The Argentine Triangle: A Craig Page Thriller (38 page)

Suddenly Craig heard an ominous sound. Behind them was the roar of a powerful motorboat.

While he steered the pontoon boat, he tossed Gina the binoculars. “Keep your body as low as possible. Tell me what’s coming.”

He knew the answer before she said it. “A white motorboat. I see Estrada and Schiller on board along with at least six sailors.”

“We’re fucked,” he said. “Where’s the goddamn helicopter?”

She responded to his curses with prayers. That can’t hurt, he decided. We need all the help we can get.

The pontoon boat was no match in speed for Estrada’s craft, which was rapidly closing the gap between them.

At a distance of twenty yards, the motorboat cut its speed and maintained a constant distance.

Through a bullhorn Estrada called out, “We urge you to surrender. No one will get hurt. Turn off your engines. We will come for you.”

Craig cut his engine to a very low idle and steered the pontoon boat around to face Estrada’s boat, making it appear as if he intended to comply.

At a distance of ten yards, without any warning, Craig let go of the wheel and grabbed the Uzi from the floor of the pontoon. “Hit the deck,” he called to Gina. Then he aimed and blasted away. In the hail of gunfire, bullets ripped into Schiller’s body.

Craig kept firing shots, striking the captain in the head, who collapsed to the deck. That caused the motorboat to veer wildly. Estrada was out of sight. Craig took down two more sailors. Before the others could get off a decent shot from the spinning and twisting boat, Craig turned up the engine of the pontoon and tore away downstream in the direction of the Falls.

A minute later, one of the other sailors grabbed the wheel and turned the boat around. They resumed the chase, now heading downstream after the pontoon. Glancing quickly over his shoulder, Craig saw Estrada standing tall, an Uzi in his hand.

Craig looked skyward with despair. Where the hell is that damn helicopter? He called to Gina, “Keep your eye on their boat.”

Craig couldn’t stop now or turn around. He knew Estrada would kill them both. Yet, if they kept going, in a matter of minutes they would be going over the Falls to a certain death.

“What do you see?” he shouted to Gina.

“They’re setting up a big weapon,” she called back.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Estrada’s crew loading up a mobile grenade launcher. From this distance, there wasn’t much chance of missing the pontoon. The blast would blow apart the pontoon and might even cause the engine to explode. Either way, they were doomed.

Better the unknown to a certain death. He shouted to Gina over the roar of the engine: “Out of the boat. Into the water. Now. Roll. Keep your body low.”

She looked at him as if he were crazy.

“Into the water,” he screamed. “Drop deep under the surface. Once they fire that weapon, we have to avoid flying debris and burning particles.”

As the sailor standing next to Estrada took aim with his grenade launcher, Craig shouted, “Now move. Follow me.”

Keeping low, he dove into the water, getting clear of the engine of the pontoon. She copied his movements.

He held his breath and dove down under the swiftly moving muddy water. From the tremors in the water, he was certain the grenade smashed into the pontoon, blasting it into hundreds of pieces.

When he came up, he frantically searched for Gina. Her head was bobbing in the fast moving current of the brown, muddy river, slightly downstream and off to one side. She had survived. She was waving her hands wildly. They were both too far in the middle to have any chance of reaching shore with no overhanging branch or anything else to grab hold of.

From Estrada’s boat, sailors began shooting at them with rifles and machine guns. He felt as if they were fish in a barrel at an amusement park. “Ping.” A bullet hit the water two feet away. Spray from the impact smacked him in the face.

He and Gina had one edge. The river was swollen with spring runoff from a winter of heavy snowfall. The strong and erratic current made it impossible for Estrada’s men to get off a good shot.

Then suddenly Estrada’s boat stopped moving. The powerful engine reduced to a low din. At first Craig thought the boat had a mechanical problem, and he felt a sudden ray of hope. Then he realized what Estrada was doing. He had no need to pursue or even shoot Craig and Gina. In a few minutes, the water would pull them over the Falls to an almost certain death on the rocks below. Craig thought again of getting to shore, but the river was too wide for that and the current too powerful. In front of them, the thunderous roaring of the water pouring over the Falls was so terrifying that Craig could barely think.

But what could they do?

Now they were finished. He was certain of it.

He could still see Gina’s head. He shouted out, hoping she heard him over the roar of the water, “I’m sorry. I did this to you. I’m …”

Before he finished the sentence, he heard the sound of a helicopter approaching from behind. Craig twisted around in the water and watched in amazement and joy as an American Blackhawk shot a laser-guided Hellfire missile that blasted into the engine of Estrada’s boat, setting off a huge explosion. The sound was deafening. Flaming pieces of debris and body parts flew into the air. Craig covered his face to avoid being struck by sparks or burning material.

“Goodbye General Estrada,” he called to the remains of the man who had set all of this in motion. But he had no time to savor the victory. That chopper had only a minute or two to pull them out of the water.

Knowing how close they were to the Falls, Gina was terrified and screaming hysterically. “Help, help!” She was waving her arms frantically.

He watched the chopper drift lower and closer to them. A rope ladder was dropped out of the side door. Through a bullhorn, a Marine shouted, “We’re coming for you first, Craig.”

“No. No,” Craig shouted back. “Get the girl first. Then me.”

“It won’t work that way. You have to be holding on to the ladder, or we have no chance of picking her up.”

Craig knew they were right. He had to do it their way.

The maneuver was one that Craig had done countless times in a CIA training course. But the fast moving current made an always difficult operation even tougher. He reached up to clutch the rope with one hand first. After that, he would grab it with the other.

The swaying rope ladder was directly overhead. He grabbed for it. His hand was on the last rung, but the water pulled him away.

“Shit.”

