The Right Stuff

It wasn’t.

Another ten minutes brought Mac and his sullen, squirming captive to the edge of a clearing. Although the boy hadn’t as yet uttered a single sound, Mac clamped a hand over his mouth. Eyes narrowed, he surveyed the scene.

It didn’t take him long to determine the village was deserted. No dogs yapped. No pigs snuffled in the dirt. No goats were tethered to stakes beside the huts. Nor could Mac discern any sign of human habitation…until an unmistakably female figure in a sleeveless white blouse and baggy tan slacks emerged from the clapboard building at the far end of the dirt track that served as the village’s main thoroughfare. Obviously agitated, the woman thrust a hand through her cropped blond hair.

“Paulo! Where are you?”

The woman repeated the shout in Spanish, then Caribe. Mac was congratulating himself on having located at least one of the missionaries when his attacker gave a strangled grunt and renewed his frenzied attempts to escape.

This time, Mac let him go. The little squirt shot off, his skinny legs pumping.

“Paulo! There you are!”

Her shoulders sagging in relief, the woman dropped to her knees and opened her arms. The boy charged straight into them. The woman hugged him fiercely, rocking back and forth.

Mac decided he’d better make his presence known before the kid painted him as an enemy. But when he stepped out from behind the tree, the woman’s horrified glance whipped from his black-painted, blood-streaked face to his assault rifle. Before Mac could identify himself and assure her he meant no harm, she let loose with a piercing yell.

“¡Los soldados!”

“Lady, it’s okay. I’m…”

He started toward her, then stopped dead as the shutters covering the windows of one of the huts banged open. In the ominous silence that followed, he heard the snick of a weapon being cocked.

Impatiently, Cari swatted at a persistent mosquito and searched the towering ferns lining the river.

Where the heck was Mac?

Why hadn’t he contacted her in… She drew another bead on the functional black watch strapped to her wrist. In fifty-two minutes?

After he’d missed his last signal, she’d waited ten endless minutes before trying to raise him on his radio. When another ten had crawled by, she’d tried again. Each time she’d received nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Now she was eight minutes away from the point where he’d insisted she get out of Dodge.

Could she abandon him?

She was no closer to an answer now than she’d been for the past fifty-three minutes. She glowered at the leafy ferns, willing them to part.

Dammit, where was he?

And what the heck had that kiss been all about?

She didn’t have an answer for either question.

Grinding her back teeth in frustration, Cari pulled out her sidearm and released the magazine. A quick check verified the clip was full. She snapped it back in, holstered the Beretta, and swiped her damp, sweaty palms down the side of her BDU shirt.

She could still taste him on her lips. Still feel the scrape of his bristly chin on hers. With all her years in uniform, she would never have imagined she’d be feeling this kind of prickly, itchy, physical awareness smack in the middle of a mission!

Or at all, for that matter.

She was no nun. She’d dated her share of smart, sexy men. Had drifted in and out of several heavy relationships before meeting Jerry. And he was certainly no slouch when it came to stirring her senses. Yet Cari was darned if she could remember ever experiencing such a severe reaction to a single kiss.

She’d be a fool to attach too much significance to it, though. It could only have sprung from tension, that peculiar combination of nerves and adrenaline that came at times like this. Mac had no interest in her outside the professional. None he’d demonstrated during their months in the New Mexico desert, anyway. And she found him almost as irritating as she did attractive.

So why the heck couldn’t she lick his taste from her lips? Scowling, she slapped a palm against the side of the hatch.

Where was he!

“Pegasus One, this is Two.”

The sharp, clear communication almost had Cari jumping out of her skin. Gulping down her relief, she keyed her radio.

“Go ahead, Two.”

“Be advised that I’m en route back to your position, approximately fifty meters out. Prepare to cast off as soon as we get our passengers on board.”

“Roger.”

He’d done it! He’d located the missionaries and brought them out. Cari would have a word with him later about the grief his missed signal had put her through. Right now, she had to power up her craft.

The engines were humming and she was back at the open hatch when the ferns began to shake. Seconds later, Mac popped through the leafy wall. He was carrying something on his back. Not something, Cari saw in surprise when he turned to hold aside the ferns. Someone. A child.

