“Igapo,” she said, “Black Water.”
Harry looked around and said, “Is there maybe a waterfall nearby?”
“Impossible to say. Certainly not one on the map. There are so many in this part of the jungle. Some big, some small. Some exist only during the rainy season.”
“Why do you ask?” Saladin asked Brock.
“I hid in one. After the plane went down.”
“Tell us,” Caparina said, putting a hand on Harry’s shoulder.
“We all survived the plane’s landing. I was the last one off. When Top’s welcoming committee started shooting at us, I made it into the jungle. I was the only one who got more than a hundred yards from the plane alive. After slogging it for about an hour, I found a waterfall. I hid inside when I heard the dogs coming.”
“Inside. You mean, behind the water?”
“Yes. There was a deep indent in the rocks at the base of this waterfall. A small cave with a tunnel leading deeper inside. Unfortunately, they caught me before I could do too much exploring. But it looked interesting.”
Saladin looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘interesting’?”
“It looked like the tunnel could have been manmade.”
“How far do you think these falls were from the landing strip?” Caparina asked, suddenly much more interested.
“I didn’t get very far from the strip,” Harry said. “The jungle was so thick and I only ran for about an hour. Probably less than three miles.”
“We’re probably here,” Saladin said, pointing to the map. “And with this flood, we’re not going any further right now. Let’s track the water buffalo on foot along the river. There’s still a lot of light left in the day and it’s better than turning back.”
“I agree,” Caparina said. “Let’s follow this river and see what we see.”
“Go with the flow,” Harry said, smiling at her. Even soaking wet, she was a babe.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s get the weapons.”
A half-hour later, trudging in the rain through knee-deep mud behind a herd of meandering buffalo, Harry was feeling more than a little discouraged. But he began to notice that the current was speeding up dramatically. It was beginning to at least look more like a run of rapids. And, maybe it was leading to a waterfall.
Suddenly, Saladin, in the lead, halted.
“Listen,” he said.
“What?” Caparina said, pausing to hear.
“That dull roar. Up there, not too far. Hear it?”
“Yeah,” Harry said, his face showing some life. “That sounds like it.”
“All waterfalls sound the same, Harry,” Caparina said. “Some are a little louder, that’s all.”
“I know, but this one sounds like the one I found, that’s all I can tell you.”
Fifteen minutes later they were standing near the top of a very large waterfall, watching it cascade down into an almost circular pool some forty feet below.
“Yeah,” Harry said looking down and nodding his head. “I dove in that pool and swam under those falls. Let’s go.”
“You’re sure about all this, Harry?” Caparina asked.
“It’s a hell of a difficult climb down there,” Saladin said.
“Almost positive,” Harry said.
32
MIAMI
T his mystery man you’ve kidnapped,” Hawke said to Stokely Jones, “tell me more.”
“The Mambo King? You’re going to be talking to him yourself in about ten minutes. You want me to go faster?”
Hawke glanced at the big sixties style chromium speedometer centered behind the steering wheel and said, “Not really.”
The two men were rumbling loudly across the causeway spanning Biscayne Bay, strapped into the black leather-pleated front seats of Stokely’s outrageous new automobile.
Hawke, who favored more understated forms of conveyance, was fascinated by the GTO Pontiac. This street- legal racing machine, he had just learned, was capable of running the standing quarter mile in a shade under seven seconds. A small miracle. Hawke, for all his racing automobiles, had never owned anything that could touch this metallic beast off the line.
Alex Hawke was eagerly anticipating his meeting with the Venezuelan officer. Stoke had arranged the rendezvous at the Key Biscayne home of his intended, the beauteous Fancha. He had somehow forged an agreement with the Coast Guard honchos in Key West to maintain custody of the man for forty-eight hours. Or, longer if necessary, since, as Stoke told the commander, it was clearly a matter of national security. The man was now parked temporarily in a staff apartment located above Fancha’s boathouse.
“What’s he like, your Venezuelan colonel?” Hawke asked.
“You know it’s funny.”
“What is?”
“Well, like I told Tommy Quick this morning, it’s weird, but I feel like I’ve known this guy all my life. Even though we only met two days ago.”
“Really? Why is that, do you suppose?”
“To tell you the honest truth, when we were out there in the Tortugas, I encouraged the man to let his hair down. You know, seeing as how I’d saved his life, I said to him, and this is a quote, ‘Fernando, if you got any frijoles, spill ’em now, hombre.’ ”
Hawke laughed. “So, he’s talking, is he? What the hell does he want?”
“Asylum for him and his family up here in the big Magic Kingdom, I think. That’s the best card we got to play. Anyway, I told him you were a big-time government guy and would listen to what he had to say.”
“You say which government?”
“Hell, I don’t even know which government. I can’t keep up with you anymore. You ought to wear those little flag pins, so folks know who they’re dealing with at the moment.”
Hawke smiled, and realized just how much he’d missed Stoke’s company. He looked affectionately at the big man out of the corner of his eye. The sixties steering wheel looked small in his big brown hands.
Hawke said, “You say you encouraged the colonel to let his hair down? Is that right?”
“Yes I did.”
“You mean you told this poor guy you’d leave him alone to die out there in the Tortugas. If he didn’t immediately agree to tell you everything you wanted to know.”
Stoke smiled and shook his head, “C’mon, now. You’re in America now. We have rules and regulations when it comes to interrogations.”
“War is war,” Hawke said quietly.
“Tell me about it,” Stoke said.
Hawke shifted his eyes to a beautiful old ketch heeled over and beating to windward, a golden blonde lying spread-eagled atop her cabin house. Hawke could make out a tiny triangle of red material below her waist and nothing above it. What a glorious view that skipper had.
Something, perhaps the sight of such a lovely boat under sail, triggered unpleasant thoughts of the anti-ship weapons Stoke had found on the submerged airplane. The fact that they were Russian-built was troublesome enough. Unfriendly Latin American strongmen in possession of these things was a huge problem. Especially in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the oil America imported traveled up through the Gulf and entered at the Port of New Orleans.
