Whirlwind

by David Klass

  Charred stumps. Rocks. An occasional empty streambed. All covered by a funereal shroud of cinders.

  Gisco, where are we?

  Back from the dead, are you? That must have been one hard crack on the noggin. How are you feeling?

  These bumps don’t make it any easier. What is this place? What happened to the rain forest?

  Colonel Aranha is no friend of the trees.

  How’s the boy?

  I don’t know. He can’t speak and he’s not telepathic. He is feisty, though. He tried to bite the arm of the guy who clubbed you, and got knocked down pretty hard for it.

  How come you didn’t try to bite the guy’s arm?

  Could it be because he was carrying a submachine gun? Gisco asks rhetorically. Yes, I believe that was the reason. Then, excited and frightened: Jack, look!

  What?

  Over there! The gates of hell. And they’re opening!

  38

  Jungle fortress meets desert prison. The scorched wasteland is broken by an enormous fence, topped by rings of razor wire. Guard towers are visible at intervals, with armed sentries standing stock-still.

  Only one way in. A massive gate. The buckle on this formidable mesh belt. I try to puzzle out why an army regiment in this remote part of the Amazon might need such a fortress. To keep enemies out? For intimidation? To protect valuables? Or because things are happening inside that are so horrible they are best kept secret?

  Our transport vehicle rolls up and the gate slides open. We roll in and the enormous gate closes behind us. I force both eyes open as we rumble down a road toward a compound of low buildings. They look like army barracks—and were clearly designed for functionality rather than comfort or elegance.

  They also look strangely familiar.

  I recall my vision of P.J. in chains, menaced by a giant spider.

  Gisco, I’ve been here before, in my dream about P.J.

  It must be the colonel’s base. I hope they have a cafeteria.

  It’s a prison, Gisco. The people I saw inside it were starving to death. Those were the lucky ones.

  You really know how to put the damper on the end of a trip.

  Our transport vehicle rolls to a stop. Guards are waiting for us. They wear khaki army uniforms and carry guns and clubs. They drag us out and shove us forward.

  I hear awful sounds carried on the breeze. Men begging. Women pleading. The cries of desolate children.

  Gisco cocks his ears and looks sad.

  The boy also hears them. Recognition registers on his young face. He knows pain and helplessness.

  We pass from sunlight to gloom as the prison’s heavy door clangs shut. We’re pushed and shoved down a series of narrow and dank low-ceilinged corridors.

  The cries of misery are constant now. A mother calls her child’s name again and again. A man begs for water. The heat is sweltering. This prison was built almost without windows—the afternoon sun turns it into a kiln.

  I try to remember the twists and turns of this maze. If we ever manage to escape from our captors, I’ll have to find my way back out.

  But it’s no use. One hallway leads to another, and my head is still throbbing.

  An enormous rat runs into the corridor ahead of us and bares its teeth. One of the guards raises a pistol.

  Terrific. A sweltering, vermin-infested dungeon. Can you imagine what the mosquitoes are like at night?

  We’ll find some way out of here, Gisco. If there’s an entrance there has to be an exit.

  I hope so. But there’s an old dog saying: don’t bury your bone in too deep a hole or the hole will eat the bone.

  Faces pressed tight to the bars of the cells. Women. Kids. Malnourished. Hopeless. I slow down, scanning their faces, searching for P.J.

  A guard shoves me so hard I stumble. I whirl around and he’s got his club raised. Go ahead, his eyes urge. Give me the slightest chance to club you or shoot you. I’ve done it many times before, without guilt or remorse.

  I turn away and lower my head submissively, and feel his club jab hard into my back.

  We turn down another corridor and stop. My handcuffs are removed. Keys turn in a lock. We have reached our new home.

  They push me in, and I go sprawling. The boy is shoved in after me, and we end up in a tangled heap. Then the cell door is slammed shut and locked. It takes me a minute to realize that Gisco is not inside with us.

  I hear him growl and I whirl toward the bars.

