Ted Bell - Spy

“Homer, sit tight, I’m taking the next flight out. I’ll rent a car and find you. Is there a street address on River Road?”

“No, sir. But there’s a sign at the end of the driveway. ‘Morning Glory Farm.’ ”

“I’ll find it. Do not approach these people when they return. Do not go near the truck. Until I get there, you see something happening you don’t like, you call it in to the locals. Let them handle it.”

“It’s starting to snow pretty hard now. Really coming down. Hope your flight gets in.”

“I hope so, too. You get anything to eat?”

“Stole an apple from the bowl here. All right if I steal a little food from the pantry? I’ve been living on Twinkies and R.C. Colas for three whole states.”

“Take something they won’t miss from a high shelf and get out of that house, Homer. Now, git!”

“Sheriff?”

“Yep?”

“I might be wrong about all this. What these trucks mean, all of them headed north like they are. All along I’ve been thinking it was drugs. Now I’m not so sure.”

“I hope you are wrong, Homer, but I’m not so sure anymore, either. I’ll be there soon as I can.”

66

AMAZON RIVER, BRAZIL

F ocus. Concentrate. Look where you’re going, not where you are,” Hawke said. He was standing, feet planted wide apart to brace himself, at Stiletto’s helm. Stoke could only hear him because of the headphones he was wearing.

It was two in the morning. Having notified the police and searched the entire hotel and grounds for his missing friend, Hawke had decided he’d no choice but to press on without him. It had not been an easy decision to make. There was a big moon hiding behind swiftly moving clouds. Not much traffic at this hour, only the small double-decked ferries and few big cruise ships headed upriver to Manaus.

Hawke, outwardly calm but still angry, was driving the powerful offshore boat flat-out over the wide river, hurling masses of foaming white water out to either side of the razor-sharp hull. Stiletto was hammering east on the Amazon, backtracking down to the Madeira River before she’d make the turn south and head into the deep jungle of the Mata Grosso.

Hawke was in a hurry, running at the extreme edges of the powerful vessel’s performance parameters. Stoke could see the digital speed readouts flickering red over Hawke’s head well enough. They were doing nearly 130 knots. In the dark.

This would be pushing it in broad daylight. On the open sea, running in a flat calm. But at night? On a damn river? Stoke didn’t even want to think about what would happen if they struck a submerged object at this speed. Radar only picked out what was on the water, not what was under it. At this speed, it was hard enough to avoid the lighted navigation buoys that were blurring by now and then, disappearing astern almost before you saw them coming.

“You want the helm, Stoke?” Hawke said, his eyes riveted on the onrushing river. All lights in the wheelhouse were extinguished. He was only a silhouette, standing at the wheel in the pale reddish light of the control fascia overhead. Everyone on the bridge deck was wearing headsets in order to hear. The noise of three 1,600-horsepower gas turbine engines at full bore, even muffled, was overwhelming.

“Like to watch you a little longer,” Stokely said carefully, “then I’ll take her.”

In truth, he wasn’t at all anxious to take the helm from Alex. He wanted Hawke’s mind fixed on the boat and the river, not on what had happened to his friend Ambrose Congreve. And whatever was waiting for them in the jungle. The “Reckoning” as Ambrose said it was called in the code letter. Better to keep Hawke focused, concentrating on driving the boat as fast as it would go for long as he could. Stoke knew Hawke had to be thinking exactly what he was thinking.

Get there fast.

If Top had their friend, and there was not much doubt now that he did, Las Medianoches henchmen would soon be breaking that dear man into a million little pieces to find out what he knew. Congreve could not long survive the vicious blend of voodoo tortures Top’s terrorists practiced in the jungle.

The boat heeled sharply to starboard. A second later, she slammed hard to port. Hawke had just missed a low-lying barge, towed by a small tug plying her way downriver. Much as he wanted to, Stoke couldn’t tell Alex Hawke to slow the boat down. Unless they found this damn River of Doubt, unless they found Muhammad Top, soon, the terrorists would have their Day of Reckoning. And Hawke’s best friend Ambrose, the man who’d been a father to him since early childhood, would be gone the hard way.

In the end, Stoke knew, everybody talks anyway.

“Nav,” Hawke said quietly into his lip mike. On the primary navigation monitor mounted above him, the image of the boat was rapidly moving easterly across the GPS map displaying the Amazon. They were rapidly closing the distance to the mouth of the Madeira River.

“Navigation here, sir.”

“Nav, when do we pass through zero-five-zero south, zero-fifty-five west?”

“Local time or Zulu time, sir?” Zulu was Coordinated Universal Time, which had replaced Greenwich Mean Time as the world’s standard.

“Local.”

“Zero-two-twenty, sir.”

Hawke stole a glance at his watch and edged the throttle a notch forward. Except for the dull roar of the engines, it was deathly still on the bridge. Everyone strapped into his seat, keeping conversation to a minimum. All probably thinking the same thing. Hit a log or an oil drum at this insane speed and you’re dead before you know it.

“Focus is the big one at this speed, right?” Stoke asked Alex, not wanting his friend’s mind to wander down any bad roads even for one second.

Hawke was silent for a moment, his eyes scanning the river of blackness the boat was devouring at a staggering rate. He saw something ahead, a pinpoint of light, put the helm over a fraction and the boat heeled sharply, then corrected. On an even keel once more, Stiletto surged forward.

“Yes. Focus,” Stoke heard Hawke say in his headset. The voice was calm, almost no emotion at all. “It’s oddly cerebral. What you’re thinking about determines what you tell the boat to do. What your inputs are. That’s why you must always be thinking ahead of the boat. The further behind the boat you are mentally, the more forced and rougher your inputs are likely to be.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“The enemy of concentration is emotion,” Hawke said, verifying Stoke’s instinctive theory. “Or, exhaustion. Most high-speed accidents occur when the guy driving the boat becomes afraid he’s in over his head, doesn’t think he quite knows how to exit this turn. Panic rules. Or, he’s running on pure adrenaline. Can’t do that, either. You have to quiet your mind enough to listen to the boat. Let it tell you what it wants you to do, and do it. This boat gives you a lot of feedback. But you’ve got to stay ahead of it. Ready to drive? I’d like to grab an hour or so of rack.”

“Yeah. I’ll take it. Just a sec.”

Stoke had been watching Hawke carefully. He’d gone a little crazy with the local Military Police commander when nobody could help him find Ambrose. Realized, finally, they’d have to shove off without him. He seemed calmer now. Stoke thought Hawke could handle it now, do what he had to do in the next day or so. He’d already moved into his mission performance zone. He’d pushed emotion back in that dark closet where it rightly belonged. Still, he looked exhausted from pushing the boat hard all the way down from Key West, three days in open ocean. Stoke thought he’d soon be no good to anyone without some rest.

Stoke had unbuckled his restraining belts and now stood beside Hawke, moving his hands to the wheel as Hawke backed off the throttles momentarily.