Wild Orchids (20 page)

"So are you," Lora said with feeling, and would have said more if Max hadn't leaned forward suddenly.

"It's up here on the left. Keep an eye peeled, it's easy to miss."

"Si." Clemente too was leaning forward, scanning me seemingly impenetrable wall of jungle that rose on either side of the narrow road. "Ahh." He braked suddenly, throwing Lora forward. Before she had recovered her balance, he and Max were out of the car, dragging what seemed to be a narrow section of jungle to one side. Then they were back in the car and driving through the opening they had created. Clemente stopped again on the other side, and both men got out to drag the concealing foliage back into place. They got back in, and the car moved slowly forward without lights along what seemed to be a surprisingly good road. All around the car the jungle loomed, dark and menacing. In the distance came the scream of a small animal as a predator claimed it. Lora shivered, shrinking back into the velour upholstery of the backseat. She would have liked to scoot closer to Max, but she wasn't feeling too sure of anything at the moment, especially him.

"Where are we going?" The question had a quavery quality to it she hadn't intended.

Max turned his head again to look down at her. This time there was no beam of moonlight to illuminate his face. This far into the jungle, the foliage blocked out every moonbeam.

"There's a small airfield up ahead a ways. We have a plane waiting to take us out of the country."

"What on earth is an airfield doing in the middle of the jungle?''

He grinned. She could see the white gleam of his teem even through the darkness.

"A well hidden airfield is very useful in some professions."

"Like what?"

"Oh, drug running—there's probably more dope grown in these mountains than corn, it's big business around here, and the growers need a way to get it out of the country; then there are the guys who smuggle guns into Nicaragua and El Salvador; and the other guys—or sometimes even the same ones—who smuggle refugees out; and it's useful for men like Ortega, who can't pass through a border in most of the free world without worrying about being arrested. He needs an airfield where he can fly in and out."

"What exactly does Ortega do, anyway?" The question, which had been nagging at her ever since she first stepped into the man's elaborate parlor, was almost a whisper. In the front seat, Clemente snorted.

Max looked at her for a moment. She thought he was going to refuse to answer. Then he shrugged and said, "He's a businessman, pure and simple. He'll turn his hand to anything that offers a big enough profit. Drugs, guns, phony money, refugees—you name it, he's got a finger in it. But he's smart about it; in all these years he's never been nailed with the goods. I've known him for quite a few years, and we're friends of a sort, but I wouldn't trust him across the street and back—not unless he was being well paid to be trustworthy."

Lora listened to this chilling recitation with growing horror. The worst part about it was that Max seemed so unconcerned about Onega's crimes—was Max involved in drugs and guns and all of that, too? She didn't want to believe it, but the evidence was overwhelming. No wonder the police were so eager to arrest him. He would probably go to jail for the rest of his life if he was caught. And deservedly so, she told herself firmly, trying not to think of him pinned in a small cell until he was withered and old. A criminal deserved to pay for his crimes.

"Here we are."

They pulled out of the jungle into a cleared area the size of perhaps three football fields placed end to end. There, barely visible in the darkness, was a lumbering, propeller-driven aircraft painted in shades of camouflage green. Lora stared at it with some misgivings. They were going to fly in that? It looked like something left over from World War II! Clemente drove up beside it, and a door over the wing slid open. Obviously, their approach had been observed.

"You took your own sweet time, Maxwell!" A leonine head with overlong black hair thrust out of the door in accompaniment to the angry voice. Lora looked up at the heavyset stranger as Max, who had pulled her from the car, thrust her toward a set of steps that led to the wing. Clemente brought up the rear as the propellers began to turn, slowly at first and then with increasing speed.

"We were gone just as long as it took," Max replied coolly. "You—" He was interrupted by the sudden blaze of lights that seemed to spring up out of nowhere to bathe them all in a noonday glow.

"Alto! Federales!" The words, yelled over a loudspeaker, froze them all momentarily in their tracks.

"Christ! Get out of the way, Minelli!" Max recovered first, grabbing Lora around the waist and lunging up the steps and into the plane with her.

"Alto!" The command to halt boomed again as Clemente leaped through the door right behind them. A loud burst of gunfire exploded. Bullets raked the plane just as the man called Minelli banged the door shut. Max shoved her to the floor of the cabin as bullets whined and twanged above, hissed, "Stay down!" and sprinted, bent almost double, for the cockpit. Clemente, Minelli and the other man in the cabin dropped to the aisle between the seats, lying on their stomachs with their arms covering their heads. Lora, after one quick horrified glance, followed suit.

"Tunafish, let's get this baby out of here!" The roar was Max's. It was punctuated by more gunfire. A profusion of bullets thudded into the metal fuselage in a series of staccato ta-tats. Lora winced and covered her head as round after round of ammunition spat at the plane that started bumping over the ground, gaining speed, and finally, sluggishly, lifted .into the air.

