Chapter 23

Helen and Garcia crouched, making smaller targets of themselves. “Tell them we don’t want to hurt them,” she instructed. “Tell them I’ll fly the wounded for medical help.”

Garcia called out to them in Spanish and one of the soldiers shouted back. “They say to put down our arms,” he translated for her.

“All right,” she acknowledged.

“All right?” He was aghast.

“No, I mean, we back up toward the rear exit,” she clarified. “I’d like to help the wounded though.” She moved a few inches to the rear, trying to sense whether the hostages were out of the building yet or not. “Keep talking to them in Spanish,” she urged. “Tell them we come in peace, we want to sell them a wonderful bridge spanning the waters between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Tell them…”

Garcia shouted at the soldiers in Spanish, probably not conveying the same ideas at all.

Helen and Garcia edged back a few more inches, their eyes surveying the interior of the hanger, so they could spot trouble before it hit them right between the eyes.

Everything was dead silent now, except for the groans of the two or three injured soldiers. This was the proverbial quiet before the storm. Helen and Garcia crept backward, their weaponry at the ready. No one else moved.

“A Mexican standoff,” she breathed into his ear. He didn’t bother to acknowledge the quip.

However, the situation was the very one which that term described. She and Garcia certainly didn’t want to begin shooting, as the odds were incredibly stacked against them, but the Zapatistas didn’t want to start the gunfire going either. They didn’t want to risk their lives—especially when they weren’t exactly sure what this particular skirmish was all about, anyway.

Helen thought she and Garcia might make it out the door in this spirit of detente, but she was wrong. Suddenly a rifle went off and a bullet whizzed by right above her head. Good grief, someone was trying to kill her again. That very fact seemed unbelievable.

The firing of a single shot was a signal for the battle to begin in earnest. No one wanted to be left out of the war. The hanger filled with the deafening reverberations of military firepower, and lead projectiles zinged dangerously in every direction.

Helen fired defensively, but she didn’t want to kill anyone any more than she herself wanted to be killed. She was a sharpshooter and could have picked them off one at a time without much difficulty. Aiming for gun hands was a little bit harder and, she well knew, tactically stupid—yet the image of the boy “soldier” holding his crushed leg in his hands stayed with her and caused her to rein in her ability to hit, bang on, those strong, young, pumping hearts.

She felt Garcia pull at her, coaxing her out of the line of fire. She had forgotten for a moment that retreat was the order of the day. She followed his lead but kept her eyes on the guns in front of her as best she could through the clouds of smoke released when the gunpowder ignited.

To cover their withdrawal, she fired and fired again, hoping that she had missed her target—but the yells of those hit told her that her eye was as good as ever, even with an unfamiliar weapon in hand.

Finally, she could feel the breeze behind her, and she backed out through the door. She and Garcia slammed it shut.

The hostages were nowhere to be seen.

The two Americans ran around the building and found themselves back at the 747. The stairs were in place and the passengers were finishing getting on board. “Are you insane?” Helen demanded of the co-pilot who stood outside the craft, ushering the other escapees on board. “I just banged the hell out of this thing. No way it’s safe to take up in the air.”

She considered the airplane, nose snuggled against the smashed wall of the building and wondered how anyone even thought they could extricate it from its current position without a normal airport’s elaborate equipment. Blithering idiots!

“It may not be 100 percent, but we’ll have to take that chance. We have no other option,” the co-pilot responded stolidly.

“Get them the fuck off this plane,” she ordered, enraged. “What kind of a maniac are you? We have to pack them on board the Cessna and hurry before we have another gunfight on our hands.”

“The Cessna’s a five-passenger plane. We won’t all fit,” the co-pilot shouted back, incensed.

Lost in the exhaustion of days and heat of the moment, Helen grabbed him by the shirt. “It carries about four-thousand pounds,” she insisted between clenched teeth. “There are forty of us at most and eight or nine of us are children. Start loading the CitationJet.” She jumped on board the 747 aircraft and began telling the weary, terrified women and children that they must get off at once. The reactions she received weren’t mixed. They were out and out resistant.

The flight engineer emerged from the cabin to see what was happening. “Hurry,” she commanded. “We’re going in the Cessna. This thing is wrecked.”

