Operation Turtle Ransom_A suspenseful, wild-ride-of-an-adventure on a tropical beach in Mexico by Kimberli A. Bindschatel

Author:Kimberli A. Bindschatel [Bindschatel, Kimberli A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turning Leaf Productions LLC
Published: 2017-09-27T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

After gathering what tools and equipment we had that might be of use, we headed back down the beach to find a good place to hide before sunset when the turtles would come, and the poachers after them.

The two-way radios had wired earbuds. Not ideal, but at least we could cover more ground and be able to communicate. I took my cell phone, too, just in case. There was no cell reception on the beach, but who knows where we’d end up.

My plan was to set up a stakeout, identify one huevero who might be easy to follow, and go from there. We had one shot at this. We couldn’t risk being seen and scare them away, or worse, end up in a confrontation.

Not far down the shore, we started to see more turtles hauling out of the surf, and up onto the beach, to lay their eggs. I couldn’t help but feel for them; dragging those heavy bodies across the sand seemed so difficult for an animal whose entire life was spent weightlessly swimming in the ocean.

“This looks like a good spot to hide,” Noah urged, stealing my attention from the turtles.

I followed him and Chris into the bushes.

He handed me a pair of binoculars and I scoped the area. No sign of poachers yet.

“Now we wait.”

Chris scanned the beach with such intensity, if a poacher even thought of coming by, he’d know.

A growing dread gnawed at the insides of my stomach. I’d never been nervous on a stakeout before. Not like this. Maybe I was just used to Dalton. With him, I knew my back was covered. He wouldn’t falter. He would do exactly as he’d promised.

Noah was capable, but a bit of a wild card. I wasn’t sure what he might do. His logic took him to greater extremes, but it was logic, of sorts. At least I knew he wasn’t volatile.

Chris, on the other hand, was proving to be unpredictable. I had to figure out what to do about him.

As the sun dropped below the horizon, more and more turtles emerged from the waves. Soon there were so many that they were crawling over each other, fighting for any patch of sand, some digging nests where another nest had just been made. For as far as we could see, the smooth beach had turned into an undulating mass of turtle shells.

Since this was the second night of the arribada, the slower turtles were arriving—the old, the sick, the injured. I spotted one with an abnormal hump in its shell, then another with a chunk torn from its backside, probably from a shark. Some of the more feeble ones didn’t make it very far up the beach and started digging before they even got past the tide line.

The heat and humidity from the jungle seemed to envelope us. We were only a few feet off the beach into the foliage, but any breeze wasn’t getting in here. A trickle of sweat made its way down my spine.

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