Wildfire (42 page)

Christ, and we haven't even gotten our hands on anybody yet,
Paxton thought.

"Glad to hear Justin's all right," Henry Lightstone rasped. "So what's the matter with your arm?"

Paxton looked down at his left arm and observed that it was now swollen to about twice its normal size.

The acting team leader shook his head in disgust.

"Tell you what," he said after a few moments, uneasily aware of how vulnerable they were, sitting around in a disabled boat in the middle of the Bahamas, and having little or no idea who or where the bad guys were, "if you characters are up to moving, and I don't have to carry anybody up or down any ladders, why don't we go check on Bobby and Mo-Jo again. Make sure they're doing okay. Then we'll go up top, see what we can find in the way of medical supplies, and get everybody patched up while Snoopy here figures out how to get this here boat going again."

Ten minutes later, while Mike Takahara was down on his knees in front of the control station, pulling circuit boards out of the main panel, the four agents carefully brushed aside fragments of broken glass, settled themselves into the couches of the L
one Granger's
thoroughly trashed flying bridge, and then surveyed the damage.

In Paxton's words, which he had uttered in a dismayed whisper when he saw the damage to the salon downstairs, it looked as though the bomb had gone off
inside
the eighty-two-foot yacht, rather than thirty-some feet beneath the hull.

"Hate to think what the owner's cabin must look like," Dwight Stoner commented as he helped Lightstone apply antiseptic and bandages to the painfully oozing abrasions that covered an impressive amount of his bare skin.

"Probably looks a whole lot worse than the salon," Lightstone said, looking even more glassy-eyed than before from the cumulative effects of his medical treatment.

"Ah don't want to hear about it," Paxton growled. "Fact is, Ah don't even want to
think
about it."

But he smiled when Lightstone erupted into another burst of fervent cursing as Stoner swabbed a particularly deep abrasion with the Mercurochrome-based disinfectant.

"Better give him the rest of the bottle on that one, Stoner, mah man," the supervisory agent suggested. "Wouldn't want one of them bad-ass wounds to get infected now, would we?"

"Hate to do this to you, Henry, but I think he's right," Stoner said sympathetically as he easily deflected the wide-eyed agent's instinctively protective hand, and then poured the rest of the bottle into the palm-sized hip abrasion.

Henry Lightstone's reply was lost in yet another agonized explosion of profanity.

Paxton waited until his wild-card agent had calmed down and blinked the tears out of his eyes.

"Good thing ol' Bobby believes in being prepared," the supervisory agent said as he selected another bottle of the fiery antiseptic out of the box he had tucked against his crudely splinted left arm, and tossed it over to Stoner.

"Paxton, you son of a bitch," Henry Lightstone rasped, "I'm going to—"

"Thank me kindly, and then
listen
the next time I tell you to shoot a goddamned hammerhead shark instead of patting it on the head and cutting it loose?" Larry Paxton suggested with a cheerful smile.

Lightstone simply glared at his acting team leader.

"And speaking of dumb-ass stunts in general," Paxton went on, his voice turning serious, "I don't suppose you happened to notice anybody else swimming around down there, before that bomb went off?"

"Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did," Lightstone said. "A diver in one of those aqua-sleds, heading out that way." He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb in the general direction of Cat Island, the top of which was barely visible off in the distance.

"Anything useful for ID?"

"He might have been wearing a yellow diving suit, but I'm not even sure of that." Lightstone looked around and then suddenly realized the distant boat that had been anchored was no longer visible. "But I bet I know how he got out here." Lightstone explained his theory about the dive boat being used as a transport for the diver and his sled.

"Anybody remember what it looked like?" Paxton asked hopefully.

Everyone shook their heads.

"Shit," the supervisory agent muttered.

"Thing is, though," Lightstone said thoughtfully, "whoever these people are, I think we might have screwed up their plans this time."

"Oh, yeah, and just what gave you that idea? The fact that we're still alive and complaining, instead of being fish food?" Paxton asked sarcastically.

"Yeah, I suppose." Lightstone smiled in spite of himself. "But I'm pretty sure that bomb had some kind of antenna wire sticking out of it."

