Perilous Skies (Stony Man) Read online

  The well-staged play would continue even when the Great Escape came to Glass Key. There would be nothing more than a few fishermen already on the stretch of sand. The fisherman’s open boat would not raise the suspicions of the DEA, even if it stopped by.

  Valdes was dressed for the part. He looked like some low-wage Bahamian fisherman. Their boat was an old tub that cost them a hundredth of the lease cost on the Great Escape. But it was just as important to the operation.

  Everything looked right. Everything would work correctly. Valdes had thought through every aspect of this operation, looking for flaws, looking for potential problems. As the Great Escape headed for Glass Key, he grew more confident. This was going to work out the way it was supposed to. There would be no surprises.

  And then a shadow flitted over the sand. Valdes thought it was a bird and dismissed it from his mind almost immediately. Then his mind replayed the image of the shadow. The wings of the birds seemed too stiff. He was not alarmed yet, but he did turn to check out the bird.

  Instead he saw an aircraft zipping at two hundred feet above the surface of the Caribbean Sea. It was off-white, almost gray, and it almost seemed to absorb the color of the sky around it. It was an almost angelic-looking little craft, with strange curves. Valdes found it difficult to lock his eyes on it, as if it was every second on the verge of fading into the blue sky behind it.

  And it was silent. It was a glider or some such...

  But that wasn’t true, either. As it banked and lined up on the long, narrow stretch of sand, Valdes heard the gentle purr of a jet engine. The aircraft almost disappeared from his vision again, now that he was staring straight down the nose.

  One of his men cursed.

  “What is that?” Valdes demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  Valdes wanted to say more, but he became aware that the thing was closing in on them very fast. It was coming in for a landing on the sand. He found himself wondering if it was a big toy—because it moved too easily in the breeze, as if it didn’t have enough mass to be a real, human-size aircraft.

  No, it was manned. There was a wide-aspect glass windshield mounted over the cockpit and there was a man at the controls.

  Small or not, there was no way it was going to have enough room to land on this tiny stretch of beach. Valdes kept thinking the pilot must be about to pull up—but the little jet seemed to be aiming right at him.

  His men began to shout, and they scattered away from the center of the Key, while Valdes stared the thing down. He didn’t like this development. He didn’t understand it. He had not accounted for it in his planning—how could he have? He wanted to raise his gun and shoot that plane out of the sky simply for being an anomaly.

  Instead he hurried into the waist-deep waters of the Caribbean to escape being run down. The aircraft became louder as it hissed past him, settled on the sand and taxied almost gently for just a few hundred feet, throwing up sand and a fine mist of water.

  * * *

  THE AIRCRAFT HAD COME upon them so quickly that they had not even had time to consider making a run for it. As Valdes watched the aircraft slow to a halt and make a nimble U-turn on the sand, he again got the impression of a toy plane, with very little mass. The belly of the aircraft seemed to reflect and absorb the color of the beach sand, while the upper fuselage, seen against the Caribbean sky, seemed to absorb the blue.

  It taxied in his direction. Even close, the two small engines mounted alongside the tail made no more noise than a well-tuned SUV. Adelmo wondered if it could possibly be DEA—but then he realized that there were no numbers on the tail. No markings anywhere.

  The pilot waved, and even with the sun glaring off the glass Adelmo recognized his brother.

  “It’s Pyo,” he snapped angrily.

  The other men lowered the weapons they had brought to bear on the strange little plane.

  “Since when is he a pilot?” one of his men asked.

  “Since never,” Adelmo declared. Pyo would never have had the self-discipline needed to take flying lessons, and certainly not the aptitude. But as far as Adelmo could tell he was the only one at the controls of the small jet.

  Adelmo glanced at the Great Escape, sailing smoothly to the still waters inside the other sandbars that protected Glass Key.

  “So what’s he doing here?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” Adelmo said, and he did not like his own answer. He had planned this operation meticulously. Leave it to Pyo to screw it up. Adelmo realized suddenly that he hated his brother.

