The stunted, wind-contorted trees and dry grasses clinging to crevices in the granite rock gave way to a cloud forest zone as they descended. As if to signal the change, the skies darkened and a brief but torrential downpour sent water cascading down the mountain side and made the surface of the road even more slippery and treacherous. The rain ceased as abruptly as it had begun but it was replaced by a thick, clinging mist. A constant stream of drips fell from ferns growing out of the rock face, and crooked trees loomed out of the mist, their branches festooned with mosses, lichens, ferns and orchids.
As the road dropped lower, it passed out of the mists of the cloud forest zone and as the air began to clear, Harper could see that the lower slopes of the mountains below them were cloaked in the dense sub-tropical vegetation that marked the start of the rainforest. There were vines, creepers and vividly coloured flowers and giant, sapphire blue Morpho butterflies weaving among them. After the bone-chilling cold of the Altiplano and the mountain peaks, for a while the air began to feel fresher and warmer, but before long that was giving way to the moist, slightly foetid atmosphere of the jungle.
They swung round yet another bend and found themselves looking down into a steep-sided valley with a fast-rushing river glinting in the sunlight on the valley floor, and a road running parallel with it. The dirt road they were following clung to the mountainside for a couple more miles or so, passing a deep gorge into which a waterfall was plummeting, but then descended to join the other road at the midpoint of the valley. There was something at the junction of the two roads but from this distance he could not tell if it was a low building, a vehicle or something else.
‘This is where we need to ditch the car before the road starts dropping down and then strike off back up the mountainside,’ said Scouse.
‘Then that gorge ahead might do as a car graveyard,’ Harper said. ‘There looks to be plenty of vegetation growing in it so with luck, it might finish up out of sight.’
He slowed as they approached the gorge, crossed by a rickety-looking iron bridge floored with thick baulks of timber. It had no guard rail and was only a little wider than the Mercedes, but large boulders were blocking the way to the gorge on the near side so they had to inch their way across before coming to a halt on the far side with the nose of the Merc a few feet from the start of the sheer drop down into the gorge.
‘Grab the maps and your water bottle,’ Harper said, ‘and then let’s go.’ He switched off the engine, left the handbrake off and waited until Scouse was out of the car before grabbing his backpack and jumping out himself. At once they began to give the Merc a push, grunting with the effort. As soon as it started to move, they stepped back and watched as it rolled slowly on, then toppled over the edge, and began to plummet down, gathering speed as it fell. However, it had only crashed down fifty feet or so before it came to a halt against a huge boulder with a sickening thud. ‘Damn it! But it’ll have to do,’ Harper said. ‘And with luck, unless you’re actually peering down into the gorge, you probably won’t catch sight of it anyway. Right, let’s move.’
They jogged about a hundred yards along the road, then branched off onto a faint track with a dense growth of plants and grasses along it, suggesting that few, if any, people had come this way in quite some time. Harper kept scanning the mountainside above them and when he saw a place where the gradient eased a little, he led Scouse off the track and up through the fringes of the rainforest. They had covered only a couple of hundred yards when they heard the sound of an engine on the road below them and the rattle of timbers and metal as it began to cross the bridge over the gorge.
‘Down!’ Harper said, dropping flat into the soil and humus of the forest floor. The sour odour of decaying leaves filled his nostrils as he heard Scouse drop beside him. They waited, every sense focussed on the sound of the vehicle below them. It seemed to take an eternity to cross the bridge but after a heart-stopping pause as it slowed right down, it accelerated away again and a moment later, through the thick vegetation, Harper caught a glimpse of one of the cartel Landcruisers, with four gunmen still perched in the back. It passed by without stopping and disappeared down the dirt road.
Harper’s heart rate slowed as he got to his knees and crouched, watching the red glow of the Landcruiser’s brake-lights flickering through gaps in the foliage each time it slowed for the sharp bends, as it headed down the mountain side towards the junction with the other road. When it reached that point a couple of minutes later, it came to a halt next to another vehicle. The occupants jumped out and must have had a hasty consultation in which, no doubt, the driver of the vehicle that had been waiting at the junction would reveal that no other cars had come down that road for some time. A moment later the Landcruiser began a three-point turn.
