Silent Running

Twenty-odd years ago Cancun had been just another sleepy Mexican fishing village on the coast of the Yucatán and not even a very big one at that. Then the area had been “discovered” by modern financial conquistadors bent on conquering their share of the burgeoning Caribbean tourist trade.

Since Cancun had barely even been a village, the developers hadn’t tried to do an Acapulco look-alike and build on the site’s existing Old World Mexican charm because there simply wasn’t any. Instead, they had gone for the gusto, building from scratch, U.S.-resort style. And since they hadn’t wanted to get into the hassle of buying out the villagers and relocating them, they’d built on the then-empty, eight-mile-long sand spit across the bay from the village. The old dirt road through the town had been turned into a four-lane causeway leading from the airport to the hotels on the peninsula.

With only that one bridge between the peninsula and the mainland, whoever held the bridge controlled access to the resort. No one knew yet why the mysterious invaders had captured the strip at Cancun and the thousands of tourists vacationing there. Bolan had to admit, though, that the physical terrain was perfect for what they had pulled off. He’d studied the NRO recon satellite photos before getting on the Harrier, but he needed to make a personal recon before he decided on his move.

CHAPTER FIVE

From a hundred yards out, there were few signs of life in the old village of Cancun, the odd low-wattage light or candle cast a soft glow, but those were about the only lights showing. There was no civilian foot traffic and no signs of any vehicles, even parked, anywhere. Whoever the resort invaders were, they’d obviously swept through and secured this place, as well. But, the Executioner hadn’t seen any foot patrols yet, so they might have gotten overconfident, which was fine with him. He liked it when his opponents were overly impressed with their own brilliance.

Bolan kept to the shadows as he made his way through the village. Were it not for the few faint voices he heard from some of the darkened dwellings, he would have thought the place had been emptied out. What inhabitants remained were keeping a low profile. He was moving quickly when a woman’s scream, sounding louder because of the unnatural silence, split the night. A man shouted and the woman wailed again.

Against his better judgment, Bolan couldn’t ignore it and went to investigate.

Following the sound, he came to a small adobe house a block off the main road. The front door was hanging wide open and a candle or lantern was burning inside, but the light was too dark for him to make out anything through the small window. Stepping up to the open door, he saw what looked to be a man struggling with a woman on the narrow bed against the wall in the corner of the single room.

In the dim light, he didn’t have a clear, unobstructed line of sight, so his right hand whipped the Cold Steel Tanto fighting knife from the sheath on his assault harness. He was through the open door and across the room in three steps. The would-be rapist looked up from his work just in time to catch the blade as it slashed across his jugular.

The thug gurgled his death as Bolan grabbed him with his free hand and pulled him away from the motionless woman. She was unconscious, but breathing and didn’t appear to be badly hurt. He laid his fingers against the side of her neck and found a strong pulse, so he just covered her.

Dragging the corpse outside, he closed the door behind him before taking the body to a hiding place behind what looked to be a tavern. If there were other wandering thugs loose tonight, he didn’t want someone to stumble over it and raise the alarm. From there, he continued on his way.

HAL BROGNOLA was still keeping to his sleep-when-ever-he-could regimen. The world might be going to hell in a hand basket, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Yet. He’d been awakened for the first meal his captors had provided in the late afternoon, wolfed down the beans and soft tortillas, used the urinal, crawled into bed and gone right back to sleep.

It was after dark when he was awakened by voices coming down the hall outside his cell. His watch had been taken away during the search the first night, so he had no idea what time it was, but it didn’t really matter. He sat up, swung his legs over the side of his bunk and got mentally prepared to greet his visitors.

Two black-clad Latino gunmen entered the cell followed by a swaggering Diego Garcia. “How do you like your accommodations, Mr. Brognola?” he asked. “It’s not quite your usual fancy D.C. hotel room is it?”

Brognola patted his narrow bunk. “Not bad for a Mexican jail.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen a lot worse. The food’s not quite up to Cancun’s usual standards, though. I expected to eat much better here.”

“You’re eating what the people of Cancun eat on a daily basis,” Garcia said. “They might be able to find work in your hotels, but they can’t afford to eat the food they prepare for you.”

