I saw the little blue eyed blond as soon as she came into the bar I hang out in in Rio Azul. I drink a few beers there when I make my infrequent trips in from the jungle for supplies.
Among other things I'd once been an engineer for one of the world's largest oil companies. I'd found some good indications in water and soil samples of a large gold vein in a site somewhere upriver and had felt no compulsion to point out my intuitions to my employers. Oh, I sent the results in, but my hunch about them was my own.
They'd paid me to find oil and I'd found it for them. Now I was back in South America on my own time to see if I could find the source of that gold leeching into the river and prove a claim on it.
So there I was, sitting at the bar that evening drinking luke-warm beer, and minding my own business. She walked through the open doorway and I checked her out, as every other man in the place did. She wasn't the beauty queen slash centerfold sort. Her face had an attractiveness that was innocent, open, and intelligent. Damned cute seemed to fit as a description.
Her long blond hair was done up in the puppy ear things on each side of her head I'd always considered dopey and far too young for most women above the age of twelve to wear. On her they looked sensible in the tropical heat, ultra-feminine, and utterly adorable. I knew in that moment, I wanted her.
She sat at a table and as the bartender walked to take her order I glanced around the room. What have we here? Jorge and Manuel, two of the biggest troublemakers in Rio Azul were pointedly ignoring the lady? It didn't take a genius to figure they were up to something crooked, and it involved the cute blond.
Like I said, It was none of my business, but she was so damned cute! I stood and walked to her table. "Pablo, I'll pay for her drink." I told the bartender. I asked her then, "Ma'am, would you mind if I sat and spoke with you for a moment?"
"Sir," she said in a somewhat frightened sounding voice, "my guide is taking me to my husband and he told me to stay here and not to speak to anyone. He said I'd be taken care of."
I sat down in the chair across from her, "Ma'am," I told her, "unless you have the 101st Airborne waiting outside, you and I are both in deep trouble, you have been betrayed!" I heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and as I turned, I instinctively ducked, which was probably what kept the bottle Jorge swung from killing me.
As I came up I put nearly two hundred pounds of very pissed off Texan behind the uppercut I landed on Jorge's jaw. I heard the satisfactory crunch of cracking teeth and bone and saw he'd stupidly had his tongue protruding from his mouth when he'd swung at me. He'd be talking with a lisp from now on, if at all!
I whirled and ducked as I charged at Manuel, who had a handful of a cute breast and was dragging the blond toward the door. My ducking again saved me from stopping a beer bottle with my head! I dragged him away from her, and threw him against the adobe wall. I held him there by his throat and gave him what we call back home a punctuation ass kicking. I asked him, "What are you going to do to the cute little lady now, asshole?" Each of my words, punctuated by my fist in his face, bounced his head off the solid wall.
I looked around to see they had no reinforcements who dared to buy into this fight. I turned to her, "You're damned good at looking cute, Lady, how are you at running?" It turned out she was pretty damned good at that, too, and she dashed out the door, except she was running away from the river. My boat, motor, and provisions were in the other direction.
I allowed her to lead for a hundred yards, then told her at the next opening between the buildings, "Follow me now, and stay close!" Fear is a good motivator. She was right behind me when we reached the river and found my boat, concealed under some overhanging trees. I was beginning to like having her follow me around, but forced my mind back to more serious things, like surviving the night.
We'd gone only a few miles upriver when I first heard the helicopter, and knew we were in even worse shit than I'd thought. I pulled into the riverbank and told her to duck, they were using searchlights. My .45 pistol was in my hand, but I didn't want to start a gunfight, especially with a lady in my boat. They went over us, and the cute lady asked me, "Uh, couldn't that be rescuers?"
"Think about it, Ma'am," I asked her, "it's been less than an hour since the attack on us. These are the jungles of South America. Who would know a failed kidnap or murder attempt had been made on you, and have a helicopter out here searching already?"
I couldn't see her face, but I heard her say, "Oh shit!" My suspicions were verified when someone in the copter that had passed overhead opened up at something in the water with automatic weapons fire!
Working while I was talking to her, I knew anyone with choppers could bring in infrared binoculars, and infrared scopes for rifles, too. We had to get further away from the river than they'd expect us to travel in case they thought of using them to search the jungle from helicopters. I pulled the boat motor off and sank the boat with rocks, pushing it deep enough into the water its profile shouldn't be visible.
All evidence of our passing was removed from the bank of the river, except for a distress sign that would stand out like a sore thumb to the five superbly trained men from my former military troops now waiting for me to return to our camp with supplies.
I couldn't risk dumping the motor in the river because of the danger of an oil slick being noticed. We made two trips to a staging area I established a mile from the river where we concealed the motor and all the supplies we could not carry with us immediately. Perhaps you're wondering how I was finding my way back to those sites in the dark?
My superior navigation skills I'd learned in Uncle Sam's Army, of course. My handy Global Positioning System receiver I'd bought at a neighborhood electronics store back in the States helped, too. Never leave home and go into the jungle without one!
