Island Inferno Read online

  “Me too,” Coop said as they carried John’s ruck between them into the hangar. “At least the mission wasn’t a total loss.”

  They carefully set the bundle in an empty corner of the hangar just as Frank and Sweeney approached with their gear. “You two keep an eye on the ITEB and our gear,” Coop said. “Rip and I’ll report to Marcel and see what he plans to do next.”

  “Roger that, boss.” Sweeney dropped his rucksack and sat on it.

  Marcel was still conversing with the older woman. When they got close enough, Rip heard her saying, “… and she always does the accounting for Lerida Coffee during the harvest season, though she seems to prefer looking at bugs in the jungle.”

  “Mama, this is Sergeant Rip Rubio. He’s the man who found me.”

  Rip stepped forward and extended his hand. “Mucho gusto, señora.”

  Fernanda turned to Coop. “And this is Sergeant John Cooper. He’s the comandante of the team.”

  John smiled and shook the elder Lerida’s hand. “Um … team sergeant, actually.”

  The woman smiled politely. “I am very grateful to you. Of course, if Fernanda had listened to me, she never would have gone to that terrible island in the first place.”

  Rip tried to relieve Fernanda’s discomfort. “Well, uh, I’m glad she was there. She was able to give us some valuable information, and without her, the mission would likely have been a failure.”

  Marcel scowled and shook his head. Apparently Rip was talking too much. Fernanda brightened a little, though. “Oh, and this is my friend Hedi! She was supposed to be with us on the island, but at the last minute she had to stay behind.”

  “And now I’m very glad I did.” Hedi looked at Coop like he was a movie star. “I’ve never met an American commando before.”

  Everyone laughed except for Marcel, who cleared his throat. “Doña Lerida, I’m very sorry, but I must insist that your daughter not share the details of this operation with you or anyone for the time being. It is absolutely essential for the safety of these men.”

  Señora Lerida nodded. “Will you allow me to contact my husband’s brother to let him know that his son is missing, at least?”

  Marcel frowned. “I suppose that is reasonable. Now, we have much to accomplish this evening. I hope you understand?”

  “Certainly, Señor Bucard. Thank you for alerting us that Fernanda was safe and for bringing us here to meet her. I cannot tell you how worried we were.”

  Marcel bowed slightly. “Of course.” He turned to Fernanda. “Miss, we may contact you in the next day or so for an official debriefing, if you don’t mind.”

  “No problem,” Fernanda said, her face downcast. She looked up at Rip. “Will you all be looking for Carlos and Zack?”

  Marcel interrupted. “I’m afraid they’re not at liberty to discuss their mission at this point, miss.” But he wasn’t looking at her—he was scowling at Rip, who stared back icily. This guy was really getting on his nerves.

  Marcel held out a hand in the direction of a Marine security guard standing near a white Chevy Tahoe with diplomatic plates. “Ladies? Shall we?”

  Rip and Coop walked with them toward the vehicle. On the way, Fernanda whispered something to Hedi, who handed her purse to her friend and then hurried up next to Marcel. Hooking her arm through the station chief’s, she smiled up at him. “Agent Bucard, I’d love to take a tour of the embassy sometime. Do you do that sort of thing?”

  While Bucard sputtered to find a suitable way to fend off the blond German, Fernanda pulled a pen from Hedi’s purse with one hand and took Rip’s hand with the other.

  The pen tickled his hand as she began scrawling numbers on his palm, whispering, “This is my cell phone. That first number is a six. Call me if you can. I’ll be here in the city if you need anything.”

  She dropped the pen back into the purse, and Rip watched her lithe figure gliding toward the vehicle. Then she stopped and turned back to him. “And Sergeant Rubio?”

  He arched an eyebrow at her in reply.

  “Thanks.”

  Rip tossed an easy salute in her direction. Would he ever see her again?

