by Patrick Dent
“Five months later, I hit bottom. Not literally, of course. We were in the Gulf of Tonkin, twenty klicks east of Haiphong. Our mission was a routine missile launch, not entirely dissimilar to our current assignment. We had been running a blockade for three months, and the ship was overdue for routine maintenance. The missile launchers in particular were questionable.
“Now you know the Navy. They're ultra conservative when it comes to scheduled maintenance. I just knew those launchers were fine. My silver leaf wasn't even broken in and I already had my sites set on Captain. I wasn't about to let some pencil pusher stand between me and the Full Bird. I ignored the maintenance notice. I remember feeling… superior, godlike. I tell you, there's nothing like being at sea. My ship felt like my own country, and I was the leader.
“So, I ordered the launch. That strike would have been our twenty-first in thirty days – a new record. The men were exhausted, but spirits were high. I thought I was the most motivated commander in the Navy. But, the illusion didn't last long.
“One of the launchers malfunctioned. The man monitoring the pressure for that hydraulic unit was exhausted and didn't notice when the pressure began to build. A pump exploded, and damned near ignited one of our missiles. Had that happened, the statistics predicted 50% casualties and the ship lost.
“The primary explosion killed two men. Another suffered burns over ninety percent of his body. That man, Jenkins, is still in the naval hospital at Norfolk, and the odds are he'll never set foot outside a hospital again.” Rymes' eyes welled with tears as he spoke. “I tell you, there're no words to describe how I felt when I had to write those three letters.
“I visited Jenkins' family. I cried in their living room as I explained how my ambition was the reason their son would spend the rest of his life in bed, a mutilated husk of what he was meant to be. To this day, I can still see the look in his father's eyes when he told me he forgave me. In a way, I think his forgiveness was more painful to me than the incident itself. If he had caused my son to become horribly disfigured, I don't think I could have forgiven him.
“I was reduced in rank to Lieutenant Commander and stationed stateside – Norfolk.”
Though no human possessed the words to give solace to this tormented man, Killian felt like he had to try. “Sir, I can't imagine what you're feeling, but I do know the Navy has seen fit to give you another command. You won't make the same mistake again. Besides, we are at war. Over fifty thousand American boys have died in Vietnam. They all had families. You couldn't possibly have known. Who knows how many lives you saved by ordering the launch? Think of the infantry and cavalry troops stationed around Haiphong. Think of the NVA who couldn't get Soviet supplies because of your attack.”
“Joe, you're right about one thing,” Rymes said, “You can't imagine.”
* * *
Tarfaya Bay, Morocco
Gip's senses were heightened as he scanned the deck for any signs of movement or hiding places. There were none. The only sounds were the occasional seagull squawks and the incessant slamming together of the two boats. Drake broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Gip, you go aft and look for a hatch. I'm going down there.” Drake pointed toward the hatch that had saved Jorge from the barrage of bullets. Drake hurried to the hatch, but stopped himself short of the entrance, counted to three, and flung himself into the unknown.
Gip jogged down the side of the pitching and yawing boat, holding his weapon above his head with both hands to maintain his balance. Even so, his finger was pressed against the trigger guard. His training was ingrained to the fine-muscle memory level. His fingers knew exactly what to do with a weapon without conscious thought. They maintained the shortest possible, safe speed-to-draw.
When he reached the aft, he hesitated for a second before he swung into the opening of the hatch, leading with the barrel of his weapon. His eye detected motion and notified his finger even before his brain. He automatically aimed center-mass and pulled the trigger, spraying his bullets in a spiral pattern. Although he had extensive training with fully automatic M-16's, the recoil of the Uzi took him by surprise. The 'rise and run' effect was greatly exaggerated in the eight-inch mini-gun. The bright light of the muzzle flash assaulted his eyes, momentarily blinding him. Bullets flew wildly, ricocheting throughout the corridor below. He involuntarily blinked and backed away from the hatch.
