alive) and instead of talking turkey with Don Osvaldo he was running for his life and hopping into the back of a poultry truck crossing a bridge to nowhere. Once safely across the Paran River, he’d taken to the jungle, sleeping rough for a week until, good luck, the heat died down. Hiding in jungles is hot, thirsty work. Harry finally succumbed to his baser desires and hitched a ride with a busload of poppy growers to his current residence, a less than idyllic village called Madre de Dios.
All he’d really wanted was a couple of cold cervezas and a warm bed. Was that too much to ask? Before Saladin Hassan had left to go find the Xucuru tribe that was holding Alex Hawke for ransom, he had given Harry the address of a place (an abandoned mosque) he could use to hole up in, but only, Saladin had emphasized, in a dire emergency. Saladin, reluctantly giving Harry the key to an upstairs room, said, don’t use it. As it happened, he had used it, although in hindsight, maybe that wasn’t a really good idea.
It was a scruffy little town he’d slipped into. Losing himself in the horde of merchants, peddlers, and smugglers hoofing it at a snail’s pace over the Puente de la Amistad (the bridge of friendship) he thought there was something a little incongruous about the sight of golden domes and spindly minarets rising up out of this lush jungle. But what he found out was, back in 1975, after the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon, the Islamic population of this region had swelled rapidly and was now somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty thousand in this one town alone.
Why were they here and what the hell were they up to, you might well ask yourself. Well, money. The more the United States shut down the terror networks’cash flow, the more these guys had to turn to alternative sources of income. And what better source of income than drugs? Human trafficking and guns? Not too shabby either.
What Harry was picking up on was a whole infrastructure in this part of Latam, locally known as the Mafia- Araby, who had taken over all the weapons and narcotic sales and distribution channels down here. This was because the badass Arab sin sheikhs made the local toughs look like a bunch of drugstore gauchos.
And the Mafia-Araby was using all this ill-gotten lucre to finance their Latino terrorist operations. In this region alone, the number of guerilla training camps had to have risen exponentially. And high-tech weaponry was flooding in, some of it experimental technology stolen from the U.S. and Britain.
Now, you had to wonder, as Harry did on a regular basis, how come his bosses at the Pentagon, Langley, and NSA had missed all these interesting developments in Latin America. Just by walking around, looking at faces, you could see there was not a lot of love for the norteamericanos down here, no matter what the race, color, or creed of the people on the streets. What there was a lot of, if you asked Harry, was trouble.
Trouble wasn’t brewing, like Milwaukee’s finest, it was fully brewed. And, some day real soon, somebody around here was going to pop the top on a whole six-pack of shit.
The funny thing was, all this snooping around he was doing wasn’t even Harry’s assignment. He’d been ordered down here with a couple of other CIA guys for one specific reason: find Alex Hawke and if he was still alive get him the hell out. Harry had gone to his boss, Charley Moore, at the JCS and volunteered for this assignment when he’d heard about it. He owed Alex Hawke a big favor.
He had met Hawke a year or so ago. Hawke had pulled him off a Chinese steamer just before it sailed Harry back to the Chinese prison hellhole where he was scheduled to spend what was left of his life begging to die. He owed Hawke big time and had planned to repay that debt if he ever got a chance. Now, he had it.
This town was busy, busy, busy. Really hopping. In addition to the group of young Shiite Muslims he’d seen outside a mosque (raising money for the imminent jihad, no doubt), there were countless good citizens packed into the narrow streets, hawking everything from designer jeans and leather jackets to plasma TVs, computers, and laser tools. There was some other stuff, too, including tons of choice Colombian marijuana, hashish, and cocaine for the guys who made a living transshipping the stuff to Puerto Paranagua over on Brazil’s Atlantic coast.
Harry didn’t pick one up, but he’d heard on the street you could buy a counterfeit Brazilian passport from Brazilian officials for a measly $5,000. And that passport, under the current waiver program created by some benevolent genius in Washington, opened the portals to the fabulous Magic Kingdom lying immediately to the north of the Mexican border. The waiver made a valid Brazilian passport all you needed to travel throughout the United States.
Think about that one for a minute and your head will explode.
He was pretty sure the blossoming suicide bombers hanging around the mosque had figured that one out long ago. If you could afford five grand for a passport, you didn’t need to worry about sneaking across the Mexican border to blow shit up in Houston or Chicago or wherever. Just hop a flight to Miami. That’s pretty much what Harry was thinking about when the girl had showed up on the stool right next to his.
He’d gone into the first bar he’d seen that looked air-conditioned. No windows, so it was dark inside, too, and he’d felt all safe and cozy inside sipping his cerveza fria with a whisky back at the bar. Then, at some point, a girl was sitting next to him. A nurse, she said. It was her day off. What was her name? Caparina. Yeah, that was her name, pronounced like that Brazilian drink he liked, the one made with limes and Cachaca, grain alcohol distilled from sugar cane. Lethal.
Caiparinha. Some kind of butterfly, she’d said it meant in English.
So, what the hell, he’d bought her a few beers, not many, only a hundred or so. She’d asked him if he wanted to get busy and he said, yeah why not?
Why not? Jesus, he knew why not now. She had a torn Wanted Dead or Alive poster in her free hand and Harry immediately understood that he was up creek number two without a paddle. Now that the sun was up she was comparing his face with the Xeroxed one on the wanted poster. There was a small painting of the Holy Virgin stuck on a nail just above Harry’s head. Caparina smiled at him, then reached up and slapped the poster over the painting, the nail head sticking right through Harry’s forehead.
A warm breast brushed his cheek as she settled back down, kind of squishing herself onto his lap.
“Mmm-pf!” Harry said, and she looked at him for a long minute and then pulled the gun out of his mouth. The oily aftertaste was pretty bad, but at least he could work his jaw. He thought she was being a good girl, but then he saw her reach for the cell phone on the night table.
“Don’t do that!” Harry said.
“Porque no?” she replied, looking again at the poster with the big fat number prominently displayed on the bottom. Harry tried hard as he could but he was darned if he could come up with a zippy and compelling answer to that question. Why shouldn’t she call the telephone number on the poster and collect the reward? Seriously. Why the hell not? In fact, there were many thousands of reasons why she should do exactly that. Hell, if their roles were reversed he would do exactly the same—
“You’re pretty,” he decided to say, letting her have both the pearly whites and the sleepy brown eyes. Harry was an okay looking guy. He’d been told he looked like Bruce Willis with hair. He didn’t see it, but frankly, whatever. Some times it worked, some times it didn’t. This time, thank you Jesus, it did. She hesitated, then put the phone back and looked at him, that cute little smile on her face. Caparina could obviously tell Mr. Happy was back in town and restless; maybe looking for a place to settle in for a spell.
She got busy. You know, one for the road, after all she had nothing to lose and Harry certainly did not. He was reduced to thinking of turning himself in, getting the reward, and then escaping again. Admittedly, it was a plan with a lot of holes.
He meant what he said. She was pretty. She was a drop-dead babe even sober, meaning when he was sober not her. He looked at her face, too, as she started rocking back and forth on top of him, grinding away at him until he was hard as stone. She had what Harry the world-traveler called a pretty version of the U.N. face. Part Chinese, part Indian, part mestizo, part brown skin gal. She had long purplish black hair, full lips, and amazing breasts that were now swinging dangerously close to his lips.
“Hey,” he said, “C’mon on.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
“Beg me,” she said.
“What?”
“Beg.”
“I don’t beg.”
“Oh, yes you do, Mr. Harry Brock.”
“All right, I’ll beg.”
“I don’t hear you.”
