by Don Porter
The boat that came out of the channel was so loaded that the freeboard wasn't showing. People on the benches were sitting with their feet up, and several of those clinging to the posts had their shoes in their hands.
“Do you see them?” George was straining for a look at the incoming boat, but trying to keep himself behind a surfboard.
“No, but the whole Italian army could hide on that boat, and maybe the bad guys are under water.” We passed, and no shots were fired. The boat we squeezed by in the channel wasn't quite so loaded, but again we didn't see any assassins waiving Uzis. The two boats collided with a good solid thump. We bounced off and the wooden hull made a terrible screeching noise when it scraped against the coral, but we didn't sink.
“Hey, look at that,” George was pointing. The O'Malley speedboat plowed away from the dock and raced back along the coast the way we had come. “Do they have the duffle bag?”
“If I had a coin, I'd flip it. Lucky thing though, he's headed the wrong way to beat us to Tumon and the airport. He'll have to go clear around the end of the island, unless they have a car stashed somewhere.”
Our water taxi chugged out of the channel, missed the departing derelict and arrived back at the marina intact.
The scene on the dock was chaos. Traffic was stopped, cars at crazy angles with several bent fenders showing. When traffic had stopped, people had pulled out to pass and met cars coming the other way, until they made a solid queue, a two-dimensional version of gridlock half a mile long. A hundred people, dressed from bathers to farmers, were packed together at the edge of the road, babbling and shouting. Drivers in both directions were trying to clear the gridlock by blowing their horns and revving their engines. Half of the cars didn't have mufflers, and the other half were burning oil, so the scene was disappearing into an acrid blue cloud of exhaust.
Two local cops were trying to herd people away, and a brown army blanket on the ground beside the road was obviously covering a body. George flashed his badge at one of the beleaguered cops and jerked the blanket off the end of the corpse. He was looking at a pair of oxfords, so he covered them and checked the other end. It was one of the guys who had been following us, not my dinner companion, and he had more holes in his face and chest than a fishnet.
George covered him again, and was immediately accosted by an old fellow in overalls who had been trying without success to get the attention of the local cops.
“You've got to get my pickup back. Mary's in it, and she's pregnant.” The farmer was almost babbling, dragging George by the sleeve, so I joined them. The guy must have seen George's badge and leapt to the erroneous conclusion.
“Slow down, what happened?” George asked.
“I heard a bunch of gunshots, so I stopped. Two guys grabbed me and tossed me out on the ground and took my pickup, but poor pregnant Mary is still in it.” He was close to tears.
“Is Mary your wife, or your daughter?” I asked.
“No, Mary is my prize brood sow, and she's going to deliver any time now. I was taking her to the vet in Inarajan. She's going to be terribly upset.”
“Describe the pickup.” George had a pen in his hand, but nothing to write on. The farmer didn't notice.
“It's a Tacoma, pretty blue, but I haven't gotten around to buying license plates.”
“This year's model?”
“No, two years old. You can't miss it, Mary's in the back.”
”Now listen, this is very important, were the guys who took your truck carrying a duffle bag?”
“Yeah, big army type bag, they threw it in the back and almost hit Mary.”
“Which way did they go?” George asked. The farmer pointed back toward Talafofo, which was back the way we had come, and we ran for the car. A siren was blaring behind us, probably summoned from Umatac, but blocked by the traffic and not getting any closer. It was lucky that we were parked two blocks away, because the pack of cars was mostly on the other side, trying to get past the marina. George jumped into the Buick and banged bumpers on both ends getting into the road. He backed around, scraped both sides on trees, tracked up someone's lawn, and we were clear to race away from the scene.
Racing in rural Guam is a relative term because the road is so crooked that you can never see more than fifty yards, and something is in the road around every bend, a cow, a carabao, a farmer on a tractor, maybe a flock of chickens. Every time we hit thirty miles an hour, George was standing on the brake to miss something else. I was trying to watch the driveways and the occasional roads that we passed; no blue pickups stood out.
