Chapter 22

She staggered back from the punch and would have fallen, but the soldiers standing behind her reached out and held her up. She was dazed—in part by the blow, in part simply by the idea of being hit so viciously. She had always laughed at the men in her martial arts class who were afraid to give her much of a tap, careful not to do the weak little woman any harm. She imagined herself tough and hardy and her male opponents to be overly priggish. In an instant, her philosophy had changed: It really wasn’t nice for a guy to sock a girl the way he would another man.

She stared the rebel in the face, but tears had formed in her eyes from the pain he had caused her. She sucked in air, catching her breath, waiting until she was able to speak again, which took her a good thirty seconds. “If we were acting as equals, I’d have a chance to hit you back,” Helen said.

“You had your chance, Miss America, when you kicked me earlier,” he answered.

She tried to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had just transpired. “What do you want from us?” she asked. Her voice had grown steady again. “What do you want in order to let all of us go?” Her eyes sought the forty or so hostages huddled, exhausted, against the far wall of the hanger. A little boy was crying non-stop. Helen nodded toward them to indicate that they were included in her negotiation.

“I’ll think about it,” the UNRG leader responded. “My intention wasn’t to have you all brought here. In fact, I didn’t know about it until a couple of hours ago. So I’ll have to take my time deciding what I’m going to do.” He paused and gave her a very direct look. “But I want something from you in the meantime, and all that it will buy you is that I won’t hit you again.”

“And that is?” She hoped to seem casually interested—not overly eager to comply.

“I want the box you took from my tent. Where is it?” A harshness had crept into his tone.

“I really don’t know,” she responded. “I lost track of that. It may still be back at your camp in Guatemala.” She glared at him.

The rebel cracked her across her face with the back of his hand. The slap not only made a loud snapping sound, but it also stung unpleasantly. She knew her face would go black and blue with marks from his fingers.

Hearing a noise behind, she turned. Garcia struggled forward, pulling away from his guards. “The box is in the Cessna,” he yelled out to Helen’s assailant.

“Oh, so you are some type of gentleman, after all. Very reactionary of you.” The revolutionary smiled, as if he found something amusing in this, but his smile had an almost human quality to it, quite dissimilar from Avilla’s smile, which signified only disdain and contempt.

Helen glowered at Garcia. Giving up the box so immediately upon demand wasn’t really the best approach. Once the box was gone, they would have absolutely nothing left to bargain with. But men never thought these things through, did they?

The rebel leader gave instructions to two of his soldiers who ran off toward the field, presumably to search the CitationJet for Avilla’s lead-lined box. Did it hold plutonium? she wondered. Diamonds? Cash? Securities? Drugs? A liverwurst sandwich? Old newspaper clippings announcing Avilla’s promotions up the corporate ladder? Nothing at all would surprise her at this point. But if the case did contain plutonium and the soldiers decided to open it up to check, she hoped she wouldn’t be in the room at the time. She wasn’t sure how that stuff got to you—whether it simply floated on the air, or not—but she knew the ore was deadly in a silent, sudden way.

She glanced at Garcia. He had been roughed up a little, she could see, but he still looked like a guy who would take ten minutes to change, then escort you to the poshest East Side restaurant for a late dinner. Though remaining adorable while being slammed around by enemy forces might be difficult, he was managing. Well, he hadn’t been cracked across the face, the way she had.

They waited. The socialist commander rested on a folding chair that hadn’t been in the hanger earlier in the day. He shuffled through some documents he had with him, entirely removing his attention from Helen and Garcia for the duration. Helen tried to read the papers he was looking through upside down and was startled to find that he was examining the various identification cards and written materials belonging to the hostages.

He had felt her eyes on him and glanced up at her. “Know who you’re dealing with is best, don’t you think? Do you know how much a family will pay to have a loved one returned to them unharmed? Many, many millions if the family can afford it. I am sorry that my group was not the one to have kidnapped the banker, Jesu Hark. They asked for one hundred and twenty million dollars for him. How much would your family pay to have you back, do you think?”

