Wild Orchids (40 page)

"At least we got entertainment," Minelli was saying, his tone jovial. "The broad here's been giving you a real good time. Maxwell. She can start spreading it around a little while we wait. But we don't mean to deprive you altogether—you can watch."

Lora shuddered inwardly at this confirmation of the fate that awaited her at Minelli's hands. As if to emphasize his words, the hand that had been gripping her waist slid up to grasp her breast. He squeezed hard, his meaty fingers pinching her nipple. She cried out at the pain of it, then literally saw red. Without even having to think about it, she was kicking back to catch him in the kneecap. He groaned as the force of the blow caught him unawares and reached instinctively for his injured leg. The gun lowered and his hold on Lora loosened enough to allow her to whirl and jam the heel of her palm hard against the underside of his nose. The move that had served her so well all that time ago with Max worked equally well with Minelli. He howled, staggering backward, the gun forgotten as he clapped his hand to his bleeding nose. Lora tore free of his grasping hands and shoved him with all her might. He staggered, tripped over Tunafish's pallet, and fell. Behind her, Lora heard a shot and the sounds of a struggle…

"I'm going to kill you, you bitch!" Minelli screamed, his hand coming away from his nose as he jerked the gun up to point it at Lora.

She screamed, dropping to the floor and covering her head as a shot exploded in her ears. Her scream echoed and re-echoed through the chamber, but she didn't seem to feel any pain. Minelli must have missed…

She opened her eyes a fraction, lowering her arms so that she could see what was going on. To her heartfelt relief, Max stood nearby, a gun held purposefully in his hands. Minelli was rolling around on the floor, groaning, his left hand clutching his mangled right arm, which was pouring blood. DiAngelo was high-tailing it out through the mouth of the cave. Max snapped a shot off after him, but to no avail: they could hear the sounds as he slipped and slid down the shale.

"You are one awesome lady, did you know that?" Max said, shaking his head in admiration at Lora, who was getting unsteadily to her feet. "I never did ask you: where did you learn that stuff? It's scary."

"I took a rape prevention course."

Max grinned widely, and Lora returned his grin, sparing scarcely a glance for Minelli as she moved to untie Tunafish, whose eyes were bulging over the gag. As far as she was concerned, Minelli deserved to bleed to death…

"I don't believe it!" Tunafish burst out as soon as she eased the gag from his mouth. His head swiveled around so that he was staring at Lora. "You took that slime-bag out! All by yourself! Boss, do you believe it?"

Max grinned again. "Oh, yeah. She pulled that on me once. Hurt like hell, too. I've been real nice to her ever since."

Tunafish chuckled. "I noticed." Lora jerked on the rags binding his hands, and he winced, grimacing as she pulled them free. "Sorry about lettin' myself get ambushed like that. We heard the helicopters and then, bam! They were on me. Must have gotten themselves untied some time ago, and been waitin' their chance."

Max shook his head. "Don't worry about it. You okay?" Tunafish nodded. "Lora, tie something around Minelli's arm, will you? I'd kind of like him to come out of this alive—I was paid to deliver him."

"You're doing a hell of a poor job," Minelli snarled from the floor. Max snapped the gun around at him.

"I can do a worse one," he said tightly.

Minelli subsided.

Lora wrapped Tunafish's shirt around Minelli's arm and tied it with rags from Max's windbreaker, not caring that Minelli groaned and winced with pain. He was bleeding profusely from a large hole in his upper arm as well as from his nose, but not, she thought with some regret, enough to die from. When she was finished. Max hog-tied him with the leather thong and left him sitting.

"We've got a problem," Max said when he rejoined her and Tunafish. "Everybody out there must have heard those gunshots, so it's going to be just a matter of time until they find the cave. But only the feds and the mob are here so far, though I imagine Ortega is right behind them. He's probably hanging back, watching to see what happens before making his move. But what we're going to have to do in the meantime is get out of here and hide in the jungle. Those guys out there will be searching this mountain with a fine-tooth comb."

"What about Tunafish?" Lora could barely get the words out around the dryness that suddenly afflicted her tongue and throat. Her worst nightmares were coming true. Not only was Max's plan not going to work, Ortega hadn't even shown up! What if he never did?

"I carried Tunafish up here, I can carry him back down again. Thank God he's been on a banana and fish diet! Maybe he's shed a few pounds."

Neither Tunafish nor Lora bothered to respond to this bit of forced humor. Instead, Tunafish pointed at Minelli.

"What about him?"

"Leave him for his friends—or the feds." Max turned to look at Lora. "Grab as much of our gear as you can carry, and let's get the hell out of here." Lora scrambled to obey as Max moved toward Tunafish. "Come on, buddy."

"You,
gringos!
This is the
Federales!
Throw down your weapons and come out!"

The shout made them jump. They looked at each other in nervous silence. It was too late to hide… The moment of truth was at hand.

