Perilous Skies (Stony Man)

by Don Pendleton

  Rafael Encizo was holding his bloody left hand high in the air and using his right hand to rummage in the broken glove box.

  * * *

  “GARY!” DAVID MCCARTER shouted urgently. “Did you reach Rafe yet? What’s his condition?”

  “Uh, he’ll live,” Manning reported.

  “Looking for the goddamned Tylenol,” Encizo muttered, maybe unaware that he was transmitting. “I’ve got a brutal tension headache.”

  McCarter looked over the tops of the salt piles at the ruin of the Land Rover in the distance.

  “You have a headache, mate?”

  “Like you wouldn’t fucking believe.”

  * * *

  MANNING GAVE HIS eyewitness account to Stony Man Farm as he helped Encizo limp to the small utility building alongside the salt field.

  “The jet burned, Stony. It burned just like the jet in Chilan. We didn’t get video this time, but trust me, it was the same scene. Even the pieces that broke off the wreckage went up in flames and melted into the desert.”

  “And the rest of the Encina group?” Barbara Price asked him.

  “They took off after the first plane went to shit,” McCarter reported. “They had their plane with them. I could see it—barely. It did a high-altitude flyover of the wreckage of the first plane, and then took off. So did the men in the vehicles. Our vehicle, by the way, is out of commission. We’ll need a ride out of here.”

  The sun was getting higher and the heat more intense, and the hot, dusty little shack retained enough coolness to feel comfortable by comparison. Encizo was directed to sit on the desk, where he could receive first aid on his bloodied hand. The only chair in the little building was occupied by the woman they had rescued. Lily Encina watched Rafael Encizo take his seat.

  She didn’t look like a woman who had been through a traumatic experience; she looked like a woman ready to kill someone. But her eyes became less fierce when Encizo gave her a pained smile.

  And when her expression became less fierce, it became quite appealing.

  “Lily Encina,” she said by way of introduction.

  “Call me Rafe,” he said with a smile. Then he winced as Hawkins did something painful to his ring finger.

  The woman, younger than Encizo had assumed she would be, glanced at what was happening with his hand, and winced for him.

  “It looks bad.”

  “Not as bad as my head feels.”

  “Hold still,” Hawkins complained.

  “I hear you busted your car,” Lily Encina said.

  “Yeah, you should see it.” Encizo sounded positively pleased with himself. “I guess we’ll be stuck here for a while, Lily.”

  McCarter chose that moment to enter from outside. “Jack is on his way. Pick us up within a half hour.”

  “But I guess we’ll be staying in Buenos Aires for a while,” Encizo added. “We have unfinished business.”

  “What is it you do, Rafe, besides ruin automobiles?”

  “We’re flying back home within the hour,” McCarter said. “Back to the United States.”

  Encizo glared at him.

  “Of America,” McCarter added.

  “Too bad,” Lily said. “I would’ve liked to make you dinner. You sort of saved my life.”

  “I’d love to,” Encizo said.

  “Technically,” Hawkins interrupted, “I was the one who pulled her off the hill.”

  Lily Encina looked around the room at the five Phoenix Force commandos with a faint smile. “I would love to make dinner for all of you boys.”

  “Well, we are in Buenos Aires frequently,” Encizo said.

  “We are?” Hawkins asked.

  “We can be,” Encizo said. “At least, I can be.”

  “Well,” she said, “consider it an open invitation.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Glades County, Florida

  When tourists vacationed in Florida, very few of them came to Glades County. Even when they came to live in Florida, they didn’t come here. The county had one of the lowest population densities in the state outside of the Everglades National Park and the various state parks, which filled the map starting about twenty miles south of the county line.

  The town of Muse was a throwback. An unincorporated little outpost of civilization in the middle of twenty thousand acres of South Florida swamp. It was 150 miles and a world away from Orlando and the other central Florida tourist destinations.

  The old man in the metal chair was also a throwback, the kind of old man who had been sitting in a metal chair in front of a bait shop in South Florida for the past century.

  Like the bait shop, he was faded and dusty. But his eyes were alert to the strange car coming up March Road when it was still a half mile away. When it was a quarter of a mile away, he could hear the engine, and it didn’t sound like any of the cars he knew. Not that there weren’t strange cars passing through the town of Muse from time to time. It was just that he always knew when they were coming.

  The vehicle was new and shiny and painted a deep rich green so dark it was almost black. The scorching sun penetrated the layers of paint and threw up an olive-colored rainbow. But the dust was already starting to settle on the hood, dimming that glorious paint. At this time of year, up here you were a good five or six feet above the water table, and the dirt drained and turned to dust. And when some fool drove in his shiny new Jeep Wrangler, coming too fast, driving like he had no sense, then for sure he was going to kick up a cloud of dust.

  The old bait-shop owner had learned to accept the dust that came at this time of year. When the car stopped the clouds engulfed his old metal chair and the old man just blinked a little. Didn’t cough. Did not try to wave the dust away from his face.

  A scrawny-looking young man stepped out of the passenger side, nodded at the old man and just sort of stood there for a minute, looking in all directions.

  “Got cold Cokes inside,” the old man offered.