‘We’ve got to get moving again,’ Harper said, ‘because they’ll be coming back up now, looking for traces of where we left the road. We need to be out of sight before they get back to the bridge and realise where we’ve dumped the car.’
He led the way through the edge of the rainforest, using it for cover but not wanting to descend any lower into it, since every metre of height they lost now would only have to be regained later when they began to climb back up the mountain in earnest. Within a few minutes, they heard the sicarios’ Landcruiser returning, driving much more slowly, and they again flattened themselves into the soil and leaf litter, remaining motionless until it had passed by.
As soon as its engine note had faded, Harper led the way on through the jungle, using a path so faint that he might have taken it for an animal track, had he not spotted a few stray, yellowing coca leaves lying in the dirt. He had seen no coca plants in this area so the leaves could only have been lost by human drug mules when the bulky bundles of leaves they were carrying to a jungle lab somewhere had snagged on low-hanging tree branches as they passed underneath them.
In the small clearings where one of the rainforest’s giant trees had fallen or been felled, hummingbirds were flitting through the patches of bright sunlight, feeding on the nectar of exotic flowers, but Harper had no eyes for the beauty of the scene, only for the way ahead and whatever dangers it might contain. He moved on even more cautiously, signalling Scouse to stay quiet, certain that there must be a jungle cocaine processing laboratory somewhere not far ahead of them. The dense vegetation meant that they could see only a few yards ahead but they kept their ears pricked for any sound of activity or people moving through the rainforest towards them, and paused to listen in absolute silence every few yards before moving on again.
Had he been alone, Harper would have left the path at once, and worked his way through the jungle until he was safely past whatever lay ahead, but even if Scouse had been relatively fit, Harper knew he would have struggled to make good time through such dense secondary jungle and in his present weakened state it would be next to impossible for him.
Harper moved on, measuring each footfall, scanning the foliage for bent or broken branches, and scenting the air for the distinctive sour aroma of coca leaves being processed into cocaine base. When they reached a jungle stream, he even crouched down and scooped up a mouthful of water, tasting it for traces of chemical run-off, that would have signalled an active cocaine lab.
They had walked on for another mile or so, when they came to a row of pits, like roughly dug open graves in the forest floor. They were lined with plastic sheeting and though they were empty, they still carried the stink of kerosene. ‘What the hell are these?’ Scouse whispered.
‘Maceration pits,’ Harper said. ‘Fortunately for us they haven’t been used recently, so the cocaine fabricás must have moved on to a new site. They don’t stay long in any one place in case the DEA find and target them.’
‘It stinks,’ Scouse said, wrinkling his nose.
‘It’s the kerosene. They fill the pits with coca leaves, soak them in kerosene and sometimes sulphuric acid as well, to break them down. Poor kids they call pisadores - walkers - get paid a few Bolivianos to speed the proce
ss by treading them with their bare feet, just like French winegrowers used to tread grapes, except that French kids don’t have to permanently damage their feet by paddling in sulphuric acid, nor get brain damage from the fumes. But the cocaine traficantes don’t care, one thing Bolivia is not short of is destitute kids who’ll do anything for a few bucks.’ He shook his head at the thought. ‘Once the leaves have been macerated long enough, they siphon off the liquid from the pits, mix it with water, bicarbonate of soda and more sulphuric acid, give it a stir and voila! - they’ve got cocaine base. They can’t convert it into powder cocaine in the jungle though, because the chemistry is too complex, so it’s carried into the cities or across the border first. Sometimes it’s hidden in petrol tanks, gas bottles or tyres, or in loads of fruit and vegetables but often it’s just carried on the backs of kids acting as mules - and there are so many that the slang name for them is hormigas - ants. Kids can earn ten or twenty US dollars a day doing it - ten times more money than they could earn in a month working in a legitimate job.’