The three of them moved as one toward the mouth of the cave, Lora and Max on either side of Tunafish, helping him. Despite the fact that he was wounded and securely tied. Max kept an eye on Minelli, who was still rolling around and moaning and did not look to be in good enough shape to cause anyone any trouble at all. Lora dismissed him from her mind as, standing flush against the inside of the cave, the three of them peered out. What she saw below brought butterflies to her stomach.

"You have three minutes to throw down your weapons and come out!"

The soldiers she and Max had seen earlier waited at the foot of the cliff, their impressive arsenal of weapons trained on the mouth of the cave. DiAngelo stood under guard at the rear of the formation; so did the six other men that Max had identified as Minelli's friends.

"What do we do?" The terse question was Tunafish's. '

Lora looked at him, and then at Max. Then they all three looked back out at the waiting
Federales.

"We hold them off for as long as we can and pray that Ortega gets here," Max said firmly.

Lora looked down at the waiting army and swallowed. Unbidden, the last scene from the movie
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
popped into her mind, when the two men, weary and wounded, were left facing the entire Bolivian Army. She sincerely hoped that none of the three of them were about to suffer Butch Cassidy's fate. From the number of guns below, the police had come prepared for a massacre.

Chapter XXIV

The three of them were still staring gloomily down at the
Federales
when a squad of dirt bikes came roaring out of the jungle. Helmeted drivers revved the cycles toward the astonished feds, who had turned to gape at the emergence of the first shiny red motorcycle and still hadn't recovered the presence of mind to fire on them. About half the cycles had a second man riding shotgun, or machine gun in this case, and these gunners opened fire with whooping abandon as the cycles zoomed and leaped and skidded to form a moving circle around the feds, who were at last beginning to fumble with their weapons.

The scene reminded Lora of a modernistic version of settlers and Indians, with the feds taking the role of the embattled pioneers. She stared goggle-eyed down at the circus below. Max and Tunafish watched with no less astonishment. The feds had dropped to their bellies and knees behind every conceivable cover, but the rocks and squat bushes that dotted the base of the cliff were scant protection from the darting enthusiasm of the bikers.

In the confusion, DiAngelo and the rest of the mob group managed to break away from the preoccupied policemen and flee in great leaps to the jungle. A few of the cyclists fired desultory bursts after these unarmed escapees, but, judging from the way they dived into the undergrowth, they managed to keep from being seriously hit. The cyclists obviously considered the policemen their main opponents, and they continued to roar around them in a circle, firing and laughing gleefully as the bullets tore into bushes and ricocheted twangingly off rocks. The feds gamely returned fire, but few of the cyclists fell. The cyclists had gradually tightened their orbit until they formed a circle around the hapless feds when the most mind-boggling thing of all happened: out of the jungle, big as Ike and trampling down small trees and undergrowth in its path, rolled something that looked like a cross between a bulldozer and a World War II vintage tank!

It stopped just short of the jungle, its long gun pointing in the direction of the hard-pressed feds. The hatch opened, and from the hatch emerged a rotund figure in a white silk business suit topped incongruously with a combat helmet.

"Ortega!" Max stared, then collapsed against the wall, chuckles turning into full-throated laughter as he took another good look at the antics going on below.

Ortega—for it was he who had half emerged from the hatch—had a bullhorn to his lips and was shouting something in Spanish at the stunned
Federates.

"Surrender or die," Max translated for Lora's benefit. The shooting had stopped with the appearance of the tank (presumably the feds were as taken aback by its arrival as the three of them were) and there was a tense moment as Lora waited with baited breath for it to resume. These
Federates
were the Mexican equivalent of the FBI, after all. They would not just tamely surrender to a man of Ortega's stamp. They would lob a grenade or something, and go on to carry the day…

A white handkerchief attached to the muzzle of a rifle rose from behind a rock and was waved slowly back and forth. As Lora watched, the cyclists whooped and zoomed enthusiastically while the feds got to their feet, threw down their weapons, and were taken prisoner by the dismounting riders. Meanwhile, Ortega and the tank rolled to the foot of the cliff. Ortega looked up at the cave, and raised the bullhorn to his lips again.

"Don't anybody move! You're all under arrest! This is the DEA!"

A rush of green uniformed soldiers emerged from the jungle without warning, and wild pandemonium ensued below. Onega's men, thinking the battle was over, were caught unprepared. Most of them had dropped their cycles, and there was a mad scramble for rifles and bikes. They got off a few wild shots, but it was clear from the beginning that this new adversary had the advantage of discipline, weaponry, and surprise. Ortega's men were quickly rounded up. Ortega fared better. He popped back inside the tank, the hatch slammed shut, and the tank rolled back into the jungle, seemingly impervious to the shots fired at it, while a small contingent of the newly arrived soldiers ran after it.

"That you up there, Maxwell?"

"Good God, it's Barney," Max said to no one in particular, staring down at the crisply uniformed man who stood at the base of the cliff with his hands cupped around his mouth.