“Sorry, ma’am, but I gotta give you a shot. The boss said to do it right away. Like I said, I’m sorry, but I gotta do what the boss man says.”
Lacey didn’t respond. Every time they moved her to a different location, she was sedated. So yet again she was going someplace with someone.
Who gives a damn anymore? This is Murtagh’s payback for my putting him in prison, where he still belongs. If I were still an ADA, I’d bust this blubber-bounded bozo so fast his head would spin on his fat shoulders. She sighed. Yeah, big talk for a hostage. What does he want with me anyway? He could have killed me anytime, but instead I’ve been hauled around to God knows where, and now I’m on this boat out in the middle of the ocean. I can’t see any land, so how can I even tell where we are? But it doesn’t matter—I won’t be here long.
Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, she responded to the drill and bent over the table. Using her thumb to hook her jeans, she lowered them to expose a bit of butt. The stab was less painful than in the past, or maybe she was used to getting the “go juice” in her glutes. With the shot, all pain would soon be gone, and so would Lacey, as she drifted off yet again.
ELEVEN
AFTER THE PARASAILING LECTURE from José, Amiti entered Wainwright’s room. He asked if either Wainwright or Wilson had questions before José left to pack up the gear. No one did.
“As I’ve said, we’re three and a half hours from the spot where the Vasquezes will meet us. We’ll cross back into the United States to our destination, Port Isabel.
“Rudy and José will leave in about twenty minutes to drive Rudy’s truck to Port Isabel. He’ll have all the weapons, ammunition, and tactical equipment with him. He has a place to stow things so as not to alert the authorities on either side of the border. We’ll relax here until 2030 hours then drive my Bronco into the US and meet the Vasquezes at 0100.
“You can change into your mission-mode attire at the launch site. For the drive, wear comfortable clothes and keep your IDs with you. By the way, should anyone inquire about our destination and purpose, we’re going fishing at Port Isabel.”
At 8:30 p.m., the three men piled into the Bronco. Wainwright dozed in the backseat for the first leg of the drive then changed places with Wilson when they stopped for something to eat. Amiti refused Wainwright’s offer to take over at the wheel. He said he’d napped earlier and was fine; he preferred to drive. They made good time and pulled into the beach-access road in Port Isabel, Texas, just after midnight.
The Birdmen donned their black jumpsuits and rock-climber shoes. Their heads were topped with knit ski caps and headsets for the scanners. Their jumpsuits had custom pockets designed for the scanners as well as the ammo magazines. Each man wore a shoulder holster, empty of its intended pistol. The group assembled at the beach parking lot at 1:00 a.m., where Rudy reiterated each man’s responsibilities.
“What intelligence do we have on current activities on the Spoiled Yachten?” Wainwright asked Amiti.
“If I had such information, I’d share it with you this instant. Since I don’t, one must assume there is none. Listen, we’re ready to go. Rudy’s brothers are on their way to a rendezvous spot to await his signal when we’re in the air. We’ll be towed behind Rudy’s ultra-quiet outboard to an altitude of about five hundred feet at twenty-five knots.”
“Hey, man. I didn’t know we were goin’ that high. I’ve got a really bad case of acrophobia. If I get sick up there, I could barf those burritos we ate earlier.”
“Well, thank you for that information, Mr. Wilson. What I suggest then...” Amiti turned to José, the rigger. “Put Mr. Wilson in the trailing harness, please.” He flashed Wilson a smile. “I think that’ll take care of it. You’ll be on the longest lead line, so if your prediction should materialize, no one will be next to or below you. You may barf burrito at your behest.”
José had built the towline so each harness was longer than its neighbor. That would prevent the lines from crossing and the men from smashing into one another. As José attached the harness, Rudy supplied each Birdman his weapons and extra magazines. Amiti, always the perfectionist, asked Rudy to run a radio check. Everything was ready. The parasails were on their launch stanchions, the tether attached to the harnesses.
Amiti looked at his comrades as each nodded his approval, and then he gave a wave of his hand. Rudy acknowledged the signal and spoke Spanish into a scanner. In a silent second, tension tightened the tether. The parasails lifted off the stands in order: first Wainwright, then Amiti, and finally Wilson. The Birdmen silently soared off the sand into the lightless night sky, gone from sight.
