Silent Running. Don Pendleton

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      CHAPTER FOUR

      SS Carib Princess

      The requisitioned storeroom behind the cruise ship’s French café had served well as an impromptu playroom, and Richard Spellman and Mary Hamilton didn’t drift off to sleep until the early morning. Part of their sleeplessness, though, resulted from the occasional muffled gunshot heard in the night.

      When sunlight streamed through the porthole on the two voluntary stowaways and woke Spellman, he glanced at his watch and saw that it was a little after nine. Getting up carefully so as not to wake Mary, he went to the porthole, but only saw open sea. Obviously the ship had passed through the canal into the Caribbean while they’d been in their self-imposed, but-not-completely-unwelcome exile.

      “Richard?” Hamilton said.

      “Right here.” He turned back. “We’re at sea, and my guess from the sun angle is that we’re heading south. At least we won’t starve, though. Hiding in a restaurant storeroom is definitely the way to stow away.”

      “How’re we going to know when we’re safe?” Hamilton asked.

      “Damned if I know,” Spellman admitted. “This sounded like a great idea last night and I’m convinced those were shots we heard, so I think we made the right move. The problem is that locked away like this, we don’t have any idea what’s going on out there. I’ve got a feeling, though, that I’m not going to be presenting my paper today.”

      The gunfire in the night had scared Hamilton as nothing else had ever done, but Richard’d had a calming effect on her and it was still working.

      She smiled slyly. “I guess we’ll just have to find something to keep ourselves occupied then.”

      RICHARD SPELLMAN was no sailor, but later that afternoon he recognized that the ship had reduced her speed and he chanced a peek around the edge of the porthole.

      “Where do you think we are?” Hamilton asked.

      “It looks like we’re coming up to some resort mooring for cruise ships,” he replied. “If I had to guess, I’d say that we’re somewhere in Mexico. Maybe the Yucatán.”

      “What’s going to happen to us?” the woman asked before she could stop herself. She hated playing the helpless woman with him, but she admitted to herself that she was scared. So far, Richard had been very calm, considering the circumstances, and in comforting her, had calmed her fears. Now that they had arrived at some kind of destination, though, the fear came flooding back.

      “I don’t have much experience at this kind of thing,” he admitted, “but my guess is that we passengers have been taken hostage. For what, I have no idea. I don’t know anything about Mexican politics.

      “But—” he snuck another peek “—like it or not, I think that we’re about to go to school for a cram course.”

      She shook her head. “How can you be so damned calm about this? I mean, I don’t mind, but aren’t you scared half to death? I know I am.”

      He turned back. “Sure I’m scared,” he said. “Any rational human in this situation would be. But I’m saving it up for the right time to freak out. You know, a time and place where it might be useful.”

      She smiled in spite of herself and felt her fear ebb again. If she was going to die on this trip, at least she’d found someone she wouldn’t mind dying with.

      “You’re a very funny man,” she said. “And if we can get out of this mess, I think I’m going to want to see more of you. A lot more.”

      “That’s a date.” He grinned. “But first we have to figure out what in the hell we should be doing next. What do you think about trying to sneak off this damned thing as soon as it docks?”

      She glanced around the storeroom. “There’s got to be more room to run out there than there is in here.”

      “Good girl.”

      THE CRUISE SHIP was met at the Cancun moorage by Diego Garcia, a small fleet of buses and a couple dozen of his Matador gunmen. Nguyen Cao Nguyen, the first man down the gangplank, was met on the dock by the Cuban.

      “Here they are, Comrade,” the Vietnamese said, “packaged and delivered as you requested. Almost seven hundred and fifty of the international community’s top medical men, their women and their children. And, as we expected, most of them are Yankees.”

      “Any casualties?” Garcia asked.

      “None.” Nguyen shook his head, referring to his own Matador team. The deaths among the ship’s crew simply didn’t count, and the passengers who had tried to resist were too few to mention, either. Since the bodies had been dumped over the side, he hadn’t been able to reconcile the passenger manifest with the head count, though. But again, a few hostages more or less wouldn’t really matter.

      “Do you have the people I asked for selected?”

      Nguyen nodded. “Of course, Comrade,” he replied. A last-minute change to the master plan was to mix the political and medical hostages. He didn’t understand the reasoning behind the decision, but it didn’t really matter.

      “Very good,” Garcia said. “Bring them out now and tell your people to keep the ship ready to sail on a moment’s notice.”