  Two of the guards have drawn their guns and are pointing them at Gisco’s head. A third guard approaches the dog with a rope coiled into what looks like a noose.

  Gisco, don’t give them an excuse to shoot you.

  Gisco snarls at the guards again. Once they put that thing around my neck, they can do what they want to me.

  There’s no choice, I tell him. They probably just want to take you to the doggy wing of the prison.

  Or feed me to the army ants.

  I see the guards aim guns at his head. Gisco, if they shoot, they’ll kill you for sure. I’ll find a way out of here and we’ll be together again soon.

  Do you promise? I don’t like the idea of being alone and at the colonel’s mercy.

  I promise.

  Gisco stops growling and allows the noose to be draped around his neck. As soon as it’s on, the guard yanks it tight and Gisco starts choking and gasping for air.

  Keep the faith, Jack. I’ll be back. They don’t know who they’re messing with …

  Two guards grab the free end of the rope and they drag Gisco away like a trussed pig to the slaughterhouse.

  The boy and I watch helplessly and then turn back to our cell. It’s big for two people. But we’re not alone.

  39

  At least twenty other men and boys are in the same dank, gloomy space. When the guards unlocked the door with guns drawn, the inhabitants of the cell must have backed up to the far wall. Perhaps that’s the protocol here. I get the feeling if you violate one of Colonel Aranha’s rules, you don’t get a second chance.

  Now that the guards have departed, our cell mates emerge from the shadows and circle us. They don’t look pleased at having two new mouths to share their food with. The oldest must be eighty; the youngest appears to be eight or nine. Most are gaunt, some are frighteningly emaciated, and many of them look desperate to the point of madness.

  A tall man with rotting teeth makes a grab for the watch on my wrist. I instinctively swat his arm away.

  The contact produces an immediate reaction. Weapons come out. Not guns or knives, but primitive prison weapons—sharpened sticks and stones chipped into hand axes and iron shards that have been chiseled into shanks. Questions and taunts are barked at us, whispered at us, and shouted at us, in a variety of languages I don’t understand.

  I put one arm protectively around the boy and prepare to fight for my life.

  A sturdy, bearded man with what must once have been a barrel chest issues a sharp command. The hostile crowd instantly stops threatening us. Hands holding weapons freeze in midair. Lips barking taunts fall silent.

  The bearded man steps in front of us. His hair has gone white and his barrel chest has staved in, but he still looks powerful. His strong face and intelligent eyes mark him as a natural leader. He asks us a question in Spanish, and then repeats it in what I think is Portuguese.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I don’t speak those languages.”

  His face reflects surprise. “Americans!” he says.

  “I’m American. This boy is not. He was kidnapped by drug smugglers in the Andes, who cut his tongue out. My friend—that dog they just dragged away—and I helped him to escape, but then Colonel Aranha’s soldiers shot down our hot-air balloon and captured us. They brought us here.”

  As I listen to my own explanation, I’m sure no one will believe it. From the drug smugglers in the Andes to the balloon, it sounds preposterous.

  But the bearded man slowly nods. He looks the boy over as he translates my words into several different la
nguages for the benefit of our other cell mates.

  “So you are an enemy of Colonel Aranha?” he finally asks, in surprisingly good English.

  “Yes. I think he plans to kill me.”

  “He plans to kill all of us,” the bearded man says. “This prison is a slow death. How did a young American come to be the enemy of a Brazilian Army colonel?”

  “It’s complicated,” I answer. “A family feud.”

  “Family feuds are always complicated. But if you and your family are enemies of the colonel, you are welcome here.” He speaks a few words to his cell mates, and the results are immediate. The hostility vanishes from their faces. More important, their makeshift weapons disappear into pockets, mouths, armpits, and cracks in the floor.

  A few of the younger kids in the cell step forward and wave hello to the boy from the Andes. I find my hand being shaken by a dozen unshaven walking skeletons.

  “Welcome,” the bearded man says, gripping my hand firmly. “I am Ernesto. You are one of us now.”

