Wild Card pp-8

by Tom Clancy

  Which, Jarvis thought, was of course the very thing he had done. And perhaps that proved the Sunglasses were a step ahead of him, counting on his desperation to do him in, knowing the boat could tempt him to reveal himself this time when caution would have prevailed at another. Perhaps there were ten such boats, a dozen, set out into the marshes as lures.

  Perhaps, yes…

  And then again, perhaps not.

  Jarvis flattened himself almost onto his belly and crawled further toward the shore, slipping among the low foliage and riblike air roots, his already soiled and tattered clothes muddying to stick clammily to his body. Then, a few yards from the boat, he paused again. A man in swim trunks and a jacket was moving from its pilot’s station toward the middle part of the deck and Jarvis realized now that there was a woman with him, kneeling down over something—

  His eyes widened.

  No, he thought.

  Not something.

  Someone.

  Jarvis inched still closer until he was chin-deep in the mire, hoping the insects and leeches in his company would not make a total feast of him. But on he went anyway — he had to get a better look at the person on that deck. It was a man, he saw now. A large man lying on his back, his head on what might have been a towel or jacket…

  Suddenly Jarvis pulled in a breath.

  There was blood all around that makeshift pillow. All around it, and all through it, and even smeared on the woman’s swimsuit.

  If these were Sunglasses and not people in trouble… maybe even people with trouble akin to his own, for why else would they have sought the forest in a working boat rather than turn southward toward Los Rayos, where the injured passenger could receive medical attention… if these were Sunglasses, then he was a brainless fool for wanting to help them, ah yeh.

  An’ help yah’self, ya want’a be honest, he thought. For here might be a way off the island… a way to reach someone of authority on the mainland before he and his knowledge of Udonis’s hidden shipping files were made to disappear off the face of the earth, like the oil shipped to far and unknown places on those barges.

  Dripping wet, spattered with muck, Jarvis put aside his fear and weariness, got to his feet, and started toward the boat — but had not taken more than two steps forward when he heard a new sound that momentarily froze him in his tracks.

  Standing barely in the shadows of the trees, he craned his head back, looked through the trees into a broken sky, and saw three helicopters out over the water, one on his left, the other two on his right, still the size of wasps to his vision, but belting in with trajectories that would lead them to converge directly over the shore ahead of him.

  * * *

  Annie heard the chop of rotors and looked up, her heart pounding in her chest.

  “Pete,” she said, and grabbed hold of his arm. “Pete, those copters—”

  Nimec pointed up to their right.

  “That one’s theirs, Annie, I can tell from its shape,” he said, and then swept his hand across to the left. “And those two… those two’re ours.”

  * * *

  The Stingray’s pilot spotted the choppers coming on at breakneck speed from the south and turned toward the man beside him, his eyes surprised and dismayed behind his helmet visor.

  “Warn those bloody bastards off, whoever they are,” he said.

  * * *

  Still staring skyward at the choppers, Jarvis filled his lungs with what he thought must have been the deepest breath he’d taken in his entire life… and then prepared to make what he thought might be its greatest decision.

  As fate would have it, the people he’d hoped would prove his salvation needed immediate rescuing themselves, needed to get immediately out of sight as well, for it was now beyond question that they too had fallen on the wrong side of the Sunglasses. Fallen in a way comparable to his own in terms of its threat to life and limb, if Jarvis could tell anything from the number of birds in the air.

  And having reached these conclusions, how was he to act on them? What new demands of his conscience must he prepare to accept or reject? He exhaled. These were good enough questions in theory, no doubt. But however intimidating it might be, he must deal only with reality, as he had since his cousin was murdered, and then since his own aborted escape attempt on a boat, and all throughout his ordeal afterward. And however many questions he might choose to ask himself, Jarvis knew the choice before him was no different than it had been seconds earlier. He could retreat into the forest and whatever safety it provided, or do what he could for the passengers aboard that boat.

  “Lord Almighty, do whatcha can to protect me,” he muttered to himself, and plunged on ahead toward the water.

  * * *

  “You have entered restricted airspace,” the Stingray’s copilot said into his headset’s mouthpiece, his radio tuned to a common frequency. “I repeat, this is a nofly zone. Identify yourself and redirect—”

  * * *

  “We’re UpLink International aircraft out of San Fernando,” the lead Skyhawk’s copilot responded in a calm voice. “And you can redirect your head up your ass, because we’ve got permission to approach from your government and are coming in whether you like it or not.”

  * * *

  Jarvis Lenard emerged from the mangroves in an almost maniacal dash, splashing his bare feet into the open surf.

  “Both of ya, come wit’ me ’n’ be quick,” he yelled to the man and woman on the boat, cupping his hands over his mouth. “Getya injured fella int’a raft and come on where I can bring ya into hidin’!”

  * * *

  The Stingray’s copilot looked over at the man flying the aircraft. “You think they’ve really gotten airspace clearance?” he said.

  “They haven’t had much time,” the pilot said, his hand on the collective. “But we can’t know for sure.”

  “What’s our next move, then?”

