The Right Stuff. Merline Lovelace

up. He was a tousled-haired boy of three or four. He was also blind, Cari realized when his groping hands failed to connect with hers. Gulping, she took a better stance and stretched out her arms. His chubby fingers found her sleeves and dug in.

      “Okay, I’ve got him.”

      To her consternation, she soon discovered each of the children possessed some form of physical disability. One dragged his right leg. Another had a cleft palate that left his young face tragically disfigured. The merry gap-toothed girl had a spine so twisted she couldn’t stand upright. Dismayed, Cari waited for Mac to climb aboard.

      “I had to bring them,” he said in response to her silent query. “The Whites wouldn’t leave them.”

      Dragging off his boonie hat, he swiped an arm across his sweat-drenched face. Only then did Cari see the vicious-looking cut on his forehead. Someone—Dr. White, she guessed—had added a few neat stitches. Before Cari could ask Mac what he’d run into, the tall, lanky missionary grabbed her hand and pumped it.

      “I’m Reverend Harry White. I can’t tell you how grateful we are to you for coming after us. The fighting in the area drove off the villagers weeks ago. We had no one to help us bring the children through the jungle.”

      “Yes, well…”

      “Our church has arranged adoptions for them, you see. My sister and I have been trying to get them to the States for almost two years.”

      “Sister?”

      Cari’s glance cut to the doctor. She’d assumed—they’d all assumed—the Whites were husband and wife. Obviously the intelligence supplied for this hastily mounted operation had missed a few minor details.

      “We’ve paid a fortune in bribes,” Janice White put in, picking up on her brother’s comment. “Obviously not to the right people.”

      “No matter,” the reverend said with a smile. “We’re on our way now.”

      “Hang on a minute!”

      Cari shot a quick glance at Mac. His shrug indicated he’d already covered this ground once with the Whites. Biting her lip, she faced the minister.

      “Are you suggesting we smuggle these kids out of Caribe?”

      “Yes,” the man of God replied simply.

      Cari pursed her lips. She was an officer in the United States Coast Guard. A major portion of her job was to prevent the kind of illegal emigration the missionary was suggesting. She’d lost count of the number of vessels crammed with refugees she and other coast guard crews had been forced to turn back. Small boats carrying whole families across miles of open sea. Fishing trawlers trying to slip fifty or so desperate souls past coastal patrols. Container ships with hidden compartments stuffed with starving, suffocating cargo.

      “Smuggling them out is our only recourse at this point,” Reverend White said earnestly. “As Janice said, we’ve been working on their papers for more than two years. Finding a responsible official to deal with was difficult enough before the fighting erupted. Now, it’s well nigh…”

      “Harry!”

      His sister’s frantic cry jerked the missionary around.

      “Where’s Paulo?”

      “Isn’t he with you?”

      “No.”

      “Dear Lord above!” The reverend spun back to Mac, his face contorted with panic. “He was right ahead of me. I can’t imagine how… When…”

      “I’ll find him,” Mac said grimly. His glance cut to Cari. “You’d better get Pegasus ready to swim. I picked up some radio chatter a while back. It sounded close. So close I didn’t want to risk using my own radio until I knew I could get the kids safely aboard.”

      Well, that explained why he’d skipped an interim signal. Unfortunately, the explanation didn’t particularly sit well with Cari. The idea that the bad guys were poking around nearby upped her pucker factor considerably. Climbing over kids and backpacks, she made her way to the cockpit.

      Scant minutes later she had Pegasus ready to plunge back into the river. He sat nosed half on, half off the bank. Cari kept the engines churning gently in reverse, with just enough power to keep her craft from being dragged along with the current. The rear hatch remained open. All the while her heart pounded out the seconds until Mac returned.

      She hated this business of being left behind. She was used to sailing her ship, her crew and herself into action, not sitting at the controls while someone else took the lead. She wanted in on the action.

      Mac had been right, she thought grimly. She wasn’t the barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen type. As much as she ached for a child of her own, she knew she belonged right here, right now. No one else could have maneuvered Pegasus up this narrow, twisting river. No one else could get it back down.

      Which she hoped to do.

      Like, soon!

      They only had a few hours of daylight left. She didn’t relish navigating the Rio Verde in the dark, even with all the sophisticated instrumentation crammed into Pegasus. It was time to make tracks.

      Where the heck was Mac?

      He came crashing through the ferns several heart-pounding minutes later. He had a scruffy little boy tucked under one elbow and his assault rifle tight in the crook of the other. Cari’s breath wheezed out on a small sigh of relief.

      The next instant, she sucked it back in again. Right before her eyes, the fronds above Mac’s head began to dance wildly. A heartbeat later, she heard the deadly splat, splat, splat of bullets tearing through the leaves.

      He was taking fire!

      Twisting in her seat, Cari shouted a terse order. “Dr. White! Reverend! Get the children down flat on the deck! Now!”

      She waited only long enough to see Mac and the kid come diving through the rear opening. Slewing back around, she hit the switch to close the hatch, wrapped her fist around the throttles and thrust the engines to full forward.

      Pegasus sailed off the bank. His belly hit the river’s surface with a smack that would have rattled Cari’s teeth if she hadn’t already clenched them tight. Her jaw locked, she aimed her craft for the dark, rushing channel in the middle of the river.

      She expected to hear bullets pinging off the canopy at any second. The bubble was made of some new composite that was supposed to be able to withstand a direct hit from a mortar, but she wasn’t particularly anxious to test the shield’s survivability.

      She made it to midstream without any bullets cracking against the canopy. As soon as the depth finder registered enough clearance, she took Pegasus under.

      The water closed around them. The view ahead became one of swirling currents, darting fish and dark, fuzzy shapes. As she had during the torturous journey upriver, Cari kept her gaze locked on the sonar screen. All she needed to do now was ram a jagged stump or slimy green bolder.

      She didn’t relax her vigil until Mac slid into the seat beside her and assumed duties as navigator. Blowing out a ragged breath, Cari slanted him glance.

      “Is the kid okay?”

      “Yeah. He’s a tough little runt.” A rueful smile flitted across Mac’s face. “He’s the one who put this crease in my forehead.”

      “How’d he do that?”

      “He beaned me with a rock.”

      Despite the tension still stringing her as tight as an anchor cable, Cari had to laugh. “That’s going to make a great story at the bar when we get back to base. So what happened? How did you lose him?”

      “My guess is he fell back and couldn’t call out to us to wait for him.”

      “Couldn’t?”

      Mac’s