house after that. Staying in some apartment over the hardware store now. And his momma, Rosalinda, who was originally from Juarez, was never any damn good. Drugs or alcohol, everybody said.

His mother just upped and took off with some married John Deere regional sales manager from Wichita here about six months ago. People said she and her lover boy run off together. Went down Juarez and kept on going. Nothing runs like a Deere, as they say on television. Rosalinda left Homer to take care of his baby sister, graduate high school, and do his part-time courthouse job all at the same time. Last June, after graduation, that’s when he’d come to see Franklin about a job on the force.

Of course, Franklin had said yes. He always did, somebody needed something in this town. And now she saw those damn worry lines around her husband’s pale gray eyes coming back again. Those damn worry lines never stayed gone too long lately, worries piling up like they were around here. Illegals, drugs, border shootings. And now the abductions of four beautiful young girls.

The shit around here was knee deep and rising.

The boy looked over to the window, watching something out there maybe, trying to compose himself.

“She’s just a baby, you know, Sheriff? Not even fourteen.”

“I know what you mean, Homer,” Franklin said. He let go of a sigh and shoved his chair all the way back from the table. Then he reached for his boots.

Daisy knew what Franklin meant, too. She’d felt it coming as soon as she’d seen Homer at the door. Everybody for miles around was living in fear until they were sick with it. They’d finally sent a posse out on horseback to look for the girls. Now another one had gone missing. They’d been snatched from their houses in the middle of the night. Stolen from the roadside in broad daylight, waiting on the school bus or coming out of the Piggly-Wiggly. Drugged and trussed up and hauled across the border to God knows where all or whatever.

White slavery, that’s what her friend and neighbor June Weaver said it was. Underage prostitution. Steal the little Anglo girls and put them to work in the cathouses south of the border. June worked the switchboard down at the courthouse. Which meant obviously that not much that happened in this county, good or bad, escaped her notice.

“Who’d they take?” Franklin said in a tired voice. He was getting to his feet, brushing cornbread crumbs from the front of his jeans. He eyed his deputy who’d managed to pull himself back together.

“Joe Beers’s youngest daughter, Sheriff. Name is Charlotte. Didn’t come home from the picture show.”

“This evenin’, then?”

“Yessir.”

“What time is it? I mean right now?”

“Just after nine p.m., Sheriff. Charlotte went to the six o’clock with her girl cousins. Supposed to meet up with them at the Rexall after the show. Didn’t sit with them at all. Went to sit up in the balcony with her boyfriend.”

“Hollis.”

“That’s him all right.”

“When did you get the call?”

“About an hour ago. I was out past Yancey in the Crown Vic, looking for our posse. It was Junebug on the radio told me. They got the boyfriend in custody already. He says she went to the little girl’s room during the show and never came back.”

“What about her purse?”

“Pardon me?”

“She take her purse to the ladies’ room?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff.”

“Homer?”

“Yessir?”

“The posse. You say it like they were vigilantes. They aren’t. They volunteered to go. And I deputized ever one of them boys.”

“Yessir, I reckon that’s true enough.”

“I know you wanted to ride with them. Your time will come soon enough. Let’s saddle up. I’ll go with you in the cruiser. Daisy? Listen to me. You lock up these doors please. Front and rear. Leave that shotgun sitting right there on the counter. It’s loaded with double-ought buckshot. I’ll be back here in a few hours.”

The screen door slammed behind him and she watched him walk all the way across the yard. She liked the way he walked.

HIGHWAY 59 over toward Prairie proper was deserted in both directions. The hills and rocks and sage looked golden in the strong white light of the full moon. Franklin Dixon didn’t seem to feel much like talking so the deputy left him alone with his thoughts. Prudhomme could imagine where they were running without too much trouble. Four girls taken in the jurisdiction this month alone. Almost thirty people had been abducted along the Tex-Mex border over the past year. Four girls from Prairie alone. Vanished into thin air, every one of them. Make it five, now, most likely, with Charlotte gone.

“Pretty moon,” Franklin said after a few miles.

“Yessir, it sure is.”

“No word from that posse.”

“No, sir. Not a peep. I don’t know what in Sam Hill could have happened to ’em. They’re supposed to be back here yesterday evening.”

“I know that, Homer.”

“Sorry.”

“Taillights up yonder.”

“Semi. Yessir.”

“How fast you reckon?”

“Eighty. Eighty-five.”

“Accelerator’s the one on the right. Use it, son.”

“Bells and whistles?”

“Good Lord gave ’em to us for a reason.”

“Yessir.”

Prudhomme turned on the siren and the blue rotators and accelerated. The old Ford Crown Vic didn’t have much juice but what she did have, Homer used up pretty quickly.