“I don’t think you kidnapped me to lecture me about the local cuisine, Garcia. There’s not much I can do to improve the diet of your ‘people.’”

“Your government has had a chance to improve the lives of the people of Latin America for years,” the Cuban shot back, “but they have done nothing except to work hard to make it worse. Now that the people have taken things into their own hands, they will improve their lives for themselves.”

“By invading the United States?” Brognola laughed. “And stealing what we Americans have created by our own ingenuity and our hard work? That’s very original. I’ve never heard that one before.”

“The people are only taking back what was taken from them in the first place,” Garcia stated. “California, Texas and Florida rightfully belong to the Mexican people you Yankees stole them from.”

“Don’t forget Arizona and New Mexico.” Brognola couldn’t help himself. “We won them, too, when we beat your sorry asses in the Mexican War.”

Brognola didn’t even try to duck when Garcia swung at him. This guy wasn’t too tightly wrapped, but as long as he could get him fired up every now and then, he wouldn’t start asking the questions Brognola didn’t want to answer. He took the blow without flinching.

“Your arrogance is going to cost you dearly, Brognola.” The Cuban almost spit the words. “I know that I could get a good ransom from your Washington friends for you, but I think that I’ll turn you over to a People’s Revolutionary Court instead to be tried for your crimes again humanity. The punishment will be to face a firing squad.”

“Oh, please!” Brognola said. “Put me on trial in a kangaroo court and charge me with what? Being an underpaid career government employee?” He shrugged. “If I worked for the State Department, you might be able to make a case for my having repeatedly committed Crimes Against Common Sense, but I’m just a midlevel federal cop.”

“A cop, as you say,” Garcia replied, “who has the ear of the President. But your President is missing much more than just one of his many overpaid advisers. As of today he has also lost his source of cheap labor and a dumping ground for his toxic waste.”

Brognola frowned. He was no stranger to the incomprehensible ravings of would-be, socialist “saviors of the people,” but this was a completely new one on him. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“The president of Cuba has just announced his recognition of the newly formed People’s Republic of Mexico,” Garcia said proudly. “The Mexicans will now follow on the glorious path of the Cuban peoples to attain their true freedom from Capitalistic exploitation.”

Brognola wanted to laugh but he knew better. This guy was rapidly descending into true paranoia. “In case you missed it,” he couldn’t keep himself from saying, “we’re in the twenty-first century now. Che was the heart of the Revolution, and he’s been dead for years so, for God’s sake, get over it. After spilling his guts to the CIA, he got stood up against a shit house wall and was shot like a diseased dog.”

Hearing the name of his personal hero spoken of so disrespectfully, the Cuban went berserk. Brognola’s head snapped back from two blows to the face. The first strike opened a cut over his left eye and the second felt as though it had chipped a tooth. He’d been through worse and didn’t react.

Garcia suddenly stopped and stalked out of the cell. One of the goons reversed his AK and smiled as he made as if to jab Brognola in the gut with the butt before following his boss out and locking the door behind him.

Brognola hid a smile as he laid back down again. Once more he had managed to deflect the conversation to lesser topics. But how much longer he could keep getting hit in the head remained to be seen. So far, though, he was taking it without incurring any permanent damage. Barbara Price was always saying that he was a hardheaded bastard, and now he was getting a chance to test that statement.

QUICKLY MOVING through the reminder of Cancun village, Bolan intersected the main paved road and followed it to the bridge that crossed the lagoon. As the photos had shown, the causeway was being guarded from the opposite end. A pair of open-top SUVs with mounted machine guns and searchlights were parked at the far end, and a dozen gunmen loitered nearby. It would be no problem for him to simply take out the security force, but this wasn’t the time to make a lot of noise and leave more bodies behind. Someone was bound to notice sooner rather than later.

His only other choice was to make a half mile swim across the bay, which wasn’t the option he would have chosen. Nonetheless, he headed south down the village side of the lagoon, separating it from the resort area, looking for an alternative to a swim.

