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round of drinks for the females, when another woman caught his eye.
    She was sitting at the opposite end, of the bar, in a very darkened corner, talking to three other women. It was only that she had lit a cigarette and the match illuminated her face that Hunter saw her at all. And while JT’s friends may or may not have been “working girls,” there was no doubt that the four women at the table in question were hookers.
    Is that really her? he thought.
    Hunter hastily excused himself and slowly made his way, down the crowded bar, attempting to get a closer look at the woman. When one of her companions lit a cigarette of her own, he was able to glimpse the mystery woman once again.
    Despite the pound and a half of make-up, he could see she was very pretty, with beautiful long brown hair and what looked to be a lovely figure.
    Could it really be her?
    He inched his way farther through the crowd until he arrived at the very end of the bar and staked out a position just ten feet from where the four hookers were sitting.
    Suddenly he felt a tap on his shoulder.
    “Interested in the merchandise, pal?”
    He turned, slowly and faced a small, bejeweled, white-suited man.
    “You talking to me?” he asked, instinctively reaching for the butt of his shouldered M-16.
    “Yeah,” the small man replied, his voice betraying some kind of foreign accent Hunter couldn’t quite place. “I saw you eye-balling the produce. You want to buy or what?”
    Once again, a cigarette was lit at the table, this one fully illuminating the face of the woman in question.
    Goddamn , Hunter thought, it is her.
    “How much?” he asked the pimp, never taking his eyes off the woman.
    “One bag of gold for one,” the slimy little individual answered. “Three bags for all four.”
    Hunter couldn’t help but laugh in his face. “Sure, pal,” he said retrieving a single bag of silver from his flight suit and passing it to the man. “This is for the pretty brunette. You can keep the change.”
    The man grudgingly took the silver. “I got rooms, too,” he said. “Nearby. Only two bags of silver …”
    Hunter pushed the man away from him and was already walking over to the table. “I won’t need a room,” he told him.
    A few seconds later, Hunter was standing over the table, the woman looking up at him through a haze of mascara and eye liner.
    Even though she recognized him right away, she showed absolutely no surprise. “Fancy meeting you here,” she said, blowing a stream of cigarette smoke up into his face.
    He reached down and gave her arm a slight, yet forceful tug.
    “Come on,” he said somewhat harshly. “I just bought you.”
    “My dream has come true,” she said, gathering her things together. She crushed out her cigarette and stood up, straightening out her black negligee-style mini-dress in the process. “See you later, girls,” she said, winking at her companions.
    At the other end of the bar, JT had been following Hunter’s actions with almost painful curiosity. Now, as he watched Hunter lead the hooker back through the crowd and toward the front door, he turned to Ben and said: “Since when did he start paying for it?”
    Ben turned and was about to say something when he got his first good look at the painted lady.
    “I can’t believe it,” he said. “That can’t be who I think it is.”
    Just before he reached the door, Hunter glanced back over his shoulder at his two friends, a very strange expression on his face.
    It was Elizabeth.
    She was the same woman who, not a month before, Hunter had tramped all over Central and South America trying to locate. She and her father had been major players in the plan the United Americans had used to prevent the fascist organization, The Twisted Cross, from destroying the Panama Canal. In fact, her father was the man responsible for building a crucial piece of equipment that helped Hunter deactivate the 52 nuclear-tipped underwater mines the Cross had placed in the Panama