by Ted Bell
“I am zee famous Froggy. Do not insult me.”
“Chill. I’m just talking out loud. Hear how it sounds.”
“If he can be found, we will find him.”
“You sound like you don’t think I’m coming with you.”
“You want to come?”
“Is Paris a city? Two four-man squads. You take one, I’ll take the other. Fan out, go in. Hop and pop, just like the good old days, mi Corazon.”
“We must talk now to Commander Hawke and tell him what we think.”
“Yeah. Holy shit. What was that?”
Stiletto had shuddered to a halt, mid-river.
“What is it? We run out of river?”
“Dead stop. Something’s wrong. Let’s get forward.”
Hawke and Brownlow stood at the helm.
“Stoke,” Hawke said as they entered, “Take a look at this.”
Stoke joined him. “Aw, shit. Blockade.”
He was looking at the Indian war party two hundred yards further downriver. A solid phalanx of war canoes was waiting for them. Had to be a hundred canoes, rafted up, row after row of them, twelve abreast, covering the entire width of the river at its narrowest point. Completely blocking the river.
Waves of canoes stretched back, maybe twenty, thirty rows deep. It was hard to see just how many were waiting in the evening light. The dugouts were decked out in all kind of exotic combat regalia, flaming torches hung at the bow and stern, each boat loaded to the gunnels with painted warriors ready to rumble in the jungle.
Right now they were just beating the drums. Soon, the whole concert would get under way. Seemed like they only knew one tune, stuck in a groove.
Kill you, kill you.
Hawke said, “What do you think, Stoke? We’re already two hours late for our scheduled pickup of Brock. If he thinks we’re not coming and bolts, we’re finished.”
“Slow down. But don’t shoot.”
“No? Why not?” Brownlow said, “We’re being attacked. We could blow through those dugouts like a knife through butter.”
“Not in these shoals, you can’t. Besides, it’s not necessary,” Stoke said. “As long as everybody stays locked inside the boat, what can they do? Bounce spears and poison darts off the windows all night, that’s about it. Let’s just keep moving. Slow.”
“He’s right, Brownie,” Hawke said. Then, into his mike, “Crew. Clear decks and batten her down. Everyone get below and stay there. Do not engage the enemy.”
It took a minute or two to get everyone shut down inside.
“Not a lot of water under our keel, Skipper,” Brownlow said, pointing at the monitor displaying a depth-sounder’s 3-D depiction of the river bottom ahead. Ugly shoals filled the screen, a narrow channel snaked forward. It was barely wide enough to accommodate their slender beam.
“Look at those bloody shoals,” Hawke said. “The Xucuru picked this location deliberately. We’ll go through them dead slow.”
“Yeah,” Stoke said, “Keep us moving, Brownie. Rule of tonnage. You get hit by a truck, you get run over, kemosabe. We just stay in the channel, let them do what they gotta do.”
“One problem with that idea,” Hawke said, eyes on the canoes a hundred yards ahead, “At this slow speed they’ll board us. They’ll be climbing all over the damn boat.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Stoke said, “Stop the boat.”
“Spit it out,” Hawke said, watching the Indians through the night vision binocs now. The sun went down in a hurry on the river. Stoke looked at him and smiled.
“First, we disable our deck guns, lock up the missile boxes. Not that these fellas could use them, but still.”
“This plan sounds bad so far,” Hawke said.
“Wait. Then, we break out the carpet tacks.”
Brownlow said, “Did he just say, ‘carpet tacks’?”
“He did,” Hawke said, looking carefully at his friend.
“Secret weapon,” Stoke said, “Little low-tech trick I picked up on the dock in Manaus. Back in a flash.”
Stoke left the bridge and disappeared below. While he was gone, Stiletto was locked down, all exterior weapons systems disabled, hatches closed and locked. A few minutes later Stoke reappeared on the bow, a heavy sack of carpet tacks on each shoulder. He was moving slowly, emptying the canvas sacks. He was laying down a thick carpet of tacks on the decks, all the way from bow to stern on the starboard side. Then he repeated the process on the port side, smiling through the window as he headed aft, spilling his tacks. When he was finished, he climbed the ladder and used the remaining tacks to cover the wheelhouse roof.
