Atlanta Extreme

by Randy Wayne White

“Well, no, probably not. But it depends, James—”

  “Someone tried to exercise a contract on me tonight, Jerry,” Hawker said, cutting in. “He gave it a good try, but he fell a little short.”

  Rehfuss’s voice became even more cautious, and Hawker guessed that there was either someone in the room with him or the line, indeed, was being tapped. “I’m not surprised that they failed, James. You’re a good businessman. Tell me, what did this person look like?”

  “A big black guy with a beard. The beard might have been fake. He had an island accent, a deep voice. He knew too much about me. It sounds like one of your free-lancers to me. It’s a shame, too, Jer, because I had heard that our companies were going to be friends again. I was looking forward to the negotiations.”

  “You said it was a large black man, James?” Rehfuss asked, pressing on. “Please be more exact in your description. And you haven’t even told me where you’re calling from.”

  “You don’t really expect me to tell you after what happened tonight, do you, Jer?”

  “How can I help, James, if you won’t trust me?”

  “You can help by telling me if your representatives still have orders to exercise that contract. I have his equipment, by the way, and his prints, too, I assume—not that anyone really gives a damn.”

  There was a long silence on the Washington end, and Hawker knew that Rehfuss was talking to someone else. He wondered who. Finally the lanky CIA agent came back to the phone. “I hate to admit it, James, but it could be one of our representatives. Orders went out last week that we were going to deal with you on a more friendly basis—temporarily, at least. We were waiting until we closed the deal with you, and apparently not all the orders got through.”

  “Well, Jer, old buddy, tell your buddies at the head office that I will be a lot more amenable to a deal if your sales reps aren’t trying to cut my throat.”

  “Right away, James—but please do this for me: Promise you’ll get back within the next three days. We need to discuss—”

  “I’ll be in touch, Jer. I’ll be in touch.”

  Hawker hung up the phone and sat moodily finishing his beer. To hell with it, he thought. To hell with them all. I work best when I work on my own. If Laurene Catocamez—or whatever her name is—still wants to take me to Curtis, I’ll go. But I’ll trust no one. And if it looks like Curtis needs a kick in the ass, I’ll do it my way, in Masagua or Atlanta or wherever I decide.

  Hawker stripped off his torn and bloody clothes, turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it, and tried to suds one of the all-time shitty days away. When he was finished, he slid the Beretta under his pillow and crawled beneath the sheets.

  A few minutes later, just as he was dozing off, there came a light tapping at the door. Hawker was on his feet in an instant, the weapon cool in his big right hand. “Who is it?”

  The tumbler of the lock clicked, and the door swung open. Laurene Catocamez stood in the doorway wearing a long, sheer negligee instead of the T-shirt. “I’m sorry, James,” she whispered. “That’s what I came to tell you. Please believe that we had nothing to do with it. Let’s be friends.”

  Hawker switched the Beretta to his left hand and walked naked to the door. He could feel the woman’s eyes on him. He pulled the door wider and said coldly, “If you want to fuck, let’s cut out all the bullshit and just fuck. But if you’ve come looking for more information, don’t waste your time, lady. I have too many friends as it is. I don’t need any more.”

  Laurene Catocamez stepped into the room. Hawker noticed that she was shivering slightly. She wrapped her arms around him and rubbed her face against his chest. “Then we have something in common, James, dear,” she said. “Neither of us wants to be friends, but we both have something the other wants.…”

  four

  Belize International Airport seemed a pompous name for the concrete runway and drab terminal with its broken windows and walls scribbled with graffiti. As bored tourists waited in line to be ticketed, Laurene Catocamez led Hawker through the terminal outside to a twin-engine Trislander.

  Hawker looked at the plane. “We’re flying?”

  The woman had opened the bottom door to the aft luggage compartment. “Yes. Part of the way. We will then go by jeep, and then horseback.”

  Hawker, who had ridden horses while on a mission in Texas, winced. He didn’t like horses. “I can’t wait,” he said.

  “We should be there in about four hours.”

  “This is a lunch flight, right? Where’s the stewardess? Where’s the pilot?”