  The copilot thought, frowned.

  “We aren’t going to just let them through,” he said.

  “There are two of them—”

  “I can count,” said the pilot. “When can we expect some assistance up here?”

  The copilot checked his graphic displays.

  “It shouldn’t be long,” he said. “Beta-three-zero’s closest, bearing in from the harbor. The others are also on course.”

  “Then hail Beauchart and give him the situation as it stands,” the pilot said. “We stay with the intercept unless or until he call us off.”

  * * *

  “Chopper alpha-one-zero reports a pair of UpLink choppers on a heading for the target vessel,” the radioman said, his mouthpiece pulled slightly away from his face as he glanced up from the console. “The intruders claim sanction from the mainland and our crew is asking how to proceed.”

  Standing to his right, Henri Beauchart bent his head toward his chest, closed his eyes, and rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger. What was he to do? Contact air traffic authorities in San Fernando to request they verify or deny the UpLink pilot’s assertions? If the clearances proved legitimate, then those who afforded them certainly had been informed that the approaching helicopters were on an emergency rescue operation. How would he explain his position of wanting to turn them back? Even if he were able to come up with something to justify it, whatever he said would be disputed by UpLink. And the one indisputable fact was that Nimec and his wife had been able to send out a call for help. In the end, it wouldn’t matter whether or not official permissions were given. If they were still to disappear, it could not be explained away. Eckers had staked everything on his accident scenario, and he, Beauchart, had been a willing accomplice — and now the scenario was dead. Along, perhaps, with Eckers.

  Beauchart produced a long breath, feeling himself physically deflate. None of his options were good. It was all coming down. No matter what action he took, coming down around his head. A confrontation over the helicopters’ right to approach would only help bury him deeper.

  He opened his eyes,
raised his head from where it had sunk, and turned to the radio operator.

  “Order our pilots to disengage,” he said. “The visitors are to be considered friendlies and allowed full entry.”

  * * *

  The lead Skyhawk’s pilot saw the Aug pulling off, turned to his partner, and grinned.

  “I win the bet,” he said. “Told you my bullshit story would work.”

  The copilot looked at him.

  “Suckers,” he said. “You gonna rub it in?”

  “Just pay up and get me that date with your knockout cousin,” he said. “I promise not to take too much advantage of her.”

  * * *

  Nimec heard the man in ragged clothes screaming at them from the shore, looked his way, and then turned to Annie. The Stingray had veered off in the northerly direction of its approach, shrinking from sight even as the combined roar of UpLink’s oncoming birds began to drown out whatever the stranger was shouting at the top of his lungs.

  “What’s he saying?” Annie said.

  Nimec took a glance back over his shoulder as the Skyhawks swept in, then shrugged.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “But for some reason or other, I’m sure we’ll find out before too long.”

  EPILOGUE

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  “Oil,” Vince Scull said.

  “Rogue oil,” Nimec said. “Lots and lots of it.”

  “Going to Cuba and North Korea,” Scull said. “Two countries on the government’s long-term embargo list.”

  “And they were just the biggest customers,” Nimec said, nodding. “There are others that’ve had temporary sanctions against the import of U.S. fuel products slapped on them. Foreign policy and national security reasons.”

  Scull put his hands over his ears.

  “Enough, Petey,” he said. “Here I am thinking it’s love that makes the world go ’round, when you’ve got to show up and murder the idea.”

  Nimec gave him a faint smile. They were sitting in Scull’s office at UpLink Sanjo, a medium-sized room adorned with photos of Vince at some of the many corporate sites where he’d been stationed over the years. Here he was with the founding crew members in Johor, here with his arm around a pretty female staffer in snowy Kaliningrad, there posing beside a pack mule against the mountain spires at Ghazni… Scull was well-traveled to say the least, his footloose leanings having very possibly worked to the extreme detriment of his three marriages, all of which had come to their crashing ends in acrimonious divorce proceedings.

  Nimec had long wondered about the pictures of Vince’s three ex-wives in a heart-shaped frame on his desk, each a smiling head shot. Was their sharing space in a single heart an example of typically crooked Scullian humor? Or could it be a window into something deep and sad?

  One of these days, Nimec figured he’d find a tactful way to ask.

  “It was some racket,” he said now, and glanced at Scull across his desk. “A fifteen-hundred foot long oil tanker disguised as a container ship sets out from the oil field at Point Fortin with millions of gallons of refined aboard, anchors there in the water near Los Rayos to wait for feeders that’ve been converted to smaller oil barges. They get their fill-ups and head off to banned ports, or to rendezvous at sea with other smuggler ships.” He paused. “We still don’t know how often those runs were made, or exactly how long the operation was going before we caught onto it, or how much oil was moved in total, but the word is that it was all done on a scale nobody’s ever seen. Not from a single producer.”

  Scull grunted.

  “Gonna make a whole lot of high-priced international lawyers happy for a while,” he said. “Nothing puts smiles on their faces faster than a big cloud of stink in the air, and the fumes from this scam reach from Washington across the Caribbean.”