  He also realized that only one of his men had been demanding answers. His second man was hanging back, silent. And Jorge was a man who was not often silent. Adelmo wanted to turn on Jorge and question him, but he controlled himself.

  He must regain control of this situation—whatever direction this situation took.

  Adelmo’s mind was burning with questions about the aircraft and about Pyo’s ability to fly it—but he wouldn’t give Pyo that satisfaction.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Adelmo demanded.

  Pyo gesticulated ridiculously at his head, indicating he couldn’t hear what Adelmo was saying. Then he flipped a switch on his dashboard and spoke, and his voice was played loudly over an external speaker somewhere on the aircraft.

  “Like it?”

  “What are you doing here, Pyo?” Adelmo asked.

  “Taking what’s mine,” Pyo said. He adjusted something and snapped another switch on his dashboard, and gunfire cracked from under the nose of the small jet. The man alongside Adelmo slumped to the sand, one knee shot out.

  The man screamed and grabbed his bloody knee, and Adelmo cursed, took a step back and thrust his gun at his brother in the seat of the aircraft.

  “You fucker.”

  “Stop, Adelmo,” Jorge said. He was now holding his automatic weapon on Adelmo from five paces away.

  Over the loudspeaker, Pyo laughed.

  Adelmo regarded Jorge—a man he had trusted.

  “I am sorry, Adelmo,” Jorge said. “Pyo promised to give me back my own brother if I would help him.”

  “And you believe him? You are as big an idiot as he is.”

  “An idiot?” Pyo asked over the loudspeaker. “You’re the one who’ll look like a fool, Adelmo, when this is all done. I’m going to see to it. Whatever sweet words you used to talk father’s men into serving you are going to be undone by this time tomorrow. You watch and see.”

  Pyo wanted Adelmo to demand answers. He waited for Adelmo to argue. Adelmo knew his brother—knew he became irritated when someone showed no interest in his secrets. It was little-boy behavior they had never grown out of.

  Pyo demanded attention, and Adelmo refused to give it to him.

  “Well? Don’t you care how I’m going to do it?”

  “No,” Adelmo said.

  Pyo hissed and snapped, “Get him to work.”

  The gun that was pointed at his stomach waved slightly at the sand where the anchored containers would be buried. Made of plastic and steel, they would protect the cargo.

  In the days since they were dropped, the containers had been buried in a foot of the shifting tidal sands.

  “Start shoveling,” Pyo ordered from inside the aircraft.

  It only took a few minutes for Adelmo to shovel off enough sand to access the top of the containers. He pulled out the packages and was directed to drag them alongside a hatch in the side of the aircraft.

  By then, the Great Escape captain had radioed, demanding an explanation. He wanted to know why there was an aircraft on the stretch of sand where they were making their rendezvous.

  Adelmo’s guard, Jorge, radioed back. “Everything is okay,” he said. “Go ahead and anchor.”

  Adelmo wondered what was in store for the occupants of the Great Escape. He cared nothing for the rich young men and he cared nothing for their college whores, but he cared for the three men who served as crew on that yacht. They were men he had hired, men who
had been associated with his family on and off for thirty years.

  He also wondered if those men would be smart enough to smell a trap. Certainly the young college men would not be.

  Adelmo could see his brother, behind the glare of the sun on the windshield of the strange little airplane. His brother was keeping an eye on the approaching Great Escape. He did not seem to be concerned by the fact that the Great Escape had cut its engine too early and was drifting offshore, and the powerful-looking man on deck was watching the activity on shore through binoculars.

  Clearly Adelmo’s men on that boat would recognize him and would see the gun being held upon Adelmo. He heard them demand attention through the radio on Jorge’s belt. Jorge did not answer it. He just shifted on his feet. It must be uncomfortable for him to be stabbing these men in the back, even if it was an unnecessary price to get his brother back.

  Of course, Adelmo knew, Pyo would not give Jorge back his brother. The entire story was a fabrication. The brother was almost certainly dead.