A woman pushed through the greenery after Mac. She was followed by a boy in sneakers and scruffy, white cotton pants. Another child poked through a second later, this one a scrawny girl in pigtails and tattered, pink sneakers.

Her jaw dropping, Cari watched as several more children emerged. A tall, lanky man with a wide-eyed little girl on his shoulders brought up the rear of the column. Mac hustled them all toward the waiting craft.

The woman reached the vehicle first. Cari stretched down a hand, grasped her wrist, and helped her up the steps.

“Thanks.” She raked a hand through short, sweat-spiked blond bangs. “I’m Dr. White. Janice White.”

“Glad you made it, Doc.”

Nodding, the missionary stood back as Cari reached for the child Mac lifted up. He was a tousled-haired boy of three or four. He was also blind, Cari realized when his groping hands failed to connect with hers. Gulping, she took a better stance and stretched out her arms. His chubby fingers found her sleeves and dug in.

“Okay, I’ve got him.”

To her consternation, she soon discovered each of the children possessed some form of physical disability. One dragged his right leg. Another had a cleft palate that left his young face tragically disfigured. The merry gap-toothed girl had a spine so twisted she couldn’t stand upright. Dismayed, Cari waited for Mac to climb aboard.

“I had to bring them,” he said in response to her silent query. “The Whites wouldn’t leave them.”

Dragging off his boonie hat, he swiped an arm across his sweat-drenched face. Only then did Cari see the vicious-looking cut on his forehead. Someone—Dr. White, she guessed—had added a few neat stitches. Before Cari could ask Mac what he’d run into, the tall, lanky missionary grabbed her hand and pumped it.

“I’m Reverend Harry White. I can’t tell you how grateful we are to you for coming after us. The fighting in the area drove off the villagers weeks ago. We had no one to help us bring the children through the jungle.”

“Yes, well…”

“Our church has arranged adoptions for them, you see. My sister and I have been trying to get them to the States for almost two years.”

“Sister?”

Cari’s glance cut to the doctor. She’d assumed—they’d all assumed—the Whites were husband and wife. Obviously the intelligence supplied for this hastily mounted operation had missed a few minor details.

“We’ve paid a fortune in bribes,” Janice White put in, picking up on her brother’s comment. “Obviously not to the right people.”

“No matter,” the reverend said with a smile. “We’re on our way now.”

“Hang on a minute!”

Cari shot a quick glance at Mac. His shrug indicated he’d already covered this ground once with the Whites. Biting her lip, she faced the minister.

“Are you suggesting we smuggle these kids out of Caribe?”

“Yes,” the man of God replied simply.

Cari pursed her lips. She was an officer in the United States Coast Guard. A major portion of her job was to prevent the kind of illegal emigration the missionary was suggesting. She’d lost count of the number of vessels crammed with refugees she and other coast guard crews had been forced to turn back. Small boats carrying whole families across miles of open sea. Fishing trawlers trying to slip fifty or so desperate souls past coastal patrols. Container ships with hidden compartments stuffed with starving, suffocating cargo.

“Smuggling them out is our only recourse at this point,” Reverend White said earnestly. “As Janice said, we’ve been working on their papers for more than two years. Finding a responsible official to deal with was difficult enough before the fighting erupted. Now, it’s well nigh…”

“Harry!”

His sister’s frantic cry jerked the missionary around.

“Where’s Paulo?”

“Isn’t he with you?”

“No.”

“Dear Lord above!” The reverend spun back to Mac, his face contorted with panic. “He was right ahead of me. I can’t imagine how… When…”

“I’ll find him,” Mac said grimly. His glance cut to Cari. “You’d better get Pegasus ready to swim. I picked up some radio chatter a while back. It sounded close. So close I didn’t want to risk using my own radio until I knew I could get the kids safely aboard.”

Well, that explained why he’d skipped an interim signal. Unfortunately, the explanation didn’t particularly sit well with Cari. The idea that the bad guys were poking around nearby upped her pucker factor considerably. Climbing over kids and backpacks, she made her way to the cockpit.

Scant minutes later she had Pegasus ready to plunge back into the river. He sat nosed half on, half off the bank. Cari kept the engines churning gently in reverse, with just enough power to keep her craft from being dragged along with the current. The rear hatch remained open. All the while her heart pounded out the seconds until Mac returned.

