The Viper Squad (34 page)

“I don’t want to be selfish about this,” Mike said, “but if any of you think you can save your skin—”

Andre laughed. “Anyone who believes Esteban would honor a safe—conduct for us out of Nicaragua after what we’ve done to them,
take one step forward.”

No one did.

“Think of something, Mike,” Sally said in an adoring voice.

They all laughed and joined in.

“Yeah, Mike, think of something.”

“What do you want us to do, Mike?”

“Come on, Mike.”

Mike held up his hands, grinning. “Don’t start getting loony. All right, listen to this. These bastards would have blown us
out of the water by now if they didn’t need to take Sally alive. For some reason, it seems they want to take me alive too.
But Sally is our trump card. So long as she’s with us and it looks like we can’t escape, they won’t shoot. They have to figure
time is on their side. The more time we give them, the more troops they’ll be able to move in on top of us. So what do we
do? If we swim for shore, they’ll blast us with their big guns. They’ll kill Sally rather than let her escape. In short, we
have one obvious choice—we sail out of here and they remain behind.”

They all waited while Mike went below and returned with a roll of steel cable.

“As our nautical consultant, Bob,” Mike asked, “do you think I could wrap this around the cutter’s propeller?”

Bob looked serious. “She probably has twin screws, Mike. You might succeed if you had me to help you. There’s masks and flippers
below, but no oxygen.”

“Let’s go,” Mike said.

They went over the shore side of the launch and swam under it. They had to surface for air on the way to the
cutter, which was difficult for them to do unseen because of the calmness and clearness of the lake water.

Unknown to the mercs, they had been seen going over the side of the launch. Esteban shouted for frogmen. There were no frogmen
on board the cutter. Then crew members. Half the crew did not know how to swim, and those who did had never dived… so they
said.

“If I find you’ve lied to me,” Esteban warned them, “I’ll have you shot. I need volunteer divers. Fast.”

No one volunteered.

Esteban grabbed a mask, flippers, spear gun, extra spears. He expertly went over the far side of the cutter, came beneath
it and swam fast with his loaded spear gun extended before him.

Paulo saw two divers swimming through the water. The second carried a roll of cable and hung back behind the first, hampered
by his load. Paulo decided to test the spear gun on the easier target.

The divers hadn’t seen him, so he took his time aiming, and released the spear which had no attached line to slow or deflect
its flight.

The spear gun shot slightly to the right of aim, so that Paulo harpooned the diver through one leg instead of in the trunk.

The first diver saw immediately that the second was in trouble, swam back and raised him to the surface for air. Paulo searched
for a good shot, but then was forced to surface for air himself.

Panicked by Mike’s shouts, Sally grabbed a rusty shotgun from a cabin rack and climbed up on the foredeck. Lance and Joe had
dived in the water and were swimming out to help Mike with Bob. Andre and Harvey stood on the afterdeck with their automatic
rifles, scanning the water.

Sally searched in the opposite direction. Almost beneath the prow of the launch, she saw Paulo Esteban’s head out
of the water with the mask raised from his face. He took a deep breath, winked at her and replaced the mask. He dived before
she could blow his head off with the shotgun. She knew she was too late, but she was in such a rage she fired anyway.

The buckshot caught Esteban in the ass as he dived, reducing his broad posterior to a bloody pulp. He surfaced immediately,
maskless, roaring with pain.

“Sally, Sally, help me!”

She looked away. Andre and Harvey were helping Bob aboard. She winced when she saw the spear through Bob’s leg. But Andre
snapped it quickly and pulled it out.

Sally knew her job. She ran below deck and collected bandages and disinfectant. She heard the launch’s diesel stutter and
refuse to start. After a few more tries, it roared like an Indianapolis racer and they were on their way. She brought the
bandages out on the afterdeck, but none of the men were paying any attention to Bob’s wound, including Bob himself. They were
all looking back over the water. The crewmen lined the deck rail of the Nicaraguan cutter.

Paulo Esteban was in the water. He was being circled by three blue-gray fins. He shouted and splashed the water and the fins
veered away, then began to circle him again. He swam toward the cutter until the sharks got too close to him again, when he
frightened them off by splashing. But the blood scent in the water was too strong and they came in to circle him again, moving
faster now and making feints at him.

Paulo was no more than twenty yards from the cutter by this time, and its crewmen had lowered a small boat into the water
and four were shimmying down ropes into it. Others fired rifles from the deck at the circling fins.

When one shark made a lunge at him, Paulo somehow managed to kick it away, and the three beasts resumed their rapid circling.

Then one shark rolled on its side, and they all saw the white of its belly and the rows of teeth on its extrusible
jaws as it swam just beneath the surface, seized Esteban by the middle, shook him from side to side and dived deep with its
bloody burden.

The two other sharks dived also, and the water surface was disturbed by their feeding frenzy beneath, as they tore the food
from each other with their toothed maws.

“You want to know if it’s true that I was the one who killed Paulo Esteban?” Sally said into the phone. “Sure it’s true. Though
I had some help doing it.” She listened some more, then the smile faded from her face and she replied sharply, “No. I had
nothing to do with Clarinero’s death. He was a good man.”

After some more talk, she put down the phone and said to Mike, who was looking out the hotel-room window at the view of San
Jose, the Costa Rican capital, “That was a call from New York. A guy from
People
magazine. They want to do a spread on me. They’ve been told I’m a government agent. Can you believe my father? Telling everyone
that. He calls you my backup team. I hope you’re not offended.”

“Amused,” Mike said.

He had kind of figured that Dwight Quincy Poynings would have spent his time plotting some sort of cover-up. Which was okay
with Mike. Except the less said about him and the team, the better.

“I never told you, Sally,” he said. “Clarinero gave me a message for you. He wanted you to know that he loved you.”

“Really?” Her eyes brimmed, and a tear trickled down her cheek. “I thought I loved him too at the time. It’s only since then
I’ve realized I was deceiving myself.”

Mike looked at her inquiringly.

“No,” she confessed, looking him in the eyes, “I never knew what real feeling was until I met you.”

Mike edged toward the door.

But Sally was quicker than any leftist guerrilla, and overcame the merc before he could escape.

The girl ran away to witness the revolution first hand, and was last seen on the evening news brandishing a captured M16 rifle
while “liberating” a Salvadoran village with her comrades.

It’s Special Forces veteran Mike Campbell’s job to bring her back alive to her rich daddy in Boston. So Mike assembles the
toughest merc squadron available, arms them with state-of-the-art weaponry, and marches into the explosive Central American
jungle war the whole world is watching.

For the girl it’s a romantic romp with a dashing guerrilla leader, but for a professional like Mike Campbell, it is just another
dirty war he’d better win if he hopes to live till pay day.

War is their business…

THE
POINT TEAM