Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller) (15 page)

The manager pulled a wad of hundreds out of his pocket, wrapped the five around them and said with a smarmy smile, “Anytime-any friend of Mr. Popov is a friend of mine.”

There was little in the way of conversation on the way back to the marina where Rivera stored his boat. Miller finally broke the uncomfortable silence. “We’re at a dead end up here. Everything points to Popov and Escabado both heading south and probably Kyle as well. We’re too far out of the action to be able to do anyone any good. I’m moving this operation down to Honduras-we have some intel resources already in place that we can use.” He turned his attention to Rivera. “If I can get you temporarily tasked to our group, would you be interested in working with us? Until we can identify our security leak, I don’t want to involve anyone else from any federal agencies.”

Rivera glanced away from his course for a moment and flashed him a toothy smile and a big thumbs up. “Hell yes, I’m interested. Just talk to my boss and make it happen.”

Miller was a man of his word-within four hours, they were wheels up and headed south towards Honduras.

I was beat. In the four days since leaving Cay Sal, we had sailed almost seven hundred fifty miles in the Caribbean and much of that under difficult circumstances. Even with the autopilot, I was still on deck at least twenty hours out of every day. Tasha would spell me for a couple of hours at a stretch so I could at least get enough sleep to get by. It was not my idea of a romantic cruise at sea by any stretch of the imagination.

“Tasha, I think we’re going to drop the hook for the night. It looks like there’s a small island about twenty miles south, Isla Cisne. The notes on the chartplotter say it used to be called Swan Island before the Hondurans took it over. Looks damn near deserted, but we can at least get a good night’s sleep. I need to be sharp before we get down to Nicaragua.”

Tasha replied with an innocent tilt to her head. “Do we have to spend the whole night sleeping?”

“My God, I’ve created a monster,” I said with a grin I made no attempt to conceal. I unfurled the genoa completely and saw the boat speed jump another knot. In another three hours, I was rewarded by the sight of Swan Island barely visible in the distance as it emerged from the sea.

On the chartplotter, the western side of the island was showing a dock that appeared to be sheltered from the swells on the windward side of the island. I, for one, wanted to at least get off the boat and walk on solid ground for a few minutes.

“Tasha, I’m going to start the engine. Would you furl the genoa and drop the main?”

“Da, Capitan,” Tasha replied with a wave that I thought might have a less than respectful meaning in Russian.

The dock extended into the water for a hundred yards. I brought Dolce Vita in at an angle to the dock, swung the wheel hard over to starboard, and shifted into reverse. The boat neatly swung in a circle and almost had stopped all forward momentum as the stern swung into the dock. No telling when the dock had been built-it was crudely finished in rough concrete and had old rusted iron cleats that looked like they had been in place since the early 1900s.

Tasha flipped a loop over an ancient cleat on the wall and tied it to the cleat at the stern. We snugged the boat into the dock with a couple of spring lines and a bow line after placing every fender we had onboard between the fiberglass hull and the jagged concrete of the dock.

It looked like the island had been deserted for years. There was only the sound of the boobies screeching as they perched on the rocks and the waves crashing on the other side of the quay. That deserted appearance was quickly belied as five uniformed men armed with M16s quietly appeared at the end of the dock. They quickly walked down the length of the dock and stared at us in silence.

“Su pasaporte, por favor,” said one man who was armed only with a pistol.

“Aquí están,” I said as we quickly handed over our passport. After a moment’s examination of our documents, I could see the soldiers visibly begin to relax.

“Would you prefer we speak in English? I am Sergeant Cardoza,” the leader said with a welcoming smile.

“Certainly I’m Kyle and this is Tasha. I have to say; your English is very good.”

“Gracias, probably comes from growing up in Miami until I was twenty,” he said. “My apologies for the surprise greeting, but we often have less than desirable visitors arriving on our shores; you are welcome to stay tonight. We were just about to have dinner in a few minutes. Would you care to join us? As you can imagine, we don’t get a lot of company here.”

