Undercurrents Page 24

  The response that came back from Rhonda@freeFlorida.net was Glad you’re enjoying your trip. Expect you wear your new jewelry these days. You wearing it Right Now?

  Which meant “Continue, wear your GPS transmitters and microphones from now on, and that the come-rescue-us phrase was ‘right now.’” But they had no way of knowing if they had any friends out there monitoring their transmissions.

  Dread was staring at him and Nicole. Ryder frowned in their direction, too. Chase forced a laugh. “You’re not telling me that you guys are Border Patrol?”

  Dread answered in a cold voice, “I’m tellin’ you not to ask.”

  Chase gave him a look. “I’m here, aren’t I? Just trying to pass the time.”

  Dread pulled his night vision goggles over his face and turned back to the desert.

  Chase hoped the tiny mike in his jacket collar was picking up all their conversation. Or that Nicole’s was. And that their backup was within receiving range. The code “right now” was supposed to unleash a team of local and federal law enforcement, who would rush in and arrest the lot of them. But was their backup actually out there?

  “Damn, it’s getting cold. I thought you said they were coming any minute now.” Nicole pulled a pack of gum out of her pocket, helped herself to a stick, and then offered the pack around. Nobody took her up on it. She stuffed the stick into her mouth and chewed a couple of times. “I read about those cockroaches that turned up dead close to here last week. Nice work, guys.”

  Randy turned to look at Marshall and Ryder. Chase couldn’t be sure, but he suspected they were smiling.

  “Shut up!” Dread hissed over his shoulder. “Didn’t I just tell ya not to ask?”

  “I wasn’t asking,” Nikki retorted, tossing her hair. “I was compliment—”

  “I see something,” Dread interrupted.

  They all crowded to the lookout, pulling their night vision goggles down into place.

  The first guy Chase spotted was big and burly and headless. Then he realized he was looking at a kid, maybe fourteen or so, buckled into a backpack twice his size.

  “Drug mule,” Marshall snarled.

  That looked like a possibility. The backpack could hold a bale of marijuana. The man that followed a few paces behind carried two bulging black plastic garbage bags, which could also contain drugs. But trailing behind him was a woman with a baby carrier strapped to her chest and a small bag over her shoulder. A dozen more forms walked in the distance, flashing in and out of the cactus forest. A mixed group, maybe; drug carriers and illegal immigrants, coyotes making as much money as possible per trip.

  “Why the hell are they going that way?” Marshall grumbled.

  “They’re too far away,” Ryder whispered. “Fan out.” He moved toward the opening, with Joanne and Randy in his wake.

  “You mean right now?” Nicole murmured in a low voice.

  Dread threw her an annoyed look over his shoulder. At least Chase figured that was what the guy was doing; it was hard to read anyone’s expression with night vision goggles obscuring half their faces.

  “Of course, he means right now!” Chase growled. “Let’s go!” He shoved Nicole out into the darkness.

  Their group scattered, ducking and weaving from cactus to cactus. Chase almost leaned against a saguaro before remembering the thorns. This outing was going to hell. Where was their backup? Neither he nor Nicole wore Kevlar vests because that would have instantly tipped off their group. The best they could do was their matching red Southern Sting Shootout Champion windbreakers, which, if seen and recognized, might help identify them as good guys. But in the dark, that was a gigantic if.

  Ryder moved quickly, crouching low, approaching the hikers. He stopped, raised his rifle, and sighted down the barrel. There was a fftt sound like a bottle rocket launching and then the biggest hiker grunted and flopped into the dirt. The woman with the baby screamed and started to run. Ryder aimed his rifle in her direction.

  Shit! These nutcases were going to murder all these people. Where the hell was their backup? Another fftt vaporized the arm of a saguaro. The woman kept running, the baby screaming along with its mother now. Ryder tracked them with his scope.

  Chase heard a man’s shout cut short. Someone else had been hit. Nicole was off to his right. He had to keep her in sight. Fftt. Fftt. Footsteps. Shouts for help in Spanish. “Ayúdame!”