He described how he'd peeled the device off the keel of the ship, and what it had looked like when he'd exposed the timing mechanism.

"Do you remember about how far away that diver was when you saw him?" Mike Takahara asked, sticking his head up over the pilot chairs in the front of the enclosed flying bridge.

"I'd say maybe a hundred feet, hundred and fifty feet at the outside, but that's a guess."

"Did you ever see him look back?"

Lightstone thought for a moment. "No, not that I recall. To tell you the truth, I think he was going pretty fast the other way, but I wasn't paying that much attention."

"About how long would you say that wire was?"

"Eight, ten inches. Something like that."

"Kind of thick, not real flexible?"

"It was about as thick as that Romex stuff we used to wire the warehouse."

"Sounds like a transmitter detonation system to me." The tech agent nodded. "And from the way you described it, the guy on the sled was too close to the boat to have set the bomb off deliberately, so you probably
did
trigger some kind of anti-tampering switch that started the timer. You said the red numbers started counting down from twenty?"

"That's right."

"Which makes it even less likely that whoever was on that sled set the bomb off intentionally," Takahara said.

"Oh, yeah, why's that?" Paxton asked.

"Because you always want to build a delay sequence into an anti-tamper switch, just to make sure you have time to shut the whole thing off and start over again if you accidentally trigger the switch during installation," the tech agent explained.

Paxton shrugged. "Makes sense."

"I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting tired of people trying to blow us up all the time," Thomas Woeshack muttered. "I think I want to go back to flying planes."

"No offense, Woeshack," Lightstone said. "But the way you fly, I think you've got a lot better odds with bombs."

"And speaking of taking chances," Stoner said, looking out through the amazingly still-intact side window of the flying bridge, "what do you think about the idea that the guy on the sled might still be hanging around, instead of taking off with that dive boat?"

"I kind of doubt it," Mike Takahara said after a moment. "If I were in his place and I saw Henry trying to peel that thing off the keel with a diving knife, I'd have taken off as fast as I could get that sled to go. And if he didn't, and stayed close, I guarantee you that the initial shock wave blew him
and
his sled ass-end over teakettle."

"Along with about ten thousand fish." Paxton nodded, looking out one of the amazingly unbroken bridge windows. The water surface around the
Lone Granger
was now covered with thousands of floating fish carcasses for about a hundred yards in all directions. As the agents watched, a half dozen more dorsal fins—all of them much smaller than that of the fearsome hammerhead—cut back and forth through the water all around the yacht.

"Maybe he's out there right now, bleeding out his ass and ears, and trying to figure out how to get that sled going again before he gets eaten alive," Dwight Stoner commented hopefully.

"That's a nice thought," Lightstone said, grimacing as the huge agent taped a big patch of gauze over his hip abrasion. "In fact, if we didn't need to get Bobby and Mo-Jo some medical attention pretty soon, I'd want to go back out there in the Zodiac just to look. But since we
are
in a hurry," he reminded, "where are we going to find a hospital around here, and how do we get to it?"

Paxton looked over at Mike Takahara.

"The only real hospitals are at Nassau and Freeport," the tech agent said, looking up from the circuit board he held in his hand. "Almost all the main islands are supposed to have clinics, but most of them are probably going to be just a nurse on call and some basic first-aid gear."

"How far is it to Nassau?" Paxton asked.

Takahara thought for a moment. "Figure maybe about a hundred miles. Too damned far to paddle in an eighty-two-foot yacht, if that's what you're thinking."

"What about the Coast Guard or the Royal Bahamas Defense Force," Woeshack asked. "I bet those guys could get a seaplane out here pretty quick."

"Is the radio working?" Paxton asked Takahara.

"Not right now, but I could get it rigged up to the main batteries without much trouble. But do we really want to attract that kind of attention?"

"Yeah, that's a good point." Paxton nodded.

"There's a small airstrip near Arthur's Town, at the north end of Cat's Island."

"How far's that?"

"Maybe fifteen at the outside. We could make it in the Zodiac if we had to, then charter a plane to Nassau."

"Okay, good." Paxton smiled.

