Silent Running

“Hal—” Hector de Lorenzo’s grin threatened to split his face “—may I present Señorita Elena Martinez.”

In his cop’s mind, Señorita Martinez registered as five-six and a well-distributed one hundred and thirty pounds. The stats, though, didn’t even begin to convey the effect of the complete package. The low-cut, tight-waisted dress she wore was a stunning advertisement offset by long hair combed down over her back.

“Elena,” de Lorenzo said, turning to the woman, “my old friend Hal is one of the American President’s most valuable advisers, so you should make him feel welcome to Mexico. I might need his help someday and I want him to remember me fondly.”

The woman extended her hand and Brognola felt like a fool, but he bent over it like a Spanish grandee in a forties Zorro movie. “I am honored,” he said.

“As am I, señor,” she replied with a smile.

“Let’s eat,” de Lorenzo said.

Dinner was being served in the largest of the hotel’s open-air dining areas adjacent to the main pool. The scent of tropical flowers and salt water on the warm air and the flicker of torch lights created a romantic atmosphere. So did the intimate laughter of the young “dinner companions” each man had at his table. This was the most sexually charged event he’d attended in a long time where everyone still had their clothes on. With the pool close by, though, that could change at any moment.

The music from the live band wasn’t as loud as it had been during Happy Hour, but it was still a force to be reckoned with. It did, though, make dinner conversations more intimate because he had to lean close to Martinez to hear her low, throaty voice. Which, of course, put him in olfactory range of the subtle mix of her expensive perfume and her natural pheromones. It was a very nice combination indeed and went well with her catlike eyes, silky long hair, low-cut dress, soft lighting, Caribbean rum and spicy food.

He was leaning close again, his face inches from her fragrant hair, answering one of her questions when a switch was thrown and the dining area was hit with harsh light from spotlights around the perimeter. By the time he could blink away the retina burn, a dozen black-clad men armed with AKs entered from the shadows and surrounded the diners.

“Aw shit!” Brognola muttered. He’d come to Mexico to chase a hunch, but it looked as though it had come chasing him instead. There was no way this was going to have a happy ending.

“Hal!” Martinez clutched his arm, her eyes wide.

“Just stay calm,” he told her as he tried to figure the odds.

Since none of the diners had foreseen a need to pack lethal hardware while drinking and dining, there wasn’t a gun in the crowd. The exception was the squad of waiters who had all produced handguns from somewhere, but it looked as though they were on the side of the intruders.

“Everyone stay where you are,” one of the gunmen commanded in English and then Spanish.

When one of the diners jumped up, he was instantly shot. He fell dead across his table, scattering the dishes and drinks. This freaked his dinner partner, who also tried to run, only to share her companion’s fate.

“Stay seated!”

If there was something that cops and prosecutors knew how to do it was to listen to men with guns in the hands. Another dozen gunmen started taking the diners and their companions from their tables and searching them before leading them away. When it came his turn, Brognola went along with the pat-down. This was no time for macho heroics. He did, though, try to steady Elena Martinez when the grinning thug took his time running his hands over her.

When they were both found to be clean, they were led away to the main conference room inside the hotel, where they found more armed men waiting for them. Whoever had put this operation together wasn’t missing a trick. Once there, Martinez was led away to join the other women and Hal was sent over to join the men. The guards allowed no talking, so the men waited with their own thoughts and fears of what was coming next.

Brognola had no fears, though. He knew full well what was coming next. He just didn’t know who was sponsoring this mass hostage taking and what they thought they were going to get out of it. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

CHAPTER TWO

Panama Canal

Dr. Richard Spellman wasn’t a man who enjoyed wasting his time; he was much too busy for it. He wasn’t one of those doctors who kept America’s golf courses in business or one who took extended winter vacations in exotic resorts. For one, he wasn’t a wealthy man, and two, he wasn’t the kind of doctor who could take time off. He was an M.D. bench researcher in a university hospital; not too much downtime came with the job. While his salary was less than stellar by current medical standards, he didn’t really care. He loved what he did. He loved it so much, in fact, that his wife had divorced him and taken up with a California plastic surgeon. Not only was she able to get her face-lifts and boob jobs done free now, but her new husband was willing to take her to exclusive, exotic locales and to parade her to show off his handiwork.

So, being on a cruise ship passing through the Panama Canal en route to the Caribbean was a first for Spellman and totally out of character. But it wasn’t really a vacation, either. The sole reason he was on board the SS Carib Princess was that the Society of Genomic Research was holding its annual meeting on board, and he had been invited to present a paper on his work. Even so, if the association hadn’t picked up his tab for the cruise and offered him an honorarium, he couldn’t have afforded to attend.

He’d been prepared to really hate wasting the time both before and after he made his presentation, but he had to admit that he was actually starting to enjoy himself. He’d never been at sea before and found the experience strangely liberating. Also, after a couple of years eating his own cooking, he was thoroughly enjoying the ship’s cuisine on his all-inclusive ticket.

Spellman stood at the rail watching the early evening jungle along the banks of the canal as the ship approached the eastern lock. In a little more than an hour, they would be in the Caribbean steaming for the island of Aruba. That would be another first for him; he’d never been to a tropical island. He turned when he heard footsteps approach.

“There you are, Richard,” a woman in a light tropical dress said with a smile.

Dr. Mary Hamilton was the other reason he had started to enjoy the cruise. Since his divorce, his social life had been pretty much confined to exchanging mumbled greetings with the surly waitress in the restaurant where he had breakfast. When he’d found himself almost the only single guy in a boatload of doctors with their trophy wives and younger girlfriends in tow, he’d been a little overwhelmed. It made him realize how long it had been since he’d enjoyed the scent of a woman. On the second night out, though, he’d stumbled onto Mary.

