Blood Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  She shook her head. “No hablo español,” she yelled back. They were maybe fifty yards away. Then a large van arrived, bearing the Blood Orchid logo, and backed up to the airplane. The two pilots began unloading boxes, quite heavy boxes, judging from their body language. The boxes kept coming, until Holly realized that there could not be any seats in the airplane, that it was being used for cargo.

  The men finished their work, and the van drove away. The two pilots began arguing about something, and one of them gestured toward Holly. Then one of them got back into the airplane, while another made a cellphone call, occasionally glancing at her.

  That was all right, she thought; he was calling the Blood Orchid office, reporting someone loitering on the airstrip. Then he finished the call, got aboard, closing the door behind him, and shortly, the airplane’s engines started and it taxied to the runway. The jet took off, headed north, and was soon out of sight.

  Then Holly heard the sound of a small airplane and spotted Ginny’s Piper Warrior at about a thousand feet, seemingly on a base leg for landing. The airplane turned final, landed, and taxied to the ramp. Ginny shut down the engine and got out.

  “You take the left seat,” she said.

  Holly put Daisy in the rear seat and climbed aboard and ran through the startup checklist with Ginny. Soon they were rolling down the runway for takeoff.

  “Let’s do some touch-and-goes,” Ginny said over her headset. “Just enter a left crosswind, then turn downwind and make a normal approach. The procedure is touch down, then apply full power and retract flaps, then take off again without stopping.”

  “Okay,” Holly replied, turning crosswind and climbing. She climbed to a thousand feet, turned downwind, and began running through the landing checklist. She turned base leg, then final, put in full flaps, and set the throttle for landing. When she touched down she applied full throttle, retracted the flaps, and watched the airspeed indicator climb toward sixty knots, her takeoff speed. As she pulled back on the yoke there was a loud noise, and the windshield exploded.

  “I’ve got the airplane,” Ginny shouted. She grabbed the controls and continued climbing “What happened?” Holly shouted over the newly increased noise.

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said. “Maybe we hit a bird. I’ll come back around and land.”

  Then, as they turned crosswind, Holly felt something jar the airplane, and a hole appeared in the Plexiglas window next to her head. “Get out of here!” she shouted at Ginny. “Somebody’s shooting at us!”

  53

  Ginny leveled off at a thousand feet and reduced power to cruise, then she moved her headset microphone close to her lips. “I’m going back to the Orchid Beach airport,” she said. The airplane was vibrating heavily.

  “No,” Holly replied. “We can’t go there; it’s not safe. That’s what whoever was shooting at us will think we’ll do. Is there someplace else nearby?”

  “There are half a dozen airports within a few minutes’ flight, but with all the vibration, I think the propeller must have been hit, and if that’s true, it could come off the airplane any time, and we’d be done for. Without the prop up front, the airplane’s balance would be so affected that we couldn’t fly; we’d be too tail-heavy.”

  “Then let’s put it down on a road or something.”

  Ginny was looking around now, and she swung the airplane onto a northerly heading. “There’s a disused World War Two training field a few miles north. I’m going for that.”

  Holly sat in her seat and stared forward, searching for the airfield. Only her big sunglasses made it possible for her to keep her eyes open, with so much wind in her face. She glanced at the airspeed indicator: Ginny had slowed the airplane down to eighty knots, but that was still a lot of wind.

  “There!” Ginny said, pointing just to the right of the airplane’s nose.

  Holly spotted the three runways, set in a triangle, and a large hangar. “I’ve got the field.”

  “You want to land it?” Ginny asked.

  “No! You do it.”

  Ginny laughed. “We’ll land in the same direction as at Blood Orchid; the wind direction and speed will be about the same.” Then the airplane began to vibrate even more. Ginny reached over, yanked out the mixture knob, and the engine stopped.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Holly demanded.

  “I think we were about to lose the prop,” Ginny replied, starting a turn toward a runway. “It’s still windmilling, but with no power, there’ll be less stress on it. Turn off the master switch.”

  Holly switched it off. “Do we have enough altitude to make it?” Holly shouted, her headset no longer of any use with the power off. The airplane seemed awfully low to her.

  “We’re about to find out,” Ginny yelled back. “Never mind the wind direction, we’re going for the runway straight ahead. Tighten your seat belt and brace yourself.”

  Holly yanked on her seat belt until it hurt, then turned and held onto Daisy’s collar, then she braced against the instrument panel, elbow slightly bent, so the impact wouldn’t break her arm. It was becoming clear that they weren’t going to make the runway.

  Ginny flew the airplane lower and lower. “Hang on!” she yelled as she flared.

  The airplane was headed straight toward a drainage ditch about fifty yards short of the runway. Ginny began pulling back slowly on the yoke, and the stall warning horn began to shriek.

  The airplane stalled and fell the last ten feet to the ground, landing with a noisy slam, then bouncing a couple of times. They came to a stop on the very end of the runway.

  “Well,” Ginny said, “we made the runway.”

  “A little late, though,” Holly replied. “I’m glad you were able to miss the ditch.”

