That would be a mistake. I knew I had to make my own breaks. One way or another, I knew that I had to force Carlos’ hand, and I had to do it quickly.
Carefully, I avoided the patroling guards and moved around the back of the hacienda, then made my way to the edge of the cliffs. Lowering myself over the lip, I started down.
In the darkness, I could barely make out the footholds as I let myself down the face of the rock. The cliff was steeper than it looked. Inch by inch, handhold by handhold, I let myself down. Once, my toes slipped off the slippery, sea-wet surface and only the desperate grasp of my fingers kept me from falling the hundred feet onto the boulder-strewn base of the cliff.
I’d moved down only about ten feet below the lip of the cliff when I heard the guards come by overhead. The sound of the waves and the wind had kept me from hearing their approach sooner. I froze where I was, fearful of making a sound.
One of them struck a match. There was a brief flare and then blackness again. Any second, I thought, one of them could take a step to the “edge of the cliff and look over, and the first I would know that I’d been seen would be a bullet blasting me from my precarious handholds. I was completely vulnerable, totally helpless. My arms ached from holding myself in the awkward position I’d been in when I first heard them overhead.
They gossiped a moment about a girl in town, laughing at some trick she’d pulled on one of them. A cigarette butt came arching over the cliff, its red coal falling past me.
“… vamanos!” said one of them, finally.
I forced myself to remain motionless for almost another full minute before I dared take a chance that they’d gone. I began to move downward again, my mind concentrating on the sheer descent. I stretched out my foot, finding another toehold, testing it carefully, moving down another six inches. By now, my muscles were aching in torment. My right forearm, where Luis had slashed me, began to throb with pain. With a deliberate effort of will, I blocked everything from my mind except the foot-by-foot, slow descent.
Once my foot slipped into a fissure and I had to wrench it free. My ankle ached from the sharp twist as I worked myself downward. My hands were torn, the skin on my fingers and on the palms of my hand were sandpapered raw by the rocks.
I kept telling myself that there was only a few more feet to go, only another few minutes, just a little way further.
And then, panting, almost completely exhausted, I was on the narrow beach and moving along the base of the cliffs, avoiding the boulders, forcing myself to run in a tired dogtrot around the curve of the headland, trying not to think about how much time had been wasted in my descent.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On the far side of the headland, I found a sloping ravine that cut down between the steep cliffs. In the rainy season, it would be a torrent of water that poured the floodwaters from the hills into the sea. Now, it provided me with a path to the top of the cliff.
Tripping, sliding over loose shale, I scrambled my way up the ravine until I came out within a hundred yards of the road. To the east, almost half a mile away, I could make out the glow from the spotlights over the front gate of Garrett’s hacienda.
I waited by the edge of the road, forcing myself to wait patiently, trying not to think of how rapidly time was running out on me. The hour I’d allowed myself was more than three-quarters gone. Headlights finally glowed in the distance. I stepped out into the middle of the road, waving my arms. The car braked to a halt, the driver poking his head out the window.
“Qui pasa?” he shouted at me.
I came up to the car. The driver was a teenager with lank, black hair swept back over his ears.
“A telephone. Can you get me to a telephone? El asunto es muy importante!”
“Get in!”
I ran around to the front of the car and slid into the seat. Even as I gasped, “Vaya muy de prisa, por favor!” he let in the clutch in a racing start. Gravel spewed from the rear wheels, the car leaped ahead, the speedometer needle swinging up to sixty, seventy and then past one hundred and ten kilometers an hour.
Less than a minute later, he screeched in to the Pemex station and burned rubber coming to a halt.
I flung open the door and ran to the public telephone. I put the call in to the Hotel Matamoros, thinking how ironic it was that Ortega himself had told me where to get hold of Teniente Fuentes!
It took almost five minutes to get him on the line. It took another five minutes to convince him that I was going to give him the cooperation that Jean-Paul had asked me for in the minute before he was killed. Then I told Fuentes what I wanted from him and where to meet me.
“How soon can you get here?” I asked, finally.
“Ten minutes, perhaps.”
“Make it sooner if you can,” I said, and hung up.
Teniente Fèlix Fuentes had a face like a Toltec idol carved out of brown rock. Short, massive chest, powerful hands.
“Did you bring the rifle?” I asked as I climbed into his unmarked police car.
“It’s on the back seat. It’s my own personal hunting weapon for small game. Take care of it. Now, what do you have in mind?”
Fuentes put the police car into gear. I told him where to head. As we drove, I outlined what had happened so far. I told Fuentes about Dietrich and his formula for making synthetic heroin. I told him that Ortega now had Dietrich a prisoner and what Ortega planned to do. Fuentes listened soberly as I brought him up to date.
“And now,” I said, “I’ve got to get back into that house before they find out I’ve been gone. And as soon as I’m back, I want your men to raid it. We’ve got to flush out Ortega. If we can throw them into a panic, there’s a good chance Ortega will lead me to Dietrich.”
“What excuse do I have to raid Garrett’s hacienda, Senor Carter? He’s a very influential man. So is Ortega.”
“Is forty kilos of heroin a good enough excuse?”
Fuentes whistled aloud. “Forty kilos!For forty kilos I would raid the Presidente’s house!”
I told him where to find the heroin. Fuentes picked up the hand mike and radioed headquarters for rein-forcements. He was explicit. No sirens, no flashers, no action until he gave the signal.
By this time we were back down the road that led past Garrett’s hacienda. At almost the exact spot where I had parked Bickford’s car only the night before, he stopped to let me out.
I took the rifle and a rope grapnel from the back seat. I hefted the weapon. “It’s a beauty,” I told him.
“My prize possession,” said Fuentes. “Again, I ask you to be careful of it.”
“As if it were my own,” I said, and turned away, setting oil across the field in a crouching run. Fuentes backed the police car down the road some hundred yards or so to intercept the others when they came.
I picked out a position on a slight rise about two hundred feet from the driveway that led from the road to his house. I was at a slight angle to the gateway. I dropped the grapnel at my feet and lay down carefully on my stomach, the rifle cradled in my arms.
In a few minutes, two police cars drove up, the second one almost directly behind the first. Fuentes directed them into position, one on each side of the road that led past the driveway, the men in the cars waiting with engines turned off and headlights out.
I lifted the heavy rifle to my shoulder. It was a superbly made Schultz & Larson 61 match rifle, a .22 calibre, single shot, bolt action weapon with a twenty-eight-inch “barrel and a globe front sight. The palm rest was adjustable for my left hand. The stock was carved with a thumbhole so that I could grip the semi-molded pistol grip stock with my right hand. Especially manufactured for International Match requirements, the rifle was so accurate that I could put a bullet through the end of a cigarette at a hundred yards. Its heavy weight, sixteen and a half pounds, made it rock steady in my grasp. I aimed it at one of the two spotlights mounted high above the left side of the front gate.