“Slow down, son, you ’bout to rear end him.”

“Yessir. He’s slowing down pretty quick with those air brakes. You want me to pull him?”

“He’s a lawbreaker I believe.”

Homer hit the high beam flashers and the big truck slowed way down fast, moving toward the shoulder of the two-lane, brakes hissing.

“Sheriff, what’s your twenty?” the radio crackled.

“Hey, June. We’re on 59 and headed in. Deputy Prudhomme told me about Charlotte. You know, I just—hold on a sec, June—what the heck is this big fella doing here, Homer?”

“Beats tar out of me, he just wants to play, I guess.”

The big truck seemed to have changed its mind. It lurched along the shoulder and all of a sudden roared back up on to the blacktop and started accelerating down the middle of the road. Deputy Prudhomme stayed on his tail for a moment or two and then the gap started widening. You had to wonder what he had under the hood.

“He’s doing more’n a hundred, Sheriff. Company puts governors on them rigs, I thought.”

“Pull up alongside and move him gently over into his proper lane.”

“Yessir,” Homer Prudhomme said, and mashed the go pedal. But just as he was about to pull even with the cab, crowding him, the truck’s engine emitted a high-pitched whine and the whole rig leapt forward again, going much, much faster. The big red taillights diminished to pinpricks on the horizon in seconds.

“Well, I’ll be,” Franklin said, moving his head side to side in disbelief. “You hear that whine? Superchargers.”

“He has to be doing near a hundred forty miles an hour, Sheriff.”

“Trucks can’t go that fast.”

“Well. I dunno. This one can. We’ve lost him.”

“Ain’t lost one yet and don’t plan to start. Stay with him, boy. Do the best you can.”

“Yessir.”

“June? You still on the air?”

“Right here, Sheriff.”

“Listen, we got a race-car driver in a souped-up tractor rig out here headed south on 59. Bright red, white, and blue Peterbilt cab with a big red baseball bat painted on the trailer’s side. Some outfit called ‘Yankee Slugger.’ Never heard of ’em. Rolling fast toward the border. Get Wyatt to send a couple cars out to the intersection, will you please. Block the road and—now, what’s he doing?”

“He stopped up there on the hill,” Prudhomme said.

“June, I’m going to have to call you back. We got to go see about this truck.”

“I ain’t going nowhere but here. You still want Wyatt to order two squad cars out there, Sheriff?”

“No, June, thank you. We’re all right.”

Of course, as it would turn out, they weren’t all right. Nobody was.

Not even a little bit.

8

DRY TORTUGAS

W hat’s so dry about the Dry Tortugas?” Luis “Sharkey” Gonzales-Gonzales asked nobody in particular. He was staring down at all the clear blue water below. Sharkey, who was tanned a dark nut brown, was sitting two rows back on the other side of the aisle looking like a true citizen of the Conch Republic. A wicked-looking shark’s tooth swung from his twenty-four-carat gold neck chain. He wore a faded fishing shirt with blue marlin leaping around, some old khaki shorts, and his trademark white suede loafers, no socks.

Sharkey had his head turned to the window, cheek pressed against the glass. He was gazing down at the glassy blue-green sea a thousand feet below the seaplane as the pilot banked left and lined up for a landing at a giant brick fortification called Fort Jefferson.

Stokely Jones didn’t answer Shark’s question about the Tortugas being so dry. He was too busy looking for the Isaac Allerton’s skeleton. Wrecks, man. For the last ten minutes, he’d been seeing bones in the white sand beneath the turquoise water, the scattered and broken backbones and ribs sticking right up where you could see them. The Allerton was down there somewhere. She’d been caught in a blow off Saddle-bunch Keys back in 1856. After her anchor lines were cut, she ground over Washerwoman Shoals, lost her rudder, and sank in Hawk’s Channel in five fathoms.

Mick Hocking, the young Aussie pilot sitting to his left, said Allerton’s remains were coming up. They were flying over the exact area where Mel Fisher had discovered the Spanish galleon Atocha and about a billion dollars in gold. Survey boats were moored in the shallow water, fifty feet or so, Stoke thought it looked like. You could tell the treasure hunters by the survey cable reels mounted on the transoms.

Off the Marquesas, and west over to the Dry Tortugas, the typical things you might find, if you stuck with it a few years, were artifacts and emeralds. Emeralds were almost common. Stoke had always had a fondness for buried treasure, a feeling he’d shared with his boss, Alex Hawke. He’d caught the bug the first time they’d worked together. They were down in the Caribbean, looking for the pirate Blackhawke’s lost treasure.

