by Fred G Baker
They sloshed through pools of water to the truck and climbed in, soaked to the bone. They had missed it.
Then, there was a break in the rain—and just at the edges of their vision, they saw the black stern of a freighter laden with containers on her deck. It was just leaving the inner harbor for the open bay. Then, the rain closed in again.
“Shit! Goddamnit!” Wilson shouted, pounding his fists on the dashboard. “I’ve been watching this ship every day since I’ve been here—and today it slips away, just like that.”
“They’re making for the open sea. There’s no way we can catch them now.”
Just then Lightchurch’s Rover pulled up alongside them in the rain. Wilson stared straight ahead, to where the black freighter had last been seen. Madeline climbed out of the truck and ran to the rear window of the Land Rover. She reported what they had witnessed.
“I’ll call the chief and see if there’s anything he can do.” Lightchurch rolled up his window and began dialing. Madeline crawled back in the truck to get out of the rain and waited with Wilson for news.
After five minutes, Nash rapped on the truck window and beckoned them to Lightchurch’s Rover. They stood outside his back window in the drizzle while he spoke. “The chief said there’s nothing he can do. The few coast guard patrol boats he has are tied up patrolling the volcano and the airport to make sure none of the Cubans can make a run for it. He said even if he could free one up, it would be too small and lightly armed a craft to stop a full-size freighter.” He looked disappointed. “In any case, the Shanghai Maiden will be in international waters within a half-hour and then we’ll have no jurisdiction.”
“We’re all done then,” Wilson said. He looked at Madeline in despair. There was silence for several moments as their failure sank in.
Then, Lightchurch spoke. “If you’re up for it, the chief said they’re stretched thin at the airport and you two could join his men there to help cover the perimeter.”
***
At 7:00 p.m., rain was still falling intermittently in the darkness, but the wind was dying down after a late surge of fury right after sunset. Wilson and Madeline were stationed on the north side of the airport near the westernmost service doors of the airport terminal. They had been moved around three times to where they were needed, as a supplement to the police cordon that surrounded the main terminal building. They hoped this would be their final deployment as the hostage crisis neared its end.
The entire day had been consumed by conflict—with the twenty-six remaining Cubans holding seventeen hostages: Five airport employees and twelve innocent passengers. Fighting all day had killed several additional Cubans and wounded ten more police officers. No hostages had been killed since noon, when negotiations with the Cuban commander, Cortez, had been taken over directly by the chief himself.
A grand deal had been arranged for the release of all passengers and two employees, if an aircraft was made available to fly the Cubans to Caracas—where the chief had been assured by the Venezuelan government that they would be taken into custody and punished. The Venezuelan government would then repatriate the three hostages back to Grenada—but nobody trusted the Maduro government.
For this purpose, a Caribbean Airlines plane had been made available for the mission. The ATR 72-600, with twin turboprop engines, was a steady workhorse of a plane that could take off and land under the most severe conditions and on short runways. It was an ideal choice for this flight in bad weather. It had been fueled and brought to the far end of the terminal, where the Cubans would exit the building with their hostages and walk across the tarmac to a small staircase and up onto the plane.
The hostages who remained behind would be released as the plane began its taxi toward the main runway. That was the plan—and also the part of the exchange that worried everyone. Would something go wrong? And would hostages die unprotected on the tarmac?
During the boarding of the plane, Wilson and Madeline would support the policemen by securing the northwest corner of the terminal on the tarmac, in case anyone ran away in that direction. It seemed unlikely that one of the Cubans would try to escape just before getting on the plane, but stranger things had happened in these types of situations.
Wilson was still in shock. Tori Vargas’s face ran through his subconscious. He couldn’t turn off the image of her tortured body jammed into the suitcase. Occasionally, an image of her in her bikini—as he remembered their afternoon of fun on the beach—was juxtaposed in his memory. The contrast between the pleasant and the dreadful was overwhelming. He found it hard to concentrate on their task—just waiting. He needed some action to take his mind off her death.
Madeline was standing twenty feet away. “Hey, Wilson. You OK?” She kept an eye on him, wary that he was losing it just when they needed to be at their best.
He didn’t respond, so she strode over and squared off in front of him, getting in his face. “Come on, Robert.” She placed her left hand on his chin to shake his head, gaining his attention. “We’re about to load up now. Snap out of it.”
He looked in her eyes and saw determination and sympathy. “Yeah. I’m OK.”
“You look like shit.” She smiled and slapped him lightly on the cheek. “Get with it, man.”
Finally, in darkness, the moment for boarding had arrived. The airplane was sitting a hundred feet from the building—the propeller on the far side of the craft turning slowly. The one on the near side—the boarding side—was shut down.
A door opened halfway down the west side of the terminal. A hostage—apparently one of the airport employees based on her outfit of khaki pants and a blue uniform shirt, hands tied behind her back—was pushed into the glare of the exterior terminal lights. She looked terrified. Then another came out, hands also bound. A Cuban followed, pointing an AK-74 at the hostages and dragging another female hostage with him. Nothing happened. Then, the whole mob of hostages intermixed with Cubans surged out, and—as a group—they shuffled toward the aircraft. Wilson could almost feel the tension that pervaded all the parties: Cubans, hostages, police, Madeline, and himself.
