Chapter 14: Bloodshed, Aftermath, Paparazzi

We lost the next day of movie making because of all the police, news people, and even people from Sony that flew in. I guess the Policia had friends in the media, because right behind the authorities that arrived in the morning twilight came the press – the paparazzi, even several American reporters. I guessed it was a slow news week. Shortly after dawn, most of film crew trooped through the woods to the clearing where I had found and neutralized the six men. The corpses of four of our guards, and severe wounding of several others attested to the ruthlessness of the kidnappers; the remaining guards had been knocked unconscious.

The Policia found from some of the living abductors that they knew Jill Dane was a well-known celebrity, and from the newspapers our film location, so they thought they would capture her and get a ransom for the ‘Famous Film Lady.’ She had been a specific target; they found publicity pictures of Jill in the truck. One officer who spoke broken English explained to me that the young men were thugs in the area with a known bad reputation.

While I thought the policia left a lot to be desired in terms of thoroughness, I agreed with the conclusions they jumped to, particularly since it absolved me of being detained or of any arrest or prosecution for what I had done to the men, including two deaths.

I had killed one man outright with a shot to his chest. Another had died because of the head wound I inflicted with the granite ocks in my sock that made a wonderful sap. Two others had severe concussions and would have headaches for a long time. I doubted they had a lot of aspirin in a Nicaraguan prison. I had shattered another man’s femur with a rifle shot. The man who surrendered was the only unscathed one of the lot. The police told me that he described me a the devil incarnate.

The kidnappers who were alive were placed one each in four police vehicles and taken away to jail and medical treatment. I offered to appear in court; however, the head of the local Policia waved his hand dismissively. He didn’t believe my testimony would be needed inasmuch as the evidence against the six men was so strong, including Jill’s identification of three of the men that had burst into her motorhome. Based on his comments, I figured out really fast that the justice system in that country worked a little different from the one in the U.S.

That left only the press to deal with.

From the time they arrived in the small field, the photographers had started to take pictures of me and everything else around, including the dead men, and those I had bound and tied – even in the dim dawn. There were constantly photos as well as video being taken.

Jill came back to the field driven by some of the armed police. She’d put on a peasant dress so she looked like an innocent woman the men had tried to take advantage of instead of the nymphomaniac vamp I knew she could be. A doctor from the American Embassy was part of the entourage; he gave us the good news that she didn’t have a concussion, just a bad bruise. She, too, became the target of the photographers. We promised them a press conference soon. Thus, at noon after working all morning with the detectives, Mark, Jill and I held an impromptu news conference near the pickup truck that I’d disabled. Barry Peter’s cute and sexy girlfriend from the night before was bilingual and served as our interpreter.

Jill told her story to the press, and I followed with mine. Jill described how she had just finished her shower and was drying herself when the men burst into her motorhome with knives and a rifle. She grabbed a raincoat to cover herself, but not before the lead man had ‘copped a feel’ as she put it. I told the press about being stopped outside my own motorhome and being made to lie face down in the dirt, seeing Jill’s abduction as the kidnapper’s exited from the clearing where our vans stood. I skipped the part about needing to take a pee in the woods.

I briefly described my background as a Green Beret, and then blow-by-blow took them through the steps I took to locate the men and disable them. I tried to downplay my part in the event, but given the facts that was impossible. While I acted modestly, I also tried to give the impression that I had more tricks up my sleeve and so did many of the others in the filming crew.

Jill spoke and described me as the greatest hero in her life; she pledged her undying love for me in the process, calling me an old friend whose courage and heroic powers she had not known of before that day. I had become her prince in shining armor. She kept using glowing adjectives about me, to the point where I blushed and told her to tone it down. The media ate up all that stuff; the stenographers could barely keep up with her glowing words.

Mark Ang, our movie director for Pressure Limit, fielded a few questions about the movie, why they’d picked this site to film – a good question, and how the attack would impact the movie. After that we ended our panel, and we walked back to the motorhomes at our film site. Behind us, two hearses from the local coroner’s office were collecting the two bodies I’d left. The ghouls with the cameras photographed and taped loading the two dead men into the vehicles, and their exit from the field.

Mark assembled the entire film crew and cast – everyone – in front of the makeshift hut we’d been filming at the day before. He announced that we would not sleep overnight or work in the dark at the film site again. He had already arranged for some of the motorhomes in our caravan to be driven to Granada mainly with our luggage. They would be parked adjacent to the Granada Hotel and Spa, but we would not sleep in them; we’d sleep in the hotel under continuous armed guard – guards he guaranteed would be more alert and vigilant that the previous ones. He also introduced a new Head of Security; a man whose profile resembled a large block of granite; he talked about new security precautions both during filming and when we were ‘off duty.’ We had another week in Nicaragua to finish filming at this part of the film, and we would be well protected.