‘I’m scared to ask why you know so much about the cocaine trade,’ said Scouse.
‘Probably best,’ said Harper.
They moved on again, but the rainforest now began to thin, the remaining trees marked by the scars of logging and burning, and as they reached the edge of a clearing, they saw a few shacks built of mud and branches, and roofed with palm fronds or rusting corrugated iron sheets, that were held in place by rocks and tyres piled on them. Harper put his mouth close to Scouse’s ear and breathed, ‘We can’t risk being spotted by whoever lives in these, so we need to retrace our steps a little way and then start to climb up the mountain again.’
They back-tracked for a couple of hundred yards and Harper then turned back up the mountain, following a stream bed that offered a slightly easier path through the last fringes of the rainforest. Before he did so, he drank as much water as he could hold and got Scouse to do the same and then re-filled their bottles from the stream. ‘It may be a while before we find another water source,’ he said, ‘so let’s make the most of this one while we can.’
Then they began to climb. The rainforest thinned and then gave way altogether, first to the narrow zone of the cloud forest. As they paused while Harper assessed the way ahead, he cast a glance up at the tree canopy above them, which was almost buried under the thick mat of moss growing over it. As they reached the end of the cloud and moved on to the open slopes beyond, Harper kept his gaze moving, scouring the slopes above them for movement, but concentrating most of his attention behind them. The slopes offered little cover other than scattered boulders and a few trees that diminished still further in number as they climbed higher, but he made use of whatever he could find, working his way up from boulder to boulder and using any dip or patch of rough grass that gave even a vestige of cover from any watching eyes below.
A few short stretches of the road had now come back into view, and he raked each with his gaze for any sign of the Landcruiser or the sicarios before moving on again. He set a stiff pace, climbing up the mountain side at a forty-five degree angle to the slope, but soon had to slow his pace as Scouse was already beginning to struggle and his chest was heaving from the effort of scaling the steep slope in the increasingly thin, oxygen-depleted mountain air. Harper could hear Scouse’s gasps and rasping breath as he tried to match Harper’s pace, and he eased off a little but said ‘Scouse, mate, we’ve got to be up to the ridge and well away before they spot the car and start searching for us, can you give it all you’ve got?’
‘I’m trying, Lex, believe me, but I just can’t seem to get my breath.’
‘It’s the altitude,’ Harper said, ‘but save what breath you’ve got for climbing and once we reach the ridge the going should be a lot easier. The good news is that if any or all of the guys who are following us are Brazilians or Colombians, they aren’t going to be any more comfortable at this altitude than we are.’
‘They have big mountains in Colombia too.’
‘I know but most of the country is tropical coast or rainforest and the guys who run the cocaine cartels there are mostly from the lowlands.’
‘But if the guys chasing us are Bolivians or Colombians from the Andes?’
‘Then we might well be in the shit, because they’ll be far more used to operating at altitude than we are and it won’t have the same ill effects on them that it does on us.’
They had to climb with some care for the gritty soil and dry grasses of the upper slopes didn’t offer the most secure footing and beyond that were bare rock and loose screes that posed even greater problems. Higher still above them, they could now see the permanently snow-capped peaks of the Andes filling the horizon. ‘Be glad we’re not going over those,’ Harper said. ‘Just another couple of hundred metres and we’ll be up to the ridge and then we’ve just got to keep following the contours around the head of the valley and over the next ridge beyond it.’
‘Oh is that all,’ Scouse started to say, but then his breath failed him, and he shook his head and ploughed on, ever more slowly, using his hands to pull himself upwards over the steepening gradient.
CHAPTER 20
They were crossing a stretch of bare granite rock, and the sun striking it at a low angle was sparkling, both from the billion quartz crystals embedded in it, and from the veins of a silvery metal ore that were threaded through it. ‘That couldn’t be silver, could it?’ Scouse said, forgetting his breathlessness for an instant in his excitement.