Hawke told Stoke something one time they were diving down here in the Keys. Hawke said it was interesting how many decades it took professional wreckers to figure out that the big Spanish galleons, loaded to the gunwales with gold and silver, would not be found in deep water. They would most likely be in shallow water, like you had right here.

The galleons headed back to Spain would have been here in the South Atlantic during the hurricane season, Hawke said. That was June to October. And, if you looked at any map of the trade routes, and saw the storm tracks, many of those galleons obviously have been blown here into the Florida reef line. Some would be lost in open sea, sure. But many of them would fetch up in shallow water before they ran aground. Then, huge rollers would lift them up and split their keels on the reefs. Voilà, they’d spill all their booty on the bottom down there.

Stoke heard a little crackle in his headphones.

“Ponce de Leon called these islands ‘Las Tortugas’ because they looked liked turtle shells on the far horizon,” Mick said. “The ‘dry’ part came later when he found out the hard way there was no fresh water to be had down there. Still isn’t, so bring that bottle of Fiji along with you.”

“Ponce de Leon, huh? Is that right?” Stokely asked the pilot. Stoke was up front in the cockpit, in the right hand seat of the seaplane.

“Yep.”

“Huh. All that time I was down here, I never knew that.”

He’d liked the guy, Mick, right away. Mick was a high time bush pilot from Queensland, Australia, who’d spent most of his career up in Alaska, flying wildcatters around. Mick seemed to understand that this flight was of an extremely sensitive nature. That the missing plane might be a matter of national security, Mick said, and this is a quote, ‘You’d have to be a fairdinkum wanker or a drongo to fly in here at night below the radar, mate.’

Stoke liked him on sight. And he’d asked just the right amount of questions when Stoke had first reached him on his mible.

“You spend much time down here in the Keys, Mick?” Stoke asked him now.

“I did. I was in and out of Key West Naval some back in the day. A few years after your lot, I guess. Did some spec ops training with the SEAL blokes just down the road. Pissingly hot, even for an old sandgroper like me. Heat and Skeet we called it, Mr. Jones. Tough outfit, your SEALs are. I was impressed.”

Mick had a crinkly smile, and, like that guy in the Crocodile Dundee movies, he always had a grin stuck in his voice. Cheery. That kind of guy.

“Take a gander down there, Stoke,” Mick said in the headphones. “That must be your mate’s boat coming up now.”

A moment later, Stoke saw an old fishing boat below, moored at the island’s disintegrating coal station. The thirty-foot boat, which had been painted blue some time early in the last century, was bobbing up and down, tied to the old wharf. A skinny white-haired guy stood on the bow, waving his floppy straw hat at the approaching seaplane.

Little was left of the island’s broken, rusted-out black wharf. It was standing in turquoise water on the west side of the fortress island. This was where all the southbound steamers used to refuel before heading across the straits to Cuba and points further south. The battleship Maine had made her last pit stop here, before she was mysteriously sunk in Havana harbor.

Some people thought it was a Spanish torpedo that sank the Maine, and some thought it was Cuban terrorists. Whatever it was, America went to war with Spain over the sinking and kicked Spain the hell out of Cuba for good. You’d think Fidel would owe us one, right? You’d be wrong. Fidel was someone Stoke happened to know personally. He never talked about it, but he’d actually been awarded the Cuban Medal of Honor by Castro himself. Yeah, he had that medal in a drawer somewhere, but that was another story.

The old blue fishing boat had to belong to the guy Sharkey had arranged for them to meet. Fort Jefferson was a very out of the way place. Nobody ever came out here unless they were very curious about old island fortresses abandoned after the Civil War.

Stoke had forgotten how massive the thing was. How thick those solid brick walls were, heavy black cannons sticking out all over the place. All they did now, sell a few postcards to touristas who ventured out from Key West after a few too many Cuba Libres at Sloppy Joes booze emporium. Might come a day when America could use a fort down here, Stoke was thinking. In the event of a Gulf War in our own backyard.

Harry Brock believed, as did Stoke, that this neck of the Caribbean was shaping up fast as a place where the shooting could start. Hell, that’s why Stoke was poking around down here, wasn’t it? Latin America was blowing up in our faces. Stokely hoped to hell Sharkey had found something useful down here. He didn’t have a whole lot of time to dick around.

Stoke turned around in his seat and smiled at his sole employee. His trusty gut was talking to him, it was saying maybe Luis was actually on to something worthwhile. Besides, he was starting to feel more comfortable with Luis lately. Yeah, maybe Sharkey was a little hyper. Nervous type. But Stoke’s instincts about the wiry Cubano were trending positive.