  Chase jogged to keep up with the fleeing immigrants and their pursuers. Why didn’t he hear a helicopter or ATVs? All he heard were screams and shouts in Spanish. The hiss and thunk of bullets flying. He couldn’t just watch this slaughter. He aimed at Ryder’s foot while bellowing at the illegals to hit the dirt. “A la tierra! Bajense!”

  His shot kicked up the gravel beside Ryder’s boot, and Ryder swiveled. Dread appeared out of the dark at Ryder’s side.

  The bullet caught Chase in the shoulder. The impact knocked him to his knees. He barely managed to keep his rifle raised. Ryder had him in his sights. Chase squeezed his trigger first. Ryder fell with only a faint grunt.

  “Motherfucker!” Dread bellowed. “Charlie’s a goddamn rat!”

  Nicole fired squarely into Dread’s back. The big man dropped facedown to the ground. Then suddenly there were more people running through the cactus and everyone was shooting and swearing and screaming in English and Spanish. New voices boomed over megaphones. Spotlights and headlights flashed through the cactus. The flickering light illuminated the mother crouched over her baby, hunched against a rock and half-hidden behind a bush. Chase staggered to his feet and walked in her direction.

  Randy burst into view ten yards away, his night goggles pulled up onto his head. His face was a mask of fury. The pistol in his hand was aimed at Chase.

  Chase felt another burning kick, this time in the middle of his chest. He landed on his back, stunned. The fall knocked the breath from his chest and the night vision goggles from his head. He stared at a sky strewn with incredible stars, suddenly deaf to the firefight blazing in the desert around him.

  The bullet wounds didn’t hurt as much as he’d expected. More uncomfortable was the ground he lay on; he could feel a rock under his right hip and another jacking his bleeding shoulder off the ground. God, he was cold. Thirsty. Exhausted. He could barely keep his eyes open. How could he be running and shooting and screaming, adrenaline pumping one minute, and so completely content to lay motionless the next? He should try to get up. But he was so tired.

  He hoped the Mexican family would live. He hoped Nicole had escaped. He hoped their undercover work would keep this from happening again.

  The desert sky was so big. This wasn’t such a bad way to die. The stars were truly beautiful out here, away from city lights. Summer would really appreciate this view.

  20

  J.J. was already in the dining area when Sam dragged herself upstairs at 5 A.M. the next morning. Somehow J.J. had coerced Constantino into giving her breakfast early. Her plate was half empty when Sam slid into place across from her.

  “Aha,” she said. “I was giving you two minutes more, then I was going to knock on your door.”

  Sam blinked sleepily as Constantino placed a plate of scrambled eggs and fruit in front of her. “How did you say you found this guy who’s taking us?”

  J.J. shrugged. “I asked Eduardo who had the fastest boat in town, and then I looked the guy up at the harbor before I got on this boat.”

  “Is he a licensed dive guide? To take divers, boats are supposed to have a special license.”

  J.J. looked up from buttering her toast. “You’re trying to tell me that you always follow the rules?”

  Sam pondered Dan’s special arrangement with Eduardo, their lack of displaying dive flags, her solo wanderings on the islands. How many regulations had she violated here?

  “That’s what I thought.” J.J. said. “I’ve always found that in small towns—and although the population here is spread between a few islands, it still all adds up to a small town—everyone finds a way to
fit into the system, even if that means looking the other way at times.” She pointed her fork in the direction of Sam’s plate. “Better eat up. Our boat’s coming in twenty minutes.”

  Sam quickly downed her breakfast and packed her diving duffel—wetsuit, regulators, weights, buoyancy vest, face mask, fins, camera, and waterproof case. It weighed a ton.

  She found J.J. waiting for her on the stern platform. Her diving gear was zipped into a black duffel at her feet, and a white plastic-wrapped package lay on top of it. “Lunch,” said J.J.

  The approaching boat was a pale scab on the blue plane of the horizon. The buzz of its engine arrived long before the craft did. It was a huge flashy go-fast boat with giant twin outboards, the kind that drug runners favored to outrun patrol boats. The owner, a baby-faced young man with smooth olive skin, introduced himself as Domingo Guerrero.

  “Guerrero?” Sam repeated. “At Darwin Station, I met—”

  “Dr. Ignacio Guerrero,” Domingo supplied. “My uncle.”