  Panama City. 0437 hours

  Each revolution of the ceiling fan made a slow tick-tick-tick. The noise competed with the clock on the shelf in Fernanda’s apartment, both reminders of each second that passed while Alex, Carlos, and Zack remained missing.

  She lay on her back on the bed, unable to sleep despite the fact that she was completely exhausted. The room felt confining and oppressive. The absence of the jungle sounds, which had driven her so crazy, now made it feel like she was stuck in a mausoleum. Anxiety clawed at her, and being alone only made it worse.

  The clock on her bedside seemed frozen.

  As she and her mother had climbed into the black sedan ten hours earlier, she asked the balding embassy official named Marcel if he had any information on Alex. His curt answer was that the professor had indeed made a frantic phone call two days ago, but nothing had been heard from him since.

  Hedi offered to stay after accompanying Fernanda to her apartment, but she knew that if Hedi stayed, they’d be up talking all night. And Fernanda hadn’t felt up for that. So after making Fernanda promise to call her first thing in the morning, Hedi went back to the dorm.

  When exactly is first thing, anyway?

  Tick-tick-tick. 4:39 a.m. The clock was mocking her.

  Lord, please be with Carlos and Zack right now. Keep them safe and let them be found quickly. And Alex … please help him survive and be found too. I still feel badly about what happened between us. If I had done the right thing earlier, made my faith clearer to him, I doubt anything would have happened. Please forgive me.

  She thought of Rip and the rest of the team—men who had risked their lives to take down the pirates and who had protected and rescued her. The tall one with the beard had even taken a bullet in the process.

  Please take care of Rip and his friends. I don’t understand everything about why they are here, but guide them to their goal and keep them alive.

  Fernanda sighed. Though it felt good to pray, like getting the worry out of her head so there’d be room for other thoughts, she wanted to do more. But what?

  “What you have loses its value if it isn’t shared.”

  She opened her eyes. Why had she thought of that? Zack’s words echoed in her head. Did You bring me that thought, Lord? If so, what do You mean by it? What do I have to share that will help this situation?

  Frustrated, she threw the sheet off of her body and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She got up and padded over to the small table in her kitchen where her laptop lay. She opened the screen and punched the power button, then turned to the stove and set the kettle on to boil. As sacrilegious as it was for a Lerida, she normally didn’t drink coffee, but this morning would be an exception.

  Once the computer booted up, Fernanda opened her Internet browser. She laid her forehead on the table while the modem screeched out a handshake with the ISP. What was she going to do? Ask Google, “Where have the pirates taken my friends?”

  She checked the Web site of La Prensa, Panama’s main daily newspaper. A search for the word piratas returned only a review of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

  Fernanda cradled her head in her hands. What was the name of that ship? Iguana. Indonesia. Indigo. Grrrhhh! What was it?

  She got up and ground some coffee beans—Lerida Organic Estate—into a French press and poured the boiling water over the grounds.

  Ignacio. Investigator. Inversion. She was going to go insane.

  Stop thinking about it. That was what she had to do. Her subconscious would remember if she left it alone for a while.

  She sipped her coffee and considered the previous twenty-four hours. An involuntary shiver went through her as she realized just how close she’d come to dying. What had been an abstract, nebulous concept, had in the past few days become almost a living entity, something that had pursued her on the
island. If Rip hadn’t shown up when he did, she certainly would have tried to drink the bottle of “water” she’d found that morning. And if it was really some kind of explosive … Fernanda shuddered again.

  She thought about the athletic Latino sergeant who had literally dropped from the sky into her life. Was it only twenty four hours ago? It seemed much longer. He’d saved her life, what, two, three times in less than a day? And he’d gone face to face with the man who had terrorized her—and won. Perhaps she was just a sucker for a man in uniform, but there was more than the intense eyes under long, dark lashes that attracted her. Rip had a purposeful hardness in his face, a white-hot focus that she found more attractive than any physical asset could ever be.

