LITMIR.BIZ

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was at the far end of the strip. But before checking out the hotel, he wanted to recon for a feel of the kind of forces he would be facing here and their locations.

      There was an additional risk of exposure by doing it this way, but he didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting Brognola out only to discover that there was no way for them to escape. He wanted to locate his back door first. Even then, finding the man was probably going to be more difficult than it really should be.

      There was a comfortable sub-Q personal locator beacon often worn by people like Brognola—or people who were going in harm’s way—that made finding them a snap. A single overhead pass of a satellite or spy plane would activate the beeper, and it would remain powered up for five days. As Bolan well knew, though, Hal didn’t like to wear the miniature beepers, saying that they itched him.

      For the lack of the locator beacon to follow, if Brognola wasn’t being held in the hotel, Bolan was faced with the possibility of having to search more than a hundred buildings to find him. And, to make it even more difficult, according to the data dump he’d received right before he’d taken off from Texas, the airline manifests showed that some eight thousand American tourists had been flown into Cancun recently. Of course, there were also the thousands of Mexicans who lived and worked in the area to serve the visitors.

      Finding the proverbial needle might turn out to be easier than this job.

      WITH ALL THE ACTIVITY at the pier Richard Spellman and Mary Hamilton decided to wait for dark before trying to make an escape. They had also changed into fresh, starched sets of cook’s whites they had found in the storeroom. They weren’t the most practical camouflage to wear while trying to make a nighttime break, but he figured that if they were spotted, they could be taken for the hired help, not escaped Americans on the run.

      “If you think you can handle it,” he told his companion, “it might work better if you lead off. With your Spanish, you might be able to talk our way out of trouble. I can pretend to be a deaf mute or something. But if it looks bad, get behind me real fast.”

      Hamilton smiled nervously. For someone who was more comfortable in a lab than a battlefield, her new man was proving resourceful.

      Grabbing one of the extra tablecloths, Spellman tied the ends together to make a crude bag and loaded it with several plastic bottles of mineral water. Hamilton added a box of whole-grain crackers, some cheeses and a big tin of smoked salmon.

      “How about some of those jazzed-up coffee beans?” Spellman asked. “We may need to stay awake until we can find a place to hide.”

      “Good idea.”

      Spellman slipped the locks on the storeroom door, opened it a crack and peered out. The passageway was clear, and he motioned for Hamilton to follow as he eased out into the hall. The deck they were on was two down from the main one. He expected the main to be guarded, but when he had boarded, he’d noticed a cargo hatch in the side of the ship on one of the lower decks. In L.A. it had been used to load passenger luggage and supplies for the trip. If he remembered correctly, it should be two decks down from where they were.

      The passageway outside the café was deserted, and the pair quickly headed for the stairwell leading to the lower decks. The ship’s passenger areas were carpeted, so Spellman barely heard the approaching footsteps in time to grab his companion’s arm and get them both out of sight. The stair steps were also carpeted, which let them move quickly and noiselessly. Two decks down, they came to a hatch labeled D Cargo.

      “This should be it,” he said as he undogged the steel door and opened it.

      The compartment behind the door was the size of a small house but was divided up into smaller sub-areas holding different cargos. Several of the cubicles held the passenger luggage he’d seen being loaded in L.A., and others held ship supplies. He motioned her inside and dogged the hatch shut behind them.

      The steel deck in the compartment wasn’t carpeted, so they stepped lightly as they crossed to the hatch on the outer hull. The sign on the steel door read Loading Berth.

      “This should be it,” Spellman said.

      The controls for the hatch were simple, but he opened it slowly so as not to make any more noise than necessary. The lights on the pier had been turned off, but the few lights burning on the ship illuminated about a six-foot gap between the hull and the dock. He looked inside the hatchway for a gangplank to bridge the gap, but there was none.

      “Can you jump that far?” he asked.

      Hamilton peered down at the water. “Maybe if you go first and catch me?”

      “First I have to see if anyone’s watching us,” he said softly. “Grab my belt while I take a look.”

      “Be careful,” she whispered.

      Spellman held on to the door frame with one arm and swung out as far into the void as he could to look up at the decks above him. It was difficult to see anything beyond the expanse of the glossy white hull, but he caught moving shadows at both the bow and the stern before swinging back inside.

      “It looks like they’ve posted a guard at both ends of the boat,” he said. “But I don’t think that they’re looking this way.”

      Putting his hands on Hamilton’s shoulders, Spellman looked her full in the face. “I think we have a good chance of pulling this off,” he said. “If we can get off the ship, I know we can find someone to help us. I’ll go first and if I’m spotted, I’ll take off running to draw them away from you.”

      “I’ll follow you,” she said.

      Spellman backed up a few feet, took a deep breath, sprinted for the open hatchway and leaped. He cleared the gap with ease, but landed hard. Getting to his feet, he made sure that no one was watching from the ship’s decks before motioning for Hamilton to join him. As he had done, she backed off to get a run at it and cleared the gap by a foot.

      He caught her arm as she came by and kept her balanced on her feet. “Good jump,” he said softly. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

      “You’re limping,” she said as they started off.

      “I was never good at track and field. I hit wrong when I jumped, but I’ll be okay.”

      “You sure?”

      He grinned. “Yeah, I’m a doctor, remember?”

      Taking her hand, Spellman led her across the pier into the cover of darkness.

      WHEN BOLAN ENTERED the built-up area of restaurants and shops it was like being on an elaborate, full-size movie set after all of the actors and crew had gone home for the night. No one was on the streets, and none of the establishments was open for business. Again, a few dim lights glowed behind curtained windows, but that was all. Most of the streetlights had been turned off, as well, but that suited him just fine. Shadows were a scout’s best ally.

      A couple hundred yards farther on, he saw that one of the plazas along the main boulevard was brightly lit. Taking that as his cue, he decided to find out what was so important that it needed to be lit up. Coming from the side, he noted a handful of black-clad gunmen lounging around the entrance of a sizable building facing the square. The machine gun mounted on top of the SUV parked beside them told Bolan that the contents of the building had to be of interest.

      When he got close enough to see the bars on the windows, he realized that this had to be the town lock-up. He had no way of knowing if Brognola was actually being held prisoner in there. But it was a jail and it was being guarded by the intruders, so before he moved on, he would take a look.

      Slinging his H&K, he drew his Beretta 93-R and threaded the sound suppressor onto its muzzle.

      He was working his way around the plaza when the gunmen made it easy for him. The guy behind the machine gun stepped down and said something to the others who laughed as he walked into the jail. That left him with only three targets to take down, and they all had their weapons casually slung.

      Their confidence

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