“That ought to do it,” Stoke said, dropping down into the wheelhouse a minute later. You may proceed whenever you’re ready, Cap’n Brownlow.”
“What the hell, Stoke?” Hawke asked and Stokely just smiled.
“Skipper?” Brownlow said, “Ready?”
“All ahead dead slow, Brownie,” Hawke said, “Easy as she goes, no course deviation.”
The waiting flotilla war party saw what Stiletto was doing. The otherworldly thing was advancing upon them, slowly, despite their blockade. Instantly, they unleashed the first wave of poison-tipped arrows toward the oncoming black boat. Those weapons expended, the archers gave way to a second force of warriors who stood and elevated their long blowguns.
Inside the wheelhouse, the noise was akin to being attacked by swarms of steel locusts, the incessant smacking noise of darts and arrows hitting carbon fiber. Stiletto had now sailed directly into the main force, encircled within the huge logjam of war canoes. The Xucuru were in full war cry, howling, giving vent to their frustration by banging with their fists on the sides of the sleek hull. Crude grappling lines made of twisted vines were thrown aboard the slowly moving powerboat. War canoes pulled alongside and warriors scrambled up the lines to the decks.
“They’re boarding us, Skipper,” Brownlow said under his breath. “Christ, they’re all over the damn boat.”
Screaming savages with torches appeared at the wheelhouse windows. The sounds coming from the howling Xucuru warriors were screams of anguish, not cries of war. The Xucuru appeared to be bouncing up and down beyond the windows; they hopped madly from one foot to the other on the carpet of tacks, grabbing their feet, howling and yipping in pain.
“Not staying long, I shouldn’t think,” Hawke said, grinning at Stokely.
“Look like they’re hopping mad out there,” Stoke said.
Most of the Xucuru, upon encountering Stoke’s unpleasant surprise, leapt immediately back into the river. Those few who remained, faces illuminated by torches, were yelping and beating angrily on the wheelhouse windows. Hawke thumbed a switch overhead and all the interior lights were doused. The deck lights remained on. Now they could see the attackers clearly.
Brownlow said, grinning, “We’ve got a million dollars worth of high-tech weaponry on this boat. But that was one hell of an idea, Stoke.”
“Best security system you can buy for four dollars a bag.”
A few seconds later, all the Xucurus were abandoning ship. Ten, fifteen, twenty leapt from the decks of Stiletto and into the Black River. No more boarded after that.
Brownlow looked at the surface of the river. The water was alive, frothing with darting and biting piranhas, swarms of them, lured by the sudden abundance of human blood in the water. The Xucuru, screaming, clawed the water, desperate to reach shore.
“Captain Brownlow, the river looks clear ahead,” Hawke said. “Let’s go get Mr. Brock. All ahead full.”
“All ahead full.”
Night had fallen in the jungle.
Soon, the torches of the war canoes and the cries of angry warriors were left astern, disappearing in the gloom.
Stiletto surged ahead, piercing the darkness, setting her course straight for the heart of the enemy.
72
WASHINGTON, DC
A ir Force One lands some where around here, doesn’t it? I’ve seen that on the news a few times.”
“Eighty-ninth Airlift Wing. Right over there, Sheriff,” Consuelo de los Reyes said, pointing out a large hangar complex across the wide, snow-covered tarmac to their left.
The Secretary of State and Sheriff Franklin W. Dixon were in the middle seat of the heavily armored black Chevy Suburban. There were two DSS agents from the Diplomatic Security Service up front and behind them three more. They were riding in one of six identical vehicles, their rooftops all bristling with antennas and sat dishes.
The convoy was just now exiting the main entry gate at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland. Consuelo de los Reyes had been one of the small group of people standing in the freezing cold on the tarmac when the FBI chopper transporting Sheriff Dixon had touched down at Andrews ten minutes earlier. She had greeted the sheriff warmly, and expressed her condolences about the death of his deputy, Homer Prudhomme, in the line of duty.
