They stood like statues watching the action below, not daring to say a word.
They watched in awe as bundle after huge bundle was unloaded from the submarine. Katy was astonished at the speed at which the submarine was unloaded. “What do you think it is,” she asked. “If I had to guess, it’s probably cocaine,” answered Felix.
Felix had leaned over to talk in her ear. “I don’t think they can hear us with the pounding surf. The Columbian drug cartels hired some Russian engineers to put together these kinds of ships.” Katy didn’t think to ask Felix why he seemed to know so much about this kind of operation. She couldn’t take her eyes off the scene below.
The men soon reached the end of the unloading process and the ship started to immediately back slowly away from its mooring area. Big bundles of drugs were now being placed on long, narrow, over-sized wheelbarrows, with one man on each end. The whole process was completed very quickly. Very soon the beach was completely empty. Katy had one question. “Where do you think they are going?”
“Where do you think?” answered Felix. “I’ll give you one guess — and you better say the old cemetery.”
The whole scene Katy had witnessed was unreal. There was nothing to indicate a big shipment of drugs had just been delivered to Isla de los Muertos and was now in the process of being hid somewhere on the island. Everything had returned to normal.
Felix had lapsed into a long silence. “I don’t understand,” he finally said, “where do they get these men and the crazy-type wheelbarrows from. This is a big operation. I can understand why they don’t want to leave anybody alive who could spoil their huge drug-running operation.”
Felix again lapsed into deep silence. “I doubt,” he said, “that they will be coming back here. This part of their operation is over. If we simply follow the wheel tracks, we can see where they go in that old cemetery.”
They had to move quickly as it would be light in a few hours. The wheelbarrow tracks were easy to follow. Again, all tracks ended up at the old cemetery. As usual, they suddenly disappeared. Felix left Katy behind while he walked around the cemetery. When Felix returned, he said, “I think I have solved the mystery. After I walked over that one area, I thought I felt something give below my feet. I don’t think it was some zombie’s grave.”
As they were sitting down behind some shrubbery discussing what they should do next, a zombie walked down the main trail.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Katy and Felix were looking at each other — they had one thought in mind — I’m hungry! They had been up all night and were both exhausted and hungry. As Katy thought about it, she remembered, “I got a key for the back door of the restaurant. Let’s go.”
As Katy eased the back door open, the smell of coffee permeated the air. Al-ho sat at his small table with the day’s menu, drinking coffee and muttering to himself. At first he seemed stunned upon seeing them, and then jumped to his feet to greet Katy. “I thought I’d never see you again.” The new chef had arrived and Katy’s stuff had been placed in storage.
Both Katy and Felix wanted something that was quick to eat and drink, but Al-ho insisted on giving them a good old American breakfast of ham, eggs, hash browns, orange juice, toast, as well as coffee.
Both Katy and Felix sat there after breakfast, almost too full to move. Darkness was rapidly fading into light, and both knew that they had to leave fairly quickly. Katy stood up and grabbed Al-ho’s arm.
“I want to tell you how proud I am to have met you. It is unfortunate our two cultures had to become engaged in a great war to discover that all of our people are the same with all having the same values. It seems difficult to figure out why this had to happen. I think that deep down in all of us is the desire to live and love one another.”
Tears came into Al-ho’s eyes. He stood and hugged Katy without saying a word. Felix pointed towards the door. Katy was reluctant to leave. “This is goodbye if we never see each other again. There is one other thing I forgot to ask you. Has anyone come by to see if I was still here?”
Al-ho sat down. “Oh, Sam Kutsun was here late last night.
Katy smiled. “That doesn’t surprise me. Thanks again, Al-ho.”
They were half way back to the cabin when Katy stopped to rest. “Boy, if I had my Kalashnikov AK-47 we wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”
Felix sat down. “You know, there is a ‘gun nut’ here on the island who has a whole bunch of guns hanging on his wall. He has one of the private villas handed down before the Bali Hai became a resort. In order to get a permit for his guns, he had to make them inoperable. I think he had lead poured down all the gun barrels. Since it’s a private villa, he pays me well to keep an eye on the place.”
The villa was in a more open area than the last two cabins Katy had been in. Felix found his hidden keys and they were in just as sunlight hit the beach area. Katy was stunned. “He does have a fantastic collection.” Seeing a Kalashnikov hanging on the wall, she picked it up. “Yup, it does have a full barrel of lead. The only thing this gun is good for is to hit somebody over the head.”
The workroom was in a small basement-like enclave at the rear of the house. The electricity was off, but the flashlights were sufficient to see the details of the room. As Katy glanced around the room, she noticed a wall hanging that was off-center, with a flash of metal behind it. Moving the painting, she was staring at several small shelves that held gun magazines and ammo boxes.
Katy moved one of the ammo boxes and saw the glint of steel. “What do you know,” she muttered to herself. “This should fit the Kalashnikov.” It was another gun barrel — and this one was not plugged!
Felix had his wits scared out of him when he looked down the gun barrel of the Kalashnikov. “Don’t do that to me. I almost had a heart attack.” Katy smiled. If it scared Felix, it would scare anybody else.