  But there was something else as well, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Was it something in the way he acted? Or in how he looked at her? She couldn’t say. Whatever it was put a warm spot on her heart and a cold knot in her stomach. Fernanda hoped she’d have another opportunity to see him and figure out why.

  Invincible! That was the ship’s name! Thank You, Lord! The coffee must be working. She pulled up her browser again and searched the La Prensa Web site for the ship’s name.

  She hit pay dirt in point-three seconds.

  A merchant ship due to enter the canal at Miraflores locks failed to arrive last Wednesday at its scheduled time. The ship was reportedly named the M/V Invincible, a twenty-seven-year-old break-bulk carrier flagged in Liberia. According to canal records, the ship has visited Panamanian ports six times in the last three years to take on cargoes of sugar, coffee, and bananas.

  An official for the Panama Canal Authority told La Prensa that after the ship failed to arrive as planned and would not respond to radio calls, a search plane was sent to look for the Invincible along her charted course, but they found nothing.

  Officials are not speculating publicly on the ship’s fate but would not rule out the possibility of foul play. A formal search-and-rescue operation is being mounted.

  The middle of the paragraph jumped out at her. “Cargoes of sugar, coffee, and bananas.”

  She drummed her fingers on the coffee cup, thinking. Then she closed the laptop, went to her bedroom, and got dressed. Maybe a cup of coffee and a sunflower-print sundress wouldn’t chase away her feelings of uselessness, but doing something about it might.

  Okay, Lord. One thing I can share is my brain. The more people who are working on this case, the quicker it will be solved.

  Six minutes later as she stepped to the rain-slick sidewalk in front of her apartment building, she still had no idea how she would find her friends, but one thought kept tumbling around in her mind, daring her to pursue it and see where it led.

  Casa Lerida exports twenty percent of Panama’s coffee.

  THE CITY WASN’T fully awake yet, and traffic was light in the predawn darkness. After finally hailing a cab, Fernanda had the elderly driver take her to the FSU parking lot where she’d left her Nissan.

  It was kind of surreal to see it there, across from Zack’s car, and remember the sense of excitement they’d all shared less than a week earlier as they waited for their adventure to begin. She felt like a different person now—as if the Fernanda who had laughed at Zack and Hedi’s antics on this very spot was only someone she once knew. She paid the cab driver and then climbed out of his car and into hers. With a last look at Zack’s beat-up taxi, she headed for the Lerida Coffee offices in Paraiso.

  On the way, she passed the gates of the Ciudad del Saber, the site of the new US embassy. Was Rip there with his team? As they were leaving the island, she’d asked him who Phoenix was. He politely evaded the question. He simply said, “She’s a friend of ours.” Was she a girlfriend? Fernanda actually knew very little about Sergeant Rubio. He wasn’t married, or at least he hadn’t been wearing a ring. But was he seeing someone?

  She shouldn’t even be asking these questions. It was likely she’d never see him again. Why did that thought cause such tightness in her chest?

  Hopefully he’d call her. She’d given him her number after all. If only there was some way for her to contact him as well. Fernanda pushed the thought from her mind as she pulled into the parking lot of Lerida Coffee. Hers was the only car in the lot.

  She let herself in the building via the front office. It smelled of green coffee and paperwork, just like Papi’s office in Boquete. And for a moment she felt a pang as she was transported back to that much simpler, more carefree time in her life.

  A dim hallway stretched out toward the back of the building where the warehouse was, with an open administrative area on the right and several offices on the left. The first office belonged to her uncle. How much does he know of what has happened? Tío Edgar had always been friendly to her, if only in a distant kind of way.

  She sat at a desk and fired up the computer. Maybe if Lerida Coffee had traveled on that ship, she could use the company’s records to find out more about the ship and its cargo and find a clue as to why the ship was hijacked in Panama.

  And then what? Talk about a long shot. At least I’ll feel like I’m making an effort to help my friends. It was a small consolation.

  Once the database was booted, she started with a simple query in the shipping field, searching for the name Invincible. The search returned empty.