I glanced over at Tasha. “Sounds like a great plan,” she said. “The chef will be happy to get a little break tonight,” she said rolling her eyes at me.

We quickly finished securing the boat to the quay and accepted a hand from the soldiers who reached down to help us to the dock three feet above. The compound, if you could call it that, was only a couple minutes walk along what appeared to be a goat path complete with a few dried goat droppings to help mark the path. We emerged from the dense brush into an opening in the palms about two hundred yards long and one hundred wide with a half dozen structures visible and several others that had apparently surrendered to the smothering embrace of the lush subtropical growth. The buildings were a combination of old abandoned structures and newer Quonset huts that had not begun to succumb to the rust that thrived in the salt air. There was also a small antenna farm with a couple of newer satellite dishes and what appeared to be the remains of an old radio tower towering two hundred feet above the landscape.

In reply to my questioning look, the Sergeant gave me a quick history of the island. “This is Honduran territory. My men and I are here for forty five days at a time defending the island from all invaders-you might have guessed by now that we don’t have a big problem with that except for the occasional drug smuggler. Mainly, we just do a little snorkeling, play some volleyball, and greet the occasional visitor. There is still an active weather station on the island. The big radio tower you see over there,” he said pointing in the general direction of the rusting antenna, “used to be the original tower for what became Radio Americas. The CIA was in control of the island in the early 60’s and broadcast AM radio on fourteen channels in Spanish. It used to drive Castro absolutely crazy to hear the broadcast coming into Cuba every night from this little island. They finally closed the operation down and moved everything to Miami quite a few years ago.”

I was about to ask another question of Cardona when the breeze shifted and I smelled what could only be aroma of barbequed pork wafting in the breeze. “That smells fabulous. Do you have pigs on the island?”

“Nope, that’s barbequed cabra,” Cardona said stroking his mustache with anticipation. “Used to be a lot of goats until they were almost wiped out in the late eighteen-hundreds. Now there’s only maybe a hundred left between the two islands. We try to eat one every month or so just to keep them from over-running the vegetation.”

Another soldier dragged out a cooler filled with ice and a couple of bottles of chilled Flor de Cana rum. “I think I’ve died and gone to heaven,” I said toasting Tasha and our newfound friends. The first one went down too damn quickly and we were well on our way to finishing a second by the time dinner was served. The goat had been slowly smoked on a rotisserie for several hours and was flavored with a combination of the hardwood smoke and chile sauce rubbed into the meat. The soldiers had also prepared a crude ceviche with some of the fresh fish they had caught during the day. Apparently, fresh vegetables were in short supply, but some black beans from the can seemed to go well with the rest of the dinner.

“Aaah…a little more rum, por favor,” I mumbled. After about three healthy drinks, it was time to call it a night while we could still make my way down the goat path to the dock without falling in the ocean. Tasha was apparently in no better shape than me. She wasn’t talking very much as the night dragged on, but broke into a hysterical fit of giggling as one of the soldiers tried to jump over the fire and apparently singed some sensitive parts.

“Tasha, this way,” I said trying to keep her centered on the dock. More giggling and she muttered something completely incomprehensible in Russian. We finally made it to the boat and thanks to the high tide, found that the boat was almost level with the edge of the quay. Somehow we managed to get aboard and staggered down the narrow passageway to the forward berth.

I lay beside her, tried to decide whether it would be polite to take advantage of her in such a condition and had my question answered when she rolled over and started snoring resolutely. Five minutes later, thanks to too much rum and exhaustion, I was unconscious beside her.

My favorite alarm went off when the sun peeked in through the open hatch in the forward compartment at seven in the morning. I blearily opened one eye to find Tasha already dressed in cutoff jeans and a tank top standing in front of me with a fresh cup of coffee and a smile that rivaled the sunrise.