She was a woman many men wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t a fashion plate, nor was she young enough to be a centerfold. She was, however, trim, confident and intelligent. That rare combination made her more than exotic to his eyes. Best of all, she was also a Ph.D. research director for a major pharmaceutical company. He worked in a smaller university setting, but their professional lives were similar and they could talk shop. Until meeting her, he hadn’t realized how nice it was to be able to talk about his work with a woman who understood what he did for a living.

“You ready to go in to dinner?” she asked. “The eight o’clock bell just rang.”

Being a man who hated to waste time, Spellman took her arm. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Rather than standing in line with the rest of the herd at the common trough, why don’t we go down to that little French restaurant on the second deck and eat by ourselves. It seemed like a nice place, and the menu looked interesting.”

He didn’t add that this place he suggested was an intimate little bistro designed more for romantic encounters than for pedestrian dining. But if he was going to get to know this woman better, and he intended to, he wasn’t going to waste any more time doing it.

“Great idea.” Hamilton smiled. “I’m up for a few snails in garlic butter.”

Spellman grimaced. He should have checked on her culinary preferences. But in for a penny, in for a pound. If he needed to, he’d introduce her to breath mints.

NGUYEN CAO NGUYEN stood on the deck of the blacked-out canal tug as it approached the stern of the Carib Princess. On deck with him were two dozen heavily armed Matador operatives in black combat suits. Another dozen men stood behind them ready to take command of the ship after the assault teams had secured it. Doing the takedown in the canal made it easier, and his allies at the eastern lock guaranteed that the ship’s passage under new management would go without a hitch.

With the ship brightly lit, the Vietnamese had no trouble seeing the hatch open in the hull above the stern. A figure in a crewman’s uniform rolled out a long rope ladder and lowered it over the side.

“Go!” he said in Spanish, and motioned to the waiting assault leader.

The black-clad commandos swarmed up the rope ladder, their silenced weapons slung over their backs, and disappeared inside the ship. To keep from being spotted, Nguyen had the tugboat captain back off a hundred yards while he waited. He didn’t mind the wait because he’d been waiting for years to get his payback.

During the Vietnam war, Nguyen had been a young Vietcong agent planted in the USAID office in Saigon. In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, he’d been exposed and sent to a South Vietnamese prison camp for six years. The North Vietnamese liberation of Saigon had freed him, but when he returned to what had been his home, he learned that his wife had moved in with an American foreign service officer in his absence.

The Yankee was already gone, having fled with the rest of his people in the last-minute evacuation, but Nguyen had hunted down his unfaithful wife and killed her and her bastard half-Yankee child. He could now see that it had been an impulsive act, but he’d been imprisoned for a long time. Had he taken the time to think about it, he would have still killed her, but might not have done it so publicly. His wife’s family was high-ranking Vietcong officials, and he’d been forced to flee to Red China to escape their vengeance.

Even though China and the People’s Republic of Vietnam shared the same twisted Oriental version of Marxism, they weren’t quite on speaking terms. In the aftermath of North Vietnam’s takeover of the South, the Chinese were concerned about continuing their expansionistic policies. The unsuccessful Vietnamese military incursions into the disputed Chinese border territory only confirmed their fears. Therefore, working on the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend theory, Nguyen was welcomed in China.

When his debriefing revealed his vast working knowledge of American military and political activities, the Chinese took him on as an agent in their intelligence service. After extensive training, he’d been infiltrated into a group of “boat people” refugees from Hong Kong being sent to the United States. Once in the U.S., he settled in Southern Florida and, on orders of his Beijing masters, linked up with the Cuban DGI agents active there.

The Chinese considered the Cubans to be rather unimportant in the grand scheme of world history, and bumbling, overly emotional amateurs to boot. But they were the sole Communist state in the Western Hemisphere and a good launchpad for China’s plans for the region. And Beijing had been making plans for Latin America for decades. Since Chinese strategic thought was always couched in terms of decades instead of weeks, Beijing didn’t mind letting someone else be their front man as long as it served their ultimate goals.

When Nguyen discovered the activities of the Matador Section and reported it to his Beijing handlers, he was ordered to try to get accepted into the secret organization and, given local Chinese assets, to offer the Cubans as an enticement. The Cubans fell for it, and Nguyen soon became Diego Garcia’s second in command. As such, he was personally supervising the takeover of the Carib Princess as it was a critical element of Garcia’s overall Matador plan.

If Garcia’s operation was successful, it would advance China’s long-range objectives without their having to expose any of their own operations. Best of all, if it failed, China wouldn’t be caught up in the inevitable backlash. The Americans had been looking for an excuse to obliterate Cuba for many years now, and the Chinese didn’t want Beijing to end up on the same nuclear cruise missile target list as Havana.

When Nguyen heard the code word over his radio, he motioned to his replacement crew that would sail the ship on to Cancun. As per his instructions, the assault team had executed the ship’s captain and most of the bridge crew. The Carib Princess’s first officer, purser, engineering officer and the Black Gang had been kept alive, though. The Matador replacement crew was experienced with large vessels, but in case something came up, he wanted men on hand who knew the intimate details of operating this particular ship.

As soon as the substitute crewmen had climbed the ladder into the ship, Nguyen started up after them. His first act on board would be to notify Garcia that the ship was theirs.

RICHARD SPELLMAN grandly slathered butter on the last slice of thick-crust bread. “I swear this is the last bite,” he said. “I’m going to have to call the ship’s doctor and order a gurney to roll me back to my cabin.”

Mary Hamilton smiled. “Coming here has to have been one of your better ideas, Richard. But wait on calling for the gurney, my cabin’s right down the hallway.”

“That’s an even better idea,” he said. “But on a ship, I think they call it a passageway.”

“It still leads to my cabin.”