In twenty minutes, we had covered the seven miles to Inarajan, and in two more minutes we determined that there were no blue pickups in that city. We roared north again. Time was critical because it's only five more miles to Talafofo Bay and a major intersection with one highway crossing the mountains and another following the coast. The problem with visibility was that the jungle grows right to the edge of the road on both sides, so you can't see around corners. The blinders were half palms, half nondescript, and mostly laced with a solid mat of ivy. I was torn between watching lanes for blue pickups and looking ahead to see what roadblock was going to get us killed.
A banana plantation replaced the jungle on the right, just a little thinner and a little more organized than the jungle, with lanes making a grid. George hit sixty on a one-hundred-yard straight stretch, whipped around the corner and stood on the brake. We slid sideways in a four-wheel drift and came within three feet of hitting a farmer on a tractor who was leading a carabao. My life flashed appropriately before my eyes, but I also caught a glimpse of blue through the banana grove on our right.
“Take that lane,” I hollered. George spun the wheel, released the brake, and we came up on two wheels, but plowed into the banana trees next to the lane. The farmer continued down the road, unconcerned. Not hitting him was our problem, not his. George slammed the Buick into reverse, backed up six feet, and we bounced into the lane.
“Did you see them?”
“I saw something blue, over against the mountain.” We bumped to the end of our lane through flickering strobes of bright yellow sunlight and dark shadows, dodging stocks of bananas. When we slammed into the lava rock cliff, we abandoned the car and shoved our way between the banana trees, guns in hand. We were skirting the edge of a serious rise that stood between us and the ocean. When the volcano that made Guam pushed through the surface, it shoved coral ahead of it, and the result is limestone mountains, interspersed with lava, several of them a thousand feet tall.
The bananas either were, or had been, a plantation, and there were tracks between trees every fifty yards to facilitate harvest. We found the blue pickup, front bumper buried in the limestone hill, at the end of the second track. Mary was snuggled in a blanket in the back, nursing a dozen piglets.
“This way.” George was leading with the pistol, following a trail of mashed weeds. He stopped and swore when we came to the scratches on the limestone where the bodyguards had obviously climbed up.
“What's the matter? Afraid of a little hill climb?”
“There's limestone caves up there. If they get into those it will take a month to flush them out.”
“No problem, we can live on bananas. There's a stalk over there that should sustain us for weeks.”
“Okay, you carry them.” George shoved the pistol back into his belt, grabbed a scarlet colored flowering bush with both hands and started the climb. I skipped the bananas and followed him. We had scrabbled up fifty feet when we came to a trail that led sideways around the mountain but was seriously climbing, too. That was both good and bad. It made the climbing easier, and we could see that the bodyguards had taken the trail, but it also meant there was something up there interesting enough to warrant a path. That was probably the caves, like as not with ancient petroglyphs, and unlimited places to hide and shoot.
Sergeant Yokoi of the Japanese Imperial Army had lived in a cave just a few miles inland from this spot for twenty-five years,
unaware that WW II had ended. That was a daunting prospect. So was the climb. We try to keep ourselves in pretty good shape, but running up a mountain in eighty-five-degree temperature with one hundred percent humidity was stretching the envelope.
“One good thing, O'Malley's boat can't climb mountains. Where do you think he went?” George was talking to demonstrate that he still had enough breath left. I had to match him.
“Remember Ylig bay where the road and the beach meet? It's a couple of miles farther. My half the six million says that O'Malley is there with a roadblock.”
Chapter 26
For the last few hundred yards the trail got steeper and our quarry were easy to follow because they were dragging the duffle bag. Then I noticed two more steady grooves beside the sweep the bag was making. I looked the question at George.
“Rifle butts. They're dragging them by the barrels, and from the looks of that Swiss cheese back at the marina, I'd say they're automatics.” That was enough talk for a while; we needed all of our breath to climb. The trail topped a ridge onto a fifty-foot-wide rock shelf. A wonderfully cool ocean breeze wafted across the shelf, but it was several hundred feet straight down to the undulating blue ocean, and a few more hundred feet up to the top of the limestone mountain.
