A drink? Charity thought. What is this about?
“Just water,” she replied, as a waiter approached the table.
Stockwell spoke to the waiter in perfect Spanish, with a slight Cuban accent. He ordered the broiled lobster for both of them.
“I didn’t know you were bilingual,” Charity said after the waiter filled her water glass and left.
“A little French and German, too,” he replied. Then, without any preamble, he said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to move up the timetable.”
“By how much?”
“I need you in Trinidad in two days.”
“I thought the best cover would be the boat,” Charity said, unsure of things.
“It is,” Stockwell replied. “But, on occasion, we may need to move you into position faster than that old boat can go.”
“Flying commercial leaves an easy-to-follow paper trail, Director.”
“You won’t be flying commercial,” Stockwell began. “I had your chopper moved to Gitmo and had auxiliary fuel cells installed, giving it a range of over five hundred nautical miles. It’s also been renumbered. The paper trail on it will lead back to a shell company. One of the subsidiaries of that shell company is a tropical vacation magazine. You’ll be posing as a travel photographer. A Navy bird will meet the Coast Guard patrol boat Key Biscayne twenty-five miles north of here at oh eight hundred. You’ll be on the patrol boat, which leaves the port at oh six hundred. When you fly out of Gitmo, you’ll have to make three fuel stops before reaching Trinidad.”
Standing on the porch, Leon listened to the sounds coming from the jungle surrounding the compound. The sun was below the treetops, shadows stretching out across the wide clearing. Though he’d grown up here and knew all the noises of the jungle, occasionally there would be something new, some strange cry in the night.
What he was now hearing were the normal jungle noises. Still, Leon felt uneasy, as if some unseen thing had been following him and watching him all day. From the water’s edge a hundred meters to his right, he heard a splash in the shallows and looked that way. He had told the old man to be here at sunset; maybe the splash was him.
When Leon moved his eyes back across the darkening courtyard to his left, they fell on the old shaman now standing only a few meters away.
“Where the hell did you come from?”
The old man shrugged. “The river,” he replied in English.
Leon studied Vicente Navarro closely. His head was wrapped in a red bandana, and his face was lined with jagged black lines. But it was the shaman’s eyes that drew Leon’s attention. They were dark and cloudy, as if a smoky fog swirled from within.
Leon visibly shook off whatever affect the old man’s countenance had on him. “How did you get into the compound without anyone noticing?”
Again, the old man shrugged his shoulders and jerked a thumb behind him. “I walked,” was all he said.
“Well, it is good you did not keep the babo waiting,” Leon said, as he turned toward the door. “Follow me and wipe your feet off on the rug.”
Leon did not like this old man. In fact, he did not like any of the native people in the area. He considered them to be only slightly above the animals that dwelled in the jungle.
Vicente mounted the steps soundlessly, following Leon into the large house. He paused and wiped the bottoms of his bare feet on the rug at the door.
Leon moved into the large foyer and pointed to a room on the right. “Wait in there. The babo will be here in a moment.”
Without a word, Vicente turned and entered the high-ceilinged room off the foyer. The fact that the room was much larger than his whole house, and twice as tall, made no impression on the shaman, good or bad. One long wall was lined from floor to ceiling with leather bound books. A ladder was fixed to a track, to allow someone to reach the higher shelves.
Vicente moved quietly around the room. His eyes picked up on everything. In the center of the room, the wood floor was covered with an oval rug, the design and color of which Vicente had only seen once before, in the captain’s cabin aboard a freighter on which Vicente had once sailed.
Unlike most of the indigenous people in the area, Vicente was fairly well educated in the ways of the outside world. He’d left the jungle as a young man, sailed all over the Caribbean and up and down the coasts of North and South America. He’d learned to read and write, how to reason and solve math problems. After many years aboard cargo ships, he’d returned to his jungle home, his face already lined with years and his hair graying. As a child, Vicente had learned the ancient ways of the buyei. His father had been a shaman of the boat people, as had his father before him. Vicente had saved his wages, earned from long days and longer nights at sea, and bought land along the shore of the Manamo, not far from the village where he’d been born. He’d heard about the white people of this settlement, but was drawn to his piece of land just the same. So, he’d settled into a new life as a farmer.
Walking slowly along the shelves of books, he noticed that quite a few were the same classics that he’d learned to read with. The shelves were sorted by author, it seemed. He reached for a heavy-looking volume he’d read many times.
“Do not touch that,” a voice said from behind him.
Vicente turned to face the man who had spoken. He was a striking figure with brown hair. His sharp blue eyes held Vicente’s, and in them the older man could see the evil boiling. He wore black trousers and an immaculate white linen shirt, open at the collar. Aside from the evil Vicente could see in his eyes, he looked a lot like the captain of the ship Vicente had sailed on as a younger man.
“Those are called books,” the babo said, as if explaining a difficult subject to a small child.
Vicente gave his typical shrug and nodded toward the volume he’d been reaching for. “This one is the story of my life as a young man.”
Babo slowly approached the old man and glanced at the Melville novel. “The story of your life? You are an old farmer with no knowledge of such things.”