“I don’t have a family,” she replied at once. “No one’s left.”

“I would hate to think of a beautiful young woman like you ending up in an unmarked grave.”

She liked hearing him speak that way because if eventually she had to hurt him, she felt she would be able to justify it in her mind. He differed from Avilla and Peno in that he was sane, but he was similar to the two of them in that he was capable of limitless evil.

“You may think that if you kill me, you will have won out, but if I die because of something you’ve done or failed to do, I’ll come back to haunt you,” she told him forcefully, letting her eyes burn into his. She wanted her warning of ghostly retribution to be as powerful and believable as he had tried to make his death threat.

Would she trail him with vaporous designs on his peace of mind if he murdered her? Such a pursuit was highly unlikely. Instead, she imagined herself hovering over Eric as he sat reading American Survival on the sofa, trying to get him to think back to the time when he had loved her. She could almost see the barefoot, pregnant little wife fixing supper in the kitchen. The image made her jealous and resentful. That was the way it would go down!

The soldiers returned, intoxicated with the triumph of their success. They flourished Avilla’s box in front of the assembled group and presented it to their chief with high anticipation, telling him the story—which, being in Spanish, she couldn’t understand in the least—of how their persistence and intelligence had won the day.

“You had hidden it, they say, but they searched and overcame your sneaking capitalist attempt at deception,” the leader translated.

She smiled at the silliness of the language. Garcia had pushed the box aside so he could sit down; that was all the deception they had used.

Although she sympathized with the plight of the disenfranchised in countries like Mexico and Guatemala, she hated ideologues. They presented no honest antidote to hunger. Her face still hurt from the slap the rebel had given her and her stomach felt as if she had done a thousand sit-ups the day before—two good reasons to maintain a poor opinion of men who thought that a political stance was more than equal to a deed of kindness.

The leader opened the box without fanfare, turning what was left of Helen’s fortitude to jelly. She flushed with alarm and went dizzy and sick at her stomach. She backed away the few inches the soldiers would let her move. She was sure that she would faint. Plutonium was already in her bloodstream—killing her!

The rebel chief threw the box down on the floor in a gesture of outrage. He burst forth in a tirade conducted entirely in Spanish, so that she couldn’t comprehend the nuances of his fury.

One thing was clear to her, however: The box was empty. Thank the good Lord, the box was completely and entirely devoid of any contents whatsoever. Avilla had told the truth when he had said, finally, that he had no plutonium in the box. In fact, the box contained not only no heavy metal in there, but it also held nothing at all. She began to calm down from her horrendous fright.

The UNRG leader approached Helen menacingly and smacked her across the face once again. The blow was so hard that her neck snapped to one side sharply and she heard a ringing in her ears.

Her whole body came to attention with the blow, although its total focus was not on the pain she was suffering, but on retaliation. Her limbs were poised to strike back at her attacker, and she longed make him feel at least nearly as bad as she now felt. No, she mustn’t! Her heart beat with fury in her chest, but she kept her hand under control for one reason only. If she were to fight him now, she would be beaten back; she would not succeed. Her will called her arms and legs away from their spontaneous intent. In war, timing is everything. She was now at war and must wait for the moment when the tide would turn in her favor.

“What have you done with it?” he demanded. “What have you done with the contents of the box?”

Indeed, she wondered. What had become of whatever had been in Avilla’s little chest? She had carried the box herself for much of the time and although it hadn’t been heavy, something definitely had been in it that now was gone. Who could have removed the contents? Only one person would have had the nerve, since only one person knew that the box didn’t hold plutonium—Avilla! But when could he have emptied it? From the time they had left the rebel camp and had climbed onto the helicopter, that box had been in her possession every minute of the way.

“What was in the box?” She managed to move her mouth in order to ask. Her face felt strange. She touched her hand to her cheek; her fingers came away bloody again.

The macho Zapatista moved to strike Helen one more time. She drew her head back and raised her right leg slightly in order to kick him as she had done before in his camp. The time was not right, but she couldn’t allow him to slap her further without defending herself. She simply couldn’t!