  She sighed. For all their wizardry, computers were still as dumb as a post. They could make lightning-fast calculations of infinitesimally large numbers but still couldn’t think for you.

  Furrowing her brow, she tried again. This time inserting wildcard characters into the search: *Invincible*.

  Nothing.

  She thought back to the La Prensa article. It said that the ship was a break-bulk carrier. That meant its cargo was mostly noncontainerized. Lerida Coffee was almost always shipped in containers these days.

  An order would come in, and a truck would arrive in Boquete with one of the long metal boxes. A troop of Guaymi Indian men would show up and load the container to the roof with bags of green coffee, each of which probably weighed as much as they did. When the container was full, it would be sealed and the truck would take it to the port.

  But very small lots might have gone on a pallet, which would more likely travel aboard a break-bulk carrier.

  She looked back into the database and searched for odd lots, those too small to be containerized. There were only four in the last six months: orders to Bilbao, Lebanon, Istanbul, and Toronto. She sent the report to the printer.

  Lebanon! Hadn’t Rip said something about that?

  Fernanda pulled up the order for Lebanon. It still didn’t specify the ship. It told only the product amount, the shipment date, the destination, and the amount paid.

  She printed the report on all of the orders from that time frame. Scanning it she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, not that there would be anything on the report that would help her find her friends.

  Why am I doing this anyway? This is crazy. She dropped her forehead to the keyboard, tears brimming in her eyes.

  Wait a minute. Something about the order wasn’t right. She looked up and scanned it again. Then she went back to the report with all of the other orders from that time frame.

  Then it hit her. Why did we pay so much? The amount paid to send the break-bulk shipment to Lebanon almost exactly equaled the amount that they’d pay for a regular containerized shipment. That didn’t make sense.

  She flipped through the report again. The other break-bulk payments were less than a third of the regular container price. Why would …?

  “Fernanda?”

  Her head jerked up. A burly older man stood in the office doorway, regarding her with a look of shock on his face.

  “Tío Edgar!”

  Her uncle approached, arms outstretched, his face melting into a smile that was completely at odds with his personality. “I can’t believe you’re here!”

  Fernanda stood and tentatively accepted his embrace. He smelled of smoke and cologne and hugged
her more tightly than she would have liked.

  “I am so sorry, sobrina. I only heard last night.”

  He must be worried sick. When he pulled back, still holding on to her hands, she could tell even in the dim light that his eyes were bloodshot and puffy. He must have been crying too. In fact, her uncle was more disheveled than she’d ever seen him.

  “I’m … I’m sorry about Carlos.” The words caught in her throat. “I’ve been here racking my brain trying to figure out how to help find him. I just wish …” The emotion returned like a storm, flooding her eyes as she tried furiously to compose herself.

  Edgar clucked softly, offering her a handkerchief. “Don’t blame yourself for what has happened. If I had known you were going to that cursed island, I would have warned you to stay away.”

  “Mother did that—” Fernanda dabbed at the tears—“and I didn’t listen.”

  “Well, I have faith that Carlos will be found. And I am very glad that you were not hurt in the attack. Now why don’t you go home and recuperate for a day or two.”

  She was suddenly very tired, as if speaking with Edgar had broken through the strange emotional blockade that hadn’t allowed her to sleep. “Thanks, Tío Edgar. You are right. I don’t know why I even came here.”

  His telephone rang as he led her to the door. “I’m glad you did, chica. Times like these make you realize the importance of family. Please let me know if you hear anything.” He opened the front door for her and then hurried into his office and shut the door.

  Fernanda started for her car, then froze.

  The attack!

  Edgar’s words suddenly came back to her with the force of a summer squall. “I’m glad you weren’t hurt in the attack.”

  How did Edgar know about the attack? Hadn’t Agent Bucard insisted that they tell no one what had happened? She hadn’t even discussed that with her mother, so how else could he have known?

  Then she remembered the reports, still sitting on the printer.