The unloading gang had moved to the next truck now. The coast looked as clear as it would ever be. I crawled out from under the quilts to the tailgate. Silently, I dropped off into the darkness.
“Son-of-a-pig! ”
One of the men had been goofing off. He’d been squatting under the tailgate. As I’d swung down, I’d landed smack in his lap. He followed up the curse by pulling a gun and sticking it in my gut. I froze, still straddling him, and put up my hands. There wasn’t much else I could do.
He motioned with the gun. I backed off on my hands and knees. We both stood up. He barked into the darkness. A moment later there were other men surrounding us. Then the group parted and I found myself face to face with the moustache.
When he was told that I’d dropped off the truck, he sent a pair of men to search the inside. They returned with Jana between them. “I warned you this would happen, Steve,” she sobbed.
The moustache picked up his head as he heard the name and gave me a hard look. For a split second he seemed like one of those cartoon characters with an electric light bulb coming to life over its head.
“Should we kill them?” one of the men asked.
“No.” The moustache surprised me by not being as bloodthirsty as I had good reason to expect him to be. “I think our clients may have some special interest in this man. If he is who I think he is, there may be a bonus in it for us. And they’ll want him alive—so they can question him—not dead.”
“What should we do with them, then?”
“Take them inside.” He gestured toward the storage shed. “Tie them up securely and leave them there. I’m going over to the main house to see what they’ll bring us. If they’re not interested, we can always dispose of them on the trip back to Manila.”
Jana and I were hustled inside the shed. It was an immense room. The containers from the Luzona Maru didn’t begin to fill it. There were cables hanging from the ceiling with hooks on the ends of them. Sides of beef hung from some of the hooks.
It was chillier in here than it had been outside. I guessed that the place must be refrigerated. But the temperature hadn’t been turned too far down. It wasn’t near to freezing. Probably it had been adjusted at just the proper level for the goats’ milk. From the way some of the meat was thawing, I figured it must have been much colder before.
One of our captors said something I didn’t hear to the others. They laughed and nodded their heads as if in agreement. Then, still guffawing, they fell on Jana and myself.
They tied my ankles together, then Jana’s. My hands were pulled over my head and the wrists tied together. The same was done to Jana. Then I was picked up bodily, and the rope around my wrists was looped over one of the hooks hanging from the ceiling beams.
The cable attached to the hook was tightened, and I was pulled off the floor a few feet. Then the boys down below got playful. Laughing and chattering, they began jumping for me. The object of the game seemed to be to see who could pull my pants off. Finally one of them succeeded, removing my underwear as well in the process. With my shirttails flapping under my suit jacket, I was pulled up the rest of the way to the ceiling beam. I dangled there, the chill air raising goose pimples on my bare derriere. A moment later Jana was pulled up opposite me, hanging about two feet away.
Down below, the jokers were dancing around and pointing up at her and making dirty cracks. I gathered from what they were saying that Jana wasn’t wearing any underwear. They made the most of their unobstructed view up her skirt.
After a while, their interest palled. The rest of the containers were brought into the shed. Then our captors waved goodbye and the huge sliding doors slammed shut behind them. Slowly, the air began to get cooler and cooler. The steady hum of the refrigeration machinery was the only sound in the shed.
Jana didn’t say anything. Neither did I. There didn’t seem to be much to talk about. Our activities being somewhat limited, there seemed nothing to do but hang around and see what would develop. So that’s what we did.
We just hung!
chapter ten
JANA, however, was not the kind of girl to let herself be left hung up. The Eurasian beauty was a swinger by nature. So, after a few moments of solitude and silence, she began to swing.
It was boredom, or maybe fear, that started her off. But as I watched her pick up speed at the end of her cable, I had an idea. If only we could get together, then somehow we might be able to help each other get loose. I started to swing with her.
Our bodies bumped, and we ricocheted off each other. With out ankles tied the way they were, we couldn’t even hook a leg around each other. I began jerking my body violently to pick up speed. I figured that if I could swing past her and then snap back just right, I might be able to snarl the cables so we could stay together. Then maybe I could work on the ropes around her wrists with my teeth.
But it couldn’t be done. The cables were too stiff to wind around each other. No matter how I tried to snarl them they kept whipping me back the way I’d come. Each new try threw me into a faster spin, and I was getting dizzy from the whirling.
“Wait a minute,” Jana said. “Let’s try it slower. Much slower. I think maybe I can spread my knees apart a little and get a grip on your hips that way.”
So we swung slowly and gently until we were bouncing off each other with soft, regular contacts. Then Jana did manage to open her legs and grab onto my hips from the side. But the tension this caused on the ropes binding her ankles was too much for her. They cut in cruelly and she had to let go. She tried again, but she lost the grip. A third attempt ended the same way.
The Il tried grabbing her with my knees. But they’d tethered my ankles even more securely than they had hers. After a few tries they were bleeding, and I knew I’d never be able to maintain the proximity long enough to chew away the knots holding her hands.
We looked at each other helplessly. The tendons of my arms were killing me from supporting my full hanging weight. I knew it must be just as bad for Jana.
“We have to stay together somehow,” I told her.
“But how? We have nothing to hold onto each other with.”
Looking at her was what gave me the answer. The strain of hanging by her arms had made her breasts pop up over the top of her low-cut white linen dress. Also, the breeze from the refrigeration unit was whipping her skirt around her naked legs. For a moment, as she twirled slowly, her back was to me and her naked buttocks flashed into view.
Despite the situation, I couldn’t help realizing that Jana was quite a succulent siren. Freed of the dress, her breasts were indeed the size of small coconuts. The ruby tips I’d guessed at back in the honky-tonk turned out to be a very dark red. The lighter red of the roseates around them covered an area which was roughly the size of a half-dollar. The breasts were losing a game of hide-and-seek with the cloud of her long black hair hanging in front of them.
The rest of Jana was just as sexy. Her legs were long and well-tanned. The glimpse I’d had of her posterior had been enough to tell me it was well-rounded, plump and firm. Even her olive-skinned face, with its dark, slanting eyes and high cheekbones, had a decidedly erotic appeal.
“How are we going to maintain contact?” I repeated Jana’s question, and then answered it. “There’s only one possible way.” I explained what it was.
“I’ve had lots of strange propositions in my career,” Jana said when I finished. “But this one really beats them all.”
“It’s our only chance.”
“All right, lover.” Her eyes dropped below my shirt-tails. “But do you think you re up to it? ”
“I will be,” I assured her. “Come on. Let’s give it a try.”
We, started swinging gently until our bodies were making contact again. I ducked my head and fastened my lips over Jana’s breasts. I managed to hold the contact for a long moment until our weight forced us apart again. Swinging away, I left her nipple longer, quivering and distended.