  “And I”—the other man held out his hand­—“am Nicolas Ayala.” Although he was heavyset and middle-aged, Nicolas reminded her for some reason of Carlos Santos.

  It was the sunglasses, she realized: on top of his head were perched the same PCB frames and mirrored lenses as Carlos Santos and Ricardo Diaz. Relax, she told herself as she sat down on the padded stern bench. Wearing the same sunglasses didn’t necessarily indicate an alliance of any kind.

  As they pushed off from Papagayo’s stern, Eduardo stepped out from the engine room, yawning.

  Ayala waved. “Buenos, Eduardo.”

  “Primo,” Eduardo responded in a low voice. As they pulled away, he watched, frowning, his arms folded across his chest.

  Wolf Island was nearly four hours away, even at full throttle with powerful twin engines. The noise of the engines made it impossible to talk, so Sam and J.J. reclined against the seat cushions in silence. The sea was nearly flat, and they zoomed through the dark like a racing hydrofoil. Was the driver watching out for whales? Floating debris? If they hit anything at this speed, they’d be airborne and then, most likely, dead. But nothing happened. After half an hour of watching the two men at the front of the boat, Sam lay her head on her arm at the side of the boat, and dozed off.

  She awoke hours later with a stiff neck. J.J. was slouched beside her, her eyes still shut. The day was bright, the sunlight rebounding from the mirror surface of the Pacific. Those rays would be scorching when the boat stopped, but for now, with the wind flowing over her skin, the temperature was perfect. Flying fish launched themselves into the air, sailing on transparent outstretched fins. What flashed through their tiny fish brains? Did they think the speedboat was a fiberglass-covered predator? Or maybe they jetted out of the water at any sudden movement. Did larger fish race ahead to swallow them when they touched down?

  Ahead, the dark cliffs of Wolf Island loomed, rising more than seven hundred feet from the water’s surface. Guerrero guided the boat around the south end of the hook-shaped island. As they neared the shoreline, the cacophony of thousands of birdcalls overtook the noise of surf and engine. Tropicbirds and swallowtail gulls swooped in and out of clefts in the vertical walls; white horsetails of guano marked their nest sites. Layers upon layers of birds circled overhead. In the topmost air traffic layer, Sam spotted the unmistakable silhouettes of great frigatebirds.

  “Por allá!” Ayala pointed at the water.

  Sam and J.J. leaned over the starboard side. Two bottlenose dolphins raced alongside the bow, their sleek skins breaking the surface between crystal sprays of water.

  J.J. moved to the port side. “There’s another one over here.”

  “There are always dolphins at Wolf and Darwin Islands.” Guerrero smiled.

  Ayala added, “They are the park guards here.”

  Oh good, thought Sam. Just what she needed: another reminder that she and J.J. were in a remote area with perfect strangers and no official authorities. Not that she trusted the official Ecuadorian authorities to come to her aid any longer.

  Guerrero throttled the engine back to idle. The dolphins vanished. Some guards.

  “The best diving, it is right here.” Ayala pointed to the space between his feet. “There are lava pillars and tunnels, lots of hammerheads.”

  “Sweet,” commented J.J.

  Sam blanched.

  Guerrero must have noticed her tense expression. “Friendly hammerheads,” he said. “All the sharks in the Galápagos are friendly.”

  Sam had heard the “friendly sharks” bit a number of times since arriving in the islands. She still couldn’t decide if it was meant to be genuine reassurance for visiting divers or some sort of local joke.

  She and J.J. stripped to their swimsuits and then pulled on their neoprene layers. J.J. was speedier in her preparations, and was double-checking her tank and regulator while Sam was still fumbling with her weights.

  “Lost your knife?”

  Sam looked up. J.J. pointed to the empty sheath on Sam’s belt. “I noticed it was missing yesterday when you were lying in the bottom of the boat.”

  “Really? I had it only a couple of days ago.” She’d used it at Ola Rock to cut free the longlined albatross. She searched through the remaining gear in her duffel. No knife.

  The image of the dive knife at the police station swept into her mind. No way.

  “Probably got dislodged when we were towing that poor woman back to the boat,” J.J. suggested.