“Thanks, darlin’, I’m glad one of us is alive and well this morning.”

“Obviously, you’re not Russian. We can drink all night and be ready to start the party again the next morning. I’m going to leave you sulking with your coffee while I go exploring for a bit. It’s such a beautiful morning. I’ll be back in maybe an hour or so,” Tasha replied as she pulled on her tennis shoes.

“Fabulous,” I groused, “I’ll have some breakfast waiting and we’ll leave around two this afternoon.” Finished the remaining coffee in a couple of gulps and went up above decks for my morning constitutional, while Tasha hopped up to the dock and disappeared down a trail to the other end of the island. I wasn’t worried about her getting lost-the island was only three miles long and the most dangerous animal was one of the overly friendly goats.

I spent the next thirty minutes going through the usual checks on the engine and electrical systems. As I focused on plotting the next leg of the course to Nicaragua, I was distracted by a low thrumming sound in the distance that within seconds clearly became the sound of an aircraft engine. Squinting into the rising sun, I could make out the unlikely shape of a Grumann Albatross circling low for a landing on the grass strip that ran the length of the island. It was obvious that something was amiss, there was a thin trail of smoke trailing from the port engine and an audible roughness in what should have been the smooth rumble of the big radial engines. I grabbed a pair of shoes and the biggest fire extinguisher I had onboard and headed in the direction of the strip.

Aboard the Albatross, John Pierre had a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead as he nervously scanned the gauges of the aircraft. The first leg of the trip to from Walker’s Cay to Cuba had been fairly uneventful and they had actually delayed for a couple of days while Escabado drank and whored to his heart’s content.
Two could play that game
thought John Pierre. During the layover, he had managed to meet a lovely young Cuban physician who obviously knew a great deal about the male anatomy and was looking for creative ways to supplement the two hundred dollar monthly salary she received from the Cuban government.

Their trouble started about two hours into their leg out of Cuba. John Pierre had detected a slight roughness in one of the engines. He looked over at the port engine and was startled to see oil staining the nacelle and blowing into a fine mist as it hit their slipstream. The big radials were notorious for leaking oil, but this was alarming-it had to be either a loose or broken oil line.

Time for some very hard choices. Cuba was two hours behind them-completely out of the question. The only other options were the Caymans about sixty miles to the Northeast or Isla Cisne, a tiny speck of land that he could see just off the southern horizon. An easy decision; John Pierre was well known to the customs officials in the Caymans and had narrowly escaped being a long-term guest of the local law enforcement on a couple of occasions. “Alexandra, prepare for landing. Looks like an oil leak-we need to check on the port engine.”

Escabado and the crewman in the cabin were intently following the pilots’ conversation and without being told buckled their seatbelts and cinched them tight.

“Starting checklist for dry landing,” Alexandra said as she started working swiftly through the items on her clipboard. Dropped the engine superchargers from high to low. “20 degrees of flaps,” she intoned while John Pierre rolled into a lumbering turn for the final approach to the runway. “Extending gear.” She verified the gear down position by looking through the observation window in the floor of the flight deck.

“On final at 2,000 feet.” John Pierre reached up to the overhead throttles and reduced power on the engines as he lined up for the center of the grass runway. Flew in just over the treeline and still had twenty eight hundred feet remaining on the runway. Nose a little high, the Albatross floated for a couple of seconds and then rolled out on the runway. They continued to the end of the strip and swung the aircraft around. John Pierre idled the engines for a few seconds to empty the residual oil from the cylinders and finally the big radials coughed and wound down to silence.

He swung the center pedestal up and slid out of his seat grabbing the bulkhead-mounted fire extinguisher as he went.

“Coming through!” he said scrambling to the hatch mounted in the top of the cabin. As he squeezed through the opening, he was relieved to see that the smoke had stopped and there was no sign of fire. Probably nothing more than oil blowing off the wing. “Miguel, get me some tools. I need to open the engine cover.”