Commando

“Sounds like his daughter is just the opposite of him—clear ethics, strong morals, and decided values.”

“I agree.”

“So, if all of our info comes back in order on Travers, do you want to be a bodyguard for a while?”

Jake shrugged. He tried to appear nonchalant, but his protective feelings had been aroused. He looked down at the photo. “Yeah, I’ll go to Brazil and see what’s going down.”

“She’s a very pretty young woman.”

“The earthy type,” Jake agreed.

Jake sat there for a long time, simply feeling his way through the photo of Shah. There was an ageless quality to her, as if all the generations of the Sioux people were mirrored in her classic Indian features. She didn’t have a common kind of model’s prettiness, but Jake never went for that cookie-cutter type, anyway. He liked women who had their own special and unique features. Character, as far as he was concerned, should be reflected on a person’s face, and Shah’s face intrigued him.

Unconsciously he rubbed his chest where his heart lay.

“Memories?” Morgan asked quietly, breaking the comfortable silence of the office.

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Jake loved Morgan like a brother. They had both served as marines, and that bound them in an invisible way. Once a marine, always a marine—that was the saying. Even though they hadn’t served together, they’d come from the same proud service. Marines stuck together, and supported each other and their families. Maybe that was why Jake liked working for Morgan so much—he understood Jake’s tragic loss, and, like any marine brother, supported him as much as possible.

He gave Morgan a quick glance. “Bess was always spunky, too,” he whispered, his voice strained. “Shah kinda reminds me of my wife in some ways.”

“You always want me to give you assignments that deal with drugs,” Morgan said. “This one won’t involve drug trafficking.”

“It’s okay.” Jake tried to shake off the old grief that still clung to his heart. “Maybe I need a change of pace. Something different.”

“I feel this assignment may be more than it appears to be on the surface,” Morgan warned him.

“What else do I have to do with my life?” Jake said, pretending sudden joviality. “Go home to an empty log house? Sit and watch a football game and drink a beer? No plants in the house. No animals…” No family. No wife. Not anymore. The grief grew within him, and he got up, rubbing his chest again. He saw Morgan’s face, which was no longer expressionless. Morgan knew about personal loss as few men ever would. Jake stood there, unable to put into words the feelings unraveling within him.

“Well,” Morgan said softly, “maybe it would do you good to have this kind of assignment, then.” He attempted a smile.

“Where you’ll be going, there’ll be plenty of plants and animals.”

Jake nodded and moved to the windows. The November sky was cloudy, and it looked like either rain or the first snowfall of the year for the capital. “Brazil is having their springtime,” he said, as much to himself as to Morgan. “It’ll be the dry season down there, and the jungle will be survivable.”

“Just make sure you survive this mission,” Morgan growled.

Jake rubbed his jaw. “I always survive. You know that.”

Morgan nodded, but said nothing.

Jake turned toward him. “You’ve got a funny look on your face, boss.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”

With a slight smile, Morgan said, “Well, maybe I’m hoping that Shah and her situation can lighten the load you’ve been carrying by yourself for so long, that’s all.”

Jake halted at the desk. “Well, time heals all, right?”

Morgan sat back. “Time has been a healing force for me, Jake. I hope it will be for you, too.”

With a grimace, Jake ran his finger along the highly polished surface of Morgan’s desk. “You know what William Carlos Williams said about time? He said, ‘Time is a storm in which we are all lost.’ I agree with him. I’ve never felt so lost since Bess’s and the kids’ deaths.”

“I know.”

Jake forced a smile he didn’t feel. “Well, who knows? Maybe this storm surrounding Shah will be good for me. It can’t get any worse.”

Chapter Two

Manaus was the Dodge City of Brazil, Jake decided as he left the seedy-looking gun shop. Less than an hour ago, he’d stepped off the plane into the sweltering noontime heat that hung over the city. Now, standing on a cracked and poorly kept sidewalk outside the shop, Jake looked around. Disheveled houses, mostly shacks, lined both sides of the busy street. Odors in the air ranged from automobile pollution to ripe garbage to the muddy scent of the two mighty rivers that met near the city.

Sweat was rolling off Jake, but that wasn’t anything new to him. Manaus sat at the edge of the Amazon Basin, home to one of the largest rain-forest jungles in the world. Rubber trees had been the cause of Manaus’s rise to fame—and its downfall. Once chemical companies had learned to make synthetic rubber better than what the trees of the Amazon Basin provided, the city’s boom had ground to a halt, leaving Manaus destitute.

Jake flagged down a blue-and-white taxi and climbed in.