A half a mile downshore, he came across a beach shack with several personal watercraft pulled up on the sand in front of it. A couple more small water-craft were under the roof of a lean-to in a state of disrepair; this, apparently, was a repair facility.

A quick check showed that all of the machines had been disabled by having their spark plugs pulled, but that was okay with him. The sound of an unmuffled two-stroke engine in the still night would attract a little more attention than he wanted. The watercraft would still float, however, so he looked around the shack until he found an aluminum paddle. Back on the beach, he chose a dark-colored Jet Ski, dragged it down to the water’s edge and into the surf.

Straddling the saddle, he bent over the handlebars and paddled out into the lagoon at an angle away from the bridge. With few lights showing, there wasn’t much chance of his being spotted against the dark water, but he kept low and paddled strongly, but carefully, so as not to raise ripples. The tide was with him and the trip across the quarter mile of open water went quickly.

On reaching the other side, he pulled the watercraft well up onto the sand and tipped it over so it would look as if it had been abandoned. He took cover above the surf line to orient himself; his GPS nav unit contained a downloaded map of the major buildings in the area. The Hotel Maya, where Brognola had been staying, was at the far end of the strip. But before checking out the hotel, he wanted to recon for a feel of the kind of forces he would be facing here and their locations.

There was an additional risk of exposure by doing it this way, but he didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting Brognola out only to discover that there was no way for them to escape. He wanted to locate his back door first. Even then, finding the man was probably going to be more difficult than it really should be.

There was a comfortable sub-Q personal locator beacon often worn by people like Brognola—or people who were going in harm’s way—that made finding them a snap. A single overhead pass of a satellite or spy plane would activate the beeper, and it would remain powered up for five days. As Bolan well knew, though, Hal didn’t like to wear the miniature beepers, saying that they itched him.

For the lack of the locator beacon to follow, if Brognola wasn’t being held in the hotel, Bolan was faced with the possibility of having to search more than a hundred buildings to find him. And, to make it even more difficult, according to the data dump he’d received right before he’d taken off from Texas, the airline manifests showed that some eight thousand American tourists had been flown into Cancun recently. Of course, there were also the thousands of Mexicans who lived and worked in the area to serve the visitors.

Finding the proverbial needle might turn out to be easier than this job.

WITH ALL THE ACTIVITY at the pier Richard Spellman and Mary Hamilton decided to wait for dark before trying to make an escape. They had also changed into fresh, starched sets of cook’s whites they had found in the storeroom. They weren’t the most practical camouflage to wear while trying to make a nighttime break, but he figured that if they were spotted, they could be taken for the hired help, not escaped Americans on the run.

“If you think you can handle it,” he told his companion, “it might work better if you lead off. With your Spanish, you might be able to talk our way out of trouble. I can pretend to be a deaf mute or something. But if it looks bad, get behind me real fast.”

Hamilton smiled nervously. For someone who was more comfortable in a lab than a battlefield, her new man was proving resourceful.

Grabbing one of the extra tablecloths, Spellman tied the ends together to make a crude bag and loaded it with several plastic bottles of mineral water. Hamilton added a box of whole-grain crackers, some cheeses and a big tin of smoked salmon.

“How about some of those jazzed-up coffee beans?” Spellman asked. “We may need to stay awake until we can find a place to hide.”

“Good idea.”

Spellman slipped the locks on the storeroom door, opened it a crack and peered out. The passageway was clear, and he motioned for Hamilton to follow as he eased out into the hall. The deck they were on was two down from the main one. He expected the main to be guarded, but when he had boarded, he’d noticed a cargo hatch in the side of the ship on one of the lower decks. In L.A. it had been used to load passenger luggage and supplies for the trip. If he remembered correctly, it should be two decks down from where they were.

The passageway outside the café was deserted, and the pair quickly headed for the stairwell leading to the lower decks. The ship’s passenger areas were carpeted, so Spellman barely heard the approaching footsteps in time to grab his companion’s arm and get them both out of sight. The stair steps were also carpeted, which let them move quickly and noiselessly. Two decks down, they came to a hatch labeled D Cargo.

“This should be it,” he said as he undogged the steel door and opened it.