“Hey, Shark-bait! This guy we’re meeting at the Fort. How come he’s got the same name as you?”

“His name is not Sharkey.”

“No. It’s ‘Luis’I’m talking about. Your real name.”

“Si, Luis! He’s my father. Luis Gonzales-Gonzales Senior.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that? Now I don’t have to worry about trusting the fate of the free world to this old guy. He’s still fishing, huh, your daddy?”

“Yeah. A lot of these elders here in the Keys, they came down from Miami soon after the Mariel in ’81. They were fishermen back in Cuba. A lot of them took one look at Miami and then came down here to the Keys, man. Cheap housing. Lots of fish round here on the flats back then.”

“The old man and the sea, huh? That his boat?”

“El Bandito, she’s called. That old man going to fish her till he dies, man. He’s a good spy, man, keeps his eyes open. Once you said I was officially in the program, on the case, whatever, I asked him to do it. He’s got a tiny stilt house on a little spit of land in the Marquesas. He can see everything from there. He’s out on the water all day and most of the night. The other fishermen, they are happy to help out. Stick together pretty much and they all hate Fidel as much as I do.”

“You guys buckled up? We’re going for a swim,” Mick said. He’d been circling the landing area, looking for any floating debris before he set the Blue Goose down. Now that he was on final, he’d reduced his airspeed to about ten knots above stall speed, nose up, with maximum flaps extended. Air was getting choppy.

“Is it always this rough?” Sharkey asked.

“Clear air turbulence,” Stoke said. “Relax.”

“Man, what if we crash? Look at all the sharks down there. Those are bull sharks, man.”

Stoke craned around in his seat and looked down.

“I thought you said you were a fisherman. This is an outgoing tide. Sharks don’t feed at this hour. Sharks only feed on an incoming tide. Everybody knows that.”

“Yeah? Tell that to the one bit my damn arm off.”

9

LONDON

A ssume you only live once, Mr. Hawke,” Alex said to Ambrose Congreve. Hawke leaned back in his chair and smiled at his old friend. He liked the phrase and had been looking forward to sharing it with the celebrated detective. Congreve was fond of quoting Conan Doyle and, for once, Hawke thought he’d lob in one of his own zingers.

“Muhammad Top actually said that to you?”

Hawke downed the balance of his rum. “I was under duress. I may have embellished it.”

Congreve returned his pipe to his cherubic bow of a mouth, skepticism plain on his face.

“It’s the bloody truth,” Hawke said.

“Torture is stressful, I suppose,” Congreve said airily.

“Ah, well. It only hurts when you scream,” Hawke said, a brief smile flitting across his face.

“Ouch,” Congreve said, with a grimace only half-mocking.

Hawke nodded, leisurely recrossing his long legs, draped in soft gray flannel, at the knee. Linking his hands behind his curly black head, he leaned back against the indented leather of the deep club chair.

Alex Hawke looked remarkably fit and relaxed, Congreve observed, given what rough sledding he’d endured in months past. Ambrose, like most, had given Hawke up for dead. Reports had reached London, casting a pall over some quadrants of society and the City. It was widely reported that Lord Hawke’s expedition into the Amazon had met with disaster when his yawl, Pura Vida, had been attacked by Indians and sunk with all hands.

Two months earlier, Ambrose had seen the sole survivor’s stretcher being carried off the Royal Navy air transport flight after it arrived at Lakenheath from Rio de Janeiro. It was raining buckets that night, and all assembled had gathered inside an open hangar door, watching Hawke’s gurney unloaded and hurried by a team of navy medics across the glistening tarmac. An ambulance was waiting inside the hangar.

A weary and deathly pale Hawke had attempted a cheery greeting, saluting the few naval chaps present. His brave front could do nothing to hide the terrible shape he was in. In addition to a very worried looking “C,” Sir David Trulove, new chief of SIS, there was a small group from both 85 Vauxhall Cross and Whitehall present, and one got the feeling they’d all come expecting to pay last respects to the corpse.

Congreve, like everyone present, had been horrified at Hawke’s utterly wasted appearance. After a brief, private moment with C, who bent to whisper something in his ear as he was being loaded into a waiting ambulance, Hawke was whisked off to Lister Hospital in Chelsea. There, he was diagnosed as suffering from severe malnutrition, malaria, septic infection from a snakebite, and God knows what else. He’d been in hospital for two months. He’d made a remarkable recovery, and had only been released from hospital three days ago.

ALEX HAWKE and former Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve of Scotland Yard had just completed a lengthy luncheon at Black’s. Hawke’s club was on upper St. James’ Street, an ancient bastion for gentlemen of property. The two friends had met in the bar at one o’clock to hoist a glass or two. One, in honor of Hawke’s hospital release, another celebrating Congreve’s semi-engagement to the beauteous and very wealthy Lady Diana Mars.