Chapter XI

"How in hell did the feds get onto us?" The enormous black man at the controls of the C-47 Gooney Bird relaxed his fierce grip on the wheel as the plane climbed safely into the night sky.

"Got me." Max shrugged, taking over control of the plane from the copilot's seat. "My guess is they weren't after us, particularly. They probably got tipped of to stake out the airfield, and we walked into it. Must have thought we were druggies. The feds have tightened up enforcement since that DBA agent bought it a while back."

"Yeah." The black man nodded. "Don't matter now, anyway. Did you get the woman?"

"Yeah."

"Any problems?"

"None worth mentioning. Except what you saw."

"Must be a hell of a woman for you to go to all that trouble."

Max lifted his eyes from the shifting clouds that all but obscured the moon and the mountains below to give the grinning man a quelling look. "Just drop it, okay?"

"Anything you say, boss." The grin widened, revealing strong white teeth that stood out vividly in the gleaming dark brown face. Max threw him an irritated look.

"Can it, Tunafish." Then he realized what he had said, and grinned himself. Tunafish's nickname was always good for a laugh or two, at least for everyone but Tunafish.

"Ha, ha." Tunafish did not much appreciate jokes about his name. In fact, he did not much care for the name itself, but it had stuck with him since boot camp days and, among his old friends anyway, he could not shake it. "I don't much like them greaseballs we sprung. Don't trust 'em."

Max looked over at him again, frowning. "They give you any trouble?"

"Nah. Only—they ain't what they're supposed to be. If they were locked up because they were carryin' a little grass, then I'm my grandma's pappy."

"Oh?"

Tunafish nodded slowly. "They're too slick, too careful what they say. Used to giving orders. And to packing a piece."    

"How do you know that?"

"We got stopped by a cop on the way down here. Ran a stop sign, no big deal. When the guy came up to us, Minelli reached for his pistol. He didn't use it, but he reached. Automatic like."

Max digested this information in frowning silence. He should have figured—had figured, in fact, though he hadn't wanted to acknowledge it—that there was something fishy about the two men that he had been hired to break out of the prison at Mazatlan. The money had been too good, for one thing—a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus expenses; he was used to working for perhaps a quarter of that, but of course there'd been two of them and that particular prison was a tough nut to crack. To add to his inner disquiet, instead of a distraught wife or parent putting up the cash, there'd been a man in a business suit. Max had learned to distrust men in business suits on general principal. And there had been too damned much security at the prison, which had led to Lowenthal being killed and the rest of them having to separate. He had been the one playing the official from the Red Cross, and he had been the one whose face the guards could identify as part of the band orchestrating the escape. The thing had been a disaster from beginning to end; first, Clemente had timed the blast that was to serve as a distraction too early, and he and Minelli and the other man, DiAngelo, had still been in the company of three armed guards and the warden. He had had to take the warden hostage at gunpoint to get the three of them safely out of the prison, and even then it had been a near thing. He had sweated constantly for fear the guards would decide that the warden's life was expendable in the cause of stopping an escape from their maximum security institution. Second, outside the prison, Lowenthal, charged with providing cover fire should anything go wrong, had been shot. Max had not seen him fall, but Tunafish had. Tunafish said he had died instantly with a bullet through me brain, and they had had to leave him where he lay.

Outside the prison, Clemente and Tunafish had waited in one of the two cars that Max always insisted on—two in case one should not start. He had quickly dispatched Minelli and DiAngelo with them, and forcing the blubbering warden to drive him, had taken off in the opposite direction in the other car. There had been no pursuit then. But he did not fool himself that every police officer in the country would not be hard on his tail. He had told the warden to drive east, while Tunafish went south, hoping to throw pursuit off the other car's tail. In Puerto Juarez, he had freed the prayer-muttering warden and ditched the car, hoping the authorities would think that he had used that port town to leave the country. Instead, he had hopped a bus to Cancun, and seen himself featured on the evening news while he was eating a meager lunch with what was almost the last of his few pesos. (Not having been prepared for the fiasco that had occurred, he had not had much money in his wallet, and the warden had been equally broke. Under the circumstances, it would have been too risky to use credit cards with his name on them; no point in handing them his head on a silver platter.) He had hurried without giving the least appearance of hurrying to the tourists' market, bought himself a huge sombrero to hide beneath and a cheap Hawaiian print shirt in hopes of blending in with the tourists. Then he had walked back out to the street, wondering what he should do next—and seen a lone woman in an orange Volkswagen stopped at a traffic signal. It had seemed like fate. He had taken full advantage of this manna from heaven and jumped in beside her. Having Lora and her car for cover had worked well to get him—almost—out of the country safely, but it had disadvantages. Namely, the woman herself.