WAINWRIGHT WAS SLIGHTLY apprehensive as his legs dangled into space under the harness. The gimpy left leg was going numb. José’s contraption had been adapted from a parachute rig. One did not sit in the harness; one hung from it. The leg straps put considerable pressure on his groin. Not that Wainwright was excessively endowed, but a jockstrap and cup would have been an intelligent equipment addition. He wondered if the ol’ shoulder itch was still a useful asset. Nothing, however, itched at the moment.
Wainwright had the short leash on the left side. Amiti flew on the right, his tether five yards longer than Wainwright’s. It wasn’t possible for Wainwright to see either of the other two. Amiti could watch him, however, while Wilson could see both of his Birdmen buddies. That arrangement made Wainwright’s position quiet, dark and lonely. He expected to be very anxious at this point, but as he calmed, he began to enjoy the ride.
There was no way to direct a towed parasail at the end of an 860-foot cable. Wainwright wondered how Wilson was fairing, burrito wise. They’d been in the air for one hour, twenty minutes. Amiti had estimated the time to Spoiled Yachten’s last known position to be less than two hours. The cold evening air moved fast past his face. Wainwright was fully relaxed as he looked ahead for the yacht’s lights. It wasn’t too early to start preparing.
Rudy drove the towboat downwind of the Yachten. He’d release the Birdmen 1,500 yards from the fantail. A marker buoy had been dropped earlier from one of the Zodiacs.
A free-flying parasail has a glide ratio of 9:1. For each foot of altitude, the parasail travels nine feet forward. Once released, the Birdmen would steer their parabolic parachutes onto the heliport deck. This step was critical to the success of the mission. If the Birdmen were released too early, they wouldn’t have enough altitude to reach the heliport. Too late, and they’d overshoot their target. In either case, the mission would be scrubbed, and the Birdmen would take a bath, hoping to be picked up by one of the Zodiacs. The operative word here was hoping.
THEY WERE NOW IN FREE flight.
Geez, that looks a lot more than three-fourths of a mile away, Wainwright thought. Did Rudy release us too soon? Will I make the distance or take a swim? If the boat’s lights were off, Wainwright could miss the yacht altogether. As it turned out, the boat looked like it was ready for a Christmas parade. Lights were ablaze everywhere. Apparently, Armando hadn’t snuffed the yacht’s generator and batteries as planned.
Terrific! What else is going to fail? This is a suicide mission for sure. We’re one for two. Wait—what the hell am I doing? Feeling sorry for myself when Lacey is being held captive. Suck it up, cowboy, and get the job done.
Wainwright reached to jettison the night-vision goggles on his forehead. I wonder if Amiti sees what I’m looking at, he thought, and then the lights on the yacht blinked out. Wainwright smiled. Hallelujah, it’s not going to be like a government project after all.
He heard gunfire. From this altitude, there was no mistaking the sound of automatic weapons. The muzzle flashes shone brightly against the black sea. The bursts seemed to come from several directions but mostly near the front of the yacht. Some below the bow and others far ahead. Diego and Hector are doing their distraction thing. Great. That part of the plan is working too. Now for the rest of it.
Still concerned about the glide slope, Wainwright followed the plan. He pulled down his ski cap into a mask, adjusted his headset,
and placed the night-vision goggles over his eyes. The goggles intensified the ambient light from the sliver of moon so he could clearly see the yacht.
Wainwright placed his Uzi, which hung from a strap around his neck, at parade rest across his chest. He was ready and reached for the steering lines to adjust his direction. The ex-landman judged he was still too high, and drifting. He needed to correct course; the heliport deck was coming up at him much faster than he’d expected. It was coming up very fast, too damn fast. As he pulled the lines again to move to the right of center, he feared the hard surface of the deck was about to smack him in the face—or worse, damage the gimpy leg he’d gotten in Nam and put him out of commission. Wainwright pulled both lines hard. The chute stalled fifteen feet off the deck and dropped him to the surface with a deafening thud. He rolled to his right, gathering the lines and canopy as fast as he could to clear the area for Amiti’s landing. His left leg seemed to hold up okay.