His death had not been in vain, she told Dixon, and indeed Deputy Prudhomme was most likely going to receive a posthumous citation for bravery. Sheriff Dixon had told de los Reyes he’d like to handle all the funeral arrangements, take the boy back home to Texas with him.
“I’ll make arrangements for you and the deputy to fly home together, Sheriff.”
“’Preciate it. What’d they do about that truck?” Dixon asked.
“They’re putting it on a flatbed and taking it to Quantico. The technicians will take it apart bit by bit, see what makes it tick.”
“Making it tick. I hope that’s not a bomb.”
“We all do, Sheriff.”
As the convoy turned left and moved slowly through the small town of Morningside, heading northwest, Dixon was peering through the heavily tinted windows, trying to gather his thoughts and clear his head. The gunshot wound he’d received to the head had been purely superficial. A crease on his forehead. The EMS had stitched it up, splashed some brown stuff on it, and put a bandage over it. It still hurt pretty bad. More like a bad headache than a gunshot wound. He hadn’t had much sleep, either.
And it didn’t look like he was going to get much anytime soon.
“Where are we headed now?” he asked.
“There are some people at the White House who would like to speak to you.”
“We’re going to the White House?”
She nodded. “I’ve got a scheduled meeting there. They said you may as well come along. Tell me about that truck, Sheriff. How you came to find it.”
“We pulled the first one about three weeks ago. Homer insisted on calling it the Ghost Rider because we couldn’t find the driver anywhere. I thought he’d just run off into the desert. I’m afraid I didn’t do too good a job of looking for him. That was the night we found the, uh, my posse.”
“I know all about that, Sheriff. I’m terribly sorry about what happened to those brave boys. But I need to know everything you can tell me about those trucks before we go into this meeting with the President’s security people.”
“Homer stayed with it, no matter what I said. According to Wyatt Cooper, one of my deputies who talked to Homer, he followed one truck down to a town called Gunbarrel, right on the Rio Grande. That’s where they were coming across the border. They’d built a huge tunnel underground, came up inside a deserted warehouse.”
“They? Who built it?”
“Well, apparently, Mexicans, since that’s where the tunnel is from. But there was a fella from Prairie who was in it with them on the American side. Local man named J.T.Rawls. He must have been the one ran the operation on this side of the border.”
“What kind of operation? Had to be smuggling?”
“That’s what Homer told my deputy. I think they were bringing drugs in originally. Drugs and illegals. Had to be a pretty big outfit, too, all the money that must have been spent on that warehouse.”
“And a tunnel that size. We don’t understand the remote controlled aspect of these trucks. Tell me about that.”
“Heck, I don’t understand it either. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, the coyotes bringing in illegals that way. Or, drugs for that matter. Drivers and mules are dirt cheap down there. Expendable, too.”
“The one you found in Lee’s Ferry. The deputy told you that a small submarine had been placed in the river.”
“Yep. That’s what he told me.”
“He believed it to be an unmanned craft?”
“Yes he did. Said it took off with no one inside.”
“How’d you come to be there? At the farm.”
“Homer called me from the house where the terrorists were living. Right after I’d got back from your conference. My wife picked me up in San Antonio. She’d followed another truck herself up there. To San Antonio. Same black windows.”
“Where is that truck now?”
“I reckon she’s still looking for it. I haven’t had a chance to call her. Or, even Wyatt to tell him about Homer.”
“How do we get in touch with Mr. Cooper? We’ll do that for you. We’d like to speak with him as well.”
He gave her the Sheriff’s Office number at the Court House. The Secretary leaned forward and whispered to an agent in the front seat. Then she turned back to him.
“Homer told you there were a lot of trucks headed north?”
“Yes, ma’am. He said he’d followed about two dozen trucks out of Gunbarrel, moving in a convoy, all headed the same direction. They split up along the way. Taking different routes. He finally picked one and followed it to Virginia.”
“Northeast? All the trucks were headed that way? No one going south. Or, west?”
