Lying under a tangle of vegetation, he rolled on his good side and gingerly unzipped his flight suit. The bandage was encrusted with old blood. Nothing fresh. He zipped the flight suit back up and rolled on his belly. He wormed his way forward until he could just see the shack and the pier beyond, then checked to ensure that he was completely hidden. He decided he was.
At least two hours had passed when Flap returned. It was hard to judge. Time passed slowly when you were lying in a jungle with bugs crawling around and flying critters gnawing at your hide. If you were short of sleep, so hungry that your stomach seemed knotted, suffering from a raging thirst and had diarrhea, every minute was agony. Jake dared not leave his post, so he shit where he lay.
Once he heard a jet. It was far away, the sound of its engines just a low hum.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Flap whispered when he crawled up beside Jake, startling him half out of his skin. “What died?”
“That’s shit, you bastard. Never smelled it before, huh?”
“For crying out loud, you could at least have dropped your flight suit.”
“There’s someone over there in that shack. He stuck his head out twice and looked around. Seen smoke a couple times too, just a whiff, like he’s standing right inside the door smoking a cigarette.”
“There’s two of them in there. I looked in the back window.”
Jake had kept his eyes glued on that shack and hadn’t once glimpsed Flap. For the first time he realized just how terrifically good Le Beau was in the jungle.
“Here, this is for you.”
Flap passed over an AK-47. “It’s loaded with a full clip. Safety is on.”
“Found this lying around, did you?”
“Relax. They won’t find the guy who had it for quite a while. Maybe never. Gimme my sticker back. I feel kinda naked without it.”
Jake got the knife from his boot and handed it over.
“Lotta good that would have done you in your boot. You should have stabbed it into the dirt right by your hand, so you could grab it quick.”
“Next time. Until then I’ll just stick to ol’ Betsy here. Appreciate the gift. So what’s the setup?”
The bad guys were stacking the weapons back in the jungle, out of sight from the air. Most of the stuff was still in crates. “They got a hell of a pile out there but I don’t think they got it all. Certainly not a shipload. There’s no way of telling what’s left on the ship.”
“I’ve been figuring,” Jake said. “Seems to me that the first thing we have to do after dark is take out those two guys in the shack and check out that cabin cruiser.”
“It may be booby trapped.”
“I don’t think so. That was the boat we heard last night. The guys in the shack are supposed to kill us if we try for it.”
“Can’t start the engine here.”
“I know. We’ll have to cast off and drift downriver. We can use one of your knives to cut us some poles to keep it off the banks. Then when we’re a couple miles downriver, we’ll start the engine and motor out to sea.”
“What if the engine won’t start?”
“We just drift on out.”
“They’ll follow.”
“Not if we blow up the ammo dump and sink all these little boats.”
Flap gave a soft whistle of amazement. “You don’t want much, do you?”
“So what’s your plan?” Jake asked.
“Kill the guys in the shack and steal the boat. The Navy can come back any old time and bomb these dudes to hell.”
Jake snorted. “Your faith in the system is truly amazing. Here we are in a foreign county — Indonesia, I think. Whatever. Assuming we manage to get rescued and tell our tale, the only thing the U.S. Navy can do is send a polite note to the State Department. State is going to pass this hot tip to the National Security Council, which will probably staff the shit out of it. The fact that these weapons are going to be sold to revolutionary zealots in Asia, the Mideast or Africa who will use them to cause as much hell as humanly possible and murder everyone who disagrees with them won’t cause one of those comfortable bureaucrats to miss a minute’s sleep. When the nincompoops who brought you Vietnam get through scratching their butts, they’ll give the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia a note to give to whoever is running this country this week. That whoever may or may not do anything. After all, he’s probably getting a cut of this operation. There’s a whale of a lot of money to be made here: your karate expert captain friend is probably smart enough to spread it around a little.”
“A lot of the weapons are still on Fidel’s freighter,” Flap pointed out.
“We’ll have to blow it up too.”
“Just out of curiosity, what little army is going to do all this blowing up you envision?”
“You and me.”
Le Beau rolled over on his back and threw an arm across his face. In a moment he said, “You got gall, Grafton, I’ll give you that. You lay there with a bullet hole in your side, wearing your own shit and tell me that ‘you and me’ are going to blow up a weapons cache and a ship! My ass. They’ll smell you fifty feet away. You want me to go do the hero bit and probably get myself killed.”
“We’ll both go. But this is a volunteer deal. You’re senior to me and we aren’t in the airplane anymore. It’s your call.”
“Thank you from the bottom of my teensy little heart. Ah me…My second command — I used to lead a whole platoon, you know. Now it’s just me and one wounded flyboy with the shits. My military career is going up like a rocket.”
“Oh, cork it. What do you want to do?”
“You think you’re up for this?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you asked for it. Here’s the plan.”
As Jake Grafton listened the thought occurred to him that Flap Le Beau had been thinking about screwing these pirates all afternoon. He got a warm feeling. Flap had let him suggest it. Flap Le Beau was one hell of a good guy.
“Not right after dark,” Flap said. “They’ll expect us then. After midnight, in the wee hours.”
“The moon will be up sometime after midnight,” Jake pointed out. “The clouds will probably obscure it though.”
“It would be good if the clouds let the moonlight through. They’ll relax and maybe sleep.”
They pulled back into the jungle to a small stream. Jake undressed and sat in it. The diarrhea was drying up, a little anyway, leaving him very thirsty. He drank and drank from the stream. Then he washed out his flight suit and underwear and put them back on.
Finally he and Flap stretched out in the damp, rotting leaves. The bugs were bad, but they were very tired and the muffled noise from the village and the pier lulled them to sleep. They were both emotionally wrung out from their experiences of the last two days and nights, so their sleep was dreamless. When they awoke the light was fading rapidly and the noise from the ship had ceased. They drank again from the stream, Jake relieved himself, then they crawled back to the vantage point where they could see the shack and the small boats.
The waiting was hard.
When you have finally crossed the threshold, left behind good meals, a comfortable bed, clean clothes and the relaxed company of friends, life becomes a mere battle for survival. The nonessential sinks out of sight.
They lay in the foliage, one man on his stomach watching, the other on his side or back napping. Fortunately there was a small electric light mounted on a pole near the boat dock.
The hours dragged. With nothing to look forward to but battle, and perhaps death, delay was painful. Yet they waited.
The guards in the shack were changed several hours into the night. Two new men came, the two inside left. All of them carried rifles.