* * *
Drake leapt into the fore hatchway, ready to fire. Seeing nothing, he relieved the two pounds of pressure he was exerting on the five-pound trigger, and moved his finger back outside the trigger guard. The day was overcast, so his eyes adjusted easily to the darkness below. He cautiously crept down the steel steps, his eyes darting back, forth, up and down. He was in a hallway, with rooms looking like the crew's quarters along either side. Adrenaline coursed through his system as he began the repetitive drill of throwing himself gun first into each opening, never knowing if each lunge would be the last action of his life.
* * *
Gip leapt into the doorway of the aft hatch. He braced himself by holding the left railing as he slid down the steep stairs. He pointed his Uzi into the darkness as he descended. When he saw something that was not steel, he almost fired again, but caught himself in time. There were two bodies lying at the base of the stairs. That's six down, two to go, he thought. I wish I could let Drake know. We should have brought radios. Forgetting the radios was a typical rookie mistake, and Gip was ashamed. He didn't want to let the General down.
As he descended the stairs he realized that the number of targets still alive was irrelevant. They must search every square inch of the boat in any case. Who was to say there wasn't a mistake or an outright lie in the manifest? He saw motion again, but knew he couldn't fire upon just anything that moved anymore. Drake was somewhere down here with him. Gip's eyes were still spotty from the muzzle flash, putting him at something of a disadvantage.
“Drake!” he called out. If he didn't have an answer within a millisecond, his finger was ready to send half a magazine of lead down the corridor.
“Gip!” Drake shouted back.
“How many down?” Gip asked.
“Four above deck. I haven't seen anyone down here yet.”
“I got two just inside the aft hatch.”
“Okay, just two left. I'll go down first. From here on, we stick together,” Drake said, indicating the hatchway that led to the cargo holds.
At the bottom of the ladder, they found themselves in another corridor much like the one on the crew deck, except this time the rooms on either side looked more like horse stalls, or prison cells. Each room was barred in front, with solid walls between. Drake and Gip stood back-to-back and crept along the passageway. The rooms were all filled with greenish yellow cargo.
“Bananas! Damn it! Drake, we're on the wrong boat!” Gip exclaimed.
“Let's discuss this after we clear the deck, Okay?” There was just the slightest hint of tension in Drake's voice.
There were twenty rooms on each side of the hallway. They moved cautiously, backs pressed together, forming a gun toting, four-legged spider. Each cargo hold they passed brought the threat of instant death. Gip heard his heart pounding in his ears. He had to hold the Uzi with both hands to steady it.
Near the middle of the corridor, the bananas in cargo hold fourteen began to explode in Drake's face. Gip, once again blinded by a muzzle flash - this time not his own - opened fire into hold fifteen across the hall. He didn't release the trigger until his magazine was empty. Once the Uzi had spent its leaden contents, he couldn't see a thing, but he didn't need his eyes to reload. Fearing a double flank ambush, Gip kept his attention on the starboard hold. After a couple of extremely long and worrisome seconds, Gip looked over his shoulder to see a Hispanic man lying in a pile of badly ruptured bananas. He was barely alive. Gip was blinking madly, trying to force the giant purple spot out of the center of his field of vision.
“In, let's go!” Drake whispered urgently.
&nbs
p; Gip entered cargo hold fifteen and turned to face the door, a new clip already inserted, locked and loaded. Although his vision was impaired, he still detected motion, and he didn't have to worry about shooting Drake by accident. Anything he saw would immediately be on the receiving end of a steady stream of 9mm lead.
* * *
Drake removed Jorge's .45 automatic and placed it squarely in the center of the man's forehead. He was badly hit. His shirt was soaked in organ blood that looked black in the poor lighting. He made a constant gurgling sound, accompanied by the signature whistle of a sucking chest wound – a punctured lung. Without immediate attention, the man's remaining good lung would collapse, rendering him instantly mute and instantly useless.