As the rebel stood ready to hit her with the back of his hand and Helen altered her posture so that she might check his attack, the stunning boom of a gun exploded in their ears. The socialist chieftain stood stock still in puzzlement, wondering perhaps who had fired the shot, perhaps who had been hit. Who the shooter was was not immediately apparent, but the person struck by the bullet soon became quite obvious. A red mark appeared on Helen’s assailant’s chest, then a wet carmine stain seeped slowly across his jungle camouflage shirt.

The UNRG leader looked down at his torso, marveling at the wound, then glanced around to see which of his men had betrayed him. He took one step forward while opening his mouth to speak. His life’s blood spread in a gush over his clothing, spurting out onto the floor as he collapsed in a heap without uttering whatever final protest he had thought to address them with.

The entire group stood inordinately still, shocked at the suddenness of a death in their midst. Helen leaned down and felt her opponent’s neck for a pulse. As far as she could determine, not the slightest spark of life remained.

Without looking back, she knew who obviously had fired the shot. Although the soldiers had relieved Garcia of the gun he had taken from Avilla, Garcia still had the H&K pistol in his ankle holster. The ATF agent was also extremely tempestuous, Helen had begun to notice, and presumably didn’t care to see a woman hit more than a couple of times at the most.

As she leaned over the dead man in a gesture of concern, Helen took the opportunity to surreptitiously rob the corpse of its revolver. This was the chance she had been waiting for—a shift in the mood and the action, a point at which one courageous soul could change the current of events.

As Helen stood awkwardly, she grabbed the nearest soldier and stuck the rebel leader’s gun in this boy’s back. “They’re shooting at us,” she screamed with fervor. “Down, down, down on the ground.” She injected as much hysteria into her tone as possible.

Something like this had worked before, hadn’t it? She was going on intuition alone and her own innate wildness. She pulled the young soldier to the ground with her as she hit the floor.

Garcia began to scream, too, but couched his fearful warnings in a language they could understand. Garcia ducked, looking up and around as if anticipating where the next shots would come from. For some reason Helen couldn’t determine, Garcia’s culpability in shooting the revolutionary leader remained undetected.

In seconds, the soldiers began running for cover or hitting the deck, as if the firing had, indeed, come from the entryway, or from some unknown gunman hanging from the rafters.

Helen and Garcia continued to sow panic, but the soldiers were running on automatic now. They scattered and shouted among themselves, stumbling over their own feet and each other to hurry to some safe haven. Helen dashed toward the entrance of the hanger and, holding close to the walls of the structure as if afraid to show herself in the opening, she slid slowly out of the building and around the side. She ran a few feet away from the wall and fired off a couple of shots at a sufficient height so they wouldn’t hit anyone if they should happen to pierce the steel shell of the building—high enough, too, so she wouldn’t be hit by the ricochets. She screamed bloody murder in response to her own shooting.

What next? Her primary objective was to free the hostages and to fly them to safety. In a moment or two, however, the ragtag soldiers were going to realize that they weren’t under attack and begin to quiet down. One of most courageous of them, or the highest in rank, would take charge of the situation. What worried her was that a young revolutionary of no experience, in taking the reins, might be foolish enough to do something rash to the prisoners as punishment for his leader’s death. Or even simply because he had the power over them to do so.

Someone rushed around the corner and grabbed her into his arms before she saw who it was. She hit out once, shrieking in surprise. “Hang on. It’s me,” Garcia whispered, dodging her blow.

She stopped flailing and took hold of his wrist in order to tug him along behind her. She had a crazy, stupid, desperate idea for rescuing the passengers and crew—one that didn’t involve a gunfight, too. Gunfights only ended up with people killed, and she didn’t want even the soldiers to lose their lives over this unfortunate circumstance.

So now, she ran toward where the 747 sat parked on the runway. The stairs were still in place, and she climbed on board, gesturing urgently for Garcia to follow.

How many millions of dollars did an aircraft like this cost? she wondered.

“We can’t just fly away and leave the others,” Garcia chided Helen in his most severe tone.