“It doesn’t seem in very good shape,” the junior pilot acknowledged nervously.

“Tell them. Help me move them to the other plane.”

“All right,” he agreed. Garcia had boarded and he too began encouraging the women to take the children and exit the big craft.

“They’ll listen to the two of you because you’re men, but they won’t listen to me,” Helen grumbled at the flight engineer.

She and Garcia stood guard while the passengers were stacked cheek to jowl on the little executive jet. True the plane had insufficient room for them all, and the atmosphere in there was stifling, but in less than an hour they would be safe on the ground in Mexico city. Helen didn’t care to return to Guatemala city anytime soon. Eric had warned her against even short stays in Latin American jails.

She hopped on board, Garcia behind her, his rifle pointed toward the hanger, although despite the several minutes they had needed to move the passengers, no one had more than peeked out of the structure. Perhaps they were in no shape for a reengagement. “I feel bad,” Helen declared. “The wounded. It’s horrible.”

“Sometimes this isn’t a very nice world,” Garcia told her.

“Oh, please, that doesn’t mean I have to make it a worse one.”

She prepared her plane for takeoff and taxied down the runway. She was tired; she was hungry; she was upset, and, in seconds, she was in the air, flying into a patch of ominously dark, low-hanging cumulus clouds. She climbed and called Mexico city on her radio, letting them know her flight path and approximate landing time and suggesting they send a medical team to the spot they were departing from.

The 747 co-pilot, who was seated beside her, laughed. “They might send in a commando team to wipe out the rest of them, but believe me, they’re not going to fly in doctors and nurses.” Helen turned and glared at him. “Don’t be mad at me,” he objected. “I’m the one who saved you from being beaten by that Latin Stalin.”

“You’re the one who killed him?” she gasped.

“I’m the one, baby. I had a gun from before they arrived, hidden in my shirt.” Since he had been so thoughtful as to kill her attacker—the poor dead revolutionary idealist—she didn’t protest his now calling her “baby.” She supposed the form of address was rhetorical, anyway.

Behind, in the cabin, she could hear the children crying continuously and whining. She understood, but the sound of misery got on her nerves. She was doing the best that she could. She ran into a patch of turbulence and brought the plane higher to steady it out. How long had she been at this? The days swirled together. No way was she going to be paid enough for all the time she had put in. Wouldn’t it be nice if they awarded her this sweet little airplane as her medal for service rendered? A craft like this would give her a business in and of itself and she might even make enough to pay for the fuel.

Mexico city was civilization, and all types of personnel rushed alongside to help the skyjack victims, including some from the International Red Cross and from the American Embassy. They promised the traumatized travelers’ food, rest, and repatriation.

Helen didn’t want any of that. She clung to her plane, staying away from the thronging journalists awaiting their smash story. A mechanic checked out the jet and began to refuel the tanks. Someone handed her a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and she gulped these down, swearing she would start an improved regimen of nutrition as soon as she was able to sit down to an honest-to-goodness meal. All she wanted now was to fly on to California, buy a bathing suit, and go swimming in a hotel pool. For sure, she’d also take a shower and sleep for ten or twelve hours.

Garcia hovered nearby. “Don’t you want to stay here for a while?” he asked. “We’ve been invited to sleep at the American Embassy.”

“You go ahead,” she told him, but he shook his head regretfully in the negative.

She climbed on board and started to clean out the plane. Surprisingly for people unencumbered by luggage, her passengers had left a lot of crap behind. She began to neaten methodically. Someone had wadded a bunch of junk under the edge of the carpeting where it met the back of one of the seats. That really wasn’t nice. She had extended her hospitality and they had vandalized, more or less, her home.

What was this stuff? The discarded garbage consisted of a lot of blueprint type documents and some heavy, intricate pieces of metal and wiring. She couldn’t figure it all out, but she knew that the children hadn’t tucked it there. In fact, now that she recollected some of the events of their flight with Avilla into Guatemala, she realized something. The box had been in the cabin when he was alone for a minute or two with his gun to Delman’s head. At that point, Avilla could have removed whatever was in the case and set it aside for later retrieval. This litter might be the stuff that had been in his treasure chest.