Drake took the man's cigarette pack out of his breast pocket and removed the cellophane wrapper. He then forced the victim to sit up, causing excruciating agony as the air trapped in the wounded lung was forced out through the bullet hole. When Jorge was almost able to touch his toes, Drake pressed the cellophane against the hole, sealing the lung in an airless state. He allowed Jorge to sit back up. The suction would hold the cellophane in place long enough. This crude first aid would buy the man a few minutes of life - of talking.
“Where are the girls?” Drake asked. His face looked unusually pale in the lighting, accentuating the effect of coldness he emitted. The combination of stress, fear and pain had blessed Drake with a partial neurological shutdown. This self defense mechanism kept his mind functioning. In this stripped state, Drake's mind was devoid of emotion. No fear, no fatigue, no remorse.
“Go to hell!” Jorge replied in heavily accented English. He tried to spit in Drake's face, but he didn't have the wind.
“Drake, what if we got the wrong ship?” Gip asked over his shoulder.
“We don't have the wrong ship. Why was this asshole shooting at us? Huh?”
“Because we killed everyone else, Man! What would you do?” Gip said.
“Well, I think our new friend wants to tell us all about the girls. Hey asshole! Where did the bananas come from? Where are the girls? You know what I'm talking about!”
“Brazil,” Jorge sighed.
“The girls are in Brazil?”
“The bananas… are from Brazil,” Jorge replied between wheezes.
“Where are the girls?” Drake repeated, knowing he didn't have much time.
“What girls? We are delivering bananas… Why is the Harbor Patrol doing this?”
Drake had forgotten the uniforms and boat they had acquired from the newly rich Harbor Patrol team.
“We're not Harbor Patrol. We work for enormously powerful people who want those girls.” As Drake spoke, he hovered his left index finger above a bullet wound in Jorge's thorax.
“Please don't hurt me. I don't know… what you are talking about.”
“Wrong answer,” Drake said icily as he inserted his finger into Jorge's liver up to the knuckle and began to wiggle it roughly.
Jorge did not respond. The dead seldom do.
* * *
After a thorough search of the rest of the boat, Drake and Gip had found no traces of the missing man or the girls. They checked the identifications on the seven bodies and concluded that Fejo had been the man they saw on the bridge and he had somehow escaped. No lifeboats were missing, however. If this Fejo swam through two miles of ten-foot seas, he was one tough son of a bitch. Most likely, he had drowned. What was most baffling was the absence of the girls. Had Felipe lied to them, causing them to murder seven innocent people? The ship's log showed nothing unusual. They did find one bit of potentially important information, a name and a place – Falon, Shaqra.
“Well?” Gip asked, “Where the hell are the girls?”
“I have no idea, but whatever Falon and Shaqra are, that's where we're headed. Let's get the hell out of here.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Southern Morocco
Lupe's eyes opened to complete darkness. She blinked, hoping to jump-start her vision. It didn't work. As the chemically induced stupor wore off, she became aware of movement. But, there was something different about this movement. It was bumpy; not like the gentle motion of the ship where she had spent the last week. She also noticed she could not move her arms or legs. The scent of unwashed bodies and excreta was strong. When she tried to stand, she realized she was hog tied with ropes that bit into the soft flesh of her wrists and ankles. After a brief struggle, she decided staying put was the least painful option.
There were bodies on all sides of her, and she heard the deep breathing of many people. A jarring bump lifted her several inches off the floor, causing her head to land on another person's hipbone. A truck, she thought, now I'm on a truck. The impact of the bump woke many of the other girls, some of whom began screaming in Portuguese.
For a time period that seemed about a week, she had paced her small cell on the boat, wondering where she was being taken and for what purpose. She had overheard the other girls, dozens of them, frantically discussing their situation. Unfortunately, there wasn't an English-speaking girl within earshot of her cell. She had no idea whether her friends had befallen the same fate as she. If Susan and Becky had escaped the kidnappers, the authorities might already be searching for her. What authorities, though? No one knew where she was.