  It was foolish to expect the men on the watercraft to effect a rescue. There was more firepower on this little stretch of sand than in the Great Escape. Certainly more manpower, considering that the young college students from America could probably not even shoot a gun and would probably go running to hide in the closets if shooting started.

  The traitor—the one who thought that Pyo was going to give him back his brother—spoke to the airplane.

  “They are calling somebody about this,” Jorge said.

  “Who will they call?” Pyo snapped. “Our mother? It’s afternoon. She is deep in the grape by now. There is no one there who can help. There are no favors they can call in. Do you hear me, Adelmo? There is no help coming for you.”

  “What is it you want, Pyo?” Adelmo demanded.

  “That should be pretty obvious. I want what is mine—the family business—and I’m taking it today. I’m taking over, and I will run this business the way it should be run. And it will be the proper family business again. Only it will be better than before.”

  Adelmo stood. “I am not going to help you.”

  Pyo stepped out of the aircraft and stood in the sand in bare feet, with the door held between himself and Adelmo.

  “Put Adelmo in shackles. He goes in the rear, with the shipment.”

  Jorge pulled a fistful of rolled plastic cuffs from his back pocket and approached Adelmo timidly. Adelmo stood straight and stared the man in the face, but held his wrists out in front of him. If he would be chained like a dog, he would be chained with dignity. It would be the one putting the bonds on his hands who would feel the shame. And Jorge felt it. He would not look Adelmo in the face. He slid the plastic loop around one wrist, but before he could loop the second wrist Pyo snapped at him again.

  “Behind his back,” he said.

  Jorge growled under his breath. “Turn around.” He tried to make it sound gruff, but instead he sounded like a frightened boy on the playground.

  Adelmo saw no profit in resistance or fighting. He had little doubt that if he began to resist, he would be shot in knees like the man bleeding to death at his side. If he tried to run, he would be shot in the back before he could make it to the water’s edge.

  Yes, Pyo would shoot him in the back without a second thought.

  By now, the Great Escape was rumbling quietly away from the strip of sand, and in the glaring sun there was no one left visible on deck. Adelmo felt abandoned.

  So he let the cuffs tighten on his wrist. More were looped into his belt and between the wrist cuffs. He was walked to the belly of the aircraft, shoved to the sand, and his ankles were cuffed, as well.

  The hatch on the aircraft opened to reveal an unexpectedly large storage space. The shipment was wedged inside, leaving a tiny, cramped space for himself. He was lifted and folded into that tight space, and the hatch was closed around him.

  He did not quite understand what was going on. It made sense to him that Pyo would feel unfairly used by the turn of events. Pyo was always the victim. But when had his brother learned to fly an aircraft? And what did he hope to do with the shipment now that he had it?

  More important, Adelmo realized, was what Pyo would do with him.

  The space in which he was wedged was impossibly tight. His knees were against his chest, and his head rested against the interior of the storage space. Still, there was light coming in, and when he craned his neck he could see a tiny window above and behind him. It was just a few inches long, but when he turned his head, he found another, just off the floor, that allowed him to see the sand below the aircraft. Stretching his body into a position to see out either of these windows was incredibly painful, but it was something for him to rest his eyes on.

  There was an identically shaped window in the wall that separated the storage compartment from the cabin. He looked through it and could see the back of his brother’s head. In the tiny aircraft, he was just inches away from the man. If Adelmo had had a gun, it would have been a can’t-miss shot. If the wall was not there and if his hands were not bound, he would not have had to reach far to get his hands around his brother’s throat.

  He could see that the bulkhead he was against was not even a permanent fixture of the aircraft interior. It seemed to be bolted into place, but the bolts were on the other side of the wall, and the wall was sturdy enough to keep shifting cargo from breaking through into the cabin. Adelmo did not think he was going to find a way to break down the wall to get to his brother.

  He felt movement. He looked through the front hatch and saw Jorge seating himself inside the cabin. He closed the door but ignored the seat belt, and Pyo touched a button that brought a loud hum from the engines of the aircraft.