  The woman slammed the luggage compartment and opened the door to the cockpit. “There is no stewardess, and I’m the pilot,” she said, not smiling as Hawker winced again.

  As the plane lifted off, the clutter and slums of Belize City fell behind, replaced by coconut palms, black rivers, and jungle. Ahead were craggy, low mountains covered in waxy green. Hawker sat quietly as the woman, wearing headphones, concentrated on flying. Below, the dirt roads gradually narrowed, then were swallowed up by the tropical gloom of rain forest. Flocks of white birds bloomed from the trees and took flight. Steam lifted off the rivers in a pale haze. In the forest were sporadic clearings that held wooden shacks, tiny fields, dugout canoes on creek banks. As the plane passed overhead, men looked up from their work in pale golden banana patches. Children ran naked in the yards, waving.

  “A poor country,” said the woman.

  “A poor country,” Hawker agreed.

  Since they had awoken together that morning the woman had given no touch of affection, said no words of endearment. For that Hawker was glad. He had taken what he wanted from her, just as she had taken from him. It was a pleasant, physical thing but edged with a weird undertone of violence. They had made sex, not love. That night she had stepped into his room, locked the door behind her, then stripped off the negligee in one feverish motion.

  “No more words,” she had whispered, taking Hawker, naked, into her small, strong hands. “No more words. Just fuck me; fuck me any way you wish, as hard as you wish, as long as you wish. I will do anything you ask. Take me now.”

  The fine, Latin delicacy of her face did not match the peasant contours of her body. Her breasts were sharp cones with dark, elongated nipples that, when stroked or touched with his tongue, made the woman groan feverishly, as if about to orgasm from mere touch. Her hips were strong and wide, made for breeding and birthing, and when Hawker entered her, she spread her legs wider and wider, as if she wanted everything, all parts of the man, inside her. At the end of their first frenzied joining the woman had writhed, then screamed out loud, as if in ecstatic pain as she orgasmed.

  “That was wonderful!”

  Hawker, sweating, had smiled. “Quite a workout, complete with a cheerleader.”

  Up on one elbow, she touched her finger between her legs, then touched the same finger to her tongue. “You taste so good.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I would like a better taste.”

  “You may have to give me a minute or two.”

  “I will give you one minute. Only one.” The woman kissed his chest, his abdomen, slid down him, and locked her arms around his thighs. “While I wait do you mind if I do this?”

  With her left hand she directed him into her mouth, tracing the underside of his penis with her tongue, then sucked, hard.

  Hawker shuddered. “Maybe half a minute. Maybe that’s all I need.”

  The woman lifted her head. “Do you love me, James? Just a little?”

  “No. You know I don’t.”

  “You are a cruel bastard,” she said with an evil smile. “Would such a tiny lie hurt you?”

  “Our thirty seconds are up, woman. Get back to work.”

  She had opened her mouth wide, her eyes watching his face as she took him into her. She began gently, like a young girl with a Popsicle, but gradually she became more and more demanding, sweating and writhing between his legs like a starved feral creature. At his momen
t of release he looked down briefly to see if she would turn away. She did not. Instead her eyes glistened with a sort of wild triumph as she gulped eagerly, hungrily, wanting more of him and more and more and more.…

  Now they rode together like two business acquaintances on a junket. Hawker was glad. They had given each other pleasure, nothing more. He hated clinging women who felt that after opening their legs to a man they were entitled to his loyalties and to his soul. The woman clearly expected nothing more, and he admired her cold acceptance of their relationship.

  “Look,” she said, pointing ahead and to port. “Do you see?”

  It took Hawker a moment to find what she meant. Below, protruding above the distant canopy of green, was a massive pyramid. The ancients had built it on a mountaintop, built it of gray stone on a cliff that dominated all the valleys below, like a pale altar in a sanctuary of jungle green.

  “That is the temple of Xunantunich,” she said. “The Mayans built it more than a thousand years ago. They were a great people, a great race. See how the temple dominates the jungle; jungle in every direction as far as the eye can see—even from two thousand feet. The Mayans built a great civilization out of the jungle, but they could not conquer the diseases of the Spaniard.”