Amiti was there immediately. It looked to Wainwright that the Assassin had strolled onto the deck. No tuck, no roll, no dropping in from a leg-breaking height. Amiti walked on, pulling his chute lines into his chest then standing next to where Wainwright lay. They both looked aft for Wilson’s approach.
Wilson made it but not as gracefully as Amiti. Still, his landing wasn’t as clumsy as Wainwright’s landing. Fortunately, Wilson had retained his burrito. After the Birdmen tossed their parasails into the water, Wainwright and Wilson followed Amiti below to the saloon deck. Each man had a responsibility to cover a particular section of the yacht. Wainwright’s assignment was the saloon and forward staterooms, followed by the bridge. Amiti and Wilson proceed to theirs.
The saloon was empty. Cigarette butts filled the ashtrays, but they were cold. Nobody cleaned up after playing cards. Slobs! It looked like the crew had smoked a carton of cigarettes and drunk a case of beer. Wainwright moved forward. Beyond the saloon was a head (a toilet to landlubbers). Two staterooms lay beyond, one on either side of the narrow companionway. The crew’s quarters were straight ahead at the bow. Because of the confined space, Wainwright kept the Uzi across his chest and drew the handgun. He pulled the silencer from its pocket in his jumpsuit, attaching it to the pistol as he moved. According to the memorized blueprints, the first door on his right was the head. With the silenced pistol in his right hand, he turned the knob with his left. As it unlatched, he brought the Glock into firing position then yanked the door open. Had anyone been on the toilet, Wainwright’s appearance would have scared the crap out of them—perhaps literally—but the small space was unoccupied.
Wainwright quietly closed the door and turned to the compartment to his left. He stopped moving when he heard the unmistakable putt, putt, putt of a suppressed Uzi, although he couldn’t tell whether it had come from the bridge deck above or the deck that housed staterooms and the captain’s suite below. The stealth approach was now just a wishful thought.
The door to the crew’s quarters burst open. Three men tried to exit at the same time into the passageway where Wainwright stood. It was hard to say who were more surprised: Wainwright or the men. Wainwright took the initiative—dropping to one knee, he fired two quick taps. He hit the lead man in the forehead, who fell at once, exposing the second man behind him. He stumbled over his dead comrade and caught himself with a hand on the bulkhead, the other holding the doorknob. Wainwright’s second round hit him in the chest, putting him out of commission. The final man, smarter than his companions, ducked back into the compartment to close the door. It didn’t close completely, however, due to the bodies piled in the doorway. Wainwright sent a slug through the thin composite door, piercing the man’s abdomen. The projectile’s path passed through folds of the man’s small intestine and several of the large gut. It exited through his back, above the fifth lumbar vertebra. If he didn’t bleed out in the next few minutes, peritonitis would kill him in days.
Wainwright checked two other compartments. Although he found them empty, they seemed to have been occupied not that long ago. The occupants of these cabins might be on duty on the bridge. So, as that was his next section assignment, he headed for the ladder to the bridge deck. More gunfire sounded from above as he climbed. Looking up, he saw Amiti standing over the fallen bodies of two crewmen. A third large man, who didn’t look like he had any naval inclinations at all, lay next to them. The crew wore uniforms. The thug wore Bermuda shorts, a Lionel Richie T-shirt, and flip-flops. An Uzi machine pistol lay on the deck in front of the hoodlum’s sprawled, broken body, while a Mossad assault knife protruded through the palm of his hand. As Amiti bent to retrieve the knife, he acknowledged Wainwright with a nod then sucked in a deep breath.
“Looks like you have things well in hand,” Wainwright said. “Pun intended. Any sign of Lacey here?”
Amiti pointed with his chin at the disfigured body at his feet. “Big Boy here didn’t give up any information willingly. But after we chatted, he said Murtagh took Lacey off the yacht in the helicopter a couple of hours ago. They left about the time we were getting airborne. We are, as you Yanks say, a day late and a dollar short.”
There was no reason for anyone to stay on the bridge, except a mortician perhaps. Wainwright and Amiti went below, looking for Wilson. They didn’t find him on the stateroom deck but located him in the engine room. He too had amassed a collection of bodies: two crewmen and three bodyguards. Wilson, however, had taken a bullet to his thigh. Fortunately, it had missed the femoral artery. The wound was a through and through, not fatal if they quickly got him some medical treatment.