  Nimec rubbed his chin, thinking about that. An oil field holder in Trinidad, members of the Trinidadian parliament, and a top Sedco Petroleum exec… these were just a few of the parties under investigation or indictment in the scandal, and more names were surfacing every day. The facts and figures relating to specific transactions had come from the records of Udonis Roberts, the Los Rayos shipping accountant who’d tipped off Megan in a sudden fit of conscience and gotten murdered for it during an attempt to flee the island… a hack job that left him and the Trinidadian runners he’d paid to take him away by boat stuffed into some Florida-bound air transport crates. The body parts had turned up at Miami International in an episode that made for some lurid tabloid headlines a while back, but it had taken the rogue oil discoveries for authorities to eventually tie the case to Los Rayos. And the connection still might never have been made if it wasn’t for Roberts’s cousin, Jarvis Lenard, hiding out there in the mangrove forest with his knowledge of where Roberts had stashed his evidence. Impressively to Nimec, he’d not only been able to elude the island’s entire security force for weeks, but also a sort of elite ghost squad that did its dirty work — apparently the same group that had tried to off him, Annie, and Blake, then stage the pontooner’s crackup. The information about this so-called Team Graywolf, as well as many of the key names attached to the oil scam, had been provided by Henri Beauchart after his arrest, when he’d immediately started singing to prosecutors in two countries with hopes of cutting deals.

  Behind his desk, Scull sucked thoughtfully on his inner cheek a minute or two, then smoothed a hand over the crown of his mostly bald head.

  “The thing I keep wondering about is that invite you got to Los Rayos from those Trinidadian officials,” he said. “Between the e-mail to Meg and that islander being on the run from Beauchart’s security goons, it couldn’t’ve come at a worse time for the pols involved in the oil scheme. Or for the guy who gave Sedco distribution rights to what came out of his wells, and is supposed to have cooked up the smuggling operation with his pal on the Sedco board… Jean Claude Whatsisname.”

  “Morpaign,” Nimec said, nodding. “I’m with you, Vince, the timing would be some coincidence. And who knows, maybe it is. On the other hand, it could be the invitation came from parliament members that weren’t in the mix, and had an idea what was happening at Los Rayos, and maybe even got the same tip-off Meg did sent to their Inboxes. With all the high level government and industrial types involved, and a corruption investigation sure to come, I can see how they wouldn’t want to be known as finger pointers, and might decide it would be better for their careers setting me up to pull off the lid.”

  Scull chortled.

  “No good for a politician to have a rep for honesty with his cronies, huh,” he said.

  “Either that or have somebody get even with him by looking into his rotten business affairs,” Nimec said, and shrugged. “Hard enough finding a straight shooter in our own government, Vince. How much do we really know about what goes on behind closed doors in Trinidad?”

  Scull looked at him a moment, then grunted again.

  “Fucking Trinidad,” he said. “You and the new missus take a boat ride and almost get turned into guppy food… helluva way to remember a vacation.”

  Nimec was silent. He thought about that long afternoon in the villa with Annie after he’d gone kite-boarding, thought about her lying with her head on the pillow beside him, both of them out of breath, their bodies relaxed and coated with sweat. I think we did it, Pete, she’d whispered in his ear. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve carried two children in my belly, and think I feel that we did.

  No, he told himself, Vince was wrong. Whatever bad had happened to him on Los Rayos, Nimec believed he would always remember it more for something else.

  He rose from his chair now, stretched, and cracked his knuckles.

  “Taking off on me so soon?” Scull said. “Where’s the love gone, handsome?”

  Nimec gave him a look. “Got a meeting with Rollie and Meg later,” he said. “I need a chance to prepare.”

  Scull snorted.

  “Your meeting about Ricci by any chance?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Nimec said
, “Ricci.”

  He stood there a second, hoping Vince would leave it alone, thinking he really did want to ponder the matter some more before he talked about it with anyone.

  “So’s it gonna be thumbs-up or thumbs-down for your boy?” Scull said.

  Nimec looked at him again, released a fatalistic sigh.

  “Before this morning I’d pretty much decided we needed to cut him loose… he’s going to stay out of touch, what can we do?” he said. “Then I see he left a voice mail on my cell phone last night, called right out of the blue, and I’m practically climbing right back on the fence.”

  Scull made a face.

  “Hah!” he said. “Figures he’d show up exactly in time to make life complicated.”

  Nimec shrugged, turned toward the door.

  “Not another step, Petey,” Scull said. “You want to leave my premises, you first gotta tell me what Ricci said in his message.”

  Nimec paused halfway into the corridor, glanced over his shoulder.

  “Just that he wants to talk,” he said.

  BONASSE, TRINIDAD

  “You’re positive the line’s secure?” Baxter said.

  The satphone to his ear, Jean Luc stood looking out the window at the men in flack jackets below, holding him under house arrest in his Bonasse mansion.

  “Reed,” he said with a dead calmness that surprised even himself. “Anything I hear stays right here with me in this room.”

  There was that odd, hollow silence in the earpiece distinctive of coded electronic communications.