  Hawker wasn’t prepared for the bitterness in her voice. He said, “I’m surprised a woman from Masagua knows so much about Belize.”

  “Belize? There is no Belize. It is an invention of its silly people. There is no Belize and no Guatemala and no Masagua, if you really care to know what I think. There are only the mountains and the jungle and the seas. This is the land of the Mayans. Since the arrival of the Spaniards every conqueror has been a thief, a tourist on this soil. This land will always belong to the people who built that temple.”

  “You talk like you hate the Spanish, but you are obviously Spanish.”

  “If one is raped at birth, is not one still a virgin at heart? In my heart, I am Mayan—as are most of the people of Masagua. I know that I have Spanish blood, but I hate it. It is the blood of the thief. There is also the blood of the Negro in me, but I despise that too. It is the blood of the eternal child, the slave’s blood.” She looked at him from the corner of her eye. “Do you wonder that I take pride in being Mayan? Is your blood so pure that you don’t understand?”

  “Nothing pure about my blood,” Hawker said wryly. “I just had no idea that you were Mayan—or that you even cared. I thought this whole thing was because you hate communists.”

  “I do hate them. All of us, all of us in the cause hate the communists. They are robots; they are machines who do not think. We must defeat them; we must kill them all. But in the end our goal is to recapture our land, to return our country and all the other countries of Central America to their rightful owners. To the Mayans.”

  Hawker noticed how white the woman’s hands had become on the wheel of the plane. He said, “I’ve never met Colonel Wellington Curtis, but I’m pretty sure he’s no Indian.”

  “That is a problem that will be resolved in the future,” she said simply. “He understands that too. For now he is happy. For now we need him.”

  Hawker began to watch for more Mayan temples in the jungle. He saw a few that, like Xunantunich, stood bare above the haze of green. More often, though, the temples he saw were pyramid shapes beneath clinging vines and furious growth of the tropics; centers of ancient civilizations that archaeologists had not yet uncovered.

  The woman, he noticed, had grown suddenly anxious. Her eyes darted from side to side, reminding him of a nervous Sunday driver. She lifted the half wheel of the controls, and the plane began a sharp descent. Just above the gigantic trees, it seemed, she leveled off. For the first time Hawker perceived the speed at which they were traveling as the jungle, at low altitude, rolled by.

  “See an interesting bird?” Hawker asked chidingly.

  “In a way,” she said. “In a way.”

  At that moment there was a blur of khaki outside his window and an explosion of noise so unexpected that Hawker ducked away. “Holy shit! What was that?”

  The woman didn’t answer. Ahead the blur slowed, turned, seemed to hover directly above the treetops, facing them. It was a fighter jet painted camouflage green. The jet was so close that Hawker could now see the toy figure of the pilot. “How does he do that? He’s not moving. That’s not some kind of helicopter, is it?”

  “It’s a Harrier, a British fighter. It can stop in midair and land like a helicopter, but it’s all jet.”

  “The way he’s stopped like that, it’s like he’s waiting on us.”

  “He is.”

  From the radio transceiver came: “Securitade, securitade; warning to twin-engine Trislander, registry unknown. You are about to leave British-controlled airspace of Belize for airspace of Guatemala. Guatemalan airspace is forbidden to aircraft without proper authorization. Do you copy?”

  Into the hand mike the woman replied, “This is Trislander zero-niner-five-niner-niner. We copy. We are a missonary craft of international registry. We are entering Guatemalan airspace unarmed, carrying foodstuff and medicine for the Christian Indians. We will report our intent at Guatemala City.”

  There was a touch of resignation in the British pilot’s voice. “Twin-engine Trislander of international registry, have I made my warning clear? You are about to enter Guatemalan airspace. Please acknowledge.”

  “Affirmative. We acknowledge.”

  “Good luck to you, then, ma’am,” the voice on the radio replied, and the Harrier lifted suddenly, banked to port, and disappeared with a jet thrust that rocked the twin-engine plane.