Congreve’s splendid news, delivered just that morning, had taken Hawke completely by surprise. Congreve, getting married? He, like everyone else, had Congreve down for a lifelong bachelor.

“Semi-engaged?” Hawke asked, not sure what that meant.

“Hmm. I haven’t exactly asked her. I haven’t proposed. But we do have an understanding.”

“To understanding!” Hawke said, raising his G&T.

Any witness to Congreve’s behavior in Diana’s presence over the last year should have known what was in the offing. Smitten was gross understatement. Love was oversimplification. The man was besotted with Diana Mars. They’d been seen out and about London so frequently, and in such close proximity, many people assumed they’d been married or at least involved for decades.

Ambrose had recently whisked Diana off to the Isle of Skye for a week of sightseeing. They’d also managed to visit the odd distillery, this being preparatory research for a new book the famous criminalist was in the midst of writing.

His book would not be some tawdry tell-all about the Scotland Yard detective’s famous exploits amongst the criminal classes; in actual fact, it was projected as a slim volume to be titled Inspector Congreve’s Single Malt Cookbook. Congreve envisioned the thing as a gentleman’s companion, something that would be right at home on the shelf below one’s first editions of H.R. Haggard or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Now, they’d abandoned the bar for Black’s cavernous smoking lounge. Their faces hidden in the shadows of two large leather wing chairs, the two men spoke of serious matters like love. A tall window, spattered with rain, rose above them and the dingy light filtering down from above was watery and gray. It was a perfectly miserable London afternoon in late November.

Ambrose was freshly aglow, a man in love; his companion Hawke was happy simply to be alive.

“Congratulations, Ambrose. I am extremely happy for you both.” Hawke raised his glass of Gosling’s rum.

“Cheers,” Congreve said, clinking it.

“One thing you must never forget. I may have said this before, but it bears repeating. Great marriages are made in heaven; but so, too, are thunder and lightning.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Ambrose said, smiling. “I say, you don’t think I’m being impetuous, do you? I’ve known her less than two years after all.”

“Not at all. I think it’s high time you settled down. And Diana will be a brilliant match for you. You two will be very happy. I wonder, Constable, how do you envision the thing?”

“Well, I am mad about her and—”

“No, no. The marriage. How do you see it? If she says ‘yes,’I mean.”

“I suppose I haven’t really thought that much about it. A comfortable marriage, I’d say. Sturdy.”

“Good word, sturdy.”

“Yes. I imagine our marriage will be a sturdy little barque upon which to ride out the tumult. You know, the tides that sweep us along, and all that sort of thing.”

“Quite poetic for a flatfoot. Have you set a date yet?”

“Good Lord, no! As I say, I haven’t even officially asked her yet. Although I suppose I’ll get round to it one day.”

“Well, you—”

A somber porter in cutaway and striped trousers appeared out of nowhere and interrupted whatever it was that Hawke had on his mind. He leaned down toward Hawke in what Congreve imagined to be a conspiratorial fashion.

He whispered, “Sorry to disturb your lordship, but there’s a gentleman would like to have a word, sir.”

“Is he downstairs?”

“No, sir. He’d like you to give him a call, sir.”

“Who is it?”

“He said please give you this, sir.”

Hawke took the small envelope from the silver tray and extracted a stiff cream-colored card. He glanced briefly at it, with a silent nod to Congreve as he got to his feet. His expression had changed so quickly, it was as if someone had tapped him with a wand. His eyes, a second ago alight with warmth and humor, had instantly turned ice blue.

“Sorry, Constable, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me. I might be a considerable while. Perhaps I’ll ring you in the morning. Something’s come up, you see, and—”

“Don’t give it a thought, dear boy, I’ll just see myself out. Most enjoyable afternoon.”

Hawke turned back to the porter.

“I’ll use a private booth, please,” Hawke said and quickly strode off into the smoky shadows, porter in tow. Something caught Congreve’s eye and he turned to see the accidentally dropped card falling to the faded Persian carpet as Hawke disappeared from the room.

Congreve gazed at the spattered window for a moment, following the descent of a single raindrop, then rose and tossed off the balance of his whisky. He stared at the card face down on the floor for some long seconds. He and Alex were lifelong friends and they had few, if any, secrets between them. He bent and picked the thing up, pausing for a moment to give his conscience some operating room, and then opened the folded message.

On it was the single letter, C, written in green ink.