“John,” she called. “Come up here a minute. I want you to see this.”

Garcia hopped up the stairs into the plane and she handed him the junk she had pulled from its hiding place. He flipped through the drawings and turned over the high-tech objects. “These are some type of cool bomb detonators,” he told her.

“How do you know?”

“John Garcia knows bombs. I’m a bomb expert.” He tried to sound modest, but he grinned. “Looking at these drawings, which are marked as property of the Department of Energy, I would further conclude that these are nuclear detonators and that these drawings are plans for a nuclear bomb. A little present for Avilla’s Latin leftist friends.”

“Bringing them bomb components would complement the plutonium smuggling, wouldn’t it,” she agreed. “Of course, let’s not say the materials were intended for the Latins. I hardly envision these guys in the outback making nuclear devices. I’d rather guess that they were selling this stuff to—who knows—the North Koreans, the Taliban, or any other current wannabe villains.”

“Could be,” Garcia concurred. “I find separating the players difficult these days. That’s why the world has gotten so out of hand. Criminals, terrorists, outlaw governments. They’re all working together for their mutual support.”

“We’re heroes,” Helen concluded triumphantly, grabbing the bomb plans and staring at them again in wonder.

“You are,” he told her admiringly. He took her hand.

“No,” Helen said sadly. “I can’t get those poor peasant soldiers out of my mind, or the boy whose leg got crushed. Who’s taking care of them now? Should I go back and fly them for help?”

Garcia shook his head in curt dismissal. “They wouldn’t thank you for it. There’s no going back on any of it. Maybe those kids weren’t bad people, but they put themselves in a place where they would be hurt by events around them—however wrongly, or even rightly, from their point of view. What happened wasn’t your fault in any way. You had to think of the hostages.”

“He was just a boy,” she mused gloomily. “He may have bled to death.”

By the time they touched down in Los Angeles, Helen felt as if she was ready to begin hallucinating, she was so wiped out. She held herself together, though, and went through the rightful airport procedures. “I want to stay at the Beverly Hilton,” she announced, thinking of waking up in the morning and taking a swim.

“I actually live out in this neck of the woods, you know,” Garcia mumbled. “You can stay in my apartment.”

“Where’s your fiancé?”

“She’s at a physics conference in Zurich.”

Helen met Garcia’s eyes. She knew she was blushing. “I’d better stay at the hotel,” she stammered. “I’d better call Eric. He’ll come out. You can meet us for lunch.”

He understood what she was saying, and he nodded. She guessed he was feeling something between a little bit disappointed and heartily relieved.

They caught a cab, and he came into the hotel with her, making sure she could get a room wearing a filthy sweat suit and without any luggage. The front desk clerk took one look at her credit cards, however, and welcomed her with open arms. Maybe he thought she was an actress walking away from a hard day’s work on the set.

She bought various overpriced garments in the hotel store: shorts, a blouse, a dress, a bathing suit—fresh underwear, thank the good Lord. She hurried up to her room and showered. What a wonderful country America was—private rooms, running water. She called Eric, left a message on his cell, collapsed on the bed with the towel wrapped around her and fell dead asleep.

A knocking at the door awakened her from another world. She could barely drag herself out of bed to answer the summons. Too early to clean the room still, wasn’t it? Or had she slept clear through to morning? “Hold on,” she called, quickly pulling on the new shorts and blouse. She opened the door blithely, then staggered back. Where the hell was her executive protection training? She stood facing a somewhat familiar looking guy who held a gun in one hand. The other arm was in a long, rigid cast.

“Do I know you?” she asked. She watched him curiously. How was he intending to pull the door closed without losing his grip on the gun? Or didn’t he care that they had no privacy for conducting whatever nefarious business he was up to?

He gestured for her to walk into the room, beyond the entryway. “Where is it? Where are the fuses, the documents?” She needed a moment to separate the English words from the Spanish accent.

She began to wake up for real. “Avilla. Avilla has them in Guatemala city,” she answered calmly.

“No, he doesn’t. He left them on the plane.”

“You’re the guy I shot in the elbow after you kidnapped me and the other woman,” she blurted out.