Under normal circumstances, the view and the colors would be worth the climb. The ocean was the deep indigo color that indicated it was thousands of feet deep, with uneven cornrows of stark white foam. The waves racing in had been unimpeded since Mexico, eight-foot rollers that boomed like cannons and threw spray twenty feet up the cliff when they collided. The sky was the lighter, pristine blue that you only see mid-ocean. If you could hold a swatch of Guamanian sky up against a sample from the mainland, you would conclude that the mainland sky is brown.
The variegated greens of the jungle that clung to the inland slope were louder than George's aloha shirts and interspersed with red, yellow, white, purple … you name it, flowers everywhere. Exotic red and purple orchids sprouted from half the trees, as plentiful as dandelions invading a mainland lawn. Butterflies vied with the flowers for brilliance and profusion. Since the brown tree snakes have decimated the bird population on Guam, butterflies are free to multiply.
The rock shelf was a golden brown, sandy textured saddle with pure white streaks of coral and chunks of black lava scattered around. The whole effect was like those early Technicolor movies where the colors were so vibrant that you forgot the plot. Sunshine on the white cliff was too bright to look at and reflected heat that rivaled the direct sun.
Our worst fears were confirmed. The duffle bag had been dragged straight across the shelf and into a cave on the left that had an opening the size of a railroad tunnel. We did not step in front of that opening. We sat on rocks beside the cave entrance and just breathed and looked at each other for a while.
When I finally stopped gasping for air, I said, “What we need is a flamethrower.”
“Not this time. Remember, the money is in the cave, too.”
The cool, fresh sea breeze that was blowing across our shelf restored us to the land of the living. The perspiration from the climb evaporated, leaving me sticky and shivering. George picked up a handful of dead leaves and walked over against the hillside next to the cave, then tossed the leaves across the opening. The leaves disappeared into the cave. I got the idea.
We gathered leaves and sticks and built a bonfire beside the cave mouth. When the fire was about right for hotdogs we tossed on green leaves to make smoke. George used a bamboo pole to shove our fire directly in front of the cave mouth, and the smoke obligingly billowed away inside. We stood beside the opening and tossed on sticks.
Smoke was coming out of several small holes higher up the bluff, but not enough of it to explain the draft. “There must be another mouth,” George guessed. “Let's find it.” He started around the bluff on the inland side, so I crawled on my belly past the cave entrance and checked the ocean side. My shelf narrowed down to a few feet wide and ran a crooked course around the cliff, blocked here and there by rockslides. I worked my way along the narrow ledge, pointedly not looking down several hundred feet at the rocks and ocean. Pistol in hand, I climbed onto some boulders that blocked the path, and there was the second entrance with not only smoke, but coughing and cursing pouring out.
I heard a rock fall behind me and spun around. It was George, following his ancient pistol. He crawled up on the rocks beside me. The shelf had narrowed to four feet where we were, but kept narrowing. It was just a couple of feet wide at the second cave entrance, and ended in a sheer wall just beyond it.
“Want to go help them out?” I asked.
“Nah, let's let them come to us. As long as we can hear them coughing, we know they're not going to run out the other entrance. If they don't come out in a few minutes, I'll go throw some wet beetle nuts on the fire and we'll get them high.”
They stood that smoke for a long time before they stepped out onto the ledge, single file, both carrying rifles and the second one carrying the duffle bag. Tears were running down their smoke blackened cheeks, and the way they were squinting, we judged they were no threat. I think that our plan was to let them climb over the rock pile before we took them, because neither of us wanted to venture out onto the narrow ledge.
The first one, the one we were calling Pederson, climbed up the rock-slide, right into our laps. George stuck the pistol in his face and said, “Drop it”. He didn't drop it, he started to swing his rifle up, but the burst of automatic fire that bounced and sang off of our rock pile didn't come from him. It came from behind us. I wondered who our benefactor was, but George and I were busy, trying to burrow under the rocks. Bullets were crackling by right above us so I wasn't inclined to look back. Pederson got a shocked expression on his face and tumbled backward into space.
