Danger Zone Read online

  DANGER ZONE

  Doreen Owens Malek

  –

  Published by

  Gypsy Autumn Publications

  P.O. Box 383 • Yardley, PA I9067

  –

  Copyright 1987 and 2012

  by Doreen Owens Malek

  www.doreenowensmalek.com

  The Author asserts the moral right to

  be identified as author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  First USA Printing: 1987

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author. This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Author

  More books from Doreen Owens Malek

  Colter woke in the middle of the night.

  He’d been dreaming about Karen. Again. She was so close, right in the next room, and he couldn’t forget it. He was waging a war within himself and he was losing.

  Suddenly the door to the bedroom opened and Colter shut his eyes, feigning sleep. She was stoking the fire.

  He slitted his eyes and looked at her through his lashes. What he saw froze him and he hardly dared to breathe.

  Karen was wearing a floor length batiste nightgown, but as she stood in front of the fire the light shone through it, making it seem almost transparent. Colter swallowed hard.

  Karen finished with the fire and turned, stopping when she noticed the pile of his clothes on the floor. Her eyes moved upward to his face, and she gave a visible start when she saw that he was awake.

  “Come here,” he said huskily.

  Chapter 1

  Karen Walsh looked around at her fellow hostages and wondered how much longer they would be held. She knew that in the end they’d either be released or killed, but the waiting had them demoralized to the point that even the latter fate would almost be welcome. After five days of captivity the underground supply room that served as their prison seemed like hell, where hope was abandoned and all dreams ended in a formless, pointless despair.

  The heat in the basement was intolerable. Karen pushed her damp hair back from her brow and pulled her clinging blouse away from her midriff. The women around her were no longer even exchanging glances with one another, but sleeping fitfully or staring at the floor. Like shocked rats in a cage, they had given up and merely marked time until something—anything—happened to relieve the tedium of their incarceration.

  Karen was no happier than her companions, but felt they could have been treated worse. They received food and water at intervals and were permitted to sleep undisturbed on the floor. To her knowledge no one had been beaten or molested, but she couldn’t speak for the men, who had been taken to another part of the building. Karen’s group, an assortment of secretaries, clerks and minor functionaries, had an armed guard posted outside the closed door of their improvised jail. They could hear him pacing back and forth, back and forth, a metronomic counterpart to the heavy silence that filled the stifling, airless room.

  Karen was a translator at the government offices on the island of Almeria, a British colony off the northeast coast of South America. Located between the U.S. Virgin Islands to the north and Grenada and Trinidad to the south, Almeria had been a favorite vacation spot until it became the scene of increasing unrest during the previous decade. The natives had been trying for years to oust the British and establish home rule. Finally a militant group had taken over the Government House in the capital city of Ascension. They had captured eighteen of the employees and held them hostage, with Karen among them. The insurgents demanded a meeting with the governor-general to draw up a new constitution and turn the government over to the Almerians. If their demands were not met by eight o’clock the next morning, they would start executing the hostages one by one.

  Karen leaned back against the rough cement wall of the cellar and closed her eyes. She thought about the course her life had taken to bring her to that moment, which might be close to her last, and considered whether she would have done anything differently. She had never imagined that she’d be involved in such a drama, but supposed that no one did. She had done the best she could with her life and realized that she had no regrets.

  She had married an older man in the British foreign service when she was twenty-one and had traveled with him to Almeria. She was divorced three years later. When her former husband was transferred she stayed on and kept her job, translating official documents into Spanish for the consumption of the native population. She had been happy in her position until the day less than a week ago when her whole world had changed.

  She shifted her weight on the hard floor and tried to relax. Her clothes were filthy, she was filthy, and she’d hardly slept since the ordeal had begun, but she was better off than some of the other women whose nerves were close to shattering. At night she could hear their muffled sobbing and was grateful that so far she had remained calm. She was as frightened as anyone else certainly, but at least outwardly composed, and she found it helpful to put her mind on other things to forget where she was and what was happening.

  She thought about her family. She was worried about her sister Grace, who was married and lived in New Jersey. Grace had probably heard of the crisis in Almeria on the news and was terrified for Karen. The two women were close; their parents had died when they were children and Grace and Karen had gone to live with an aunt, who was now also dead. Their father had been a Chaucerian scholar with friends in British academic circles, and some of them kept in touch with the girls after the accident that killed the senior Walshes. One of the men introduced Karen to his brother Ian, whom she later married.

