086- Maracas

Part of the everyday routine of a dream of a life of romantic adventure. Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

Tonight, we escape to a murderous conflict of greed and passion aboard a coast-wise tramp steamer headed for Central America, as John and Gwen Bagnie tell it in their exciting tale, Maraca. I'm standing in the little patio of a cantina in Maracas.

The air is heavy with a scent of tropical vines tequila and gunpowder. There's broken glass everywhere, and the most appalling silence. Captain Kelso is standing here with me, so is Estelle. And General Topaz and his men, their swarthy faces, serious, completely erasing their earlier gaiety.

The party is over. We're all waiting for General Topaz to give the order. And then... That maybe I'd better start at the beginning. I know now I should never have taken the birth that's made on the Bruno.

She's a coast-wise tramp out of San Diego, but at the time I figured working under that loudmouth, sadistic slave-driving calso was better than the Siemens Mission. They were carrying a cargo for Santa Gato and two passengers.

From the beginning, the voids fell trouble. The one thing we weren't long out of Dego when we ran into the blow. I wasn't too concerned about it, but I went to notify the old man purely as a matter of routine.

I found him sprawled across his bark his mouth open, snoring. There were a couple of empties on the floor and another in the basin. Captain Kelso. Hey, Skipper. Hey, Skipper. Tom, we're running into weather.