  That seemed like a logical explanation; there’d been a lot of thrashing. But too many disturbing coincidences kept cropping up: the knife in the police station, half-brothers Ricardo and Tony Diaz, their guide Guerrero being the nephew of the director of Darwin Station, the way that Carlos Santos had fist-bumped Eduardo’s arm in Puerto Ayora, and for that matter, the way that Eduardo had reacted on seeing Ayala, their other guide today. “J.J., you know some Spanish. Do you know what primo means?”

  “Primo? It means ‘cousin.’ ”

  Sam flashed a glance at Ayala. Was this Eduardo’s cousin who had been fishing at Buoy 3942? Was he a poacher? Did he know who she was? His gaze met hers; he smiled.

  “What’s the holdup?” J.J. stood with arms crossed, looking as if she would be tapping her toe if she hadn’t been wearing swim fins.

  “Uh . . .” Should she say something? Or was she simply being paranoid?

  “I already double-checked everything.” J.J. hefted the tank with attached BCD, slung it in Sam’s direction. Sam caught it and slipped the straps over her shoulders.

  J.J. turned to Guerrero. “You’ll follow?”

  “It is necessary. There is always a strong current. You must stay close to the rocks.”

  “We will. If you see our bubbles getting too far away, please catch up.”

  He snapped off a little salute. “You are the boss.”

  “Let’s do it, Sam.” J.J. sat on the starboard edge of the boat, hanging her tanks out over the water, and then flipped backward with a splash.

  Last dive on the list, Sam reminded herself. Ayala looked harmless enough at the helm. Eduardo could have many cousins. These two guys had ferried her and J.J. over miles of water; they could have dumped them anywhere along the way. Eduardo knew where they had gone. She’d get through this final dive, write her last two blog posts tonight, and be done with Out There and the Galápagos. She turned and handed her camera to Guerrero.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  Sam took a last lungful of the fresh air, snugged her mask over her face, took an experimental puff on the mouthpiece, closed her eyes, and leaned backward. The water slapped her hard on the back, then wrapped around her like a cool cloak.

  She rolled to the surface, took the camera and clipped it to her BCD, then exhaled and descended. The sequence was starting to feel routine. Despite her anxiety about what might happen, she was still awed every time she sank beneath the ocean surface. Each dive was like a trip to another planet. Sunlight brightened the blue-green liquid
to a verdant pastel near the surface. Brighter shafts of light stabbed the depths like searchlights in an evening sky. A school of yellow jacks circled to the right, just a few yards away.

  Silvery bubbles streamed upward in the distance. J.J. was already hard at work, thirty feet below and at least forty feet east of her, punching buttons on a little handheld computer as she swam over a long shelf of black rock. The scene was familiar; Sam couldn’t help thinking of Dan. Focus, she reminded herself.

  J.J. looked up, her face mask reflecting the surface sunlight. She raised a neoprene-clad arm. C’mon down. As Sam watched, the current pulled her over and then right past J.J. Crap. She was flying fast. She turned into the force and kicked her way down, grabbing a rock a few feet away from J.J. to hold herself in place. She’d been taught not to touch anything underwater, but if the alternative was being swept out to sea, she was going to clamp herself to the rocks like a limpet.

  As long as they stayed no more than a foot or so above the ragged lava bottom, the current was manageable. Red starfish clung to the rocks. They swam over a canyon. Sam would have been content to glide over the top, but J.J. swam into the depression, and so she followed. Hundreds of tiny striped soldierfish darted out. Two were immediately sucked up by a hovering trumpet fish. Life was cheap down here.

  J.J. twisted toward Sam, beckoning her, pointing toward a dark hole. Sam swam closer. A lava tube, a small cave formed by superheated lava flowing into cold seawater. Lava tubes might extend for hundreds of yards or only a few feet, like the one near which she had found Dan’s body. She realized that she was biting into the rubber of her mouthpiece, and tried to relax her jaw. J.J. didn’t expect her to explore that dark tunnel, did she? Then her eyes focused on a vaguely sharklike shape inside the dim cave. It was a strange pig-nosed fish, with spiky brown skin and white polka dots and a white-tipped spur on its back as well as a floppy-looking dorsal fin. A horn shark. Wow. She hadn’t even known they inhabited the Galápagos. She framed it in the viewfinder and took a photo.