  “Sounds good.” The skinny man removed and wiped at his wire-rimmed glasses.

  The man who got out of the backseat was a Hispanic, and he wasn’t wearing the forehead of sweat his skinny white friend had been wearing. He smiled at the old man and, like his friend, just sort of stood there for a moment, not in any hurry, as if they weren’t on any deadline. Most people who managed to drive their way in such a roundabout route that took them through Muse and who actually stopped their car here, at this old bait shop, were usually in a hurry. To get out. Find out where they took a wrong turn and get back on the road to where they really wanted to be. Almost never was the place they wanted to be the unincorporated South Florida town of Muse.

  That made these visitors unusual. Maybe they were on a long slow drive, but nobody made a long slow drive that took them through Muse. Maybe they were visiting somebody here, but the old man who ran the bait shop knew everybody in town. He would probably have known if they were expecting visitors. And he would’ve specially known if they were expecting these kinds of visitors. People with enough money to buy a shiny new Jeep with the top that could come off and special paint job that seemed to throw up dark green rainbows.

  “I like your shop,” the Hispanic man said.

  The old bait-shop owner thought about that for a moment, thinking about whether he was hearing sarcasm or not.

  “Looks like a real place,” the Hispanic man added. “Doesn’t look like one of those fast-food kind of bait shops.”

  “No,” the old man said. “You are right about that. It really is authentic. This building has been here since the 1920s. Been a general store and a gas station, and now it’s just a bait shop. But I sell cold Cokes.”

  The Hispanic man smiled. “And I bet they taste just as good as a cold Coke coming out of one of those plastic shiny fast-food bait shops.”

  “I guarantee that it does,” the old man said, deciding that he really liked this Hispanic man with the easy smile.

  Then he saw the driver. He came around the front of the Jeep, taking off
his sunglasses, and for a moment his eyes met the alert eyes of the old bait-shop owner. And the bait-shop owner, on that stifling hot South Florida day, shivered a little. He knew that man. He’d met that man a time or two. He’d met that man in Korea, in a field, and that man had almost shot him in the head. He had met that man again, in prison in the 1960s, where he had been incarcerated for three weeks after a little bit of beer-induced disturbing the peace. That man had been in prison for a lot longer, and that man had decided that he wanted a pack of cigarettes, and he was willing to kill for it.

  That breed of man—with the same killer eyes—had been the scariest he’d ever met. The kind of man you encountered on a grisly battlefield and in hopeless incarceration. But not out here, not on the bright afternoon just like the thousands of other bright afternoons that had come before. In front of this bait shop.

  The old man shifted in his seat, suddenly agitated.

  But the man with the killer eyes slid the sunglasses back onto his head and strolled to the front of the shop. He took the ancient metal chair next to the bait-shop owner.

  “Nice place,” he said.

  He stretched out in the chair, as if he was about to take a nap. The old man expected to hear a threat in his voice, but the man seemed friendly enough. When you weren’t looking in his eyes.

  “Fishing any good this time of year?”

  “Yeah. Some places. Just got to know where.”

  The scary man nodded, and seemed satisfied with the answer. The skinny one with wire-rimmed glasses came out of the bait shop, allowing the screen door to slap shut, and distributed bottles of pop. He and the Hispanic man leaned against their Jeep, and the man in the chair beside him remained stretched out as if he was about to take a nap.

  “I put five bucks on the counter,” said the man in the wire-rimmed glasses.

  The old man was about to stand, saying, “I’ll get you some change.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  The old man couldn’t help but notice that they weren’t buying any bait.

  So they weren’t fishermen. And they weren’t visiting anybody in Muse. These guys didn’t seem to know what they were doing. They sure were not doing it in a hurry. And then that shiny new Jeep...

  In South Florida able-bodied young men in expensive vehicles without visible means of support were easy to label as drug runners. Lots of drugs came to South Florida.

  “You boys ain’t here to fish,” the old man said.

  “No, sir,” the Hispanic said.

  It was the Hispanic man who was throwing off his calculations. You expected Hispanics to be involved in the drug trade. But not this guy. He seemed nice. He seemed friendly.

  “If you ain’t fishing, and you ain’t part of the drug problem, and I think I decided you ain’t, then you must be DEA.”

  The Hispanic laughed good-naturedly. The skinny one smiled and raised his Coke in a toast to the old man. The man in the chair next to him shifted a little, looked at him, and the old man could feel his eyes cutting through the darkened lenses of the sunglasses. But then he closed his eyes again, relaxing.

  “You’re sharp,” the skinny one said. “Ever thought of a career in law enforcement?”

  “No, thanks. Spent ten years in Korea one summer. I seen enough of the fighting and dying to last me forever. I like it here. It’s quiet, and not much happens, and I don’t have to watch people get shot. Hope it stays that way for as long as I’m here. Do you boys think that it will?”

  The skinny one and the Hispanic had stopped smiling and now they looked thoughtful. The Hispanic man shrugged at him.

  “I wish we had the power to make that dream come true,” he said.

  “But maybe you are just here to clean up,” the old man concluded.

  The three young men didn’t respond to that, so the old man knew that it was true.