Felix found a carry type of golf bag. “Put the gun in this bag. Nobody will see it. Are you sure that thing shoots?” A shot took off the bird feeder of the edge of the patio. “It seems to,” said Katy.
After some indecision, they decided to go back to cabin 42. Approaching the back of the cabin, Felix peeked in the back window. Everything appeared normal. After thinking it over, Felix decided to crawl through the window and make sure it was safe, soon he reappeared. “It was booby-trapped. “Two sticks of dynamite tied to a trip wire.”
They sacked out for almost the day — Katy on the bed, Felix on the couch. “Just in case,” Katy had mused, “You forgot to keep up your Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
“Where did you get this damn goat cheese?” It was the middle of the afternoon and Katy was hungry again.
Felix looked kind of hurt. “Al-ho gave me ten pounds of it. It really is very good.”
“I don’t wonder. He probably can’t stand eating it.”
As the afternoon wore on, Katy started pacing the floor. “Felix,” she said “I got a question to ask you and I want your honest opinion.”
Felix had been trying to eat the goat cheese, but now had given up the effort. “Okay,” he said, What’s the question?”
“These drug gangs are smuggling drugs like cocaine into the United States. This drug can be very dangerous, leading to serious health issues, and also violent crimes like murder, robbery, kidnapping, and a lot of other lesser crimes. However, what about things that are done by industry that are not violent, but will eventually lead to the same type of problems caused by these drugs.”
Felix was now eating only crackers. “Well, I suppose it is possible. What action were you thinking about?”
“I work for a law firm that has been defending oil and gas companies that do a lot of fracking underneath municipalities for oil and gas. The petroleum geologist I interviewed said that rock units tend to have natur
al fractures throughout the rock layers. All these rock fractures will interconnect with other fractures in overlaying rock intervals. He said that even toxic chemicals pumped into the subsurface at great depths will eventually find their way to the freshwater aquifers near the surface.”
Felix scratched his head. “So what?”
Katy stamped her foot. “Don’t you get it? Once this thing starts, there is no way to shut it off!”
Felix got to his feet. “You’re right, how do you shut it off. It will seep in an upward direction for years.”
Katy started waving her hands in the air. “This book I read — Geologic Odyssey, A Journey through Earth Science — calculated that exploration in a big oil and gas field could use up to five hundred million gallons of toxic chemicals. Where are all those chemicals going?”
Felix sat back in his chair. “Well, eventually I suppose it will probably end up in the freshwater aquifers. Everybody living around those municipalities will have children with three or four heads and there will be other odd-looking people. But remember, we will have oil and gas to drive our cars. Right?”
“Right,” said Katy, “but at what cost?”
Felix looked out all the curtains, carefully moving them around. “We can’t worry about that now, we got our own lives to worry about. It’s too bad these oil and gas companies don’t have to post huge million-dollar bonds. That should make them think twice about their exploration activities.”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
The decision had been made. Tonight was the night the secrets of the old graveyard were going to be revealed. It didn’t make any difference whether it was zombies, or men dressed as zombies, the Kalashnikov was up to the task.
At the trail junction, Felix stopped. “We better check and see if that submarine returned.” They reached the anchorage and were surprised to see a small seaplane anchored close to shore where the submarine had been. Felix was stunned. “I don’t believe it. It’s a small Cessna like the one I flew all over Alaska several years ago.”
After making sure that there were no guards, Felix decided to take a close look at the plane. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “The plane is not only full of gas, but they left the keys in it. If anything, they are so arrogant that they don’t have to worry about anything. Obviously, somebody is coming back here tonight.”
All the way back to the main trail, Felix kept exclaiming, “This trail has been swept clean. You can’t tell if anybody has used it.”
Both Katy and Felix had expected to see a guard or zombie of some kind, but the graveyard was deserted. “You know what?” Katy exclaimed, “They had that big meeting at Kutsun’s villa that he was renting. They have to be there now.”
“Okay,” Felix said, “keep that Kalashnikov ready. I’m going to start walking all over zombieland.” He had brought along a much bigger flashlight that could cast a huge wide beam over a bigger area of the graveyard.
He traced footprints to one specific gravestone. He hit it, tried to move it, sat on it, stood on it, nothing happened. He finally sat down and threw small rocks at the old gravestone in disgust. He suddenly disappeared!
Katy had been watching the trails in both directions. She had turned around and Felix was gone. So she frantically called to him and got no reply. As she walked around the darkened graveyard, a voice came from behind her that said, “Hi.”
Katy almost collapsed from fright. “Hey, it’s me,” said Felix. Katy was furious. “Don’t do that again. I could have shot you!” Felix couldn’t control his laughter.
“There are two entrances to the underground tunnels. I don’t know what they ever did with any bodies that might have been there at one time, but they aren’t there now. There’s just a lot of drugs and money. Come and take a look.”
Katy went to the second entrance Felix had found. It was just off the graveyard behind some outcrops of rocks and bushy foliage. She climbed down a ladder into a darkened tunnel. Felix’s brief survey had finally found some battery lights. “The main entrance works like a department store elevator. There was some engineering involved with the construction of that,” exclaimed Felix.