Vicente smiled slightly. “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me onshore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” He smiled a bit more. “I too went out into the world on a ship, Babo. I know many things.”
“My name is Beisch, Martin Beisch,” the younger man said, surprised at the revelation that the old man could even read. “Your people call me Babo, so I assume you know who I am.”
“Yes,” Vicente replied. “I know who you are.”
“Then you probably know that I can have my men kill you and feed you to the caribes.”
“Yes,” Vicente said. “But you will not do that.”
“And why the hell do you think I will not?”
“I have been told by the light spirit that I will live to be a much older man. The why, I have no way of knowing.”
Beisch studied the old man’s face, then looked down at the way he was dressed: barefoot, wearing only the traditional loin cover of the Ye’kuana and a faded tie-dyed tee-shirt. The shirt was completely at odds with the rest of him, but seemed to suit him nonetheless.
“If you are such an intelligent man,” the babo began, “why is it you are nothing more than a peasant farmer?”
“All men may choose what they do in life,” Vicente replied, with another shrug of his shoulders. “I first chose a life at sea. Now I have chosen to work the land and help the people.”
“If you want to help your people? Then grow what I tell you to grow,” Beisch said. “If you do not, I will kill one of them every week. One of the younger workers.”
Vicente stared into the babo’s eyes. He felt no fear for himself, since the same light spirit that had visited him yesterday had returned only hours ago. She’d told him that he would win the encounter with the itoto of the forest people. He had only to wait and do as they asked. Vicente knew that the Mother of the Forest would
send the light spirit again soon.
He also knew that the babo would carry out his threat against the people.
“Yes,” Vicente said. “We will grow the coca. But, it would be a waste to cut down the cassava so close to harvest.”
“A waste?”
“In both time and money,” Vicente replied. “Our crops flourish. They will bring a good price in about a week. But we have no coca seed.”
Beisch smiled. He’d thought the old man was going to be trouble and he’d have to kill him and a few others to get the rest to capitulate. “I can get you the seed,” he said.
“Enough to plant two hundred morgen?” Vicente asked, again surprising Beisch. The morgen was the standard unit of land measure in the Old World of Beisch’s ancestors. Vicente’s and Anders’s farms were about two and a half square kilometers in size, all prime and fertile land.
“I can have the seed delivered in five days,” Beisch said, thinking this was too easy.
“We will plant the coca in seven days,” Vicente said. “By then, all the cassava will be harvested. This way, when the other farmers have already harvested their coca plants, we will have a crop still growing. The season will be a long one.” Then, knowing what truly drove the babo, Vicente added, “A later crop will bring more money, will it not?”
Thinking that the old man had dollar signs in his eyes and greed in his mind, Beisch nodded. “I think Leon was wrong about you. Yes, it will bring more money, but only if the monsoon floods do not wipe it all away.”
“The flood waters will hold off,” Vicente said. “The coca will be harvested many days before the first rains.”
“Just how do you know this?” Beisch asked, cynically.
Vicente shrugged. “I am a buyei. The Forest Mother tells me these things.”
“The Forest Mother, huh? Here is something you can tell her: if the coca is wiped out by the monsoons, you, Anders, his family, and all your workers will be cut and thrown into the water.”
“The rain will hold,” Vicente replied with conviction.
“It better, old man. Two hundred morgen of coca leaves will bring a lot of money.”
There it was again. The greed of the man was easy for Vicente to manipulate. “Yes, even more so later in the season. Miguel and I will want a better price than the others because of that.”
The babo smiled. To Vicente, it was like looking at the grin of the jaguar. “Yes,” Beisch said, “I think that can be arranged. But you have to keep the village elders and the other farmers in line. Do you understand?”
“They will not be a problem,” Vicente said, mustering what he thought was an equally evil grin. “I am the buyei. They will do as I say.”
Thurman Napier was at the commercial dock the next morning, as Stockwell had instructed him. A container ship was tied off, the giant cranes making easy work of the many steel containers arriving from manufacturers all over the world.
Napier went to the dock master’s office and waited in line with several truck drivers, roustabouts, and a handful of businessmen. After waiting half an hour, he was told that his container was near the bottom of the ship’s cargo hold and that he should come back at noon. He was also told that he’d need to provide his own truck and chassis trailer, because the yard trucks weren’t permitted to go into the mountains beyond Arima.
“Where the hell am I supposed to get a truck and driver?” Thurman grumbled, realizing the Colonel had played him. If the container was on the bottom, it had to have been loaded long before the Colonel came here. “I was told transportation was arranged,” he added, fixing the clerk with a fierce one-eyed stare.
The dock clerk nodded toward several men sitting and standing around a table playing cards. “Those men are drivers. I cannot vouch for any of them, or their trucks.”
“Fuckin’ great,” Napier muttered, turning away from the counter and walking toward the table.
“Which one of you guys has the best truck and trailer?” Napier asked, as he stepped up behind two of the card players.
A man seated with his back to Napier replied without looking up from his cards. “Go ’way, mon. We all got loads, and just waitin’.”