  He rubbed his face. He was about due for shave, he decided. He didn’t shave much. Grandpa was Seminole. One of the advantages of having Native American blood was you didn’t have to shave too often.

  And as he was rubbing his face, he saw the second unexpected thing of the day. It wasn’t a shiny new Jeep this time, coming down March Road into town. It was farther away, moving faster, and didn’t seem to be making a sound. And the fool looked like he was flying no less than a hundred feet above the tops of the cypress trees, and he didn’t make a sound.

  “Damned fools,” he said, waving dismissively at it.

  The three strangers hadn’t noticed the unusual aircraft, until they noticed him noticing it. Even the man sprawled in the chair next to him read the old man’s alertness and followed his gaze, and in an instant they all saw the silent silhouette against the sun-washed pale sky.

  And then, so fast it made the old man’s head spin, the three men seemed to melt into their new Jeep, and the old bait shop and the old man were left in a cloud of dust.

  * * *

  THAT HAD BEEN SEVERAL hours ago. The old man from Muse had been thinking about those boys a lot. He thought they were good boys. What he based that on, he didn’t know. But they hadn’t caused any trouble, not so far as he heard.

  But then trouble came, literally, knocking on his door. In the middle of the night, too.

  It took him quite a while to get out of bed and pull on his old flannel robe and get to the front door. When he opened the door the first thing he recognized was the paint job on the Jeep sitting in front of his house. He blinked a few times before his eyes were working the way they should, and sure enough, those three men were standing on his front doorstep.

  “Teach me to answer the door without my shotgun,” the old bait-shop keeper said.

  “You remember us?” asked the Hispanic man.

  “Course I do. And you seemed nice enough. But now I’m wondering what you’re doing at my house at nine in the evening. I know you don’t need more bait as you didn’t buy any the first time.”

  “You were right about something,” the Hispanic man said. “We are here to clean something up.”

  “And did you?”

  “No.”

  “Not completely, you mean. Still some loose ends that need to be cleaned up. That would be me.”

  The skinny one laughed. “You got it wrong. We’re the good guys. We’re not here to snuff you out or anything. We’re here to talk about airplanes.”

  The old man realized he was shaking. He must’ve been scared, thinking these guys were coming to shoot him. He had decided, at the moment he saw them in the dark on his front doorstep, that they really were drug runners and they had come back to off him.

  The Hispanic man took him by the elbow, sat him in his easy chair and got a glass of water.

  The old man sipped gratefully. “I don’t know anything about airplanes.”

  “We’re looking for more of those airplanes like the one we saw today at your bait shop. You saw it first, remember?”

  The old man nodded. “Sure.”

  “It seemed like you weren’t surprised by that airplane. Like you’d seen others like it.”

  “Yeah. They’re fools. Treetop flyers. Gonna kill somebody.”

  “We went after it,” growled the one with the dark eyes. They were the first words that he had said all evening. The way he said it, it was like a bad memory.

  “You went after it, but you didn’t get it,” the old man said.

  “Right.”

  The old man didn’t dislike this dark, growling figure so much as he was afraid of him and what he represented. He represented violence. Even if it was violence against violent men, he was the human representation of that violence. The old man who had seen enough of killing in his life had seen enough to know that this was a man who killed exceptionally well.

  “And now you want to find it again,” the old man said.

  “Or one like it,” the Hispanic man said. “We think that there have been a few of them jetting around these parts. After we missed that one this afternoon it occurred to us that we needed to get som
e advice from somebody who spent a lot of time watching the skies over Muse. We thought about you. We thought maybe you’d be able to point us in the right direction to wherever it is you usually see those kinds of planes.”

  “And if I don’t want to help you?”

  The dark eyes regarded him silently in the dim living room light. The old man wondered why he was testing this killer. Why he wasn’t leaving well enough alone by simply cooperating with them.

  “If you don’t want to help us,” the dark-eyed man said, “then we won’t have your help. We’ll leave, and you will go back to bed.”

  “But one thing,” said the Hispanic, “that you really ought to know. We can’t tell you what we’re doing exactly or why we’re doing it or who we’re working for. But I can tell you this and it’s absolutely true—we are the good guys.”

  The old man believed that. “But I don’t want to go out into any swamp. I spent enough time out there my whole life that I don’t feel the need to go out there again.”

  “If you can give us good directions, we’ll find it,” said the man in the wire-rimmed glasses. “A guy like you knows the swamps so well he should be able to give us directions good enough to get us there. Right?”

  “You’re right. And I will help you.”

  “Good to hear,” said the dark-eyed one.

  The one with the wire-rimmed glasses was quickly unfolding a rattling map, which he laid out noisily on the old man’s dinner table. It was an exceptionally detailed map of south-central Florida, with markings that included topography and physiographic features. There was indication of terrain, microregions of vegetation and even a legend indicating typical wildlife. This was on top of detailed roadways and development. It was printed on some sort of plastic paper the old man had never seen before. It was noisy as hell, but it also looked waterproof and didn’t seem to wrinkle very much. The old man had never seen anything quite like it.

  The one with the wire-rimmed glasses was getting excited now. He poked at the map and said, “We’re here.”