Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller) (16 page)

“Yes, Jefe,” said Alexandra as she called the cargo ship waiting for them off the coast of Nicarauga. The ‘Bandito’ was a custom built Outer Limits Catamaran. It was carried in a specially built container bolted to the top deck of a small coastal freighter the Lucia Marie that served as Escabado’s floating base of operations. The old, rusty freighter would approach to within thirty miles of the North American coastline at night and offload the Bandito. With a top speed of almost one hundred forty miles an hour, they could drop their load on a secluded dock in the dead of night by the time the Coast Guard could react and scramble a chopper.

The Captain of the freighter, Juan Pedroza had been cruising aimlessly through Cayos Miskitos for over a week waiting for the Albatross to land. Once Escabado was aboard, he was to smuggle him ashore in Nicarauga on one of the little rivers that dotted the coast. His crew was frustrated both by the delay and the seemingly endless swarms of mosquitoes that seemed to swarm off the small islands that were their namesake.

They immediately scrambled into action when they heard the command to launch relayed through the hailer on the ship’s bridge. Within minutes, the crane had offloaded the Bandito and she was bobbing gently beside the mothership.

Juan was making this run personally-partly to curry favor with Escabado, but also because he would have cut off his left cojone to be able to crack the throttles on the Bandito on the open water of the Caribbean.

He took a moment to admire the sleek lines of the catamaran hull with the closed in glass cockpit that bore closer resemblance to a jet fighter than a boat. The crowning touch was the painting of a sneering bandito with blazing guns and an oversized cigar painted on the foredeck. Juan would never risk his life by making the observation aloud, but he did think it bore a faint resemblance to Escabado. After scrambling down the ladder to the open cockpit, he strapped himself into the racing safety harness and pushed the button to lower the hydraulically operated hatch. With a push of the start buttons, the twin 1200 hp racing engines came to life with a bone shaking roar.

John Pierre was sweating profusely within minutes after crawling precariously onto the top of the wing. The combination of the tropical sun reflecting off the polished aluminum and the heat radiating from the big radial engines was quickly becoming intolerable.

In spite of the conditions, he had an insufferable grin plastered on his face. As soon as he opened the first aluminum cowling covering the engine, he spotted the source of his trouble. The bleed line that allowed excess oil to return to the oil reservoir had a compression fitting that had apparently loosened from the intense vibrations of the engine. Two minutes to tighten the fitting and he was ready to re-secure the access hatch on the cowling.

He was startled as he saw bushes moving on the other side of the airfield. That sight was quickly followed by the appearance of a lovely woman wearing nothing more than a pair of tiny shorts and a tanktop.
Merde
he thought. “Just to let you know; we have company out at the treeline”, he said leaning down into the open hatch.

Alexandra popped her head out the cabin door, saw the woman approaching and gave her a welcoming wave. By that time, Tasha had crossed the runway and was standing at the bottom of the ladder leading to the entry hatch on the side.

“Hi, do you guys need some help?” Tasha asked.

“Really nothing major; just a little mechanical problem,” Alexandra said. “You look pretty hot out there; would you like to come up for some water?”

Tasha, with sweat streaming off her face from her walk through the jungle, nodded once and scrambled up the ladder into the cabin. Stepping into the dark confines of the cabin, she paused for a second to let her eyes adjust to the light.

In spite of the oppressive heat, she felt a chill course through her body when she heard a low, familiar voice ask, “How about you dance for me, palomita?” Escabado stepped around the bulkhead with his teeth clenched around a cigar. “Popov will be happy to know we found you. But I think we talk first about why you are in a place that God has forgotten. But I think I don’t like surprises-we go out in the bush and see who shows up next.”

Everyone except the pilots grabbed an assortment of automatic weapons and pistols and scrambled down the boarding ladder into the scrub brush at the side of the runway. The crewman casually held a pistol pointed at Tasha’s head as she crouched down trying to ignore the biting flies that tormented them.

They didn’t have long to wait before Escabado’s prediction came true. The local Honduran contingent led by Cardoza came running up the goat trail at a slow trot. They had witnessed the approach of the Albatross trailing smoke on its final approach to the runway and since they didn’t hear the sounds of a crash assumed that the aircraft had landed safely.

