Silent Running

by Don Pendleton

  “Have you cleared that with Havana, Comrade?” the Vietnamese asked.

  “They have given me complete freedom of action,” Garcia snapped. “This is my operation, and I will run it as I see fit.”

  The Vietnamese agent had been concerned about the mental stability of his leader for some time and knew that Havana was aware of it, as well. Right before they launched, Elena Martinez had shown him an encoded message from the DGI saying that she was to keep an eye on Garcia and to report back immediately if he appeared unable to handle the job. As the second in command of Matador Section, Nguyen knew that he would be ordered to step up to the number-one slot should the Cuban be forcefully retired.

  He hadn’t been in contact with the woman this day, though, and didn’t know if she was as concerned about the situation as he was. He had heard something about her having gone downtown alone the previous night to try to track down one of the prisoners who had escaped from the jail. It wasn’t like Garcia to have been so lax as to have allowed that.

  That Elena had gone out alone to rectify the situation was in character, however. The woman was one of the most dangerous people he had ever known. That she was still out of communication wasn’t a good sign, and it put him in a quandary.

  Martinez was the Cuban president’s personal representative in the Matador Section of his own DGI—spy was actually a better term. She had the man’s ear, and her sleeping with Garcia meant that nothing he did or thought was kept secret from the Cuban leader. The president also used her as a conduit to make his wishes known without having to put them down on paper. When it came to Matador operations, nothing was ever committed to paper, or to a hard drive, either, for that matter. That was how the Matador Section had been able to plan and execute this operation without a word about it ever getting out.

  That was the main strength of the Matador operations, but it was also their greatest weakness. Until he heard back from Martinez, he had to play ball with a man who was rapidly losing his mind.

  “Of course, Comrade,” Nguyen said smoothly. “You are correct. When do you want me to come back into the harbor for the pickup?”

  “When the eye of the hurricane passes over us here. I will have the doctors waiting so they can be quickly boarded and we can put back out to sea.”

  “The radar is showing the eye coming on us quickly,” Nguyen said. “I’d give it under an hour.”

  “Very good. We will be standing by, ready for you.”

  “I will be there.”

  HAL BROGNOLA and Hector de Lorenzo stayed with Lieutenant Simon Villa’s team as they worked their way deeper down the peninsula into hotel row. Rather than engage the terrorists at each resort they passed, under de Lorenzo’s orders they were acting more like a recon team gathering information. In particular, the A.G. wanted to know about the movements around the Hotel Maya in hopes of getting an idea what Garcia would be doing next. Mendez’s Panthers were still hung up at the end of the bridge, and it didn’t look as though they would be breaking out anytime soon.

  When they reached the Maya, the grounds were swarming with Cuban troops. Trucks were lined up outside the entrance, and the Cubans were loading them.

  “Something’s sure as hell going on over there,” Brognola said as he counted the third flatbed truck to pull up in front of the hotel.

  When a large group of civilians was led out of the hotel under guard and put into the first truck, it was obvious what the Cuban was doing. Garcia was moving his pawns on the board.

  “He’s moving the hostages,” de Lorenzo said.

  “But where?” Brognola growled.

  “Let’s find out. There’s only so many places he can move that many people. Oh shit!”

  “What?” Brognola asked.

  “I think he’s taking them to the cruise ship pier. That’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “Those two Americans we ran into said that their ship was docked there,” Brognola said. “And if he’s putting the hostages back on that ship, that means he’s planning to pull out, doesn’t it?”

  “With the Panther battalion across the bridge, it might be the only move left for him.”

  “Can the ship survive in this kind of weather?”

  “I’m sure that it already put to sea before the storm hit to ride it out far from shore. But…”

  De Lorenzo cast an eye to the east. “I think he’s going to try to bring the ship back in and make his break when the eye passes over.”

  “If you’re right, he’ll make a clean escape.”

  “I’m sorry,” de Lorenzo said, “but when he’s gone, it should be easier to free the rest of your countrymen being held here, and there’s thousands of them.”

  Lieutenant Villa turned to the Mexican official, his eyes hard. “Do you want us to try to stop the trucks and rescue those people?” he asked.

  “No,” Brognola interjected. “We can’t risk any shooting around the hostages.”

  The young officer wasn’t quite clear what the relationship was between the two men. In his mind, being a Mexican government official, de Lorenzo should be calling the shots. But for some reason, he kept deferring to the gringo. This was well over his command level, so he’d just do what either one of them told him.

  “We can go down to the docks and try to get a closer look at what he’s doing,” de Lorenzo suggested.

  “Good idea,” Brognola replied.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Juan Gomez didn’t have to be a graduate of Cuba’s military academy to know that Diego Garcia’s elaborate scheme to change the political landscape of Latin America was swiftly coming unraveled. As far as he was concerned, the dream of a sudden strike to overthrow the Mexican government had been just that, a dream. Admittedly, it had been a good dream for a dedicated revolutionary, but even with the Chinese support that had been promised, it hadn’t been very realistic. And after his long career, if there was anything that Gomez prided himself on, it was being realistic.

