by Toby Neal
“I need to piss now,” the other man said.
“Go.” I gestured with the weapon, and the other guard vanished into the jungle on his side of the clearing.
I was now on the opposite side of the camp than I had been, with the pit close to me on my left. Perhaps I wasn’t going to have to make too big of a distraction. While the other guard was gone, I could assess the prisoners.
Feeling naked and vulnerable, knowing I was taller than the other man had been, I slouched into the open and walked casually over to the pit, hoping the dark concealed my U.S. camouflage uniform clothing. I squatted and lifted one edge of the bamboo frame with its covering of palm branches. I flicked the headlight on and shone it into the pit.
The hole was empty. Several inches of muddy water at the bottom gleamed back at me, mocking.
“Arturo! What are you doing?”
The other guard’s voice was right above me. He’d approached while I was distracted. My heart stuttered in my chest and a wave of adrenaline jacked through me.
The time for stealth was over.
I shot up from my crouch with the stolen combat knife in my fist and drove it upward into the man’s throat from below, burying it to the hilt in the soft triangle of flesh beneath his jaw
He dropped, clawing at his throat, emitting a horrible gargling. Warm blood, only slightly hotter than the surrounding air, pumped over my hand. I let go of the knife and grabbed the man under the armpits, hauling him out of the open area to his post against the tree, lowering him to a seated position against it.
He spasmed and lost control of his bowels, filling my nostrils with an abrupt stench. His legs sprawled and contracted. His heels drummed.
I’d forgotten how long it took for a man to die and how unpleasant it was to witness. No time for that sentimental shit. I needed the knife back. I yanked it out with a sideways gesture that opened the rest of his throat and finished things quicker, and got out of the way of the blood that followed.
I wiped the knife on the man’s shoulder. Gently, I replaced his hat, which had fallen off, and tipped it forward over his face. To a casual observer, he would have appeared to have fallen asleep at his post.
Straightening up, I scanned around.
No new sounds or movements. The fire flickered. The voices continued, interspersed with snatches of laughter.
I removed the man’s canteen from his belt. I took grenades, knife, and pistol and loaded up my harness belt, but I didn’t need another M16. I shot the magazine, stuffed that in a pocket, and threw the weapon into the dark.
Time to find the other captives.
I tried to think logically as I assessed the camp.
The kidnappers must have decided the pit was too unhealthy, so they’d moved the prisoners. I just couldn’t believe that the rest had been ransomed or rescued and I hadn’t and that’s why they were gone.
The men wouldn’t be stashed in a tent. Too easy to break out of. And most of the clustered shapes were tents. So I just needed to find a structure that was secure and solid, and that’s likely where the prisoners would be.
There was only one of those, a big sturdy-looking wooden shack, right in front of the fire. A row of men was seated in front of it, passing a bottle. Talking. A couple of them were playing cards.
Directly across from them, scanning the jungle and the open area, was another guard.
I wasn’t going to be able to break out my fellow prisoners without a major distraction, after all. I crept along toward my target, feeling the urgency to flee beating in my veins.
Every second I spent at the camp was another second closer to discovery.
I squatted in the deep cover of a tree, feeling my heart beating with heavy thuds. The fresh blood from the guard was sticky on my clothing and skin, and its coppery tang filled my nostrils. Listening to the strange sounds of the jungle around me, I deliberately calmed myself.
I shut my eyes to remember the map I’d seen in the commander’s office.
Directly at the end of the runway, a couple of clicks to the north, was the great artery of the Coco River. I’d rescue the men and, using the compass, get us to the river and across it into Nicaragua, where hopefully these men wouldn’t pursue us. I had no idea how to do any of it, but I hadn’t known how to get this far, either.
Maybe there was some way to strike a blow against the camp while I was at it.
I opened my eyes and looked toward the far end of the runway. The three Black Hawk helicopters used to attack us were parked there, draped in camo netting.
Perfect.