The assemblage of bodies reached the staircase and began boarding the plane. First, three Cubans boarded the plane and secured the flight crew. Then, several more Cubans climbed on board. A hostage was pushed forward, and then another climbed the steps.
There was a scuffle as one of the hostages refused to get on the plane. There was shouting and fighting—and then a gunshot. It was unclear what had happened. A body fell to the ground, and both hostages and captors leaped back in shock, screaming and shoving.
“I won’t go wid you!”
Then, another shot.
As if on cue, everyone began running to the right and away from the plane. Some of the hostages ran back toward the door they had left from the terminal. The Cuban soldiers cut them down with automatic rifle fire as they ran for safety. A few of the hostages ran toward the corner of the building where Wilson and Madeline stood guard.
Then, the airplane seemed to lift off the tarmac, erupting in a huge fireball. Something had gone desperately wrong. There was confusion and panic on the tarmac as pieces of the aircraft flew through the air, some burning. Everyone near the plane ran toward Wilson and Madeline—hostages and Cubans alike. There was much gunfire now, some coming from the terminal as police began picking off Cubans. At the same time, the Cubans returned fire and ran to catch up to the fleeing hostages. Their only chance was surrounding themselves with innocent bodies again and fleeing from the hail of bullets.
Ten frightened people ran directly at Wilson and Madeline—hostages with wild eyes and screaming mouths. Shouting soldiers tried to catch up, shooting as they ran, sometimes at the hostages they chased. Both Wilson and Madeline had their handguns up and began shooting the running people who held guns in their hands. They found it difficult to take a clear shot with everybody mixed together.
Within seconds, the fleeing crowd was on them, all mixed up, as hostages reached the corner of the
building. But one Cuban—a tall man with a mustache—caught up with a woman and grabbed her by the neck just as he reached Wilson. He ducked behind her and put a gun to her head.
“You! El Americano,” he shouted. “I will kill you now.”
He pointed his gun at Wilson just as the woman twisted in his grip. He fired at the same moment that Wilson did. All three people, Wilson, Cortez, and the woman, fell to the ground. The woman screamed and wrestled herself free. She crawled away from Cortez, who had landed in a sitting position on the ground. He swung his gun around and shot again, just as Wilson fired from the ground. They both fell backward and stopped moving.
Madeline ran up and shot Cortez in the head as he lay there, possibly trying for another shot, or in the throes of death. Wilson did not move. Madeline dropped to the ground next to him and searched for a pulse as black-booted police ran past her after the last living Cuban.
No pulse. “Help! I need help here!” She began applying CPR on Wilson. She pumped his chest even as she shouted again for help. “Start breathing, damn you!” She tried to focus in spite of a surge of emotion and adrenaline. “Breathe, Robert. Breathe.”
A paramedic ran up and took over the care of the fallen man. He checked for a pulse and stopped CPR. He checked Wilson’s eyes for reaction.
Madeline sat back on the tarmac and cried openly. “Has it all come to this?” she murmured as Wilson’s body lay there on the tarmac and rain fell from the heavens on everyone.
Chapter 20
Thursday
“I must join the PM and the chief in an hour to develop a joint statement for the governor general,” Lightchurch said. “We must also create a record of everything that has happened here over the last few weeks. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned.”
“We’re ready to proceed, sir,” Madeline said, “but it will take weeks to sort everything out.”
“How are you faring today, Robert?” His eyes drifted over to Wilson, who sat in a chair at the table. “Have you recovered enough to carry on?” Lightchurch was concerned about Wilson’s near-death experience.
“I’ll be all right, sir. My ribs are a bit rough, but I’ll make it.” Wilson ran his fingers over his heart, where the bullet had smashed into the vest he was wearing. “Lucky, I guess.”
“I was shot once while wearing a bulletproof vest in Indonesia. Knocked the piss and vinegar right out of me.” Lightchurch chuckled. “Ribs were sore for I don’t know how long.”
Madeline gave Wilson a severe look. “Lucky I made you put a vest on.”
He winced and gave her a thumbs-up.
They all chuckled at his reaction. Morgan, Nash, and Mitchell were there as well for the after-action meeting. Luckily, none of the team had been seriously injured during the coup.
“After it was all cleared up last night, the chief has ninety-four wounded or captured insurgents—Cubans and Venezuelans.” Lightchurch read from a list in his hand. “There were eighty-seven insurgents killed, as well as at least thirty-seven of his police officers. They’re still counting up the number of wounded policemen.”
“A lot of hostages were killed by those bastards,” Nash said. “But what happened to the plane?”
“We just don’t know yet what happened on board the plane,” Madeline said. “There was an initial explosion on the plane that somehow lit up one of the fuel tanks. The forensic people and the Eastern Caribbean Civil Aviation Authority have already begun an investigation. It may be months before we know for certain.”
“You know, Tori Vargas gave us the key to unravel this coup before she died,” Wilson said. “She suffered a terrible death because she helped us.”