She hated this business of being left behind. She was used to sailing her ship, her crew and herself into action, not sitting at the controls while someone else took the lead. She wanted in on the action.

Mac had been right, she thought grimly. She wasn’t the barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen type. As much as she ached for a child of her own, she knew she belonged right here, right now. No one else could have maneuvered Pegasus up this narrow, twisting river. No one else could get it back down.

Which she hoped to do.

Like, soon!

They only had a few hours of daylight left. She didn’t relish navigating the Rio Verde in the dark, even with all the sophisticated instrumentation crammed into Pegasus. It was time to make tracks.

Where the heck was Mac?

He came crashing through the ferns several heart-pounding minutes later. He had a scruffy little boy tucked under one elbow and his assault rifle tight in the crook of the other. Cari’s breath wheezed out on a small sigh of relief.

The next instant, she sucked it back in again. Right before her eyes, the fronds above Mac’s head began to dance wildly. A heartbeat later, she heard the deadly splat, splat, splat of bullets tearing through the leaves.

He was taking fire!

Twisting in her seat, Cari shouted a terse order. “Dr. White! Reverend! Get the children down flat on the deck! Now!”

She waited only long enough to see Mac and the kid come diving through the rear opening. Slewing back around, she hit the switch to close the hatch, wrapped her fist around the throttles and thrust the engines to full forward.

Pegasus sailed off the bank. His belly hit the river’s surface with a smack that would have rattled Cari’s teeth if she hadn’t already clenched them tight. Her jaw locked, she aimed her craft for the dark, rushing channel in the middle of the river.

She expected to hear bullets pinging off the canopy at any second. The bubble was made of some new composite that was supposed to be able to withstand a direct hit from a mortar, but she wasn’t particularly anxious to test the shield’s survivability.

She made it to midstream without any bullets cracking against the canopy. As soon as the depth finder registered enough clearance, she took Pegasus under.

The water closed around them. The view ahead became one of swirling currents, darting fish and dark, fuzzy shapes. As she had during the torturous journey upriver, Cari kept her gaze locked on the sonar screen. All she needed to do now was ram a jagged stump or slimy green bolder.

She didn’t relax her vigil until Mac slid into the seat beside her and assumed duties as navigator. Blowing out a ragged breath, Cari slanted him glance.

“Is the kid okay?”

“Yeah. He’s a tough little runt.” A rueful smile flitted across Mac’s face. “He’s the one who put this crease in my forehead.”

“How’d he do that?”

“He beaned me with a rock.”

Despite the tension still stringing her as tight as an anchor cable, Cari had to laugh. “That’s going to make a great story at the bar when we get back to base. So what happened? How did you lose him?”

“My guess is he fell back and couldn’t call out to us to wait for him.”

“Couldn’t?”

Mac’s smile faded. “When I first collared the kid, I tried to get him to tell me his name and where he’d sprung from. He got stubborn and clammed up. Or so I thought. It wasn’t until Doc White was stitching me up that I found out he can’t talk. He was born without a larynx.”

“Oh, no!”

“The most he can manage is an occasional grunt.”

Cari slumped back against her seat. Her stab of pity for the little boy battled with practical reality.

“You know the crap is going to hit the fan big-time if we take these kids out of Caribe without authorization from their government.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s no maybe about it. Remember the international furor over the Cuban kid, Elian Gonzales?”

“There’s a difference here. Elian Gonzales had a father who wanted him back. These kids are orphans. Throwaways, as Janice White described them, probably because of their disabilities. If their government had bothered with them at all, they would have been shuffled into some institution or foster home.”

A muscle ticked in the side of his jaw. For a moment his expression was remote, closed, unreadable. Then he tore his gaze away from the screen. The hard edges to his face softened and he gave Cari a quick, slashing grin.

“I say we take them out with us.”

She fell a little in love with him at that moment. Here he was, the all-or-nothing, you’re-in-or-you’re out, gung ho marine, putting his military career on the line for a boatload of kids.

Only belatedly did she remember she’d be putting her career on the line, too.

Oh, well. If she’d learned nothing else during her years of service, she’d discovered it was a whole lot easier to ask for forgiveness after the fact than obtain permission beforehand.

“Seeing as they’re already on board,” she replied with an answering grin, “I say we take them with us, too. But I’ll let you advise Captain Westfall of our additional passengers,” she tacked on hastily.