I took a sip of water and chewed down the guard’s chalky chocolate bar. My stomach wanted to rebel, but I needed to keep this machine fueled, because I had a lot more to do.
I crept along the edge of the jungle to the helicopters, wishing I knew how to fly one, but flying wasn’t something I’d ever made time for. In a running crouch, I made it to the closest chopper, felt down the fuselage, and unscrewed the fuel cap. I took the fuel caps off all three, and then splashed fuel between them from a square green fuel container I found sitting nearby.
This was almost too easy. Something was bound to go wrong any minute. I had to hurry.
I pulled back into the jungle and took out two of the grenades I’d lifted off the guards.
I pulled the pin on one and tossed it between two of the choppers, then tossed the other one, too. It bounced and rolled between the struts of the third Black Hawk. I squatted down behind a big sheltering mahogany tree and plugged my ears with my fingers.
Chapter Eight
Lei stood on a smooth flat rock in the middle of the creek, scanning the banks. She’d been looking for some sort of path or trail into the deep crack of this valley from the beginning, but still hadn’t spotted anything other than a thick welter of pili grass, wild ginger, kukui nut, rose apple, and mango trees forming an almost impenetrable wall of trees and foliage.
Most of these valleys had been heavily populated by Hawaiians at one time, but this one had a wild feeling, and Lei hadn’t seen any of the telltale lo`i terracing that showed the remains of Hawaiians’ agricultural domestication.
Perhaps it was too narrow. The walls rose claustrophobically steep and close on either side of the stream, bracketed by heavy undergrowth.
What could Mrs. Yamaguchi have been referring to? There was no sign of any human habitation here, and that in itself was unusual.
There were matted bits of grasses and dried, broken branches tangled in the underbrush along the way, giving testament to a flash flood not long ago. Probably the one that had washed the skull downstream.
“Well, someone was buried here,” Lei muttered, and she resumed her rock-hopping progress up the stream as the easiest route into the valley, her eyes continually scanning the banks for any sign of the grave that had yielded the boy’s skull.
The canyon made a sudden jag to the left, and the sides encroached even more, turning to nothing but a bluff of steep black lava rock with the jungle trying to get a grip on it by way of vines and grasses. Lei stooped, picking her way under a rough stone arch, and she straightened up and gasped. She moved forward several yards, awestruck by the beauty of the spot she’d stumbled upon.
A stream fell from a hundred feet of cliff directly ahead of her into a wide, calm pool surrounded by grass and kukui nut trees. The valley opened up entirely into a spacious bowl surrounded by the familiar crests of other ridges. This secret valley, cupped in the mountains like a fertile cradle, had been heavily populated at one time. Lo`i terraces, their even lines broken up by coconut and ulu breadfruit trees, ran in a stepwise pattern from the ridges down to the pond. Rock walls, fallen into disrepair and overgrown with vines and grasses, showed where Hawaiian hales had stood in a village.
And everywhere Lei looked were planted the tallest, lushest marijuana plants she’d ever seen. The hairs on Lei’s neck rose, because even though no one was in sight, the unique smell of the plant and a whiff of its smoke coming from her left told h
er that this was not a good place to stumble upon alone, wearing a badge.
Lei sank back down behind a large boulder as she assessed the scene. This was a mega-farm of the famous Maui Wowie pakalolo she’d heard came from Hana. The crop had been carefully planted in and around already-existing trees, using them for cover from the Green Harvest helicopter patrols the DEA used to do regularly—though now, with the loosening of policies toward marijuana, they were scheduled less and less often.
A mechanical noise and movement came from one of the fields.
The noise was a pruner on an extension rod, and the boy standing next to the plants looked no more than twelve. He was dressed in camouflage green, and he was harvesting mature buds from plants that soared fifteen feet high, reaching the pruner up to clip off the dense, sticky-looking, hairy green bundles that held the most THC. The kid was careful how he pruned, and Lei could tell that the dense plants had been growing awhile and had yielded several harvests. As Lei watched, another kid joined him, gathering the buds as they dropped into a plastic barrow. A third followed, using handheld clippers to harvest in the lower areas.