  Ginny pointed straight ahead: the propeller had stopped straight up and down, and the tip of the blade they could see was missing. “That accounts for the vibration,” Ginny said.

  They got out and walked around the airplane. Daisy seemed remarkably unconcerned. Apart from the shattered windshield and the punctured window, there was a line of bullet holes running from just aft of the pilot’s seat upward and aft. Holly counted seven holes.

  Ginny stood back and looked at her wounded bird. “What this airplane needs is a new windshield, new prop, new pilot’s window, and a lot of patching—plus a very thorough annual inspection. I think the engine is going to have to be torn down to see if there was any damage from that awful vibration.”

  “All that sounds expensive,” Holly said.

  Ginny nodded. “That’s what insurance is for, although I’m not sure how I’m going to explain this to the insurance company.” She climbed into the pilot’s seat. “Come on, let’s see if this thing will start.”

  “Start?” Holly asked, alarmed. “You’re not going to try to fly it again, are you?”

  “No, I’m going to try and taxi it over to that old hangar,” Ginny replied, pointing. “It beats pushing it.”

  Holly got into the passenger seat. “Right. And anyway, somebody might be looking for us from the air.”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” Ginny said, “although we’re both probably completely paranoid.” She flipped on the master switch, pushed in the mixture, cracked the throttle, and turned the key. The engine fired as if nothing had happened, and they began to move down the runway.

  Shortly, they were in the shade of the big hangar, which had been built to hold many airplanes. Ginny shut down the engine, and they got out and looked around. The roof was full of holes and the floor was covered with light debris, but it sheltered the airplane from prying eyes.

  Ginny took out her cellphone and tapped in a number. “Ham,” she said, “come get us, we’re on the ground. We’re okay, just a little problem with the prop. You drive north on highway one . . .” She continued with the directions. “That’s only approximate, since I’ve never been here on the ground. Just keep hunting until you find us.” She punched off. “Ham’s not too concerned,” she said.
/>   “It takes a lot to concern Ham.”

  “You know,” Ginny said, “I think it might have been the tip of the prop that broke the windshield. I mean, when a bullet came through your window, it made a hole but didn’t shatter.”

  “You could be right,” Holly said, looking at the prop. “Looks like there’s about six inches missing, and that’s a pretty good-sized piece of metal.”

  “Holly, who was shooting at us?”

  Holly thought about that for a minute. “I’m not sure I know,” she said. “You think I could sleep on the sofa tonight?”

  “Of course you can. Better yet, we’ll make Ham sleep on the sofa, and you and I will share the bed.”

  Holly laughed. “I’ll let you break the news to him.”

  Ginny walked around the airplane, inspecting it. “I think the shooting was coming from ahead of us when we were doing the touch-and-go. Then, when we made our left crosswind turn, it was coming from the side of the airplane; that’s how your window got hit. Looks like the shooter was somewhere around the end of the runway, to the north.”

  “It’s good that you chose to keep flying, instead of setting her back down.”

  “You know, I don’t know why I did that,” Ginny said.

  “I’m real glad you did.”

  54

  Holly insisted on sleeping on the living room sofa. They had had dinner and talked, and Ham and Ginny respected her reluctance to talk about what had happened in the past few days. Holly’s response to any conversation was desultory, and they finally gave up and went to bed.

  Holly made up her bed on the sofa and got into it, and Daisy lay down beside her. Holly was tired from the stress of the day’s events, but she did not sleep for a long time. Then, in the middle of the night, she came wide awake and sat up. Had she been dreaming, or just thinking? Somehow, she had answered a question in her sleep, then another. Pieces slid toward one another, and if they did not seamlessly interlock, at least there was a logic present. She found her cellphone in the dark and called Grant’s number.

  “Hello?” He sounded sleepy.

  “It’s Holly,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I won’t know that until I talk to you,” she replied. “I’m at Ham’s. Do you know where that is?”

  “No.”

  She gave him directions. “I want you to come and get me.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. I think I can put this thing together, with your help.”

  “What thing?”

  “Come get me.” She hung up.

  Holly dressed and waited for Grant at the gate, so as not to wake Ham and Ginny. When he came, she waited for him to turn around, then put Daisy in the backseat and got into the car. It was a warm Florida night, and the top was down.

  Grant found his way back to the bridge before he said anything. “What’s going on?”

  “Listen to me carefully,” she said, “and don’t interrupt me until I’m finished.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ve been staying in a guest cottage at Blood Orchid, courtesy of my friend Ed Shine. I’ve been kind of stunned, I guess, since the bomb went off in the cemetery. Mostly I’ve been watching TV—old movies, sitcoms, anything I could find. I tried not to think, but I believe a part of my mind was working, because I began to think of things.

  “Yesterday, Ginny called me on my cellphone and invited me to go flying, said it would be good for me. I asked her to pick me up at the Blood Orchid airfield, and while I was waiting for her, a business jet landed and offloaded a bunch of heavy boxes into a Blood Orchid van. The guys flying the airplane noticed me, and before they took off, one of them made a cellphone call. I think it was about me.