The tunnel complex had several tunnels running in different directions. One tunnel, about a hundred feet long, was stacked with huge bundles of drugs. They sat on pallets which traveled on narrow-gauge railroad tracks. Felix marvelled at them. “It looks like somebody once worked for the Union Pacific Railroad.”
A smaller tunnel had big cabinets with multiple sets of drawers. When Katy opened one, she was staring at bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills with ten-thousand-dollar tags on them. She counted the number of cabinets. Quickly counting the cash in one, she estimated that about eighty to one hundred million dollars were stacked in that tunnel, all in one-hundred-dollar bills.
After she got over her shock, Katy took a longer look at the tunnel area. Hanging from the wall were zombie outfits, with a sign indicating how they were supposed to be used. She noticed a faded brown attaché case leaning against the wall. She almost went into shock — it belonged to Sam Kutsun. She looked inside to see if the material she had seen before was still there — it was! “That has to go,” she said to herself.
It was obvious they couldn’t stay there very long. Unfortunately, Felix couldn’t find any way to make the main elevator go back to the surface. “That’s going to be very noticeable,” he said.
Katy called over to Felix. “I’m going to fill a couple of suitcases with hundred-dollar bills. You can do whatever you want to do.” As Katy carried her treasure to the surface, she saw lights coming that way. She called down to Felix, “You better do something quick. Where are we going?”
Felix had one answer. “We had better head for the plane.” He hoisted the two suitcases to his shoulders. “You can keep them off with the Kalashnikov.”
“Oh good, I haven’t had the chance to use one for a long time.”
The moon had gone down making the trail very difficult to follow. They missed the junction to the plane and had to return along the main trail to find it. Felix kept falling down after running into overhanging vegetation with the heavy suitcases. “How much money did you put in them?”
The plane had been tightly tied to the mooring dock. Felix threw the suitcases in the tail section while Katy untied the rope holding the plane. Katy went back up the trail with the Kalashnikov when she thought she heard some noise and sprayed the area with an entire magazine.
Felix finally got the engine to start coughing and started yelling to Katy, “Get on the plane.” The engine finally roared to life as the plane backed out into deeper water. Katy kept the door open and emptied another magazine at several figures that had reached the shoreline.
“I wonder what they think of that,” she exclaimed.
Felix had reached take-off speed and the plane wobbled slightly as it left the water. The plane had been in the air for several minutes when Katy asked, “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know,” Felix said, “Where would you like to go?”
Finally, Felix confided, “We are headed for the Cayman Islands if you want to keep your money. It’s only a little over 60 miles and I’ve flown it before. We are going to fly under the radar coverage. Keep your seatbelt on until we hit land.”
It was a bumpy ride. Far in the distance, lights finally came into view. “Where are you going to land?” asked Katy. “I don’t think there are any airports in the eastern part.”
“There is a small lake where I can land. I don’t think it will be a problem. We want to keep the plane far enough away from a city so they don’t know where we landed.” The landing was very rough. After getting off the plane, Felix hailed down an old truck for transportation.
In Georgetown, Felix handed the old farmer one thousand dollars and said, “You never saw us.”
Epilogue
Luis and Victor were two gunmen hired by the drug cartel to get rid of the wretch from Denver. Luis had learned his trade in the ghettos of Los Angeles. He had been deported to Honduras by the American authorities but had hired himself to various drug gangs in the Caribbean. He had tattoos covering his entire body. Down each leg was the head of a snake with the chest showing an eagle ready to pounce.
Victor was known as “the thinker.” He was older and wiser. He did not carry a knife in each boot like Luis. His philosophy was to do it all very quickly, there are better things to do. He too had learned his trade in the ghettos of Los Angeles.
The two men had scoured the eastern end of the Cayman Islands in their old rusted brown Ford sedan. They had started out asking questions near where the plane had been found. To the kids, they offered candy. To the adults, hundred-dollar bills — but only to those who had information.
They had come up empty all morning. Nobody had seen anything. Some did point one way, others pointed the other way. Everybody wanted the hundred-dollar bills for their information. Their Kalashnikovs were concealed under several old blankets on the back seat. They knew she couldn’t have gone very far because they had flown in as soon as they learned the plane had been found.
It never occurred to them that Katy Marshall might be sitting in a central park in Georgetown, reading a book and feeding the pigeons in the middle of the afternoon. Several children had come near her and she had reached into a baby buggy and had handed a hundred-dollar bill to each of them.
From time to time, she would reach into her purse and pull out a small compact to check her makeup. Finally, she spotted what she had been looking for. An old rusted out brown sedan had stopped several blocks away, with the two occupants staring at her. She knew she had been spotted!
Luis and Victor had pulled their Kalashnikovs from the back seat. They had argued about when to use them, but both agreed there were too many people around. Victor had argued they must wait much longer. Suddenly, the young woman got up and wheeled her baby buggy into the Mercado. They would wait. Earlier that morning, Katy Marshall had deposited over two million dollars in the largest bank in Georgetown.
Under the Jamaican Moon (Katy Marshall Romantic Mysteries Book 1) Page 7