antebellum accent. “We Yankees know how to avert our eyes when a maiden is at her ablutions.”
“Why thank you, kind sir.” She batted her eyes, thankful the black mood she saw pass over him was just as quickly dispelled. “And if you don’t, this belle packs a 9mm. Make sure Miguel doesn’t get an eyeful either. I bet he’s got the same hot blood as every other man in Panama.”
Even with Ruben camped on shore a quarter mile away, Lauren walked to the far side of the island to strip naked and dive into the lake. As sleek as an otter, she slid through the topmost layer of water. It was warmed by the sun and lifted days of sweat and grime from her pores. Without soap, she could only run her hands over her body, using her neatly trimmed nails where dirt had ground into her skin at knees and elbows. Her legs and underarms prickled from lack of shaving. She hadn’t been to her apartment in Panama City for nearly a week and hadn’t seen a shower in three days.
Lying on her back and filling her lungs so that she floated an easy swim from the island, she reveled in the twin sensations of the dying sun’s warm rays and the water, which now felt cool. Like soldiers had since the very first armies, she took simple pleasures where she could find them. Four days ago she had investigated a filthy shanty outside of La Palma where a low-level drug trafficker had splattered the brains of two of his mules against the mud walls like crimson Rorschach stains. The genitals of the husband-and-wife team had been crudely carved off and stuffed in their spouse’s mouth as a warning. If the trafficker hadn’t yet fled back to Colombia, Lauren considered putting Ruben on his trail when they got back to El Real.
But now she lay in a volcanic lake, and even the bizarre postmortem mutilation of Mercer’s friends couldn’t intrude on her well-being-another trick that every soldier discovered if they wanted to keep their sanity. She didn’t know what to make of Mercer. He had the credentials of an egghead, but moved and thought like a soldier. She doubted he was a veteran-veterans tended to name drop and brag around active-duty military. Though something in Mercer’s demeanor led her to think he wasn’t a braggart about anything.
He was a mystery she wouldn’t mind learning a little more about, a far cry from the embassy types who hit on her in Panama City, or the military men who professed to like her as an equal but usually felt threatened by her. Those, she’d found, either slunk off in humiliation or attempted dominion by date rape. Twice that had happened, the first succeeding and the second, a two-star during her last time at SouthCom headquarters in Miami, having to invent a car accident to cover the injuries she’d inflicted.
That sudden memory soured her tranquility. She exhaled deeply and allowed herself to sink under the water. Scuba diving had given her great lung control and she willed herself to hover under the surface for a slow count of one hundred. Clearing her eyes of water when she surfaced, she saw Mercer standing on the bank fifteen feet from her. A burst of anger prickled her skin and she was about to shout when she heard the sound that had prompted him to search her out.
The steady beat of a helicopter’s rotors.
“Come on,” he called, “I just heard it approaching.”
He tossed her shirt as she stood in the shallows, his concentration completely fixed on the sound of the unseen chopper. The cotton tee absorbed the water beading on her skin, outlining her high breasts and the curve of her rib cage as it swept toward her narrow waist. Temperature change and the sudden tension stiffened her nipples. Mercer had already stepped back to where he’d stashed Miguel in the tunnel. Lauren pulled on her pants. She followed carrying her underwear, boots, and pistol belt.
“Where are they?” She finished dressing in the tunnel. Mercer stood on a promontory of rock just outside the entrance.
“Coming in from the west but they could have circled around the volcano. It looks like a Bell JetRanger. All black.”
“Any markings?”
“Too far away.”
The chopper thundered over the lake as if it had just climbed the waterfall. Mercer assumed it had made a couple passes over Gary’s camp to determine if anyone remained there. He was certain that whoever had shot up the bodies-and ordered the theft of the Lepinay journal in Paris-was likely to be on this helicopter. His hands balled at his sides.
“Do you think-?”
“I know it’s them,” he answered tightly.
Ruben and his men had been caught off guard when the JetRanger appeared. All three had been dozing through the late afternoon. By the time they came fully awake, the chopper had swung into a hover between them and the nearest of Gary’s excavations. The helo’s side door had been removed and without having to watch, Mercer knew what would happen next. This was a well-executed air assault.
A testament to his training and reflexes, Ruben got off the first shot as the chopper hung in the air like a deadly insect. The pops of his M-16 were lost in the thunder of the rotors and the angry bark of a gimbal-mounted light machine gun slung in the open door frame. A wall of sand erupted ten feet in front of the Panamanians. They turned and ran. Eruptions of dirt followed in their wake as the gunner corrected his aim. Lauren had climbed up to stand next to Mercer and made an involuntary sound as the stream of rounds found their first mark.
One of the mercenaries arched his back in an impossible angle and was slammed face-first into the beach, his torn body carving a bloody furrow. The chopper moved sideways to close the range on the remaining men. Another burst caught the second mercenary. His head vanished. Ruben ran on. A long fusillade blew enough sand into the air to swallow him. The firing stopped for a moment. It didn’t matter that both Mercer and Lauren prayed he would appear from the settling dust cloud. It would only mean a temporary reprieve.
Ruben did appear again when the dust cloud settled. He was on his knees, his M-16 at his shoulder. He fired off the remaining rounds in his magazine. He had time to slam home a fresh one but not enough to cock his weapon before the chopper’s machine gun roared again. The sand settled a second time as a shroud over his lifeless figure.
“Get back into the tunnel and make sure Miguel doesn’t come out.” Mercer watched the black helicopter circle the lake, the door gunner alert for more targets.
With no visible marking on the JetRanger, Mercer had to hope he could see the figures within to make some kind of identification. He could tell the black paint had been recently, and carelessly, applied.
At each of the tunnels ringing the lake, the chopper hovered long enough for a pair of armed men in camos to jump down, scout the tunnel for people, and jump back on the helo’s skid. It was too far to tell their ethnicity. After completing its circuit, the chopper swung toward the island.
Mercer scrambled into the cave, timing it so that he could just peek out as the craft roared directly overhead. The smile that creased his face was without warmth. In their haste, whoever had blacked out the chopper hadn’t painted her underhull. He saw shadows of overspray on the helicopter’s normal white paintwork and the neat block letters of her ID number.
“Gotcha, you son of a bitch.”
By the time the Bell JetRanger circled for a few slower passes over the island, Mercer, Lauren, and Miguel were huddled against the far wall of the tunnel, completely screened from view. And with the rowboat hidden under the tree at the water’s edge, there was no reason for the gunmen to suspect the island currently sheltered a trio of temporary residents.
When the sound of the rotors faded, Miguel wouldn’t let go of Mercer so Lauren went out to see what would happen next.
“What do you see?” Mercer asked.
Thinking of the boy in the tunnel, Lauren modified the truth. “Ah, the men in the helicopter are landing to pick up Ruben and his men.” In fact, they were collecting their corpses.
“Are they leaving us?” Miguel cried. He hadn’t heard the gunfire.
“Yes, Miguel. They are going away in the helicopter.”
“Can’t we go with them?” he complained.
“It’ll be a lot more fun climbing down the waterfall,” she said, aghast when the first of the bodies was tossed back out of the chopper over the lake. It had been weighted so it sank like a stone. The two others were also unceremoniously tossed out to an unmarked watery grave.
The scene of the three murders was sanitized. Any trace evidence, like spent shell casings, was easily explained away in a country awash in guns moving from former Nicaraguan rebels to the Colombian drug barons and revolutionaries.