  Karen tucked her skirt around her legs and lifted the hair off the back of her neck, thinking about her husband. Their marriage had been more a union of convenience than love. She knew that now; at the time she’d been too young to appreciate the difference. She’d understood only that Ian was kind to her, and she’d wanted to get away from her aunt’s stolid existence and see some of the world. Ian’s career had offered what she thought was an opportunity for travel and excitement, and she’d been truly fond of him. To her sheltered eyes his English accent and his age had made him seem wise and sophisticated. He was a far cry from the boys who’d pawed her at high school dances and had little ambition beyond making it to the next weekend to blow their paychecks. So she was happy to accept Ian’s proposal and journey with him to his next assignment, the governor- general’s office in Almeria.

  But Karen soon realized that the marriage was a mistake. Her husband treated her like the child he thought she was, and although tolerant and indulgent, he had little time for her outside of his bed—and in fact made few demands on her there, either. His business kept him occupied almost constantly, and he and his associates were old enough to be her father. Their British wives had teenage children and nothing in common with an American gi
rl barely out of her teens herself. Karen was bored, lonely and miserable. Desperate to do something constructive, and against her husband’s wishes, she got a job at the document office in Ascension. When the marriage finally broke up, she decided to start her new life on Almeria, where she had a job she liked and friends she had made through her work. At the time of the government house takeover she’d been on Almeria almost five years.

  Now she sighed and tried to guess what time it was. The cellar was windowless, and without the arrival and departure of daylight it was impossible to tell. The guards changed shifts regularly, but if she took naps and missed the movement outside the door she lost track.

  Karen tapped the shoulder of the woman sitting in front of her. When Linda Folsom, who was the assistant to the governor-general and one of Karen’s friends, turned to look at her Karen tapped her wrist.

  “Eight o’clock,” Linda whispered, “p.m.”

  Karen nodded dully. They had half a day left.

  Suddenly they heard a loud commotion in the basement corridor outside their prison. The steel plated door to the hallway crashed open and a man burst into the room. He was dressed in combat fatigues and holding a submachine gun at the ready. The hostages cowered in fear, thinking that their fate had been decided twelve hours early.

  But as Karen looked at the intruder she realized that he was physically different from their captors, who were uniformly dark and slight, definitely Latin. This man was big, well over six feet tall, and very tan, with hair the color of lemon peel and brows bleached almost white by the sun. His light blue eyes raked the group as its members shrank against the walls and stared at him in horror. In the background they could see the guard lying at the tall man’s feet, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound.

  The man lowered his gun cautiously, taking in the scene before him, and raised his free hand in a placating gesture. “Ladies,” he said in English, with an unmistakable Southern drawl, “calm down. I’m on your side; I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Karen’s mind raced as she tried to determine the reason for his arrival. What on earth was another American doing in the middle of this mess? She could see the rest of the women looking around, wondering the same thing. They were still immobilized with fear and at this point wouldn’t trust anyone, no matter what he said.

  The man was already scanning their prison, checking the blank featureless walls, the single exit that had been barred by their captors. “Just keep cool and do what I say,” he added, narrowing his eyes at the air shaft near the door. He took a step closer to it and his weapon swung in a circle as he moved, almost touching one of the mail clerks who sat in front. She covered her face with her hands and began to cry with a soft mewing sound that was pathetic to hear.

  The gunman stopped his inspection of the shaft and looked around impatiently until he found the offender.

  “Keep quiet, will you?” he said shortly. “Unless you cooperate I’m not going to get you out of here.”

  There was a slight noise outside and he whirled for the door, lifting his weapon purposefully. The crying woman screamed.

  “Will somebody shut her up?” he said rudely, turning back and indicating the terrified clerk with the barrel of his gun. “She’s going to get us all killed.”

  Karen got up and moved through the group to her colleague’s side to put a comforting arm around her shoulder. “Shh,” she said to the woman, who was as rigid as wood, frozen with apprehension. “I really think he’s here to help us.”

  Another man dressed like the blond dashed through the door and barked something to his companion, departing almost as quickly as he had arrived. The gunman faced the trapped women and announced rapidly, “Look, ladies, we’ve got about ten minutes to pull this off. Every one of us is going to die right here unless you listen to me and can the hysterics.”

  “So far,” Karen replied clearly, the first one of the group to speak, “the only person who seems close to hysterics is you.”

  The man whipped his head around to look at her, his pale eyes meeting hers over the intervening distance. After a silence lasting a couple of seconds he grinned and said, “You’ll do. Come with me.”

  Karen stared back at him, shocked into silence. Sorry that she had called attention to herself, she had no choice but to do as he said. She picked her way over the sprawled limbs of the other hostages and stood before the intruder, her gaze wary.