  “Thanks. I’m Jack Danielson. But who are you? And where am I?”

  “This,” he says with an ironic laugh, running his eyes over the walls of the fetid concrete cage, “is what I like to call the future of the free and wild Amazon. I am the governor general. And you have just become one of our citizen-soldiers, which means, I’m afraid, that you will share our miserable fate.”

  40

  Ernesto introduces me to my cell mates, and one tale of woe is sadder than the next. There are four types of people one encounters in the Amazon, he explains, but only three were represented in this prison till I arrived.

  First there are the native Indians who hunted and fished in the rain forest for centuries. There are several of them in our cell, from different tribes. He identifies one sad-looking fellow as a full-blooded Korubo chief. Their lands are supposed to be protected by the government, Ernesto says, but they contain valuable hardwoods.

  A year ago, loggers penetrated deep into the exclusion zone, and the chief and his warriors defended their preserve with war clubs. Two Indians were shot and a logger was clubbed to death. Now the chief is here, wasting away, while Colonel Aranha uses his influence to help loggers raid the timber on the Korubo lands.

  I can’t tell if the chief understands what Ernesto is telling me. He looks back into my eyes for a few seconds, his own face sad and resigned, as if he has accepted that it is his fate to die in this concrete cage and just wishes it would happen sooner rather than later. Then he turns away, and peers out the cell’s one tiny window.

  Ernesto moves on to the second group, the Caboclos. They are of mixed Indian and European heritage, he says, and have retained some of their native survival skills. Many of them love the land and try to protect it.

  Ernesto himself is a Caboclo. “I was raised in the forest, in Pará State, till I was twelve. Then I was shipped off to Rio de Janeiro for schooling. I studied law,” he tells me, “but what I really loved was taking pictures. I worked as a photographer for papers all over South America. And then I came home to use my skills to expose what was going on in the forests I roamed as a boy.”

  He founded a group that tried to use modern technology to document environmental abuses. “Sometimes we took the pictures ourselves, and sometimes we gave the cameras to Indians and taught them how to use them.”

  Ernesto’s face radiates pride. “We got photos of wildcat diamond miners teaming up with local police to plunder the lands of the Cinta Larga. We had videos of roads being bulldozed for miles just to get to protected mahogany trees. We posted images on our Web site of the devastation that gold miners are causing in our rivers. Every year they dump tons of mercury into the Amazon basin.”

  “It sounds like you probably made some powerful enemies along the way,” I guess quietly.

  “Yes,” he agrees, “but I also had many friends. I would never have believed that I could just disappear. But one day as I was driving on a remote stretch of highway my car was stopped by gunmen in army uniforms, and I was blindfolded and brought here. I don’t think my family and friends even know that I am still alive.”

  “Can’t they find out?” I ask.

  He smiles at my naïveté. “If they ask too many questions, they may be the next to vanish.”

  Lunch is served—I’m told it’s the only meal of the day. It’s a watery soup with a few pieces of potato thrown in. As I sip my half cup I understand why the men in the cell look so emaciated. This is a starvation diet.

  I’m tempted to give in to despair. But then I spot the boy we rescued from the Andes. He’s in a corner of the cell, kicking a stone around with other kids. In this dungeon he’s found friends! They’ve claimed a tiny part of this cramped cell as their own, and are joyfully playing a crude but competitive game of soccer!

  Ernesto finishes off his soup and takes up his sad tale. “The third group in this cell are the settlers—newcomers who have no traditional ties to the land. Most were driven here from the cities by poverty and promises of cheap land to farm.”

  He points to a few men who are taller than the Indians, but now look just as weak and miserable. “But those promises turned out to be hollow—the rain forest exists in a delicate balance with nature, and when the trees are burned and the wrong crops are planted, the soil quickly becomes useless. The settlers fell into debt, they couldn’t feed their families, so they rebelled and ended up in prison with the very Indians whose land they stole.”

  “And what about the fourth group?” I ask.