  “Ginny came, and we took off; I was flying left seat. We went around the pattern once and did a touch-and-go, and as we started to lift off, somebody opened fire on the airplane. The windshield exploded, and we took some rounds in other parts of the airplane. Ginny flew us to a disused field not far from there, and we landed safely, and Ham came to get us. Got all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does any of that tell you anything?”

  Grant hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

  “Did I mention the boxes the jet unloaded were heavy?”

  “Yes.”

  “What weighs a lot?”

  “Metal . . . liquid . . . paper.”

  “Yes, paper.”

  “You know about what was going on at Blood Orchid when it was Palmetto Gardens, before the Feds went in and broke it up?”

  “Yes, they were shipping money out of the country, money from drug sales in the U.S. They were flying it out of their own airstrip to wherever they wanted, in South or Central America.”

  “Do you think they’re doing that again? Is that your idea?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “The Pellegrinos are taking in huge amounts of money from their offshore banking operations and putting it into their own offshore bank, right?”

  “Right. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Yeah, sure. So they can send as much money as they like to any bank in the world, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Now, say you’re running a drug ring in the U.S. Say you’re associated with other people who’re in the same business. It’s a cash business; you don’t take checks or credit cards, and you don’t put the money in the bank, right?”

  “Right; it would be noticed by the bank examiners if huge amounts of cash were being deposited, and they’d notify Treasury or the Bureau.”

  “Right. So they’ve got to get the money out of the country.”

  “Right.”

  “You know about this network of informal banks that people from the Middle East use to send money to relatives? They don’t actually wire-transfer it; somebody deposits it with a bank in the sending country, then a phone call is made and the relatives go and collect it from a so-called bank in the receiving country. There’s no paper trail, as with a wire transfer.”

  “Yes, it’s thought that some terrorism operations may have been funded that way. It’s very difficult to stop.”

  “Right. Now, the Pellegrinos are sitting on large sums of cash in Saint Marks that they can’t send back to the U.S., right?”

  “Right.”

  “And the drug dealers in the States are sitting on large sums that they can’t get out of the country, right?”

  “Sort of. There are other ways to get money in and out of the country; it’s called money laundering.”

  “Yes, but you leave a paper trail that someday might be discovered.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So, suppose the drug dealers in this country ship their money to a predetermined spot in the United States, where it’s counted and stored in a safe place. Then somebody makes a call to Saint Marks, and an identical amount of money, less a healthy handling fee, of course, is then transferred to someplace else in the world, an account of the drug dealers’ choice.”

  “I believe I get the picture.”

  “It’s what you’ve been working on, isn’t it?”

  “I will neither confirm nor deny that.”

  “I think what I saw today was boxes of cash being unloaded and very probably taken to a facility that was built for the purpose back when Blood Orchid was Palmetto Gardens. It’s a building with underground vaults, just like a bank.”

  “Possibly.”

  “You know that’s what’s happening, don’t you, Grant? It’s what you’ve been working on all this time.”

  Grant said nothing.

  “Then why haven’t you rolled up the operation? Not enough evidence yet?”

  Grant still did not speak.

  “All right, then, just answer me one question, just one. Will you do that?”

  “If I can,” Grant replied.

  “Who is Ed Shine?”

  55

  Grant looked at her. “Ed Shine is Ed Shine,” he said. “
He has no criminal record; he has a history in New York as a property developer; he’s even in Who’s Who, for God’s sake. The Bureau checked him out thoroughly; he is who he says he is. What is it that worries you about Shine?”

  “Everything I’ve just told you,” Holly replied. “If my theory is correct, he has to be a part of it. And it bothers me that our airplane was shot at by someone on the Blood Orchid property.”

  “How do you know that? The fire might have come from the river, or the beach, or a road somewhere around Blood Orchid.”

  “The angles were right,” Holly said.

  “Angles of fire can be deceiving,” Grant said, “especially when you’re the one being shot at. Anyway, you’ve been staying at Blood Orchid for two days, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if Shine wanted you dead, why didn’t he just drop by and pump a few bullets into you?”

  “Good point,” Holly admitted. “He certainly had ample opportunity. But that guy from the airplane that unloaded the boxes was staring at me, and he made a call. Shortly after that, we were fired on.”

  “I stare at you all the time,” Grant said. “Any red-blooded male would. And people make cellphone calls all the time, too. You’re making a connection where there isn’t one.”

  Holly sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “From what you’ve told me about Ed Shine, he’s been nothing but nice to you. There are things that don’t add up in this case, but Shine isn’t one of them.”

  “All right, but let’s go back to my theory about the exchange of money between criminal elements.”

  “Run your theory by me again.”

  “The Pellegrinos collect drug profits from various criminals in the States, then reimburse them with profits from their off-shore gambling operation.”

  “Oh, that theory.”

  “My question is, what do the Pellegrinos do with the money they collect inside the United States? It doesn’t make any sense to just warehouse it in a vault at Blood Orchid; they have to do something with it.”

  “Like what?”