Contra File

Punta Gorda

Punta Gorda

“T

racey called.” Chan Dwyer Davis brought Shake a frosty margarita and plopped down on the beach chair next to him. “She’s on schedule, due into Belize City tomorrow at 2:15. I rented a car so we can drive up and get her.”

“Thanks.” Shake stared at the sun setting on the western horizon. It was ringed in a dark aura and cast blood red reflections on the water of the gulf. “She’s gonna love this place.”

“She’s gonna love anyplace that gets her away from Woods Hole for a while. I’d like to meet that former boyfriend of hers—and kick him directly in the nuts.”

“I thought you said she was over that.”

“Believe me when I tell you,” Chan reached over casually and took Shake’s hand, “a woman does not easily get over finding her boyfriend in the sack with another woman—especially if it’s her sack in her apartment.”

“Yeah, that dude needs a kick in the nuts. Maybe I’ll head up to Woods Hole one of these days and give it to him.”

“Waste of time and effort, Shake.” Chan stretched, adjusted the bra straps on the new bikini she was modeling for him and smiled at his approving glance. “A week or two down here with us and she’ll be as over it as she will ever be. Just don’t get into it with her. Let her relax and play a little.”

“That’s what we invited her for. If she wants to talk about lost loves, I’ll turn her over to you and Linda.” Shake’s cell phone vibrated on the arm-rest of his chair, but before he could pick it up, Chan spotted the caller ID and snatched it like a live grenade. He reached for it but she turned her back staring at a text message on the screen.

“s**t!” Chan looked like she was about to toss the phone into the water. “You talk about somebody that needs a kick in the nuts.”

“Just ignore it.” Shake drained his margarita and headed for the house and a re-fill. Chan fell in beside him and showed the message: “Just sending fondest wishes for a relaxing time on the Mosquito Coast.” The sender was the man who calls himself Bayer, a friend-c*m-nemesis who was recently dragged out of the darkest reaches of the counter-terror bureaucracy and into a senior position with ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

“How in the hell does he know where we are?” Chan dumped the message and slipped the phone back in her husband’s pocket. “Does he have some kind of tracker on your phone?”

“Not that I know of…” Shake pulled out the phone and examined it. “The guy’s got more s**t than a Christmas turkey. Maybe he’s got a drone circling overhead. Who the hell knows?” He punched the power button to kill the phone and put it back in his pocket. “Anyway, don’t worry about it. I’ve got to clean some fish and get them on ice. You’ve got some lobsters to boil.”

G

A balmy breeze stirred the flame under a small pot of butter resting on a wrought-iron table set up on the beach just above the high-water mark where gently lapping waves washed over their bare feet. Freshly boiled lobsters were steaming next to the butter pot, and there was a growing pile of shells near each place as Shake, Mike, Chan, and Linda wrestled with claws and fenced for access to the melted butter. It was one of those great seafood meals where utensils were both superfluous and pretentious. The main eating tool, available to all, was Shake’s old K-Bar fighting knife which served to both crack lobster claws and dig out tender morsels of meat.

“There’s just something about fresh from the sea,” Linda swiped at her mouth with a wad of well-used paper napkin and reached for another of the boiled bugs. “You don’t get this kind of flavor with lobsters from Albertson’s or Ralph’s.”

“I don’t know what the big deal is about Maine lobster.” Her husband watched as Bear, Shake’s big Golden Pyrenees, assumed a heart-rending pose, begging for a bit of the feast. Stokey tossed him a morsel and grinned. “You can’t beat this for good chow. Just ask Bear.”

“That dog will eat anything, Mike.” Linda reached to scratch behind Bear’s floppy ears. “Yesterday he gobbled up a tamale, hot sauce and all.”

“Where the hell were we last time we had Maine lobster?” Shake leaned back and pried at the lid on a box of fat Cuban cigars he’d picked up at the local market.

“Old Orchard Beach,” Stokey reached for the butter bowl with a gob of lobster tail in hand. “We ran into Ken Semple from 2nd Force living up there and he invited us for a New England boiled supper. Lobster was good but the clam chowder gave me the shits.”

“That wasn’t the chowder, pal, it was the vodka. Remember Semple had that ice-carving of a mermaid and we were drinking the booze running off her boobs?”

“I don’t remember much—except it was hell riding that boomer out of Bangor the next day. A case of the Hershey-squirts is not a good thing to have aboard a submarine.”

“It was a wasted damn trip too. Remember Bayer wanted us to…”

“Cease and desist!” Chan grabbed the K-Bar off the table and waved it menacingly between Shake and Mike. “Remember the deal, you two. Tell all the war stories you want but we will not mention that name! Go take a walk on the beach…smoke cigars…finish that story elsewhere.”