Napier stared down at the back of the man’s head, guessing him to be in his early twenties and under two hundred pounds—probably way under, but two hundred was where Napier drew the line. Above that, he might have to use a little finesse. Below that, they were a mere nuisance, no different than swatting a mosquito.
With one hand, Napier grabbed the smaller man by the collar and hoisted him to his feet. The man kicked and twisted in Napier’s grasp. Though Napier didn’t recognize the man, he was well known in the places men like these frequented, and the smaller man knew immediately who was holding him and quit squirming.
Pointing across the table, the smaller man said, “Enrique’s truck is only ten years old.”
The man he’d singled out looked up and nodded his head at Napier. “It is true. Mine is the newest, but I already have a load. It’s being placed on my chassis right now.”
“I got a container that needs to go up to my place in the Northern Range,” Napier said, lowering the first man back into his chair. “But it won’t be off the ship until after lunch.”
Enrique tossed his cards on the table and stood up slowly. He knew who the one-eyed man was as well. “This container is only going a short distance. I can be back by noon. To the Range, it will be two hundred dollars, half up front.”
Napier scrutinized the man. He’d seen him somewhere before, he was sure. Taller than most, but still a head shorter than Napier himself. Loose-jointed and gangly, he reminded Napier of a vulture.
“One-fifty,” Napier countered. “And I’ll pay it all upfront, ’cause I know I can find you if you stiff me.”
To Napier’s surprise, Enrique countered back. “One-eighty, but I will take only half until your cargo is delivered undamaged. And if you like, we can tell the dock master, so you will not have to wait around, Mister Napier.”
Thurman smiled. The man knew who he was, and so knew that money wasn’t real high on his list of importance. The negotiating was merely a tradition. Sticking his hand out, Napier said, “You got a deal, Enrique.”
The two shook hands and spoke quickly to the clerk, who had them each sign a release and consignment form. Napier took a page from a sketch pad he always carried. Using the pencil he kept stuck behind his ear, secured in place by the eye patch, he wrote the address and his phone number on the page and handed it to the truck driver.
“You know where this is?”
Enrique took the paper and looked at it. “Yes, I know where this is. It once belonged to di Whyte family.”
“Yeah, I bought it from the old man about fifteen years ago. Call me when you’re on the way, or if there’s any delay.”
The two men walked out of the office together. “That’s my truck,” Enrique said, pointing to where a container was being lowered onto a trailer chassis. “I’ll be back here in two hours, well before noon. What is in the container, is it legal?”
Napier took a money roll from his pocket and peeled the bills off, handing them to Enrique. “It’s legal, no worries about that. Now, don’t let me down,” he growled, then turned and walked down the steps to his pickup truck.
Six hours later, with the sun already heading toward the summit of El Cerro del Aripo to the west, Napier heard the distinctive sound of a big truck coming up the long steep grade to his property. Enrique had called an hour earlier to say he was on the way.
Thurman had been working all day on an old Caterpillar front-end loader. It was plenty big enough to lift the container off the trailer chassis. He didn’t know what the weight of the whole thing would be, but he figured if he could get the bucket’s big teeth under the container, he could run chains from the top of the bucket to the far side to be able to lift it off the chassis.
Ten minutes later, just as Napier started the behemoth, Enrique’s truck came around the last turn and thro
ugh the gate. He maneuvered his truck into position right in front of the loader, which Napier was glad to see. The hydraulics for the steering leaked terribly.
“The invoice says the container stays,” Enrique said, as he climbed out of the cab.
“You got any real big chains?” Thurman asked. “At least twenty feet long?”
Enrique looked at the loader and then at the thirty-five-foot container. “I see what you want to do. Yes, I have chains. The weight is just over twelve thousand pounds. Two of my big chains will work.”
Napier moved the loader into position, slightly lifting the side of the container, with the teeth under it and the top of the bucket against the side. Enrique climbed up to the top of the container and reached down to attach the ends of the chains to two hooks welded on top of the bucket. After dropping the other ends of the chains over the far side, he scrambled down and hooked them through the pockets at the two corners, pulling all the slack out and hooking the chains back onto themselves.
When Enrique came around the front of the truck, he circled a finger in the air, signaling Napier to lift. The old Caterpillar strained against the chains as air pressure began hissing from the overcharged airbags of the trailer’s suspension. Suddenly the big container popped free, rocking the loader but remaining steady.
Napier backed up enough to clear the trailer chassis and slowly eased the steel box to the ground. He hadn’t counted on keeping the big steel box, but his mind was already thinking of how he could use it. Maybe bury it and turn it into an emergency shelter.
Opening the door, Napier looked inside and let out a low whistle. The boat sat on an aluminum trailer, both obviously brand new. He went inside and saw that the boat was strapped securely to the trailer, which was in turn chained to the floor. It didn’t look like it had moved, and there was no apparent damage.
Outside, Napier paid Enrique the balance, along with a twenty-dollar tip, and after helping him retrieve his chains, sent him on his way. It took another thirty minutes to remove the chains and blocks holding the boat trailer in place. He used the blocks as steps to allow him to back his pickup into the container and hook up the trailer.
Ruthless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 2) Page 5