‘I dunno, maybe,’ Harper said. ‘They used to mine a lot of silver in Bolivia.’ They moved on up the glittering slope. In other circumstances it would have been a truly beautiful sight, but here it merely increased their danger, for anything moving across it would break up the pattern of light and be clearly visible from a long way away. Had Harper been able to find a way to skirt it, he would have done so, but it stretched for as far as he could see in either direction, so there was no option but to grit his teeth and cut across it, praying that they would remain undetected. They had almost reached the upper edge of it, where it disappeared beneath the scree that cloaked the approach to the summit ridge, and had heard no sound, nor seen any sign of their pursuers, when something struck a rock a few yards away to their right and they heard the unmistakable sound of a ricochet as a round whined away.
Harper dropped and looked back behind them. He had to look carefully at the mountainside before he spotted a group of figures, darker outlines against the rock, way below them. ‘They’re at absolutely maximum range,’ he said, ‘and I’d be very surprised if they have sniper rifles, so it is going to take a very lucky shot indeed to hit us. So let’s just keep moving upwards, we’re nearly at the ridge and once we’re back among the rocks we’ll be just about impossible for them to spot.’
‘Okay,’ Scouse said, ‘I’ll believe you, but like I told you before, if it hits you, a lucky shot will kill you just as dead as any other kind.’
He let out a yelp and almost lost his footing on the mountainside as a shadow swept over them for a second and a majestic condor appeared over the ridgeline just above them. It banked sharply as it saw them, the wind through its feathers making a curious hissing noise as the condor flashed past them and then began to soar ever higher, circling as it rode the thermals rising up the face of the mountain.
As Scouse teetered, close to overbalancing and falling, Harper grabbed his arm and pulled him into the lee of a large boulder around which the screes were parting like a river of stone. He shot a wary glance back down the mountainside. ‘I don’t know if they’ll try to climb up to catch us,’ he said, ‘but even if they don’t, they know where we are, so they can track us and try to intercept us when we come down off the mountains - and we’ll have to eventually. But whatever happens, let’s put some more ground behind us before we even begin thinking about that. They’ve also got access to aircraft, so it’s not impossible that they could try to use those. They can’t land obviously, but they could try to bomb us with g
renades or shoot us up with sub-machine guns.’
‘You’re just a constant source of cheerful thoughts, aren’t you Lex?’ Scouse said, with a world-weary sigh. ‘I don’t know why I put up with you.’
‘Probably because I’m all that’s standing between you and a very unpleasant death of one sort or another,’ Harper said. ‘So come on then, let’s move.’
They moved off again, keeping just below the ridgeline and holding to the same contour as much as possible, though each time they crossed a gully or gorge, or forded one of the streams running down off the ridge, they had to lose some height as they slithered down one side and then were forced to regain it as they clambered up again on the other. They moved as fast as Scouse could manage, with Harper always on hyper-alert, keenly aware of the twin dangers of pursuit from behind and possible ambush from ahead.
The next real danger point was when they would have to come down from the ridge they were following to cross the valley, ford the river in the valley floor and then climb up again on the other side. The peril of that was heightened by the need to also find a way across the road running alongside the river. The terrain was so rugged and the river so fast-flowing that there would be few places where Harper and Scouse could get across it. Knowing that their prey were somewhere on the mountainside and would have to cross both river and road to escape them, the sicarios would certainly be patrolling along the road and also setting sentries or mounting ambushes at natural choke points.
They had been moving fast over the difficult ground for a couple of hours when Harper called a halt. ‘Five minutes breather,’ he said to Scouse, who looked close to exhaustion. ‘We’ve no food, we’ve got water, so drink some of that and get your breath back a bit while I take a look at those maps.’ Scouse drank greedily from a water bottle as Harper studied his maps. ‘Brilliant,’ he said at last. ‘Beyond the ridge on the other side of this valley there’s another rugged and very steep-sided valley, but that one runs due west right through the heart of the Cotopata National Park.’
Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller Page 19