Adams dropped the duffle between his knees and swung his rifle up. It was a Kalashnikov, the old .30 caliber model. He was shooting over our heads, and I heard a scream and a curse from behind us, but Adams hadn't been prepared for the kick of that rifle. He pin-wheeled backward, dropped the rifle over the edge and hugged the duffle, but he was slipping.
George lunged across our rock pile and grabbed the duffle, but Adams was going over. I dived for the duffle, got a hold next to George with my right hand and a chunk of rock wall in my left for leverage. Adams was swinging in space, terror etched in soot and tears. We were pulling him up, almost had him even with the shelf. He was trying to help, scrabbling with his feet and clawing to climb up the bag, when the bag split like an explosion. The ripping sound was like a buzz saw hitting a knot. Adams screamed, and kept screaming for what seemed a full minute before he hit the rocks below, but we were busy. Hundred-dollar bills were floating around like confetti, being whipped up the cliff, swirling around, swooping away, then fluttering back again. We were grabbing and stuffing our pockets, but trying not to get greedy enough to follow Adams.
The bills were getting fewer and fewer, blowing higher and higher, and suddenly the wind died. Those bills fluttered out to sea like a green snowstorm, spreading out to cover acres of ocean. One lone bill came flitting down the face of the cliff, just out of reach. George stretched, almost had his hand under it. He let go of the rock he'd been holding so that he could lean out farther. The bill was making little circles as it fell, beyond reach, then tantalizingly close. I wrapped my left hand around a good chunk of lava and grabbed George's wrist with my right. He strained, grabbed the bill, and I jerked him back.
“Maybe that's enough for now?” I looked straight down the face of the cliff that George had been leaning over. Our shelf was actually sticking out a bit. The first thing below us was the pile of lava rocks that the surf was pounding. Adams’ body was splattered on a black rock, like a pumpkin that had been dropped. A seventh wave came in, covered the rock, and when the foam receded Adams was gone, too. I felt a wave of vertigo that had me grabbing rocks with both hands and crawling on my belly back toward the shelf.
George shook
our half the duffle bag; two packets of bills fell out of it. He tossed the empty bag off the cliff. It swirled and circled, then followed the money. He climbed off the rock pile and edged along behind me with his back pressed against the cliff. I was watching the bag fall, and there came O'Malley in his cigarette boat, Bruno and Willy leaning out to scoop bills off the water. Rose and Dallas had nets like fishermen use and were snagging bills out of the air. They made a clean swath toward the cliff, then turned to harvest bills farther out.
I had to ask. “How the heck did O'Malley know to be here?” George gave me his condescending sneer. “Aw, come on Watson. He had a road block set up in Ylig bay, just like we figured, and when we didn't show up he came back looking for us. When he found the cars at the base of the cliff he figured that watching the show from the ocean was easier than climbing the cliff. His being below us with fishing nets when hundred-dollar bills were falling like confetti in a New York parade is either more of his good luck or our bad.”
We survived the ledge and crawled onto the level shelf. When we got to the shooter who had nailed Pederson, it was my dinner companion from Bubba Gump's. He was sprawled, face down, with a Glock in his hand, but he was hard to recognize because he hadn't much face left. Adams’ aim had been better than his balance. We stepped over the remains and went back to sit on our rock and breathe again. “Reckon we ought to report this?” I asked. “Well, sure, after all we're the good guys, right?” “Good enough to spend a week on Guam answering questions?” “I said good not idiotic. Still, it would be a shame if a couple of young lovers came up here in about two weeks and discovered the body. It might spoil their whole afternoon. My idea is to call the cops from the airport two minutes before our plane leaves.” George got up and tamped down the bills in his pockets to be sure that none would fall out. Our pockets were bulging, and George had the two bundles from the pack, but it didn't feel much like six million bucks.