Chapter 4

Cari was actually starting to believe she’d get her craft and its passengers safely away from Caribe when disaster struck. Unfortunately, she didn’t realize that hazy blur dead ahead represented disaster until it was too late.

“What the heck…?”

That was all she got out before Pegasus plowed into what looked very much like a net. It was a net, she discovered as the prow pushed hard against the barrier. Made of thin, loosely woven vines. No wonder it hadn’t returned any kind of a sonar signature.

The vines snared Pegasus like a giant fish, held him for a moment, then yielded to his powerful forward momentum. The net ripped apart. The vessel’s prow poked through. A long length of the hull followed. The swept-back wings and rear-tilted engines, however, snagged on the tangled remnants of the netting.

“Hell!”

Cari yanked the throttle back and reversed thrust, but it was too late. Dangling vines had wrapped tight around the propeller shafts. The twin engines gave a little sputter and died.

For a moment there was only silence.

Dead silence.

Cari felt a bubble of panic rise in her throat. Sailors the world over had nightmares about just this kind of a situation. She was trapped underwater. With her boat experiencing total engine failure.

As quickly as it rose, her panic evaporated. She shot a glance at the depth finder and confirmed they were less than ten feet below the river’s surface. Even without engines, she could float Pegasus up enough to pop the canopy and check out the situation.

“We’ll have to surface,” she told Mac.

“Not until we figure out what the heck snared us,” he returned, craning his neck to peer through the gloom at the entangling vines.

“My guess is it’s a fishing net.”

“Why didn’t we hit it coming upriver?”

“Could be the locals only string it in the afternoon, when the river’s running with the tide.”

“Or it could be a trap set specifically for us.”

The same possibility had occurred to Cari. “I don’t think so,” she said, chewing on the inside of her lip. “We swam upriver underwater. As far as we know, no one observed us going in.”

“Someone sure as hell observed us coming out. Those weren’t bees buzzing around my head back there.”

“They saw you, but I don’t think they saw Pegasus. We got you aboard and went under before whoever was taking potshots at you charged through the ferns.”

Mac’s eyes narrowed. “All anyone needed was a glimpse. Just a glimpse. They could have radioed to their buddies downriver, had them string a net.”

The terse exchange helped resolve some of the awful doubts gnawing at Cari. “Their buddies couldn’t have chopped down vines and strung something this elaborate in an hour. My guess…my considered opinion,” she amended, “is that we’ll soon come face-to-face with some local fishermen who are going to be very surprised at what they’ve netted.”

By now the questions were coming at her from the Whites as well. “What’s happened?” the reverend called anxiously from the back.

“Why are we stopped?” his sister wanted to know.

“We hit a net,” Cari called back. “A fisherman’s net I think, and fouled the engines. We’ll have to surface and try to clear them.”

Slowly, foot by foot, Cari floated Pegasus up from the murky depths.

The canopy broke the surface first. Eyes narrowed, shoulders tense, Mac twisted around and did a swift three-sixty. The only signs of life he spotted were two red-furred monkeys hanging from a branch extending over the river. The creatures ceased their antics and gaped at the monster rising from the depths before emitting high-pitched shrieks of alarm and scrambling away.

Pegasus pawed his way up inch by inch. Still tethered by the net, the craft remained caught in midcurrent. The swift moving river flowed past, rushing over the wings, swirling just a few inches below the canopy.

Cari assessed the situation once again and saw only one option. “I’m going to pop the canopy and try to cut through the vines.”

Mac shot her a swift look. “You sure opening the canopy won’t flood us?”

“Pretty sure.”

The possibility she might be putting the children at grave risk generated a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She saw no other way to free her craft, however. It was either pop the canopy and cut the vines or drift at the end of this tether indefinitely.

“Go back and tell the Whites what we’re doing,” she instructed Mac. “Stay with them and be prepared to pass the children up through the cockpit if we start to take on water. Worst-case scenario, we swim them to shore.”

He nodded, not questioning her decision or authority, and climbed out of his seat. When he signaled that they were ready in the rear compartment, Cari hit the button to raise the canopy.

The hydraulic lift pushed the nose down a few inches. River water rushed in, soaking her from the waist down. After a heart-stopping second or two, the nose bobbed upward again and the flood ceased.

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