  “You handled that well,” said Hawker.

  “I handle many things well, James. Please don’t sound so surprised. I have been on my own since I was thirteen years old. My mother died of black-water fever, and I never knew my father. Resourcefulness for most people is something to be exercised on a whim, like a game. But for someone like me it has always been the difference between success and failure, sometimes life and death.” She glanced at him to make sure he was listening. “Does it bother you to have your life depend on the resourcefulness of a woman? Are you that kind of man? Your life does depend on me, you know. In a few minutes I must fly this plane through a series of narrow mountain passes. If there is low cloud cover, I will have to fly by memory only. Not only that, but we must land in a clearing that has no markings of any kind. I must find it, make sure that the government forces of Masagua aren’t waiting in ambush, then land on a field considered far too short for this plane. So you see? Your life does depend on me. Does that make you nervous?”

  Hawker stifled a mock yawn. “I’m terrified,” he said. “Hurry up and find that airfield, lady. I have to take a wizz.”

  “A wizz?”

  “Yes. A wizz is something of mine that even you can’t control, Laurene, dear. I hope.…”

  five

  The plane twisted and turned through the narrow mountain passes of Guatemala. Sheer green jungle walls plunged toward them, dipped away, and disappeared, one after another.

  “You can fly this route by memory?” Hawker asked casually, trying to relax in his seat.

  “I didn’t say that,” the woman said, managing a smile as she concentrated on the next abrupt turn. “I said that if it was cloudy, I would have to try.”

  “I’m glad it’s not cloudy,” Hawker said.

  “Yes, me too. But the day will come when it will be cloudy. And then I will have to discover just how good my memory is.” The woman pulled back on the wheel, and the plane climbed desperately, narrowly missing a craggy wall of jungle.

  Then they were out of the passes, and Hawker could see a fast clear river below, rushing through the lush tropical growth. The land was wild with bright flowers, gigantic mahogany and guanacaste trees, waterfalls.

  “It looks like paradise,” said Hawker.

  “It is paradise, James. On the south side of the river is Masagua, my country. Our army has been training on the north s
ide of the river to avoid the government troops.”

  “And how does the government of Guatemala feel about that?”

  “I doubt if the government of Guatemala even knows that this valley exists. Very few know of it. That is why Colonel Curtis has chosen it for our training grounds. Like all Americans, you are surprised that places of beauty still exist in the world unknown to men and governments and builders. I find it comforting that in my country more is unknown than known.” The woman tapped the throttle and the plane decreased speed. “Hold on; the field—see it? That clearing. I’m going to circle once before landing. Please keep your eye open for soldiers.”

  “Laurene, you’ve got to be kidding. An entire division could hide in that jungle without being seen.”

  The woman reached back, picked up and threw a canvas covering on the floor. What had been beneath the canvas were several automatic weapons, a crate of ammunition, and a box of grenades. “I am not kidding—please look for soldiers. But, if they are there, we are ready. Okay?”

  Hawker picked up one of the automatics. It was one of the early-model Uzi submachine guns. Its wooden stock made it stern-heavy, awkward. He slid in a full clip of 9-mm. parabellum cartridges. “Because I have no choice,” he said, “I’m ready.”

  The woman dropped the plane lower, circling. “I see a jeep in the trees,” Hawker said. “There’s a man standing beside it. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat.”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “That will be Mario. He has come to pick us up. Do you see anything else?”

  “Trees; just a lot of trees—hey, and there’s something … something climbing through the trees like crazy.”

  The woman banked lower. She laughed. “Monkeys. They are frightened by the plane. See how they rush to escape to the highest branches?”

  Hawker did not smile. “Right. The highest branches.” Hawker checked the safety tang of the old Uzi. Full automatic was two notches forward of safety.

  The woman nosed the plane down easily, dropping it over the trees into the wind, touching the wheels onto the rough grass as the carriage of the plane creaked and rattled like an old car. She brought the plane to a stop at the end of the short runway as Mario, the tiny man in the wide hat, came driving out to meet them in a red Toyota Land Cruiser with no top.