  Nonetheless, he had gone along with the Matador leader because he had dedicated his life to being a soldier of the glorious revolution, and he always followed his orders. He was proud to have been able to fight the Yankees and their puppet allies in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East for more than twenty years. He’d often lost those battles, but it was the only life he knew and the only one he wanted to know. He was a soldier, and he wouldn’t run now that things had turned against him again. He would do his duty to the revolution as he had always done, and that meant killing as many of the enemies of the people as he could.

  The Mexican troops didn’t bother him; killing them was just a matter of doing business. They were just fighting for their own motherland. He could understand that and would kill them like the soldiers they were. His real enemies were the Yankees who had escaped and who were bushwhacking his men in the town. That was an old game to him, and he had learned to play it well in Africa. Cancun was far from the jungles of Angola, but the game was played the same, man to man, the hunter and the prey, and he was good at it.

  Before he could face his enemies, though, he had to cover the withdrawal of Diego Garcia, the Matador command group and the loading of the hostages back onto the cruise ship. With the Mexican troops across the lagoon and gaining a foothold on the peninsula, it made good tactical sense for them to leave. Cancun couldn’t be held indefinitely and the second part of the plan still needed to be carried out. If it were not, this would all have been a complete exercise in futility.

  Even though he had been ordered to cover the withdrawal, Gomez didn’t feel that he was being abandoned. Not only would his presence stiffen the spines of the Matador fighters, he’d had about all he could take of listening to Garcia’s ravings. He didn’t know what had gone wrong with the man he’d followed for so long, but he had changed.

  Garcia had once been the most audacious fighter he had ever known, but something had been wrong about the handling of this operation from the start. Earlier he had felt that the Martinez woma
n had had something to do with the Matador leader’s frame of mind, but after she’d been killed, he had become even more unfocused. The big question now was if he and the Vietnamese had the cajones to pull off the rest of the operation by themselves without him around to keep them focused. But that wasn’t his worry now; he had a real man’s work to do.

  Gomez grabbed a full chestpack magazine carrier and headed out to take personal command of the rearguard fighters. It was fitting that the storm had come upon them because a storm always favored an experienced hunter. He had stood against storms of nature and man-made storms of fire and steel, and neither of them had ever slowed him. His prey would be cowering under cover shelter, but the hunter only concerned himself with making his kill.

  Gomez’s prey was out there cowering from nature when the most dangerous thing on the planet was after them.

  THE NIGHT THEY’D BEEN rescued, Richard Spellman and Mary Hamilton had not come across any of the other people their rescuers had said would be in hiding. Maybe it was because they had been too frightened to approach them in the dark. As day broke, they continued their search, also with no results, but when the wind rose they became concerned for their safety from the storm. When they stumbled onto a small, isolated hut on the beach south of the resorts, they decided to take shelter in it to ride out the storm and to wait for the promised Marines to arrive.

  Spellman figured that it would be difficult to miss a Marine amphibious landing force hitting the beach with their armored vehicles while gunships circled overhead. When they saw the Stars and Stripes waving proudly, they’d come out of hiding with their hands in the air and be safe at last.

  “The storm might hold them up a little, though,” Spellman told his companion. “I don’t think their amphibs can swim through this kind of surf. But as long as our little house doesn’t blow down, we should be okay.”

  Just then, a gust of wind shook the walls of the hut and Spellman wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He was doing his best to hide the fact that he was scared witless, which usually translated into him running his mouth.

  He moved closer to Hamilton and put his arm around her. If he had to be trapped by a storm, at least he had a worthy companion to be trapped with. He really hoped that they survived all of this as he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

  LIEUTENANT VILLA WAS UNDER orders to let de Lorenzo and the gringo call the shots, but that didn’t mean that he was going to let them do something terminally stupid. Being the officer in command of the security unit that allowed the attorney general of Mexico to get himself killed wouldn’t be a good career move, and he had plans to do well in the army. But they wanted to follow the trucks, so he led the two civilians down to the port.

  As he had hoped, the port offered little in the way of close-in cover and concealment, but provided a hiding place a hundred yards away where they could safely watch for the cruise ship. They had just gotten undercover when the first of the trucks full of hostages pulled up at the pier.

  “You called it right,” de Lorenzo told Brognola.

  “Damn. I wish to hell I’d been wrong this time.”

  “Now we wait for the break in the storm.”

  The sudden calm that came with the eye of the storm passing over Cancun was as if the hand of God had swept down to still the wind and waters. First the winds died down to a light breeze and then the sun blindingly broke through. It was as if the hurricane had never been, and even the birds took to the air again. A glance at the eastern horizon, though, showed a wall of black shot through with lightning flashes as a reminder that this hiatus was just that.

  “How long is this going to last?” Brognola asked.

  “Half an hour to an hour.”

  “But where’s the ship?”

  “It should be coming out of the stormfront anytime now,” de Lorenzo said. “She would have had to run for open water to keep from being battered against the dock.”

  “A ship that big can’t ride it out at moorage?”

  The Mexican pointed to the smaller yacht marina at the other end of the harbor. “See what happens when you try to ride out a storm like that in a harbor.”