“A luxury yacht such as this will have a significant first-aid stash, if not a dispensary,” Amiti said. “I’ll go find some medical supplies. Can you tend some first aid to Mr. Wilson as best you can?”
After Wilson was bandaged, they called in Rudy to extricate the team from the yacht and get Wilson to a doctor who wouldn’t ask any questions; Amiti had plenty of contacts in that department. Amiti set the timers on the demolition charges they’d brought for this occasion. Everyone off-loaded to the towboat, which rapidly pulled away from the Spoiled Yachten. As they all looked aft, the explosion wasn’t as loud as they might have expected. The fire, however, was spectacular.
Flames were shooting out the lower deck portholes. That was the first sign of fire. Soon after that, flames spread to the galley and up to the saloon level. Wainwright was surprised that there was no smoke. The fire was so intense that the smoke was consumed by it even before it could form. Even at this distance, they could feel the heat of the flames in the towboat. Without smoke, there was no odor of a fire. They could see the paint blister and bubble off the portside outer plates.
But there was color, colors that Wainwright had seen before. The colors of a coma. The vibrant reds grew out of white-hot white. Every shade of the red range found in nature was there. Reds and oranges growing higher, taking more and still more of the superstructure. Who would have thought a boat would burn so brightly? And then they heard a loud crack as her keel snapped in two.
Wainwright, along with everyone else that occupied the towboat, felt a silent reverence as they watched the death throes of this beautiful vessel. Before the Spoiled Yachten was out of view, she nosed over and slid into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, never again to sail.
“WELCOME HOME, STRANGER. You don’t look like the cervezas and tacos have done you too much harm. Should I know anything about a certain nefarious trip to a nearby foreign country for unknown purposes?” Greg asked after Wainwright buzzed him into the condo.
Standing in the foyer, Greg had slapped Wainwright on his left shoulder, reminding him of his itch signal. “Well, sure, you can ask. The relevant question is ‘Should I tell?’”
“Spill it, cowboy. Inquiring minds want to know.”
Wainwright gave his FBI pal the story in outline form, quickly and point by point without a lot of detail in between.
“Lacey wasn’t there. Neither was her abductor. Murtagh’s hacienda had only one thing of interest. E
rnest Cruz was there.” Wainwright moved around Greg, closer to the door as he continued. “He was strapped to a chair, and someone—Murtagh would be my first and last guess—had splattered his brains all over the wall behind him. Cruz has made that long final trip: Oakland to Monterrey to the eternal fires of hell.
“Anyway, Murtagh split with Lacey before we got on the yacht. He’s being tipped off about us in advance. On the trip in from Laredo, Wilson and I were stopped at an army checkpoint. They might have been the ones who called in an alert. It seems everyone in Monterrey is on Murtagh’s payroll. When we got to Murtagh’s hacienda, the muscle was on high alert and was looking to take us out.” Wainwright paused, rubbing his Nam-scarred thigh. He was debating if he should reveal this part of the story to his FBI pal. “And they would have, but—you have to forget I told you this part—the Assassin saved my life.”
Greg’s eyes widened. “Our assassin? Ariel Amiti? That Assassin?”
“You got it. He was there backing us up. Honestly, I’m a bit confused about the guy. He put a crossbow bolt in the head of a thug who had my face zeroed in for oblivion. We spent a couple of intense days together. He isn’t what you might expect. Amiti’s a decent enough guy. He’s—never mind.”
“Go ahead. Shoot, man.”
Wainwright shook his head. “All this will sound like an amnesia symptom, and before I know it, I’ll find myself in a psych ward or jail.”
“Garth, we’re off the record here. You know you can trust me, don’t you?”
“Sure, I guess.” He sighed. “Look, Greg. Consider what’s been going on with me. Lacey being lost in the crash, the amnesia, the Trinity stuff, and then Stacy’s story. Now add in that my life was saved by the guy we’ve been chasing since Rubens’s murder. It’s...it’s just been way too much.”
“Well, to be candid, you look like a train wreck. Maybe you’re letting all this get to...oh, for the love of God, who wouldn’t be beat up by all this? I’m sorry—I know you have a very full plate right now.”
Inside Moves Page 18