“I did. I don’t anymore. I think you’re smart enough to follow your survival instincts.”
“Yeah?
“Tiger. You’re in over your head and you know it. Take my offer.”
“And if I don’t? If I just add your Yanqui blood to this sacred ground of el toro?”
“You do that and men far less polite will come down here in sufficient numbers and with sufficient firepower to put you and everybody in this town underground. I promise you that will happen.”
“You serious, man?”
“Right now, I’m the only thing stopping it.”
The kid looked away and Franklin could see him coming to a decision. “It wasn’t me. That unfortunate thing with your posse. I heard about that, but it wasn’t me.”
“We’ll see, I guess.”
“I need to think about this.”
“Think fast. As a show of good faith, I want you to release the five women that were stolen from my town over the last six months. Today is Saturday. I’m giving you forty-eight hours.”
“You are crazy, man, fucking loco gonzo. What makes you think I have them?”
“If you don’t, you know how to find them. If all five are not back with their families by sundown Monday, I’ll take that as a decision on your part and act accordingly.”
“Shit. I don’t know, man.”
“Look at me, Tiger. See who I truly am.”
“I see pretty good who you are.”
“You’ve got until sundown Monday.”
“I make no promises.”
“Pleasure doing business with you, son,” Dixon said, walking away from the Mexican. “All right, Homer, get your gun. Time to saddle up.”
“Adios, Tres Ojos,” Homer said, smiling at the narco.
“You know, perhaps some day me and my compadres will return the visit? How about that? We come see you sometime? You would like that?”
Homer and Dixon kept walking.
As they were climbing in the pickup, Homer said, “Were you kidding about all that ‘hammer of justice’ stuff?”
“Maybe.”
“America ain’t got a spare hammer right now, Sheriff, that’s the whole damn problem.”
“I know. I made it up when we were walking out there.”
16
DRY TORTUGAS
T he hungry mako was still in the picture. Loitering in the foreground, swimming lazy loops about twenty feet above the fuselage. Acting like he didn’t give a good goddamn, but Stoke would swear the fish kept checking him out, fish with that snaggle-toothed grin of his.
Stoke, back in his Navy SEAL days in the Keys, had always thought this particular make and model of shark was the meanest looking animal on earth. Fish had a very expensive set of curved knives set into his jaw. His pointy snout and dark eyes gave him a look of intense brainpower, even though he was just a damn eating machine. Definitely came with an aggressive attitude; his eyes looking into the back of your eyes, saying, “Hey! I’m the kind of fish who will personally bite your ass in half.”
Mako was a fast fish, too. Any Keys fisherman will tell you a mako can reach speeds of almost twenty-five miles an hour and can jump about twenty feet in the air. They’ve been known to attack small fishing boats, leaping up suddenly and landing on the deck, biting everything in sight. Like a collision at sea, a thing like that can ruin your day.
Stoke kept one eye on the mako, especially because he was pretty busy trying to stop his arm from bleeding. He’d ripped it on the jagged edge of some protruding cockpit glass. Reaching inside again, trying once more to move the dead pilot around, he’d been forced to pull his hand out in a hurry. What happened was, a big ass barracuda swam right up inside the cockpit, knocked the pilot’s head to one side and gave Stoke the evil eye.
Shit! Tore his damn wet suit, yanking his arm out and slicing his forearm deep and now his cut up hand was bleeding pretty good, too. Nothing like getting a good blood flow going around man-eating sharks to add a sense of heightened drama to any situation.
One swift scissors kick got him to the entrance to the plane. He poked his head inside. Visibility was way down inside the submerged airplane, but he could clearly see his man Luis poking around in the plane to his left. Sharkey saw Stoke and motioned him forward, pointing down at something below his fins. Stoke checked his right flank first, see if there were any more jaws-of-death types lurking around in the rear of the fuselage.
It was clear so he swam right through and hung a left toward the cockpit.
Sharkey immediately saw all the blood trailing from Stoke’s hand and started shaking his head, pointing upward, meaning he thought the wound was bad enough they should surface and get it taken care of. Stoke shook his head “no” and turned on his Beacon halogen dive light to see what all the excitement was about.
Sharkey had already ripped up a small section of the plane’s aluminum flooring. Something was down there and Stoke had the feeling it wasn’t any damn cocaine. He swam right down to the small opening and peered through it. Too dark to see anything much but they were definitely carrying cargo down there. He poked his hand down there and felt around. A flat surface under some kind of rough covering.
He stuck his light through the hole and directed the bright white beam fore and aft. There was way too much silt and blood in suspension to see anything much and he had to wait a bit for it to settle.
He looked at Sharkey, mouthing the words “good job.” Luis nodded his head, but grabbed him by the elbow and pointed up at the surface again.
Stoke held up two bloody fingers. “Two minutes.”
He pulled out the dive knife strapped to his thigh and used it to lever up a larger section of flooring. Now he could maybe get his light down inside there and see what the hell he had here. A foot below the floor frame, what looked like two large rectangular containers were lying side-by-side and covered with heavy burlap.
Stoke felt his heart pump.
Sharkey helped him get the rest of the floor section up. It took about five minutes. Stoke was starting to feel the loss of blood, but this was damn well worth a little dizziness. There were two long cases, each about six feet across and about twenty feet in length. He tried, but he couldn’t see how far they stretched back under the remaining floor.
He sliced open the burlap, making a slit about four feet long and then just ripping the material away.
Inside was a large metal container. There was stenciled information on top, printed in red. The writing was Russian, not one of his languages. Still, a word popped out at him and sent a new sensation flooding through his body, a mixture of fear and satisfaction. He’d seen this word buried in the thick briefing documents Harry Brock had given him to study when they’d met for his initial briefing in Washington.
On the Jet Blue back home, he’d opened the brief book and dug in. Read a lot of governmental boilerplate about what he could and could not do as an independent contractor. Perused a CIA overview of all of Latin American countries. And, finally, a long list of all the bad shit he should be on the lookout for when he got to the Caribbean. One whole section had been about black market foreign cruise missiles. Brock had told him to read that section very carefully. He didn’t need to tell Stoke why. It was one of the things the U.S. was most concerned about in the region.
Hell, you had half the nation’s strategic oil supply going up the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. Somebody, Fidel or Hugo, say, started taking out tankers or offshore rigs, you were looking at war on your back porch.
The Russian word he had recognized was Yakhont. Stoke sucked a lot of oxygen down and held it there, trying to calm himself down.
Yakhont had a familiar ring to it.