“Cortez punished her, all right,” Madeline said. “I wish there was something we could have done to protect her, but everything happened so quickly.”
“I’ll ask Langley if we can locate her parents—maybe help them out in some way. We owe her that.” Wilson looked at the floor, and no one spoke for a full minute.
After a thoughtful silence, Lightchurch turned to Wilson. “Robert, how were the Russians involved in all this?”
Wilson breathed deeply and then winced as his ribs warned him not to disturb them. “I’m not sure they were directly involved in the coup. We suspect they played a role in creating unrest during the elections by doing what they do best—interfering with social media and creating dissent. But, in the coup itself? Nothing.”
Madeline then asked, “But what were they doing with all that diving activity?”
Wilson said, somewhat cautiously, “It appears—and this has not been confirmed, yet—that they were playing their own game of tapping into an important undersea communications cable. The Southern Caribbean Fiber Cable runs right in the area where they were diving for several days. We know they went under with specialized equipment that may have been used to splice into the cable, so they’d have an independent tap into it.”
“A lot of sensitive information runs through that channel,” Lightchurch said. “It would be useful for them to listen in to the plans, for commerce on all the islands. They’re experts at that sort of thing.”
“It could also be used for the introduction of misinformation or viruses into the system. I’m preparing an investigation into exactly what they were doing through a local contractor here in Grenada,” Wilson said. “More on that later.”
“And the Shanghai Maiden?”
“This morning, I asked that a satellite be tasked to track the Shanghai Maiden to see where she went,” Wilson said. “I just received an initial track for her as of this morning, when the weather cleared. Here’s an image of her sailing southwest toward Venezuela. She’s only two-hundred-eighty miles from here.”
“But she left by ten in the morning,” Morgan said. “She should be four or five hundred miles away at normal speed.”
“Look at this satellite photo.” Wilson spun his laptop around so that they could all see the photo. The picture showed a large patch of sea with a freighter in the center. The scale was such that they could clearly see the ship’s deck, which was covered with stacks of sea containers.
“These are the containers she had on her when she left port?” Lightchurch asked.
“Apparently,” Wilson said.
“At least the weapons are off the island,” Maddie commented.
Everyone in the room was silent. They didn’t have an answer to that question.
Lightchurch stood up. “Well, I must drive over to the PM’s office for the meeting. Call me in the next few minutes if you come up with any good news.”
“There is one bright spot, sir,” Nash said. “The earthquakes have stopped for now. They say we won’t have any big eruption today.”
Madeline smiled. “And Radio Free Grenada is back on the air, playing soca and calypso music.”
On that note, with a grim smile on his face, Lightchurch left the warehouse. The others dispersed to their duties or drove home for some rest after the last few harrowing days.
Wilson and Madeline drove to the Hempstead for a celebratory rum punch. Gordon was tending the main bar and worked his way over to talk.
“Mr. Wilson, have you heard the news? They might raise the volcano alert to level red tomorrow. My source said it getting mighty hot and lots of lava been flowing under the sea.” He grinned as he waved his arms, suggesting a big explosion. “Whole island could go up in smoke. Boom!”
“No, Gordon,” Wilson said. “It’s news to me. Seems like lots of things have been getting hot around here.”
“Yes, well—Radio Free Grenada got the inside scoop on dis, so it mus’ be true. You know they predicted the election results too. They pretty good at this stuff.” Gordon moved down the bar and tended to another customer.
“Is he always so excitable?” Madeline asked.
“Sometimes, Maddie.” Wilson smiled. “But he’s got the inside scoop on all sorts of things.” They both laughed and sipped their drinks.
They sat in silence and listened to the recor
ded music that played over the bar’s Stingray system. Khalid’s song “Young Dumb & Broke” came on, and Gordon and two other workers behind the bar sang along.
“I better check out of the hotel and find a new place if I’m staying here two or three extra weeks to wrap this up,” Wilson said. “I can’t stay at the Hempstead after all that has happened.”
“You’ll never find a room. They’re all booked up,” Madeline said, a sly smile on her face. She pulled her barstool next to his. “You could stay at my flat if you want—but I don’t have a couch.”
She leaned over and kissed Wilson on the cheek.
Wilson smiled weakly. “I don’t know. It may not be a good idea.”
“We can take it slow while you recover your energy,” she whispered.
“That sounds like an offer I can’t refuse.” He reached out and put an arm around her shoulder, as she snaked her arm around his waist.
He looked sideways at her and smiled. “Does that mean we may do something unprofessional tonight?”
She chuckled. “Perhaps.”
About the Author
Fred G. Baker is a hydrologist, historian, and writer living in Colorado. He is the author of An Imperfect Crime, Desert Sanctuary, Zona: The Forbidden Land, The Black Freighter, and the Modern Pirate Series of short and long stories. He is also the author of nonfiction works such as Growing Up Wisconsin, The Life and Times of Con James Baker of Des Moines, Chicago, and Wisconsin, The Light from a Thousand Campfires (with Hannah Pavlik), and others.
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