“Hola,” yelled Cardoza as they approached the flying boat. He was relieved to see the smiling face of John Pierre leaning out the window of the cockpit as he waved a welcome at the approaching group. A second later, that relief turned to despair as Escabado and the crewman opened up a withering barrage of fire from their hiding places in the brush on the side of the runway.

Within seconds the Hondurans were lying in pools of dark oozing blood that was quickly absorbed by the loose white sand. Cardoza was the only soldier able to get a shot off during the ambush. In the moments after he was hit, he sprayed the Albatross with his M16. Most rounds went wild, except for a few that punched through the aluminum fuselage without seeming to cause any real damage.

I was still walking in the general direction of where it looked like the Albatross had landed. Hot as hell on the interior of the island. Sun baking off the bright sand and an endless supply of no-see-ums to aggravate me along the way.

Damn it!
I thought as the unmistakable sound of several automatic weapons firing rolled through the brush. I hustled quietly through the undergrowth to the edge of the runway. Three thousand, maybe four thousand feet away at the far end of the runway the Albatross began to belch out a cloud of black smoke as the pilot started the starboard engine.

Escabado keyed the mike on his VHF radio. “Pedroza, where are you?”

The captain of the rapidly approaching Bandito replied, “I’m about a mile away from the east end of the island. Awaiting your orders Jefe.”

Escabado rapidly considered his options and turned to the crewman. “If these soldiers made a call or left anybody back at their headquarters, we’ll have the Honduran navy crawling all over us. I’ll leave on the boat with the chica. You go back to the Albatross and tell John Pierre to head back to Cuba to draw the Hondurans away from us.”

“Si, Jeff,” said the crewman as he scrambled out of the brush to the waiting aircraft.

John Pierre had successfully started the port engine-no time for checklists or warmups today. He needed to get the big bird off the ground. A few seconds later the Albatross was straining against the brakes as the throttles were advanced and they began their takeoff roll. Within a few seconds, the flying boat was bumping down the uneven grass runway and rapidly gaining speed as it approached my position. Almost hidden in the distance by the dust caused by the prop wash of the Albatoss, I could see Escabado dragging Tasha by the arm toward the ocean on the east side of the island.

I stepped out onto the narrow runway just as the nosewheel of the Albatross was beginning to rotate off the runway. It was rapidly approaching, no more than two hundred yards away when I began to swing the big extinguisher underhanded in a back and forth motion. At seventy yards I swung in a full arc backwards and a second later swung the fire extinguisher underhanded and released it in a perfect arc toward the charging aircraft just as the rear wheels lifted clear of the runway. The ten-pound fire extinguisher hit the huge prop on the port side.

The results were spectacular. The prop shredded in an explosion of metal fragments and a cloud of powder from the extinguisher. No time for me to react as a section of the prop whipped towards me and buried itself quivering in the ground at my feet. A few large fragments punched through the aluminum cabin like it was tinfoil and the Albatross immediately yawed to port and dropped a wing. John Pierre fought for his life as he tried to correct the attitude of the aircraft. He almost succeeded. They barely cleared the palm trees at the end of the runway and were over the ocean as he struggled to gain altitude and stabilize the aircraft. He glanced at his copilot to ask for help with holding the controls-already too late for that. Alexandra had a jagged sliver of metal protruding from her throat. The blood flow was already slowing as she breathed her last gurgling breath.

John Pierre was fighting the heavy manual controls and just as he started to level out the wings again, he overcorrected. The Albatross entered a nose high stall that disintegrated into a violent cartwheel into the ocean. The starboard wing ripped off on impact and the tail section broke off from the fuselage. Within seconds, the only remaining sign of the aircraft was an oil slick and some floating debris that quickly disappeared into the depths of the lagoon.