  What had once been a nice collection of very expensive private boats had been reduced to mostly sunken wreckage. A few broken hulls had been thrown onto the beach, and the floating debris field stretched for several hundred yards. “Even the larger ships have to get out of the way so their hulls don’t get crushed.”

  Villa had been watching the horizon through his field glasses and was the first to spot the Carib Princess. “I think she’s coming.”

  “Let me see,” Brognola asked.

  Villa handed over his field glasses and Brognola put them to his eyes. The bright sun made the vessel’s white hull almost gleam. Were it not for the fact that the cruise ship was full of American hostages, it would have been a beautiful sight suitable for a TV commercial hawking a fun-in-the-sun cruise.

  Four trucks loaded with drenched civilians were waiting by the time the SS Carib Princess tied up at the pier. The deck of the cruise ship was spotted with a couple dozen well-armed gunmen as the gangplank was put down. A wet, bedraggled collection of men, a few women and kids were taken off the trucks, hurried up the gangplank and taken belowdecks. As soon as a truck was offloaded, it returned to the hotel to collect more hostages.

  Brognola burned with frustration at being helpless, but there was nothing he could do. De Lorenzo and their five-man escort wasn’t enough to do anything useful. But even if the entire Panther battalion was on hand, the presence of the hostages would keep them from acting. He had devoted his life to trying to prevent things such as this, but now that he was actually witnessing American citizens being led into captivity, he could do nothing.

  De Lorenzo heard his friend swearing under his breath, but said nothing. He knew what was bothering him, but this was a time when a man needed to be alone with his cursing.

  NEITHER RICHARD SPELLMAN nor Mary Hamilton had ever been through a hurricane before so they had no idea how long it was supposed to last. When the fury seemed to diminish, it gave them hope that the worst was past.

  “Richard,” Hamilton said, “it sounds like the wind isn’t blowing as strong as it was before.”

  “You’re right,” Spellman replied. “It sounds like it’s dying down a bit.”

  Hamilton looked through a gap around the shutter covering the single window. “And it’s getting lighter outside. Maybe we should try to find a better place to hide.”

  She had a good point. Their little shelter wouldn’t have inspired confidence even had the wind not been blowing. Plus, it was in the open and would surely be searched if the terrorists spotted it.

  “Good idea.”

  They opened the door and stepped out onto the sand. Spellman was stunned to see how quickly the sky was brightening. From what he had remembered from watching TV news coverage of hurricanes wiping out Florida, he’d thought that they usually lasted longer than this. But maybe a hurricane in the tropics was somehow different.

  Since they’d jumped ship in the dark, he didn’t have a good idea of where they were in relation to the center of town. He remembered that one of the Americans the previous night had told them to go south. Finding the sun through the thinning clouds, he took off in what he thought was the right direction.

  When they reached the edge of the built-up area, Hamilton took over the lead again. Not only did she speak Spanish, anyone seeing a woman wouldn’t automatically open fire. When they heard a vehicle approach in the street, they took no chances and ducked into an alley and waited for it to pass.

  It turned out to be an SUV with black-clad gunmen on board, and when it stopped, the two fugitives slipped deeper into the alley. Looking for a way out, Hamilton went to the end and peered around the corner.

  “Oh, God, Richard,” she said. “There’s more of them.”

  Spellman risked a peek himself and saw the sandbagged machine-gun emplacement manned by a couple dozen black-
clad terrorists. They were blocked in.

  Spellman was turning when he caught sight of a figure from the corner of his eye and a rifle butt slammed him in the side. Hamilton screamed.

  When Spellman got to his feet, four men were holding guns on them while an older man who looked to be the man in charge approached.

  Gomez wasn’t fooled by the now dirty cook whites the pair wore. The jackets had the name of the ship sewn on them, but there was no way these two were from the ship’s crew. They were fat-faced Anglos.

  “When did you escape?” he asked in accented English.

  “The first night,” Spellman gasped.

  Gomez laughed. “You should have stayed hidden, Yankee. You might have lived longer.”

  Gomez pointed to four of his men. “Take them back to the ship,” he said in Spanish. “See that’s she’s put with the other women and find a good place to hold him. I don’t want him to get loose again.”

  “Yes, Comrade.”

  “I love you, Richard,” Hamilton cried as two men led her away.

  Another rifle butt to the belly kept Spellman from answering her.

  WHEN THE GUNMEN started pulling up the gangplank, Brognola was ready to go back to the hotel to wait for Striker to catch up with him. The show was over, and a sorry-assed spectacle it had been. He was turning away when de Lorenzo grabbed his arm.

  “Hal!” he said. “Look.”

  Brognola turned and saw two people in white uniforms being escorted onto the ship. “Ah, shit!”

  “They didn’t find a good enough place to hide,” de Lorenzo said.

  “Shit!”

  AS SOON AS the last truckload of hostages had been hurried aboard the Carib Princess and secured in the holding areas, Diego Garcia stormed into the bridge of the cruise ship with his headquarters staff.

  “Get us under way immediately,” he told Nguyen Cao Nguyen. “The Mexicans might have long-range weapons, and I can’t risk the ship taking any damage.”