C was the name given to every chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes known as MI-6, since 1909. This was, as Ambrose well knew, because the Service’s original founder, Sir Mansfield Cumming, had a habit of scrawling a big green C on every SIS document he signed.

Ambrose Congreve certainly knew the implications of a summons from C. He sighed, audibly, and sank down into the soft womb of the nearest chair, still holding the card twixt thumb and forefinger. It was once more time, it seemed, to don the cloak and unsheathe the dagger. Knowing Hawke as he did, his happy fantasies of marriage and a quiet dog-and-stick life of a country scribe would most probably be put on hold.

Yes. Perhaps delayed indefinitely if, as he imagined, Hawke was soon to journey back into the heart of darkness.

“So it begins,” the Scotland Yard man said, the merest trace of an anticipatory smile crossing his lips.

10

WEST TEXAS

T he big red, white, and blue painted trailer rig was parked on the shoulder at the crest of the hill. Just sitting there. Big red baseball bat on the sides and rear doors. The words Yankee Slugger in blue letters circling the bat. Homer Prudhomme slowed the cruiser, approaching the sixteen-wheeler from the rear. Franklin looked over at him. He was still a little wet behind the ears but he was coming along pretty good for a rookie.

“Okay, we got him,” the sheriff said. “Tuck in there behind him, son. Keep your brights on. He’s not likely to bolt on you again. Some hophead with a sense of humor most likely. Pay attention to what you’re doing, however. These road warriors can get overexcited.”

“Yessir.”

“Go on now, git.”

“Sheriff?” June said on the radio. Homer had opened the door but he still had one hand clenched around the steering wheel.

“Hold the phone a second, June—Homer, go have a word with that gentleman. Inform him we don’t speed here in Mesa County. Anything over a hundred entitles you to free bed and breakfast. Write him up and we’ll take him on in.”

Prudhomme climbed out from behind the wheel and disappeared into the dust cloud still rising around the trailer. Had his hand on his right hip. Franklin had to smile. He might not be a lawman yet, but he had the walk, by God, down.

“Go ahead, June. I’m sorry.”

“What I was saying was, I think we maybe caught a break here with the North boy, Sheriff. The boyfriend says he saw somebody. There was a man at the candy counter. Hollis thought he was looking at Charlotte funny. Before the show.”

“Hollis get a good look at him?”

“The unsub?”

Franklin looked out his window a second, eyes searching the blue-white mesquite flats, and then said, “Yeah, June, the unsub if that’s what we’re calling ’em on the TV these days. Hollis get a good look at him? This unknown subject.”

“Says he did.”

“Caucasian?”

“No profiling,” June said.

“June!”

“No, sir. Latino.”

“Awright, June-bug. I’ll be there directly. We’ll have an overnight guest most likely, so turn the cot down and leave a light on at the inn.”

Franklin sat back and pushed both boots hard against the floorboard, stretching his long legs. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat on a horse, he thought, rubbing his eyes. He was at a funny place in his life. Weary all the time, seemed like. Worried when he woke up in the morning. He didn’t used to be like that. Used to wake up with a smile on his face. Well, what were you going to do? Third generation lawman. Maybe law genes could only stand so much law-breaking, is what Daisy had told him one night he couldn’t sleep.

It was the border. His granddaddy, back when he was sheriff, had said something to him once and it stuck. He was talking about a rancher shot dead for moving a fence six feet. Laws were fences he said. That’s all they were.

“A border ain’t nothin’ but a law drawn in the sand.”

A minute later, Homer was back. All by himself and shaking his head in disbelief. He put his hands on the roof and leaned down to speak through the driver’s side window.

“You won’t believe this one, Sheriff.”

“Try me.”

“Nobody home up front.”

“Say again.”

“Wasn’t anybody up in the darn cab.”

“Homer.”

“Sheriff, I swear I ain’t lying. Nobody there.”

“He run?”

“Shoot, I guess. Doors closed, headlights on, transmission in Park. Empty.”

“Let’s take a look.”

Dixon shoved his door open with his boot and climbed out. He stretched, pulling his shoulders backward, his eyes on the far hills to the south. Smoke was curling up from the chimney of a ranch house. Ben Nevis’s place.

He’d allowed a posse to ride south out of there two days ago. A dozen of desperate young fellas from town who wanted to go find their sisters and girlfriends. Idea was, they’d ride down to Nuevo Laredo and see what they could find out about all these missing girls. They were due back yesterday evening and so far nobody had heard word one. Worrisome, to say the least.

The Peterbilt was hissing and steaming when he climbed up on the passenger side running board and tried to look through the windshield. Black glass, like it had mirror inside it. He pulled out his flashlight and put it right on the glass. Couldn’t see a thing. He stuck his head inside the driver’s window and saw Homer’s frowning face on the other side.