Escabado roughly threw Tasha to the waiting arms of Pedroza waiting on the slippery deck of the Bandito. She was unceremoniously strapped into the rear seat and her hands secured with nylon zip-ties while Pedroza restarted the motors. “Jefe, strap in tight,” Pedroza said as he slowly backed off the beach with a faint grinding sound as the beach sand scraped away at the fifty thousand dollar paint job. When they reached deeper water, he pivoted the boat using the motors and punched them forward. The Bandito leaped onto plane like a scalded dog and within seconds they were skimming the water at over one hundred miles an hour on a direct heading back to the Lucia Marie.

As soon as I saw the results from my fire extinguisher bomb, I took off at a dead run toward the end of the airfield where Escabado dragged Tasha away. Record time-I reached the end of the runway in just under four minutes; just in time to see a go fast boat pivoting and racing away in the general direction of the Central American coast. Totally wasted from the effort, I leaned over with my hands on my knees trying to catch my breath. I wondered if I would ever see Tasha alive again.

On the way back to the Dolce Vita, I checked to see if any of the Honduran soldiers had survived. All dead, except for Cardoza who was slowly bleeding out from a chest wound. With each breath, the ragged hole in his chest slowly pulsed a mixture of blood and bubbles that ran down the side of his body into the warm sand.

“Senor,” he whispered gesturing at his shirt pocket. I reached into the pocket and retrieved a well-worn picture of a young woman wearing a simple dress and smiling at the camera in a natural smile that seemed to radiate her feelings for the man taking the picture. I held the picture up for him to see and watched as Cardoza’s eyes slowly glazed over as the life finally ebbed from his body.

The easterly swell was running about three feet under a pale blue sky. At one hundred miles an hour, the Bandito was flying from wavetop to wavetop leaving a towering rooster tail behind as it charged toward the Lucia Marie. Despite the padded high backed seats and racing harnesses the passengers could still feel the impact hammering up through their spines and the sickening sideways impact as they caught the occasional edge in bottom of a swell. Tasha was miserable-the jarring ride and the trauma of being snatched from the island was almost overwhelming. In spite of the circumstances, she found herself appraising Escabado and Pedroza to figure out some means for her to escape. It seemed hopeless for now, but she would bide her time and wait for the opportunity to present itself.

An hour later, Tasha could feel the deceleration as Pedroza throttled back the engines and made a wide circle around the Lucia Marie. The crew was standing by the rails at the derrick waiting to hoist Bandito up into its storage rack on deck.

Pedroza idled beside the mother ship and a crewman was lowered to Bandito by the hoist where he secured the oversize nylon slings to four lift points on the deck. Within seconds, they could hear the faint whine outside the cockpit as the lift spooled in the cable and lifted them clear of the sparkling water. One more bump as they were gently lowered into the cradle and Pedroza pushed the button to raise the lexan hatch cover.

Pedroza and Escabado unstrapped and stepped onto the deck as a crewman stepped into the cockpit with a knife and stared at Tasha with undisguised lust. He reached out with the blade, casually cut the nylon wrist ties binding her and motioned for her to crawl out of the cockpit. Tasha stepped out into the bright sunlight on the aft deck momentarily dazzled by the reflection off the Caribbean water. She was surrounded by some of the dirtiest sailors she had ever seen. The stink from their unwashed bodies seemed to flow over her and would have been overwhelming if not for the freshening sea breeze that blew in from the Caribbean.

Back on Isla Cisne

Except for the few stray goats, I was the only thing still living on the island. Just to be sure, I checked for any stragglers who might have been left behind at the Honduran base. Doors had been left swinging open in the breeze from their hurried exit when they heard the aircraft landing and rushed to help. Half eaten breakfasts with insects already crawling on them, waiting for men who would never see another sunrise. A lone volleyball lying in the blazing sun waiting for the next inhabitants of the island. I’d seen enough.

I grabbed a few supplies from the base that I could use-mainly bottled water and some canned food and rolled it down the dock to the Dolce Vita in a wheelbarrow I found behind the radio room. Without Tasha aboard, Dolce Vita already looked like a much lonelier place.

Without further fanfare, I started the motor and cast off the line as the bow pivoted away from the quay. Set the autopilot, hoisted the sails and set a course for Nicaragua. The only thing helping me avoid falling into a mind numbing depression was the quiet rage that completely infused me. God help these guys when I found them.