Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,63
rising note of panic in her voice.
Instead of answering, Emiliano opened the cab door, jumped out, and walked forward several feet along the roadway. He was quickly joined by Jackie, who wanted to see for herself what the problem was.
They stood at the edge of a crater that took up almost the entire roadway. Something had gouged a huge chunk out of the road’s surface. It was easy to see that the hole was wide enough and deep enough to prevent the truck from continuing forward.
“What happened here?” Jackie asked.
“I don’t know,” Emiliano said. “Maybe a torrential rainstorm washed away some of the road. Or maybe a slight earth tremor caused this section to collapse.”
“How are we going to get around it?”
“We can’t go forward; that hole’s too deep and too wide. There isn’t enough room here to turn the truck around and go back the way we came. And I don’t see us driving backward until we find someplace wide enough to turn the truck around. That could be miles back down the road.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I guess we’re stuck here, unless you want to hike the rest of the way to Oriente Province.”
Jackie made a face and looked down at her ballet flats. “Unfortunately, I left my hiking shoes at home.”
Emiliano looked up in frustration. Jackie followed his line of vision.
Directly above the crater, about fifteen feet up the side of the mountain, was a shelflike outcropping. It seemed to be holding in place a tumble of rocks that had somehow shaken loose from the mountain above them. The accumulation of rocks had been prevented from falling farther down the slope by this small ledge.
Hearing a sound from down the mountain, Jackie went over to the edge of the road and looked over it. Below on the switchback, headed in their direction but still some distance away, was a jeep climbing the mountain road. It held four soldiers, and Jackie could see a machine gun mounted on a post at the rear of the vehicle.
“Emiliano,” she called with urgency in her voice.
Emiliano joined her and looked down. He saw the jeep and said, “Could be Sanchez’s men. Or just a random road patrol. Either way, if they stop us, we’re dead meat. We have to figure a way to get over that crater before they get here.”
As Jackie watched, Emiliano looked over at the crater in the roadway, then up to the suspended rock fall, then back down again. He did this, looking down, then up, several more times. Something was obviously going on in his mind.
“Emiliano,” she prompted him. As though shaken out of his trance, he looked at her.
“It’s odd,” he said, “but there seem to be enough fallen rocks up there to fill this hole in the roadway. If only we had some way of removing that shelf. If we could just blow it up, all those loose rocks would come tumbling down the slope and fill up this crater.” He sighed, then continued, “Where’s a stick of dynamite when you really need one?”
Jackie could see that Emiliano was unprepared to have his rhetorical question answered in so prompt a fashion. “Wait here,” she said, and ran back to the truck. When she returned to him, she was holding the messenger bag. As Emiliano looked on, Jackie reached into it and withdrew a single stick of dynamite. Emiliano’s jaw literally dropped open.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Jacqueline, what else do you have in there? A bazooka? A battering ram? A nuclear warhead, maybe? Where did you get that?”
“From the Teatro de Cinema. I took the dynamite to keep the fire from setting it off. I guess I forgot that I had it with me,” she explained with a note of chagrin in her voice.
“You forgot?” Emiliano asked in disbelief.
“Well, we’ve been on the run, and I’ve had so many more important things to think about. Besides, I had no idea where to ditch them.”
“Them? You have more than this one?”
“Oh, yes, I have a whole bundle of them. Do you want more?”
“No, I think one will suffice.” He shook his head as though unable to believe that his companion of the last few days had been walking around with enough dynamite to blow them to pieces, and yet hadn’t thought to warn him of that distinct possibility.
Her face red with embarrassment, Jackie handed him the stick of dynamite and watched while Emiliano looked it over. She saw him frown.