“You bitch,” he responded hotly.

“I don’t have anything. If he left them on a plane, they must still be on the plane,” she insisted. “Which plane?”

“I looked in your plane and it isn’t there now. Where is it?”

She shook her head to indicate she had no idea what he was talking about. In fact, Garcia had taken the detonators and documents to drop off at the L.A. ATF offices. But why tell this man?

“Then I’m going to be the one to kill you.”

She wasn’t sure why the idea of killing her was so very appealing to all these bad guys. They mustn’t really like women very much. In fact, that misogyny was probably the source of their whole evil-doer syndrome.

He cocked his gun. He was too far away for her to rush him without being shot in the process. She tensed her muscles. She would have to try taking him down, anyway. Better to be shot in some random limb or organ than to give him a good aim at her heart or head.

She counted to one, not chancing taking any longer, and dropped to the floor, on her way to pouncing on him. She delivered a loud kiyai—a martial arts shout intended both to frighten the opponent and to focus one’s energy on an attack.

At exactly that split second, the still-open door thwacked further ajar, and someone jumped on Avilla’s messenger from behind, grabbing him around the throat. Helen scrambled to her feet and knocked the guy’s gun out of his hand. Her rescuer, whoever that was, had the man with the wounded arm on the floor. The intruder screamed in pain because his arm was being knocked around.

Carlis, the ATF agent, was on top of the bad guy. Helen stooped and picked up the gun. “Let him up,” she told Carlis. “I think his arm must be hurting him.”

She looked up. Garcia charged into the room—about a minute-and-a-half too late.

“I don’t know why you guys imagine that I’m not capable of disarming a wounded man all by myself,” she complained to the two of them calmly. “I was handling it.”

Carlis pulled the bad guy up by the man’s good arm. The two railed at one another in Spanish for a while. Helen remembered then that Carlis and the kidnapper had worked together for Peno for a while and must have a lot of catching up of one sort or another to do.

Doors along the corridor had opened and some intrepid souls stuck their heads into Helen’s room.

“Federal business,” Garcia told them, pulling his identification from his wallet and shoving it in their direction. Then he shut the door. “They probably think we’re shooting a film.”

“I can’t believe that Avilla is still causing trouble, even from his hospital bed in Central America. Wouldn’t they have given him morphine or pain killers to knock him out?” Helen complained.

“You’re under arrest,” Carlis told Avilla’s henchman, who whimpered over the rough treatment of his injured arm.

“Nice to see you again,” Helen greeted Carlis. “Next time, call and we’ll have dinner. No need to break into my hotel room to say hi.” She smiled at him so he would know that she was teasing.

“Girls,” said Carlis. “Sometimes they like one thing—sometimes they like another. You never know.”

Garcia muttered something in Spanish to Carlis, who hauled his prisoner out the door.

Garcia had remained unshaven but had showered and put on sports clothes and looked strikingly handsome. Helen nervously checked her clothing to make sure it was covering her.

“Are you okay?” Garcia asked solicitously. “We had been watching this bastard and monitored a call to him from Avilla. Carlis followed this Leon out here to L.A., to the airport, where some security guard let him onto the field. Leon broke into your plane and sort of tore it apart. Then he led Carlis here. I was headed this way to make sure you were all right. The story of the 747 rescue is all over the media. That’s how he knew where to get to you. Half the reporters in America are camped outside waiting to speak to the little lady pilot.”

“I guess the press would follow a flea in a desert, if they thought the insect had a salacious story to tell.” She made a face. “They go too far, then they blow their noses, weeping about how terrible they’ve been. How much do you think Fox will pay me?” She laughed to show she was kidding. She had the investigator’s instinctive aversion to publicity, lest she blow her cover on the next case.

“If you want me to stay, I’ll see that they don’t get to you,” Garcia suggested softly, hesitantly. Then he shook his head before she could even answer. “I’ll come by in the morning. I’ll…” He stopped talking.

Helen blushed for at least the second time that day. “Better make sure your prisoner is secure, John. Better file to extradite Avilla and put him in a federal prison hospital.”

Garcia gave her a long look of pure annoyance. “Helen,” he protested in exasperation. Just that one word, Helen.