The kids had come from somewhere. She had to see where, but she didn’t want to be spotted. Wherever there were kids working, there had to be an adult making them work.
She didn’t have long to wait. A large, dark-skinned man with a halo of heavy black dreadlocks slouched into view from a shack deep in tree shadow on the opposite side of the pond. He was wearing camouflage, too, with a green undershirt that bulged unpleasantly over a boulder of a belly. A Glock was rammed into the belt of his pants, gangster style.
The kids took one look at him and sped up.
“You boys get your quota, you can watch some TV,” he said. Lei could hardly hear his words over the trickling of the stream.
He sat on a rock beside the pond and took out a large Bowie knife. The stick she thought he was holding turned out to be a stalk of sugarcane. He peeled the skin off with the knife and bit into the pulpy inner meat of the stalk.
Lei remembered the sugary crunch of raw cane fondly, but the sight before her stole the memory’s sweetness. This asshole was making kids work in a pot field when they should be in school, bribing them with TV while he held a gun.
I could take him.
But he was armed, and who else was back here in the shelters? There could be multiple perps, and she’d put the kids in danger if she made a premature move.
Lei slid her phone out of her pocket, checking for signal. There was none. Making sure it was on silent, she shot a picture of the man, crunching a sugarcane stalk as he watched child laborers harvest the biggest, fattest marijuana buds she’d ever seen.
It was like a third world movie happening right here on Maui.
The sun felt hot on the Kevlar vest she wore, and on the top of her head. Stealthily, Lei reached down and dipped a hand in the cool stream water, rubbed it around on her face.
She had to get back out undetected. If she could just get through the stone arch and around the corner, she could rock hop down the stream and be out of there, then come back with reinforcements and do a proper raid with SWAT and DEA.
Lei began a stealthy withdrawal, squatting low and backing her way down around the rocks. She moved carefully, still facing the boss man. She was pretty sure she would make it until she saw the dog.
A big blue-nosed pit bull trotted down from the area where Boss Man had come from. He was one of those heavily muscled dogs with a big square head, wide chest, and the kind of heavy jaws that clung to prey until the fight was over.
Lei froze, hoping like hell that the slight breeze blowing in her direction from the waterfall didn’t swirl her scent over to the big dog now standing beside Boss Man. Lei continued her withdrawal, sliding backward, dropping down into the water to stay lower out of sight.
Sunlight shone on the pit bull’s blue-gray coat, rippling over its muscles. Thick as a tree trunk, the dog’s cropped behind wagged in a way that reminded her of her beloved Rotties. Lei took a stealthy step backward, and another. The stones beneath her soaked shoes were muddy and slick, but she was almost at the stone arch, where she’d be out of sight.
And suddenly the dog scented her, throwing his head up and spinning to point in her direction. He let out a menacing bellow of a bark.
There was nothing to do but brazen it out.
“Maui Police Department!” Lei jumped to her feet where she stood in the stream, holding up her badge, her weapon drawn. “Call your dog, or I’ll have to shoot him!”
Boss Man was on his feet, weapon in hand. He fired in her direction in answer, yelling, “Get her, Killah!”
The dog leaped into the stream and came at her like a sleek gray missile.
Lei scrambled backward on the slippery rocks, cursing as she stumbled, trying to keep the dog in view and almost losing her weapon. Then the dog was on her, too fast for her even to get a shot off as it jumped, jaws sinking into her Kevlar vest, knocking her backward into the water among the rocks. It sank its teeth into the vest and shook her with such force she tossed back and forth in the shallow water, gasping and flailing.
But she’d kept a grip on her weapon. She put it against the dog’s head and pulled the trigger. The report almost deafened her.
The dog’s big, muscular body relaxed abruptly, and he dropped onto her, weighty as a bag of rocks.