“He said north, ma’am.”
“He picked one truck and stuck with it all the way to Virginia.”
“He did.”
“The people living in the farmhouse. The doctor and his family. Tell me about them.”
“He was a doctor?”
“A pediatrician. Iranian. They’d been living in that house for four years. The son was in law school.”
“Well. A doctor. That’s something. You never know, I guess.”
“Don’t worry. We deeded the farm all the way back to a German ambassador and a small holding company in Dubai. This Iranian family, they were sleepers, all right. What your deputy did was the right thing. You, too.”
“You find that sub?”
“Not yet. We’ve got divers and salvage operations out from Fredericksburg all the way north to D.C.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It’s always bad. Especially now that we’ve got the Inauguration coming up. Everybody’s a little tense. I’ve got to make a few phone calls, Sheriff. You put your head back and take it easy. We should be there in half an hour.”
73
S now day, huh?” Metro Patrolman Joe Pastore said. “Remember Snow Days?”
“The best, Joey,” his partner, Tom Darius said. “Man. I loved Snow Days. More than life.”
Joe said, “Snow forts. Snow wars. Your kids’ school close down, too?”
“It was on the radio at six or something, just as I was leaving the house. I think every school in DC is closed. Look at this shit coming down. Has to be a couple of feet already, right?”
“I hope it keeps snowing. Right through the frigging Inauguration. That way people will stay home and watch it on TV. Make our lives a whole lot easier, right? Hey! Watch out for that truck! You see that guy?”
“Is this fruit nuts?” DC uniformed Patrolman Tommy Darius said to his partner, Pastore, who was driving the cruiser. A huge tractor-trailer truck had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, turning into the road right in front of them, barely visible in the swirling snow.
Joey laughed and hit the brakes, nodding his head. Is this fruit nuts? You have to ride around in a car all day, it better be with someone funny. Like Tommy. The two of them had been together ever since the academy, hell, every since grade school in Silver Spring. Inseparable, even back in the day. Next-door neighbors. Spitshooters. Hellraisers. Crimebusters. Partners to the end. Close, that’s w
hat they always said. Like wallpaper to a wall.
Their DC squad car, a white Crown Vic, followed the big tractor-trailer along a winding wooded road in the middle of Rock Creek Park. There were few people using the vast park today, because of the snowfall. They’d seen a few hikers, a couple of hardy folks on horseback, riding through the huge mounds of snow drifted up under the trees.
Darius and Pastore began following the truck on North Waterside Drive, headed southeast, the only two vehicles on the road. They’d only passed one other vehicle, a big Lexus SUV, going the other way. Not only were trucks not allowed in the park, ever, they especially weren’t allowed on Waterside. That’s because the damn drive was closed, all the way from Massachusetts Avenue to Rock Creek Parkway. Clearly marked “Closed,” and here was this guy.
Now the guy braked and hung a right on Beach Drive, going wide, and headed toward the Riley Spring Bridge.
“Hit the lights, Tommy,” Pastore said, “I’ve had enough of this dick-head.”
“Yeah, let’s pull him,” Darius said, firing up the light bar and red flashers. “Then we’ll go get some supper.”
This driver of this rig, who was apparently hauling frozen seafood from Louisiana, was either lost or smoked up or both. “Crawdaddy & Co.,” that’s what it said on the truck. Big pink crawfish or something painted on the back and sides. Didn’t look all that tasty. Looked more like big bugs.
The guy was crawling through the park, ten miles an hour, pausing to stop at every intersection and then proceeding through it, moving along as if he owned the road. The truck being from way down south in Louisiana, Darius and Pastore assumed nobody’d told this ragin’ Cajun that this was a National park, run by the Department of the Interior, and trucks weren’t welcome.
“He’s not stopping, Joey. What do you want me to do?”
“I’ll pull along side this asshole. Roll your window down and flag him over to the shoulder.”
“It’s fuckin freezing out there, Joe.”
“Just do it.”
“He won’t stop. Look at those tints. Thinks he’s a movie star. We ought to bust him for those limo windows, too.”