  Ernesto laughs. “You are the fourth group,” he says. “We sometimes see Asians, Europeans, and Americans touring the mills, processing plants, and ranches, but never in our prisons. So it’s an unexpected honor to have you here.”

  “You may have another American here,” I tell him. “A girl, with brown hair, about my age. Her name is P.J.” I describe her to him in detail. Ernesto shares my description with the other men in the cell. Two or three say they think a young woman who fits P.J.’s description was spotted being transported at night through the corridors, always under heavy guard.

  When I hear this, I can’t contain my excitement. So she is here, possibly even in this very wing of the prison! There must be a way for me to locate her and break her out. “Has anyone ever escaped from this place?” I ask Ernesto.

  “Several have tried, and they have died in highly unpleasant ways,” he tells me. “Colonel Aranha is a meticulous man. He couldn’t do what he is doing if he weren’t.”

  “And what exactly is he doing?” I ask. “It sounds like many different people are involved in destroying the rain forest. Europeans, Asians, and Americans. But also Brazilians. Even Caboclos and Indians.”

  “Absolutely,” Ernesto agrees. “And there have always been corrupt government officials who bent the rules in exchange for bribes, but never on the scale of what this colonel is doing. He’s using his powerful connections to help loggers, miners, and foreign companies gain access and break laws. In the last few years, with his influence rising, the destruction of the Amazon has proceeded at an ever-increasing pace. And we who tried to stop it are rotting here, with nothing to do but watch it vanish out our one window.”

  I look around at my cell mates—Indians, Caboclos, settlers, all wasting away. Skeletal bodies. Toothless gums. Hopeless eyes. “Why doesn’t he just kill you?”

  Ernesto shrugs. “Maybe it is his sense of humor. He makes us work, destroying what we love the most.”

  “And what is that?” I ask, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  Ernesto opens his mouth to answer, and then closes it quickly as thudding footsteps approach. Guards open the door and I follow the lead of my cell mates and hurry to the back wall of the cell.

  The guards enter with guns drawn and point quickly to ten men. Ernesto is chosen, and one of the Indians. I am the last one they single out.

  I follow the others to the front of the cell with my arms raised, and then hold out my wrists to be handcuffed. As the cuffs ar
e locked on, Ernesto whispers to me, “You are about to find out about the colonel’s sense of humor for yourself.”

  41

  It’s a small, shabby plane that looks like it dates from the Cold War. I just hope its engine is better than its paint job. As we are prodded toward it at gunpoint, I see that it’s equipped with floats for a water landing.

  It does not, however, have any seats, at least in the cabin. They’ve all been ripped out, so we squeeze down onto the iron floor. A few seconds after we are all piled in, the old Cessna takes off with a hacking roar and banks sharply. Then it zooms away, flying just a few hundred feet above the treetops.

  Peering down through the cabin’s windows, I can see the colonel’s fenced compound, built near a wide river. Virgin rain forest starts on the far side of that river and stretches away as far as my eyes can see.

  We are flying so low that we seem in danger of dipping into the rippling sea of forest green. Every now and then streaks of color flame up at us as flocks of brightly plumed birds take wing together and burst from the trees toward the clouds.

  I think of Gisco—what would he have made of my cell mates and their sad stories? And what would he think of this mysterious flight in an airborne junk heap?

  Coward though he is, I’ve gotten used to facing danger with the big dog. It feels lonely to be going it alone. I hope I was right, and the guards were just taking him to another wing of the prison. Something tells me there is a more sinister explanation for why he was dragged away.

  Minutes stretch to hours but the scenery below remains unbroken. The rain forest reaches from horizon to horizon, an untouched and seemingly untouchable world. It looks so vast and unsullied that it’s hard to believe the shadow of mankind could fall on it.

  Ernesto is sitting near me on the iron floor, peering down at the green vista. “You made it sound endangered,” I whisper to him. “We could never cut all this down.”

  He glances at the nearest guard, who is dozing off. “An area the size of France has already vanished, chopped down or burned,” he whispers back. “In thirty years it will all be gone. Every animal. Every tree. And the people …”