He didn’t feel a thing. Tears started in her eyes, even as gunfire erupted from the direction of the marijuana fields. The day had finally come that she’d had to kill a dog, and she was lucky to be alive to do it.
That child-slaving dog killer. He was the one whose fault this was—he’d sent his dog to its death. Tears wouldn’t stop streaming from her eyes as Lei tried to heave the pit bull off her, but its teeth were sunk into the vest and locked. She wasted precious seconds shoving the Glock between its jaws and prying them open to rid herself of the heavy body. Finally, with one glance back at the deadly valley, Lei dove through the stone arch and behind the sheltering bluff that curved downward toward the ocean.
Scrambling downstream, Lei pulled her radio off her belt, thumbing it on to call for help, but there was no reception. She fumbled her cell phone out of the pocket of the vest and called 911, but there was no reception for that either in this remote canyon.
And so she just ran, diving into the heavy jungle beside the stream, unwilling to make herself a target by rock hopping as she had on the way up. Lei fought her way through the underbrush, blindly shoving reaching branches and heavy growth out of the way, stumbling and scrambling, her wet pants, shoes, and Kevlar vest as heavy as her heart.
Chapter Nine
The explosion that rocked the jungle was more than I’d bargained for. I was very glad of the shelter of the wide, heavy trunk of the native tree as the choppers’ metal exploded in all directions with the shriek of a thousand banshees. Flaming, gas-covered, melting plastic soared into the air. The blades of one of the helicopters scythed through the tents. The weapons on the birds exploded, too, and in the middle of it all, a massive round went off with a whizzing boom like the biggest of Fourth of July pyrotechnics.
As a distraction, it was superb.
The three burning birds were still firing random bits of destruction all around them as I stood, pulled my cap down, and ran purposefully toward the wooden shed through the shouting, milling hostiles.
Everywhere men were yelling and cursing, almost drowned out by the roaring, crackling flames spreading from the burning choppers. Everyone at the shack had run to see what the problem was. The shack’s door was deserted, and it was sealed with a simple hasp and padlock. I looked around the side of the building, and sure enough, hanging on a hook was the key.
I unlocked the padlock, keeping my pistol ready and eyes moving, but no one came back this way. I could hear the hostiles mustering over by the burning choppers. They’d be back in a moment.
I threw the door wide.
“This is Lieutenant Stevens. Come with me!” T
here were four men inside, already up and no doubt freaked out by the noise. “We’re getting out of here!”
“Yes, sir!” The young man whose name began with a “K” ran toward me, and two others—Falconer and another man. One stayed back, sitting down on his pallet with his back against the wall. It was Carrigan. His polo shirt was black with filth, but his blue eyes sparked in the light of the flames.
“No. We’re being ransomed.”
“They’re going to start killing us tomorrow. I heard it straight from the camp commander. This is your chance.”
“No. Good luck, you crazy bastards.”
I slammed the door on Carrigan and ran into the forest, the three other men following me. Once in the darkness of the trees, I slid the headlight on its webbing band around my forehead. “Grab each other by the belt and hang on. We need to get as far as we can from here.”
Thankfully, there were no arguments to this rudimentary plan. I handed K-Man and each of the others a weapon, keeping the M16 and the compass knife for myself as we moved out. K-Man grabbed the back of my belt.
We managed a shuffling trot in the dense jungle, which was surprisingly open beneath the canopy of foliage far above, once we got away from the bushy growth around the camp. We were silent except for the crunching of sticks and leaves beneath our feet and the occasional grunt or muffled curse as someone stumbled or barked their shins in the dark. Periodically, I’d pause and check the compass, keeping us headed north.
I aimed the headlight toward the ground as best I could, navigating obstacles: a stump, a fallen log, a mound of dirt, a prickly thorned bush. Going around that, we startled some sort of ground-nesting bird, which flew up from beneath my feet with a shrill cry and a clatter of wings. K-Man cursed and pointed his pistol at it.