  They were leaving the wounded man there on the sand. The man was not even dead. His legs were ruined and he would never walk again but he was not dead. And yet they were going to just leave him here, until he did finally bleed to death, was cooked in the sun or the ocean came up and swallowed him.

  It was a reprehensible act, but it was an act that Adelmo understood. It made sense for his brother to do such a thing. What did not fit into Adelmo’s view of the world was Pyo’s ability to control this aircraft. Pyo was a rough man who muscled his way through any challenge, battered his way through any fight and shouted his way through any argument. Finesse was not his style. He had never been skilled—at anything. And yet he was deftly handling the controls of the aircraft as if it was one of his favorite old Hummers.

  Something else wasn’t right. The aircraft was making almost no sound. The engines were rushing, they sounded like a big fan, not like a jet.

  And how was this thing going to take off from a short stretch of soft Caribbean sand anyway?

  He didn’t know much about aircraft, but he didn’t think that this was something aircraft were supposed to do.

  Pyo’s plane nosed to the far end of Glass Key, dipped its front wheels in the ocean and spun in a one-eighty. Now it pointed to the far end of the island, which was not that far away. And still, the engines were as quiet as a well-tuned BMW. Adelmo began to wonder if the aircraft could even get off the ground under these circumstances.

  His back and his knees and his head were strained but he kept himself pulled up high enough to watch as Pyo went through the takeoff procedure, which was deceptively simple and short. He switched a panel gear to a mode that he wanted, then he pulled back on the throttle and the quiet little aircraft sprinted across the sand. Adelmo was knocked off balance, and by the time he had maneuvered himself to see out the front window again, they were in the air. Indistinct, through the front windows, Adelmo could see the Caribbean Sea speeding underneath them.

  Pyo reached up behind him and slid open the tiny hatch window.

  “Hey, Adelmo, you have got to see what this thing can do.”

  Adelmo’s ankles were screaming at him from the strain of holding his position, but he held it as the small aircraft descended and leveled out, until it was cruising fast just
a few feet off the surface of the Caribbean. The absence of a loud engine noise made it seem dreamlike, but within seconds he recognized the shape on the surface of the ocean, and they were coming up on it fast.

  Adelmo remembered how quiet the aircraft had been approaching the Glass Key. His men aboard the Great Escape, with their own engines likely now pushing them along as fast as possible, might not even hear the aircraft closing in on them.

  It took seconds for the small jet to reach the Great Escape. Even from his uncomfortable perch in the cargo compartment, Adelmo witnessed two of his men scramble to the deck of the boat at the last moment and raise their weapons to fire. But they never got the chance. Pyo grabbed a trigger stick and Adelmo heard—and felt—machine guns firing from under the nose of the jet. They cut down the two men. Then the Great Escape was underneath them and behind them.

  Pyo pulled back slightly, raising the aircraft gently to less than fifty feet and turned it in a sharp bank that allowed them to line up again on the Great Escape. There were two men on deck lying in pools of blood. As Pyo swooped down on the Great Escape again, another man burst from the cabin firing a combat shotgun. Pyo should have been expecting it, but he was startled and he jerked back, sending the aircraft into side-by-side warbling. For a second it felt as if he was going to lose control of the aircraft, but he pulled back on the wheel and the throttle, and nosed the aircraft into a controlled ascent.

  “Son of a bitch,” Pyo grumbled. He turned the aircraft again and swooped down on the Great Escape. It was a diving attack, something straight out of a World War II movie. The small-caliber rounds of the machine gun stitched across the deck and slammed through the cabin exterior. Adelmo’s last man stepped into the open again, leaped across the deck, twisted in midair to face upward and blast the underbelly of the aircraft at the very last moment. Adelmo heard the rain of pellets against the exterior of the aircraft. He heard his brother laugh. “He might scratch my paint job!”

  The traitor in the seat beside Pyo said nothing.

  Pyo turned the aircraft again and swooped down on the boat for a third time. The shotgunner was already a nonproblem. He must’ve taken rounds before he even made his last desperate act. He lay where he had landed, with the bodies of his two companions not far from him and a pair of red blossoms on his chest.