Late that evening, I didn’t hear the timid knock on my door as I worked on the movie script on one of the two beds in our room; the knock was so soft. On the other bed, a very naked Ellen caught my eye and pointed to the door; she lay in bed reading – Claire sat next to her in transparent light blue baby doll pajamas working on her laptop. The room was hot and didn’t invite sleeping. In my briefs, I unlocked and opened my hotel door; Jill stood there with a forlorn look on her face. My new personal bodyguard and hers stood behind her – wearing bullet proof vests and looking like large blocks of concrete; Jill had on the same trench coat she’d been kidnapped in.

“I can’t ... It’s just ... Oh, please let me sleep with you guys tonight. Please. I don’t want to be alone.” She had tears in her eyes and reached for me just as I invited her in. The two guards smirked. They already knew I’d retired for the night with my two younger and beautiful ‘assistants.’ Now, eat your hearts out, one of the hottest movie stars in the world also wanted a piece of me. I smirked back and shut the door. I wondered if that little episode would end up in some scandal sheet. It didn’t.

Jill hurled herself into my arms and held on for dear life. She was trembling and crying. I had apparently under-estimated the effect of the prior nights abduction on her. All day, she had been cool, calm, and collected, even through our group dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. I really had believed she had found a way to blow off the whole episode as a crazy night and nothing more.

Jill starting sobbing into my chest as she hugged me. Ellen and Claire came over and surrounded the distressed woman. After a couple of minutes, her pent up stress seemed to drain from her body, and Jill allowed Claire to help her remove her coat. Beneath the long coat, she wore a scoop neck pink silk camisole that flared into a very short skirt of the same material. The little outfit left little to my imagination.

Claire pulled Jill into my bed and arranged Jill so she reclined between Claire’s legs with her back to Claire’s torso – Claire wrapped her arms around her and hug her. I lay against one side of Jill; Ellen’s nude body spooned against Jill from the other side. I dimmed the lights. We wrapped our arms around Jill from all directions. We kept whispering words of solace and comfort to her – words of safety, protection, and security.

Occasionally, Jill would break out sobbing for no particular reason. She was in shock. After shuddering, she finally quieted down, psychic exhaustion took over, and she fell asleep in our arms. The three of us slept holding her all night.

After a long quiet spell about anybody from Hollywood in the media, punctuated only by another star’s DUI charge and series of court appearances, the abduction of Hollywood’s hottest female star – Jill Danes – hit the American media like a nuclear explosion inside a doll house.

Every reputable newspaper, magazine, and newscast, as well as all the scandal sheets, had Jill and me on the cover. The headlines of some told the whole story:

Mellon Rescues Danes From Death
Danes Saved by Country Music Costar
Mellon Is Better Than Rambo
Don’t Mess With Mellon – He’s Deadly
Dane’s Abduction Foiled by Death-Defying Costar
Jim Mellon Foils Kidnapping of Jill Danes
Mellon Kills Two to Rescue Movie Star Danes

They went on and on, everyone slightly different from the previous one. Some magazines proclaimed they had exclusive interviews with the two of us, only to repeat – with some inaccuracies – what Jill and I had told the assembly of the paparazzi in the impromptu news conference in that Nicaraguan field the same day I rescued Jill.

People magazine devoted a dozen pages to the kidnapping and rescue. They had the best picture spread too, even with shots of the two bodies covered in tarps. Dozens of other pictures in their coverage also showed Jill and me at the site, talking to the police, at the news conference, and pointing to various areas of the site for the other paparazzi or the police. Every supermarket tabloid had us splashed across the cover with other salacious headlines about aliens helping me or sea monsters actually doing the abduction.

In Hollywood parlance, this was a ‘Really, Really, REALLY Big Deal!’

I couldn’t believe how fast the news traveled.

More and more American reporters showed up at our film sites by the hour; no doubt flown in by private jet. The media seemed to be sparing no expense to get some coverage on this. Mark had to hire addition security to keep them at bay and to keep them from wandering into our filming. Jill and I agreed with Sony that we would give ‘official’ interviews to ET, Extra, People, US, and Hollywood Today. Reuters and the Associated Press would be allowed to sit in on two of the interviews, as well as La Prensa, the leading Nicaraguan newspaper.

In a brief lull the afternoon of the kidnapping, Mark gave me his satellite phone, and I called Crystal in Russia – the locale for part of the movie she was filming. Amazingly, I got through to her on the first try. The more I described the kidnap and rescue to her, the more frantic she got about my well-being. I kept reassuring her that I’d come out of the whole thing unscathed except for a dirty t-shirt. Ellen talked to her sister, too, confirming that all was good. Eventually, Crystal calmed down, but then she started babbling to me about how much she loved me and didn’t want me to do anything dangerous ever again in my whole life. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on in Moscow, where I’d found her doing her film, but I could tell she wanted to get home and be with me. I guessed that the fascination with her hunky co-star George Rinard had worn off and he’d become human.