“Take me to the docks. I need to hire a boat to take me down the Amazon,” he said in Portuguese to the old man who drove the cab.

Nodding, the driver grinned and turned around.

Jake sagged back against the lumpy rear seat as the cab sped off. The asphalt highway leading to the docks was bumpy at best. Not much had changed in Manaus, Jake decided. Skinny brown children with black hair and brown eyes played along the edge of the road. Dilapidated houses lined the avenue. Although Manaus was struggling to come out of the mire of depression that had hit it so long ago, it had remained intrinsically a river town, filled with a colorful assortment of characters, greedy money-seekers willing to turn a quick dime and the now-impoverished “wealthy” who had depended upon their income from the rubber trees to keep them that way.

The docks came into view after about half an hour. Up ahead, Jake could see the wide, muddy ribbons of the Solimoes and the Rio Negro coming together to create the enormous Amazon. A number of boats—some small, some fairly large—dipped and bobbed, their prows either resting on the muddy river bank or tied off with frayed pieces of rope to some rotting wooden post on one of the many run-down wharves. As the taxi screeched to a halt, Jake paid the driver in cruzeiros, Brazil’s currency, and climbed out. His only piece of luggage was a canvas duffel bag that was filled, though only partially, with clothes and other essential survival items.

Standing off to one side where the asphalt crumbled to an end and the muddy slope began, Jake reached into the duffel bag and pulled out a large knife encased in a black leather sheath. He put the scabbard through his belt loop and made sure it rode comfortably behind his left elbow. Tying a red-and-white handkerchief around his throat to use to wipe the sweat from his face, Jake rummaged in the duffel bag again and came up with a few badly crumpled American dollars that he’d stuffed away in a side pocket.

Recession had hit Brazil big-time, and over the past few years inflation had risen from three hundred to six hundred percent. One American dollar was worth hundreds of cruzeiros, and Jake knew he’d have no trouble finding a willing skipper to take him where he wanted to go if he showed he had American money.

Jake also had a huge wad of cruzeiros stashed in a hidden leg pouch. Americans weren’t common in Brazil, and those who did come were seen by the local populace as being very rich. Jake wasn’t about to become one of the robbery or murder statistics on a local police roster. Manaus was a wide-open city, and it paid for any foreigner to be watchful and take nothing for granted. All of Brazil’s large cities held areas of homes surrounded by huge wrought-iron fences, sometimes ten feet tall, to protect them from thievery, which was rampant in Brazil.

Pulling the leather holster that contained a nine-millimeter Beretta out of his bag, Jake strapped it around his waist. He wanted the holster low, so that he could easily reach the pistol. Because of the constant high humidity, Jake wore khaki pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, already marked with sweat.

Looking around from his position just above the muddy bank of the river, Jake smiled faintly. The cottony white clouds, heavy with moisture, barely moved above the jungle that surrounded Manaus. The noontime sun was rising high in the pale blue sky, shafting through the fragments of clouds. As Jake zipped up the duffel and slung it across his shoulder, he knew that for the next couple of days he’d be adjusting to the brutal combination of ninety-degree temperatures and ninety-percent humidity.

He heard cawing and looked up. A flight of red-and-yellow macaws flew across the river, barely fifty feet above the surface. They looked like a squadron of fighter jets, their long tails and colorful feathers in sharp contrast with the sluggish brown headwaters. Watching his step, Jake gingerly made his way down to what appeared to be the most seaworthy craft available, a small tug. The captain was dressed in ragged cutoffs. His legs were skinny and brown. His feet were large in comparison to his slight build, and he wore no shirt, pronounced ribs showing on his sunken chest. He was balding, and his brown eyes turned flinty as Jake approached.

“I need a ride,” he called to the captain, “to a Tucanos village about three hours down the Amazon. Think that tub will make it that far?”

The captain grinned, showing sharp and decayed teeth. “This boat of mine isn’t called the Dolphin for nothin’. She floats even when we have the floods!”

Jake stood onshore, haggling with the captain over the price of such a trip. In Brazil, everyone bargained. Not to engage in such efforts was considered rude. Finally, when Jake flashed a five-dollar American bill in the captain’s face, negotiations stopped. The captain grabbed the money and held out his hand to Jake, a big, welcoming grin splitting his small face.

“Come aboard.”

With an answering grin, Jake hefted himself onto the small tug. It had once been red and white, but lack of care—or more probably lack of money—had prevented upkeep on the paint. With a practiced eye, Jake slowly walked the forty-foot tug, checking for leaks.

“You know the name of this village?” the captain called as he slid up onto a tall chair that was bolted to the deck in front of the wooden wheel.