With no clock and no window, it was difficult for Lupe to mark the passage of time. She had slept when exhaustion asserted itself over her nervous tension. She had eaten when her would-be rapist gave her bread, cheese and water. There was nothing to remind her of life as she knew it – not even toilet paper. She was in a world so alien that she shut down emotionally. Lupe simply stayed alive, one minute at a time.
A child of a US Congressman, she had enjoyed a pampered life, keeping her virginity until her freshman year at UCLA. Even then, she had dated Bobby for three months before they made love. That day was special to her, and she had planned to cherish it forever. It was the first time for both of them, an unusual occurrence in an era when free love was sweeping the nation. Now, she associated the act of lovemaking with filth. Even the word 'lovemaking' disgusted her. She had been reduced to living as an animal, knowing that at any moment she could find herself at the sexual whim of a mindless and brutal monster.
The language barrier had prevented her from communicating with the girls around her. Now, they were all in the same compartment. She drew a deep breath and called out. “Susan! Becky! It's Lupe! Are you here?”
At first, there was no response other than the foreign chirping of the thirty-five Brazilian girls. After an unbearable pause, she heard the first friendly sound in over a week.
“Lupe! It's Becky. Where are you?”
“I don't know. I'm tied up and it's dark. Can you see anything? Have you seen Susan?”
“I can't see anything. What the hell is happening? Where are we?”
“I don't know,” Lupe shouted. Becky heard the tension in Lupe's voice.
Just then, Lupe's body was thrust toward the front of the trailer as the driver locked up the brakes. She rolled; banging her temple on the metal floor so hard she had to strain to maintain consciousness. The entire front of her head immediately exploded in pain. By the time the truck came to a halt, all thirty-eight girls were piled on top of each other in the front quarter of the trailer. Everyone seemed to be awake and screaming in panic. Lupe wasn't sure, but she thought her right arm had been dislocated in the process.
She gasped for air, but the closeness around her face and the weight of bodies on her torso impeded her breathing. She developed instant claustrophobia. If her limbs had not been bound, she could easily have thrown all the other girls into the air. As it was, she violently flexed every muscle in her body in vain. Her wrists and ankles screamed out in agony as she struggled. She felt consciousness slipping away from her.
Abruptly, the back doors opened, flooding the trailer with bright light. A man shouted something in Portuguese and many of the other girls became instantly quiet. The man repeated himself,
punctuating his sentence with the cocking of his gun. The trailer became silent.
Although Lupe was blinded by the sudden invasion of light, she discerned the speaker and one other climbing into the back of the truck. They spent several minutes roughly jerking the girls out of their situation. One of the men grabbed Lupe by the rope binding her wrists and yanked her free of the pile. Her injured arm screamed in pain.
Although she had felt no emotions other than fear and rage in the past week, she felt a gushing sensation in her body and mind – the sensation of gratitude. She wanted to thank the man for so kindly restoring something she had taken for granted her entire life – the ability to breathe.
Lupe took in enormous gulps of air. In the harsh light she saw dozens of girls, all hog-tied as she was. The one man she was able to see was fat and vile, with a huge black mustache extended below his lower lip. She heard the other man utter a phrase that was neither English nor Portuguese - possibly Arabic. The fat one stood inside the doors as his accomplice closed him inside with them. Although Lupe didn't understand what he said next, she got the message loud and clear. The man's gun was a good communicator. There would be no more talking. She lay quiet, more confused and afraid than ever.
* * *
The Kechla Citadel, Northern Morocco
“Tartus, the shipment is secured in the cellar – thirty eight girls in all.” Falon stroked his goatee as he spoke. As usual, he had handled all the details of meeting The Lady and the Tramp to extract the girls and fill the cargo hold with bananas. This subterfuge worked flawlessly, preventing any potentially dangerous encounters with Moroccan Customs. The girls were put to sleep and tightly bound before being transferred to Falon's private boat, while well-bribed Harbor Patrol agents looked the other way. He then took them to his personal pier and loaded them into the back of an eighteen wheeler. By the time the girls began to awaken, they were usually at least halfway to Safi.