“If I were going to fly away on my own, I wouldn’t do it on a jumbo jet,” she answered acidly.

That shut him up or at least put a halt to his unkind imaginings. “Shall I close the door?” he asked more reasonably.

“No need for that,” she assured him and hopped forward into the pilot’s seat, with Garcia following to take the co-pilot position. She didn’t bother running down the checklist. She had no intention of winding up in the air. Instead, she revved the engine, looking over the controls with some curiosity. Nice airplane. The only other time she had flown a commercial jet was a couple of days ago when she had handled the 727. This was much more impressive an aircraft.

Helen started the plane forward toward the hanger at a slow crawl. Usually a jet like this would be towed into its takeoff position or towed into the hanger if the ground crew wanted to haul it in for repairs—but this jet wouldn’t be taking off and it wasn’t going to be overhauled. In fact, this valuable aircraft might not be flying anywhere ever again, after she got through with it. But what the hell else was she supposed to do?

The plane gathered a certain amount of speed as it approached the building, but her intention wasn’t to kill everyone—or anyone—inside, simply to throw them into a further chaos, one that they could see had a definite, very real cause.

“What the hell are you doing?” Garcia cried as they sped toward the metal structure. “You’re going to run into the hanger! Christ, we’re going to crash.”

“Whoops!” shouted Helen jokingly, as the plane crunched through the hanger, moving the wall about 20 feet to the rear of where it had been only a second previously. Something cracked as she did that, and she figured the sound was from some delicate part of the plane itself. She might have just cut off their final means of departure. She certainly wouldn’t trust this plane in the air, after what she had this very moment done to it. She killed the engines.

As an afterthought, Helen turned on her radio communications and quickly broadcast a Mayday to the general area, explaining that theirs was the flight recently hijacked out of Richmond, Virginia, and giving the coordinates. “Now let’s liberate a couple of rifles from the soldiers inside and rescue the passengers and crew,” she told Garcia.

He grabbed her arm. “This is completely insane,” he said. “You’re a Goddamn cowgirl.”

“Thanks for shooting that bastard for me,” she grinned. “Although you shouldn’t have taken the chance.”

“You must be kidding.” He seemed genuinely astonished. “I didn’t shoot him. I thought you did.”

Her mouth dropped open. She was dumfounded. If he hadn’t shot the rebel leader, then who had?

She jumped out of her seat, pulling the dead revolutionary’s gun from the band of her sweatpants. She hurried from the cockpit through to the cabin. Since the door was still conveniently open, she leaped to the ground. Garcia quickly jumped down beside her. “It’s not easy keeping up with you,” he said.

Helen advanced toward the entrance of the hanger, which had more or less stayed in place, although the wall was pretty much crumpled. Once through the door, she could see immediately that her act had not at all been a bloodless one. People had suffered injuries. She tried not to think of it, although she was devastated. These young “soldiers” hadn’t been the ones to kidnap the hostages. They hadn’t hijacked the airplane. But they had trusted and followed the wrong men and had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She ran as if to help and stooped over one of the wounded. His leg had been crushed by the falling siding. She felt sick to her stomach.

Instead of trying to stop the bleeding, Helen grabbed his rifle and hurried to the rear of the hanger where the Points West passengers and crew huddled together in confusion and fear.

The man guarding the hostages raised his rifle to warn to her to stop and she did so, a smile of apology on her face. She put her own rifle down on the ground. The guard lowered his weapon. She approached closer as if to whisper an embarrassing secret in his ear. She kicked him twice, once in the chest and then, as he doubled over, once in the face, grabbing his weapon as he went down for the count. “Terrible training,” she grumbled to no one. Then she raised her voice so that the hostages could all hear her. “The hanger has a back door,” she shouted. “That’s how we’re getting out.” Garcia had hurried along beside her, armed with an M16. She handed the revolver to the flight engineer. “Go ahead. We’ll cover you. You may have to shoot the lock off the door.”

She and Garcia stood side by side. Together they faced the quickly regrouping revolutionary soldiers.