  He grabbed her wrist and hauled her after him into the corridor with such strength that her feet barely seemed to touch the floor. He called over his shoulder to the women left behind in the basement, “The rest of you stay put. I’ll be back.”

  Karen almost tripped over the prone guard on the way out. She halted, pulling the gunman up short.

  “Is he dead?” she whispered.

  Her companion looked down at the guerrilla, insensible on the floor.

  “Nah,” he said dismissively. “Don’t worry about him. He’ll have a shiner and a headache tomorrow, that’s all. In a few months he’ll be showing his scar to the girls and telling them what a glorious hero of the revolution he is.”

  He took off again, pulling Karen in his wake. They fled up a flight of stairs and into an outer room with a view of the street.

  “Who do you work for?” Karen asked as he left her to go to the window. He flattened himself against the wall next to it.

  “I work for me,” he replied, ducking forward and taking a quick look at the road. He glanced back at her and gestured to the hall they’d just left. “Where does that corridor lead?” he asked.

  “To the staircase running down to the main lobby.” The Government House was a converted mansion from the British settlement period and featured the central staircase common to many of those homes.

  She watched as he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket and studied it. She could see that it was a floor plan of the building. His profile was very clean, very sharp, as he bent over the blueprint; he looked like a seasoned professional athlete studying a game plan rather than the soldier he obviously was.

  “Good,” he said, replacing the map in his pocket. He looked at her again and said, “You’re an American?”

  “Yes.”

  “So am I,” he offered unnecessarily, pushing the curtain back from the window with the saber point of his rifle and taking another look at the street. The sun had set and dusk was spreading over the landscape. “Where you from?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “Oh, yeah? I’m from Florida myself but I know Jersey. I spent the night in jail once near Newark—you know that part of the state?”

  Karen stared at him. Were they really having this singles’ bar conversation while the Government House was under siege? And why had he abducted her away from the other women?

  The second question was answered as he said, “As soon as I see the trucks coming to pick you up, I want you to go back downstairs. You herd those other women out to the emergency exit by the kitchen loading dock and get them ready to go. I’ll meet you there after I make sure these floors are clear. Got it?”

  “I think so,” Karen replied faintly. “We’re being rescued?”

  “That’s the idea.” He peered at her closely, wondering if he had misjudged her mettle. “I need you to help me, now,” he said warningly. “Can I count on you to do that?”

  Karen nodded briskly, with more certainty than she felt.

  “What’s your name?” he fired at her, taking another covert glance at the street. A shot from below glanced off the window frame with an eerie, whistling sound, and a scattering of wood chips spattered against the glass pane.

  “I knew we hadn’t taken them all out down there,” he muttered to himself, falling back against the wall.

  “Karen Walsh,” Karen said, swallowing hard.

  “Steve Colter. Pleased to meet you,” he replied, with another wicked grin. Now that the initial shock of their meeting was receding, Karen could acknowledge to herself that he was very attractiv
e. He had a disturbing physical presence, and a disarming manner that made itself felt even under these less than favorable circumstances.

  “Mr. Colter, uh, what’s going on?” she asked him. “Why are you here?”

  “The Brits hired me to get you people out. We’re taking you to their embassy in Caracas.”

  “Venezuela?”

  He winked. “You know another one?”

  “But why?”

  “Closest British embassy around here.”

  “No, why are you doing this?”

  He checked the magazine on his weapon, releasing the cartridge and then reloading it with a sharp metallic sound. “For money, honey.”

  “Oh, you’re a mercenary.”

  “That’s me,” he said, leaning forward and raising his head to peer into the distance, “a summer soldier. I go anywhere the weather’s warm and the pay is good.” He straightened suddenly, alerted by some action in the courtyard and said urgently, “The trucks are here. You know what to do. Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready,” Karen said breathlessly.

  “Good girl. Go, now. Run!”

  Karen dashed back to the cellar supply room and ushered her band of ex-prisoners to the appointed spot.

  “Where are we going?” Linda asked Karen as they hurried through the labyrinth of passageways that led to the loading dock. All ten of the women had followed Karen’s direction without objection, her bravery in speaking up to Colter apparently having convinced them that she should be in charge.

  “To the loading dock,” Karen replied. “Colter is going to meet us there.”

  “Is that his name, Colter?”

  “Yes. He’s an American.”

  “I gathered that,” Linda said crisply. She was British and her father was a government official. “Is that Yank supposed to be rescuing us?”