"I don't understand. Why wouldn't we want to call the Coast Guard?" Woeshack asked, looking confused.

"Because if we put out a radio signal right now," Henry Lightstone explained, "the bastards who've been putting all this effort into trying to blow us up will figure out we're still functioning out here, and try again. Only this time they're liable to use a submarine and a goddamned torpedo."

"Oh."

"What do you think?" Lightstone asked Paxton.

The supervisory agent hesitated and then looked over at his tech agent.

"So how long's it gonna take you to get this thing started again?"

"I don't know." Mike Takahara shrugged. "Maybe four or five minutes, maybe four or five hours. Depends."

"On what?"

"On which parts just got shaken loose and which parts got broken," he said, holding up a circuit board. "This, for example, is broken."

"What is it?" Paxton demanded.

"SSRS transmitter board."

"And just what the hell is
that?"

"Satellite locator system. Standard on all big boats."

"You mean somebody could be tracking us by satellite?" Henry Lightstone asked.

"If anybody was, they're not doing it anymore." Mike Takahara shrugged as he tossed the circuit board into a nearby trash can.

"What about all the other stuff?" Paxton asked. "How we looking so far?"

"So far, all things considered, I'd say we're looking pretty good."

"Okay, keep at it."

"So what now, boss?" Lightstone asked as Mike Takahara disappeared back behind the pilot chairs again.

"Like Ah said, it's about time we took care of some business around here."

"What's that mean? You got some kind of plan?"

"Damn well better have one," Dwight Stoner growled as he examined the shredded remains of the leather glove that had partially protected the bleeding knuckles of his right hand from the abrasive skin of the hammerhead. "So far, all we've been doing is reacting and improvising and getting our ass kicked in the process."

"Oh, Ah got a
plan,
all right." The supervisory federal wildlife agent nodded. "And it's a good one too."

"I'm listening," Henry Lightstone said as he gingerly applied some of the antiseptic to a relatively small abrasion on his knee.

"You're gonna like this one, Henry, mah man, 'cause it's real simple," Larry Paxton said in a voice that was amazingly calm and controlled, considering the intensity of the anger that was still churning around in his aching head.

Whoever these people were—the ones who had tagged their operations and screwed with their computers and blown up their warehouse and tried to blow up their boat—as far as acting Bravo Team leader Larry Paxton was concerned, they had gone after his people, his team, for the last time.

"Ain't gonna
be
no more this 'good guys playin' by the rules, and bad guys doing whatever the fuck they please,'" Paxton went on in his deep, gravelly voice, "'cause we already tried that, and it ain't worked. Only thing that happened is they damn near blew us up twice, and fucked up mah boat."

Henry Lightstone cocked his head and looked over at the acting leader of Bravo Team, a pleasant smile appearing on his deeply scraped face in spite of the fact that he was still having to control an almost overwhelming desire to take someone apart at the seams. Anyone. It didn't matter who. Just as long as it was one of the people responsible for the only son of his lifelong friend having to try to outswim a goddamned hammerhead shark to save his life.

Those people, whoever they were, and wherever they happened to be right now, were going to pay.

"Yeah, so what's the plan?"

"Real simple," Paxton said. "First we get Bobby and Mo-Jo to a hospital, however we have to do it. Then once we do that, we're gonna go down to the other end of this Cat Island, and find ourselves this fellow named Alfred Bloom and have a little heart-to-heart talk with the man."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"Then," the supervisory agent said, his voice turning deadly cold, "we're gonna start doing a little ass-kicking of our own."

Chapter Twenty-six

The FBI-leased jet touched down at the San Salvador airport landing strip at precisely seventeen-thirty-two hours that Saturday afternoon.

The pilot taxied in close to the knee-high rock wall surrounding the small airport terminal building, and then shut down the screaming engines. As he did so, he noted that the wind sock had changed directions, a sign that the predicted norther might not hit this evening as expected.

When Special Agent A1 Grynard stepped out of the plane, casually dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a maroon polo shirt, he immediately observed two similarly dressed men sitting in a jeep next to a sign that read: Welcome, San Salvador Bahamas, Site of Columbus Landings.