“We’re coming back,” the Marine called.

They had lost precious seconds. Keep calm, Craig told himself. They’ll get you. You’ll have time to rescue her.

The ladder was overhead again. This time, he willed his body with all the strength he could muster to thrust his body up out of the water with both hands above his head and his eyes riveted on that last rung.

He had it.

His arms ached. The pain was almost unbearable, but he held on.

Both his hands were tight on the rope. It was cutting into his skin, but he was impervious to the pain.

Now came the hard part. “Let’s get the girl,” he shouted.

One of the Marines was halfway down on the ladder. Another one was on the second step. Each one reached out a hand to the man below until they had a human chain. Each of them stretched to the limit. The chain only as strong as the weakest link. “Don’t try to pull her up,” the Marine shouted to Craig. “Get her in your grasp and hold her. We’ll go over to shore and drop you both on land.”

The Falls were looming closer and closer. Craig’s right hand was tight in the clutch of the Marine above. His left was poised for now on the last rung, ready to reach for Gina. From his vantage point, he could see over the top of the awesome, deadly Falls. One pass was all they would have time for. One and no more.

“I’m coming for you,” he shouted to Gina. “Stay calm.”

With incredible skill, the pilot lowered the chopper so they were right over Gina. Craig took a deep breath and tried to harness his remaining strength. He reached his left arm down, grabbing for Gina’s raised right hand, extending his arm, almost numb, to the limit of the shoulder socket.

He made contact with her tiny hand. He willed his body to ignore the searing pain in his right arm and shoulder. “Hold onto me,” he screamed.

Frantically, he tried to tighten his grasp to get a firm hold on her hand. But it was moist and slippery. Her body too weak from the ordeal to help him. With every ounce of strength in his body, he tried to get a solid grip.

He felt her slipping away.

God no.

No.

No.

No.

She was gone. Helplessly, he watched her young, beautiful body with so much promise for life cascading head first over the Falls and into the abyss below.

He felt a tugging on his arm. The Marine above was pulling him up. They were closing down the human chain, pulling the men one by one into the helicopter.

Once Craig was inside, the pilot said, “I’m sorry, sir. We did everything we could.”

“It’s not over yet,” Craig said stubbornly. “She might have missed the rocks below and been carried up in the water. People have survived worse. Fly over the area below. We may be able to pick her up there.”

“We have a problem doing that,” the pilot said, sounding sympathetic. “We’re low on fuel. We have enough for one pass over the water below the Falls. Then we have to head back. I can’t take a chance on having to put this baby down in what’s now become enemy territory.”

Craig was ready to argue, but he held back, hopeful they would find and pick her up on the first pass. The rear tail gunner moved up close to Craig. The two of them peered out as the chopper flew over the swirling, foaming water—an implacable foe that had no intention of relinquishing what it had taken.

“Not much chance anyone would make it going over those Falls,” the gunner said to Craig.

“She’s alive,” Craig snapped back. “I know it.”

Leaning out of the helicopter, Craig focused hard on the white water below the Falls. They were so low that spray drenched his face. He struggled to see through a dazzling series of rainbows. No matter how hard he looked, Craig didn’t see any sign of Gina.

“Make another pass,” he called to the pilot. “We can’t let her die.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t have the fuel for that. We’re out of here.”

Craig stood up. “Then I’ll fly the damn chopper myself.”

He started toward the front of the helicopter. Before he reached it, the gunner raised his machine gun and smashed the handle against Craig’s head. He knew he was blacking out, but that was all he felt.

EPILOGUE

June the Following Year

I
n Mendoza, at a girls’ Catholic school, a young woman, concealing her beauty in a matronly black dress that extended almost to her ankles, with a small gold cross around her neck, her hair braided behind her back and tied with a rubber band, walked into a classroom and stood behind the teacher’s desk.

“Tell us about the United States,” a twelve year old in the front row with curly brown hair and a bright, shining face asked.

“Our world is here,” the teacher replied. “Today, we’ll talk about General Jose Martin and our own wonderful history. There is nothing the United States has that we do not.”

Her response was met with a collective groan from the students.

“Please, Miss Galindo,” another girl said.

“No. I won’t change my mind.”

The students looked at her with disappointment, but she didn’t care. Gina felt more at peace than she had in years. After going over the Falls, she had miraculously avoided hitting a rock. The current had carried her a mile downstream and then into a clump of trees. Unconscious, she was rescued by two fishermen.

Now, she was back home where she belonged.

At Linate Airport in Milan, Craig sipped a double espresso in a café while waiting for Luigi’s plane from Rome to arrive. Tomorrow they would begin the grueling three day rally race centered in Stresa and looping around Lake Maggiore.

As he sipped, he thought about Nicole. When he returned from Iguazu to Buenos Aires, they had one final meeting at her house. She thanked him for saving her country from the horror of Estrada’s rule. He told her that he never could have succeeded without her help. She handed him a gift-wrapped bottle of grappa made in Mendoza. “When you drink it, think of Argentina,” she said.

“I’ll also think about a courageous woman who runs a shoe store.”

He pulled from his bag a copy of the
International Herald Tribune,
still in the plastic wrapper it had when it arrived at his apartment in Milan, and glanced at the front page. Under Elizabeth’s byline, he read that President Treadwell had suffered another heart attack and died. Vice President Doug Worth had been elevated to the presidency.

Craig leafed aimlessly through the pages until the word Argentina caught his eye. A headline read: “British geologist concedes error about Brazilian diamonds.” In the article, the geologist, Dr. Jeremy Barker, admitted that he had reached a faulty conclusion on insufficient evidence. “There are traces of diamonds in the area, but not in sufficient quantities to be commercially viable.” He apologized for any damage this may have caused.