Ted Bell - Spy

It took a long time for the bikes to rumble past him.

Wyatt, Homer, and the rest of the officers stayed put until the last of the big choppers had almost disappeared up Main. Then they came down the brick walkway, weapons at the ready. The deafening roar of the engines was already becoming a distant rumble moving north and out of hearing range.

“You all right, Sheriff?” Homer said, quickly crossing into the street to where he stood.

“Homer, to tell you the God’s honest truth, I reckon we’re about one funeral away from a border war.”

Then he turned and started to walk away, go back inside and finish his lunch.

“Put that in your Key West report, Sheriff!” Homer called out after him. “I mean it!”

DIXON HEARD TWO more bikes coming toward him, big Harleys moving very slowly up the now empty street, headed the same direction as the departed Mexicans. He recognized the two boys he’d chased off the Brotherwood ranch the day the child died. Hambone and Zorro.

The two bikes rolled to a stop a few feet shy of Dixon. The riders stayed in the saddle, Hambone picking his teeth with his knife, both men grinning at the sheriff.

“Thought I told you two to move on,” Dixon said.

“We did,” Zorro said, “Just a couple of scouts, passing through. Keeping an eye on things for you, Sheriff. Looking for Mexicans. Seen any?”

Hambone laughed out loud.

Dixon craned his head around and saw the last bit of dust settling up the road. “You two roughriders are keeping a pretty safe distance, I’d say. You don’t want them to get away, you get on after them.”

Zorro said, “We ain’t necessarily looking for trouble, Sheriff.”

“Leastways, not yet, we ain’t,” Hambone added. “Still rounding up recruits. Getting sizeable, Sheriff. Two or three hundred riders in this county alone. I hear there’s a thousand over to Laredo. You let us know, come time for the last stand.”

“Take your gang violence elsewhere. This is a peaceful community. Now git out of it.”

“You might want to watch your ass, old man. Shooting war starts with Mexico, which side you want us on?” Zorro said.

“Yeah, Sheriff,” Hambone said. “Texans got to stick together in times of war. You need us.”

Dixon looked at him.

“Ain’t gonna be no Mexican war, son. We did that once already. Remember the Alamo?”

He turned and walked away to the sound of laughter.

“He fucking kidding?” he heard Hambone say to his back.

“Hey, Sheriff!” Zorro called after him.

“Yeah?”

“What the fuck do you think this is, if it ain’t war?”

31

THE AMAZON

C ould you please land this thing?” Harry pleaded.

“What? I can’t hear you!” cried Saladin Hassan, who was bouncing around up front, doing the driving.

No surprise Hassan couldn’t hear. Between the bellicose roar of the airborne Toyota’s unmuffled engine and the howl of wind and driving rain, you couldn’t really have a normal conversation. Harry Brock cupped his hands round his mouth.

“I said, try to stay on the goddamn ground!”

“Okay! Sorry!”

Harry sat back and tried to wipe away the rainwater streaming from both eyes and running like a river into his mouth. Unlike Saladin and Caparina, he had not thought to bring along a pair of swimmer’s goggles. He leaned forward and screamed again this time directly into the driver’s ear.

“I. Said. Slow! Down!”

They hit a ditch and launched again and Harry was once more hurled sideways against the thinly padded rear seat.

“Too slow and we get stuck in the mud!” Saladin Hassan shouted over his shoulder.

“What about the fucking mines?” Harry screamed, trying to hold on. “You said a lot of these unmarked trails are land-mined!”

“I don’t think this one is,” Caparina shouted over her shoulder.

“Really? You don’t think so? That’s good, Caparina,” Harry shouted back, “very reassuring!”

Harry was sitting, occasionally, on the narrow bench seat in the back of the mud-spattered Toyota Land Cruiser. This was definitely not your father’s Land Cruiser. There were no windows, no doors, and no damn top. About six inches of water was sloshing around his ankles, one foot in each of the rear foot-wells.

Saladin explained he had cut the roof off years ago. Who needs it? he said. For protection there was only a heavily padded roll-bar overhead. Harry was clinging to it now in hopes of remaining more or less inside the vehicle each time it left the ground. Colonel Hassan, Harry had learned the night before, was with an elite Brazilian spec ops group known as Halcon 4. It means Falcon, Saladin had said. Brock had heard of them. A secret government anti-terrorist unit working this region of the Amazon right now.

“You’re not on the road!” Harry yelled, palm fronds whipping across his face. “The road is to our fucking left!”

Saladin cranked the wheel hard left and they bounced back into the rut. Hassan, his beautiful ex-wife Caparina, and the American spy Harry Brock were careening down a twisting muddy trail full of unpleasant surprises. But at least none of them had been lethal so far.

Unlike Harry, Caparina, who was sitting shotgun and clinging to a grab handle on the dash, seemed to find this mad experience life-affirming and fairly amusing.

Brock tried hard to be philosophical. Be in the moment, Harry, as one of his old girlfriends used to tell him. One of the advantages of this rain was the effect it had on Caparina’s faded red T-shirt with the word Jamaica emblazoned across her lovely breasts in big black letters. He thought Saladin must be crazy. How could a man ever leave a woman like this?

Apart from the distinct possibility that this narrow twisting road was land-mined, you had to take it on faith there was no oncoming traffic from the opposite direction. Every turn was blind, with towering leafy green walls on either side. Every two minutes or so they’d hit another deep rut or streaming gully and go airborne for an eternity, returning to earth with a great splash of mud in all directions.

Caparina had a soggy, disintegrating map of the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in her lap. Periodically, she would try to show it to Harry, looking for some direction as to which way they should go. But, since the twisting gash in the rain forest they were currently following didn’t appear on any maps, it was tough. They’d been driving all morning and Harry was more confused now than when they’d started out.

The driving rain and the mud-splashed windshield didn’t help your visibility either.

“Does any of this look familiar?” Caparina said, turning in her seat to smile at Harry. She put her finger on the map, “This area here?”

“How can you tell?” Harry said, leaning forward to give the map a cursory glance.

“What?”

“I mean, Caparina, that everything looks familiar here! Everywhere you go looks exactly like this!”

“Good point,” she said smiling at him.

The three comrades, who had only recently decided to join forces, had talked into the wee hours over a late supper and many drinks the previous evening. They decided the first thing was to try and relocate the airstrip where Harry’s shot-up airplane had put down three weeks earlier. Harry estimated that, after his capture, he’d been transported over about five miles of rough jungle road, then crossed a river. He’d been taken to one of the many “detention centers” located around the perimeters of the terror training camps. Harry, along with a bunch of rural youths, was there for his “political indoctrination.” Harry listened politely, but it didn’t take. That’s why Top had ordered him shot.

Saladin Hassan was convinced that if they successfully located the secret airstrip, as identified by Brock, they’d be that much closer to finding Harry’s former detention center; and, thus, that much closer to finding Top. Saladin, in his undercover role as one of Papa Top’s henchmen, had never been allowed to visit these sensitive places without first being blindfolded.