“Well, well, well,” Dixon said.

“That’s what I told you, Sheriff.”

“You look back there in his bunk compartment? Maybe he’s just watching a racy video in there and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Yessir, I did check.”

“And he didn’t go out either door.”

“We’d have seen him, Sheriff.”

Dixon removed his hat and ran his fingers through his thinning brown hair.

“There was a lot of dust when he pulled over.”

“I guess he could have run, Sheriff.”

Franklin told Homer to have a look in the glove box. Get his registration. Jot down all the numbers on the VIN plate screwed into the door-jamb.

“Well. He must have run,” the sheriff said to Homer and jumped to the ground. “I’ll go have a look around.”

Dixon did a three-sixty, bending down to look under the trailer a few times, between the axles, and shook his head. Then he walked away from the truck, a few hundred yards into the desert. There was a rocky mound rising to about thirty feet high where he could see the plains better. The wind had come up, and there were scattered tumbleweeds blowing across the highway. There was a sound on the wind, too, but it wasn’t any speed-freak trucker beating feet through the desert.

No. It was horses. Maybe a dozen of them.

Franklin looked up, squinting his eyes, and saw a cloud of dust rising out on the plain.

His posse?

He moved quickly to the top of the hill.

The riders were tightly bunched about a half-mile away. Headed right at him at full gallop. Ben’s ranch, where they’d left from, the stables were just up the road a piece. Well. The boys were a full day late but at least it looked like they’d all come back safely. When he’d sent them off, he hadn’t so sure about the thing at all. It was dangerous down there, real dangerous. All he knew was, he had to do something for those girls.

He’d have ridden down with them if he hadn’t been so worried about his town.

There was a full-blown war raging on this border. An invasion. Illegals and drugs both. All hell had broken loose down in the little border town of Nuevo Laredo. Lots of people on both sides had died in the crossfire. Two Border Patrol Agents had been gunned down here in the last six months. Couple of tourists, too, who’d gotten lost after crossing over the International bridge at Laredo. Pretty bad. He’d heard a rumor they were sending some fellas down from Washington to look into it. Well, it was about time.

Way past time.

Apparently Laredo PD had found a stash of IEDs under the bridge. Improvised explosive devices, just like the ones used in Iraq to kill Marines. Al-Qaeda on the border? He’d heard crazier things in his life.

The Mexican border was flat broken. And nobody had a clue how to fix it. Ranchers and Minutemen wanted to put up a 2,000-mile-long fence. Money was pouring in, people wanting to put fences on their property. Nothing made sense any more. A border was a border. Any fool knew that. Folks in Washington just looked the other way. Didn’t want to upset anybody. Give Texas back to the Mexicans without firing a shot. That’s what was happening to his state.

But not to his town. Not if he could help it.

He had no idea if it was Mexican narco-gangbangers or even dirty Federales behind all these abductions. Or, even if the young ladies had been spirited away to Nuevo Laredo bordellos. But Nuevo wasn’t a bad place to start looking, he knew that for sure. It was the most lawless town on either side of a lawless border. Not that that was saying much these days.

Something had spooked the horses. Maybe one of the riders had seen him standing up here on a hill. Anyway, they’d changed direction and now the posse was headed right for him.

He couldn’t understand why they were riding so bunched up like that. He strained his eyes, trying to see. Even in the cold moonlight they were still just a tight black mass kicking up a single dust-cloud behind them.

“Sheriff? I hear horses.”

He’d been concentrating so hard on the strange spectacle he hadn’t even heard Homer coming up the hill behind him.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Dixon said, turning back to the horses. Homer looked and a wide grin broke out on his face.

“The posse! Sheriff, if it ain’t about time!”

“They look funny to you, Homer?”

“What do you mean, Sheriff?”

“I don’t rightly know. They’re riding all bunched up.”

“I see that. Something else is wrong.”

“Something sure is strange, isn’t it? No, I got it. They ain’t got their hats on, Sheriff.”

“I reckon that’s it, all right. No hats. I knew something was wrong.”

The posse had galloped to within a thousand yards.

“Sheriff, you know—something really ain’t right here. I’m gonna tell you that right now. It just ain’t natural the way they’re riding those horses—”

Homer raced down the hill, fast as he could, and his words were lost in the wind along with his hat. He was running hard on an angle that might bring him a little closer to the oncoming posse. Suddenly, the horses veered left, once again, now directly toward the sheriff up on the hill. Twelve horses galloped right by Homer flying flat out. The deputy turned his head, mouth wide open, watching ’em pass him by.