Stokey declined the cigar. Since his marriage to Linda he’d become a reformed smoker and was content just to walk downwind of Shake, sampling second-hand the rich aroma of the panatela that his buddy was enjoying. “Safe to say Chan’s got a very big hard-on for our boy Bayer.”

“Safe to say and accurate,” Shake puffed on his cigar and flopped down on a patch of sand still warm from the day’s barrage of hot sunlight. “She’ll get over it eventually, but it’s probably best to keep him out of casual conversation for a while.”

“Funny you brought him up tonight.” Stokey sat cross-legged and began to toss seashell fragments into the surf line. “I got a text message from him earlier this afternoon.”

“No s**t? How does he know you’re down here?”

“How does Bayer know any of the stuff he knows, Shake? He’s wired into the spook world tighter than a tick. Maybe he’s got me under some kind or surveillance to be sure I don’t trip off the gun-line. Who the hell knows?”

“What did he have to say?”

“Nothing much. Just congratulations on the marriage and he hopes we’re were having a good time down here on the Mosquito Coast.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Shake dug his phone out of a pocket, punched up the text screen and showed it to Stokey. “That came in earlier this afternoon. Chan nearly s**t a brick. She’s convinced he’s got us bugged or something.”

“Maybe he does.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You ever wonder about who’s really footing the bill for this little stay in paradise, Shake?”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about it and it’s gotta be Gordo Fowler, right? I mean he’s not putting it directly on his plastic or anything but he’s a three-star running SOUTHCOM and that includes Belize, so he probably knows a lot of people down here. I figure he pulled a few levers and got us comp’ed for the whole deal.”

“If it was still back in the day when you and me were running around in soldier suits, I’d say yeah, that’s gotta be what’s happening, but things are a whole hell of a lot different now. What with all the politicians and pundits and whistle-blowers, generals can’t just call in favors—especially expensive favors that have nothing to do with military matters. You read the papers in one form or another, right? The f*****g Navy has fired something like fifteen or twenty senior officers in the past year or so. The Air Force just s**t-canned a couple of generals; hell, even the Commandant of the Marine Corps has got his ass in a crack over some shitty little deal that nobody would have heard about ten years ago.”

“Yeah, I’ll grant you it’s a different deal these days, Mike, but you know how it goes. Gordo probably just made a couple of discreet calls to people he knows and got an old war buddy set up down here…”

“Discreet phone calls my ass, Shake. There ain’t no such thing anymore. Gordo is a smart guy and he didn’t get where he is by ignoring the political atmosphere that comes with exalted rank. He’s not gonna risk his stars just to hook us up with a free vacation in Central America.”

“Are you saying you think Bayer’s got something to do with this?”

“I’m saying he’s probably in the mix somewhere is all. Think about it, Shake. Maybe he’s trying to quietly reward you for Lebanon and a couple of other shitty missions he’s handed you over the years.”

“Why wouldn’t he just own up to it? You know, nice job, appreciate the effort, so here’s a little payback for services rendered.”

“He’s used to working deep and dark, Shake. Or it could be he just wants us both in the same place at the same time.”

Shake took a final drag off the Cuban and then sent it off into the dark in a shower of sparks. “I think what we do,” he said watching moonlight shimmer on the Gulf of Honduras, “is we keep the cell phones turned off and we don’t say s**t about any of this to Chan or Linda.”

“My recommendation exactly. Did you get hold of Morty P?”

“Yeah. I called the number he gave us and he answered right up. Had his phone on vibrate and it scared the s**t out of him. He had to whisper because he was on some kind of OP near the Hondo River. I looked it up. That’s right on the Mexican border.”

“Jesus, man—having a cell phone chat while you’re on an OP. Can you imagine that kind of s**t back when we were doing recon on the Ho Chi Minh trail?”

“That’s the way they communicate these days, I guess. Probably works better than radio.”

“Did you have time to tell him about the submarine deal?”

“Oh, yeah—he was very interested in that. I gave him the best location I could figure. Too bad we didn’t have GPS.”

“Did Morty P think the same thing we thought?”

“Yep. Most likely narcotraficantes moving dope by sea. He said they’ve been getting reports about them using homemade subs to run up the coast to Chetumal Bay where they offload the stuff and start it moving north through Mexico. Apparently there’s some U.S. Navy and Coast Guard advisors working with the locals to try and interrupt the sea routes but the focus has been on fishing boats and high-speed surface craft. The subs are a new wrinkle.”

“Kind of explains Captain Juan’s reaction, doesn’t it.”

“Uh huh. Taking too much notice of drug smugglers down here is a sure way to wind up as fish-food with a bellyful of lead sinkers.”

“Is Morty P still gonna be able to make the party?”

“He said he’d be here with a couple of his Marines, including the Detachment OIC. He also said he might bring one of the brown water Navy guys to talk to us about the sub we saw.”