Franklin’s brain processed it before his eyes did. Why it was that his posse looked so strange in the moonlight. He stared after them until he couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. He turned away and gazed up at the moon, thinking about what he’d done, sending those boys down there like that.

The boys on those horses were all dead.

Ever last one of them he’d sworn in, all riding straight up in the saddle, deader than doornails.

How’d they stay up in the saddles? Their hands must have been tied to the pommels. Their boots lashed together tight under the girths to keep them all sitting bolt upright like that.

Homer was right. Not one of them was wearing his hat.

Because not one of them were wearing his head.

Homer was coming slowly back up the hill, his eyes on the ground in front of him. When he got to the top he stopped and looked up at Franklin. Tears he couldn’t hold back were streaming down his cheeks. Couldn’t blame him. Homer had gone to Prairie High with half the kids in that posse. Played football with most of them. Hell, he knew these boys and—

“Sweet Jesus, Sheriff.”

“Let’s go call this in, son. You come with me. We’ll do what we can for them. I don’t want anybody else to see ’em like this.”

“This is real bad, Sheriff.”

“Yes it is.”

But they couldn’t leave. They stood and watched the headless horse-men disappear. Twelve horses thundered across the highway, the gruesomely dead boys suddenly flashing bright in the brassy yellow beams of the semi.

They started down the hill toward their cruiser.

Both looked up, startled. The big Peterbilt roared again and then the whole rig lurched forward and just took off down the highway. Franklin figured it was doing about a hundred thirty miles an hour when it disappeared down over the ridge.

The sheriff didn’t see anybody behind the wheel when it went roaring by, upshifting gears, loud and fast. Like Homer had sworn, there was nobody driving the truck.

11

DRY TORTUGAS

T he seaplane flared up and splashed down on the clear blue water, her silvery pontoons throwing out foaming white water on either side. She was an ungainly thing, a Grumman G-21 Goose, painted an unusual shade of light blue, not quite turquoise and not quite any other shade Stoke had ever seen.

Mick Hocking called her the Blue Goose.

On the Goose’s final approach, Stoke had been able to get a closer look at Fort Jefferson. The place hadn’t changed much in forty years. A huge octagonal fortress built out of brick and taking up most of a tiny little island out in the middle of nowhere.

The U.S. Army had built it to guard the southern approach to the Gulf of Mexico. The year it was built, it was declared obsolete. Somebody’d invented an artillery round that could go through six feet of solid brick. The Army had abandoned the place and later turned it into a prison. Dr. Mudd, Stoke knew, the guy who’d fixed John Wilkes Booth’s leg, had done hard time here. Union soldiers had found his house by asking everyone in town the same question.

“Is your name Mudd?”

It took about twenty minutes to moor the seaplane at Fort Jefferson wharf, throw their gear in the old man’s fishing boat, and get underway to the site. Stoke stood up on the flying bridge of the boat with Sharkey and Luis Sr., who was at the helm. It wasn’t one of those modern tuna towers that looked like a jungle gym. This was an oversized solid wood structure, part of the whole wheelhouse it was sitting on top of, reached by a ladder down to the cockpit.

Luis Sr. was planted at the wheel. He stood with his bare feet wide apart. His gnarled feet and thin brown limbs looked like roots growing into the deck. He was an older, skinnier version of his son. He didn’t have a lot to say and what little he had was in Spanish. Old man had a pint of Graves XXX grain alcohol in his sagging back pocket. Took a pull every now and then, a little eye-opener, no harm done, a simple fisherman who liked to tend his own lines. Man had a tan so deep, he looked like he’d been cured in brine. Stoke liked him.

“Doesn’t talk much, does he?” Stoke asked Luis.

“Only if he has something to say.”

Luis Jr. had a map out, talking to his father, and suddenly the boat angled hard to port, and began chugging along on a westerly course at about ten knots.

Stoke understood enough Español to know an airplane had gone down right around here a couple of nights ago. Went right over Luis’s head apparently because when he told Stoke about it, his face screwed up and he made a ducking motion when he got to that part. Had no lights on, Luis had said, none, and it was a dark night.

Sounded pretty druggy to Stoke, but he didn’t say anything to the old man.

Anyway, so it sounded like the old man had seen it go into the water. It had sunk quickly, before he could reach it, and no survivors. Stoke had asked what kind of plane. “DC-3,” Luis Sr. had said, sounding very sure. It was an airplane he seemed to know, but of course he would, living down here. Air Pharmacy, Stoke figured, flying bricks of cocaine and bales of marijuana, but still he kept his mouth shut. Didn’t want to hurt the old guy’s feelings.